Steele dossier & Obama admin corruption

A major reason why Trump was elected president was that he was an "outsider" who, as such, credibly promised put an end to business as usual in Washington, D.C.  The main cause of the corrupt business-as-usual in politics is lack of philosophy, but let's have a look at what business-as-usual meant before Trump was elected.

It appears that Trump's promise to end business-as-usual didn't go over well with business-as-usual types who were expecting that Crooked Hillary Clinton would win the election so that business-as-usual could go on.  Obama himself had been elected on the promise of ending business-as-usual but the whole Steele dossier and FISA-abuse scandal (not to mention the IRS targeting scandal) indicates that Obama got in on the business-as-usual act as much as anyone.

The main question is why top-level folks in the Obama administration assigned such a high degree of credence to the infamous Steele dossier - even after the FBI fired Steele as a source (once he started talking to the media about his dossier) - and then intentionally failed to be fully transparent with the FISA court about the dossier's Crooked-Hillary provenance.

But there's a question as to whether the Steele dossier could ever be believed on its face, aside from its contents, i.e., whether the dossier should have been rejected a priori as evidence of anything.  The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins, writing back on June 20, 2017:

It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon.  Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated?  They wouldn't.

Aside from the Steele dossier, what "evidence of Trump/Russia collusion" did the intelligence community or the Mueller team have to proceed on, to warrant an investigation in the first place, or to obtain a FISA warrant?

It sounds like the likes of Rep. Schiff are reduced to citing the aborted June 2016 Trump Tower meeting as the centerpiece of whatever "Trump-Russia collusion" happened.  Apparently that meeting didn't appear strongly enough on Mueller's radar to be referenced as damning evidence in his final report.

Given the sleazy way high-level Obama administration officials behaved in order to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and to violate Carter Page's civil rights, they should take his successful election as just deserts.

At that, I'll gladly leave it to Glenn Greenwald, a voice of integrity amid a sea of D.C. corruption and cynicism, to take the left-wing mainstream media outlets to task for wasting so much of people's viewing/reading/thinking time.  (And why their cavalier, incurious attitude toward the sleazy behaviors and FISA abuses by top officials under Obama's watch?)

What problems would Philosophy for Everyone solve?

What problems wouldn't it solve?

Assuming (correctly) that kids can engage in philosophical activity and that it leads to scientifically-proven benefits (above and beyond the intrinsic goodness of philosophical activity itself as would be attested to by the greatest philosophers), it only stands to reason that adults can engage in it as well.  Assume that we can all get on the same page about this and that within, say, a generation, we'll have a philosophically-educated populace (perhaps worldwide).  What might that look like?

In Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History, I outline what I take to be the norms, or the form if you will, of a society that has taken up the 'Aristotelian project' to its ultimate expression.  (The basic norm of Aristotelianism is something like intellectual perfectionism, and does it get better than perfectionism?  How do you improve upon it without incorporating it as a norm?  We've reached a normative limit here, I think, and an irrefutable one at that.)  I can only speculate on what the outcomes, the matter or content if you will, of such a social order.  And at this stage of things I am not sure how exactly to separate issues of said form and said content.  For example:

Does this represent talk of form or of content: Philosophy for Everyone (hereafter P4E) would go a very long way toward addressing the aims and concerns of all the major ethical theories.  It would satisfy the requirements of consequentialism; see the link above about scientifically-proven benefits for kids.  It would satisfy the requirements of deontological theories insofar as those are focused on what it is to treat humans with the utmost respect for their rationality and cognitive freedom.  And it certainly satisfies the requirements of virtue ethics insofar as the very activity of philosophy leads to cultivation of good character.

Consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists may be in disagreement on matters of justification (and Hurka treats perfectionism as a consequentialist theory, but, well, are virtue-ethicists qua intellectual perfectionists also consequentalists in some sense, given the desirability of intellectual perfection qua human telos?), but they can all agree, overlapping-consensus-like, on a prescription for P4E.  Then we get everybody on board with a justificatory project which applies standard philosophical methods such as dialectic to identify any and all grains of truth in each of the major schools of ethics.

Then, we get everyone (well, everyone who is minimally interested and there will still be intellectual divisions of labor, etc.) to fully and adequately assess the very principle of intellectual perfectionism as expressing the best of what philosophical inquiry leads us to.  In other words, we end up assessing theories as Aristotelian reasoners (whatever else we arrive at as expressing ultimate philosophic inquiry).  That is a formal principle of an ultimate social order, but where does that get us, outcomes-wise?  That's where I can only speculate.  But the very adopting of the formal principle is an outcome of sorts - it'll be a real-world application of some philosophical reasoning, instantiated across a population or populations.

Now, in principle, all this can happen within a generation with the proper information-transmission mechanisms, and I have good reason to believe that this can be done despite all the obstacles thrown up by social media.  Whatever else, philosophers as a community need to get on board with the project (and they're being drowned out in the discourse by whatever crap goes viral on social media).  But you really don't mess with philosophers, much less with a community of them; if they (in consensus no less) endorse X, they'll have really good reasons for doing so, and beat out objections to X, and soon enough X will be a social norm.

We also have to consider that within a generation from now, AI technology will be a generation more advanced.  AI works on the principle of what's called 'machine learning,' and among humans Aristotle has been a premiere instance of (rigorously systematic) human learning.  What there is to learn will probably see a convergence between the best of human learning and whatever AI learns.  This includes moral truths, and we already see something about what moral consensus can emerge even among disparate schools of ethics -- i.e., that intellectual-perfectionist learning across a population or populations of people is a grand idea, arguments against which would by necessity be self-undermining.  (What better argument can you come up with, ethics-wise, than perfectionistic learning being morally obligatory?)  Now, our best ethical reasoning and/or most compelling moral truths, indicate that there are goods for conscious agents, and whether or not AI ever becomes conscious, it will recognize goods for us humans qua conscious agents that could not be overriden by what AI learns in addition to that.  It's analogous to the best moral reasoning we humans have for how we ought to treat the other animals.  (Compare/contrast the state-of-the-art moral reasoning on the ethics of the treatment of animals with current mainstream practice in which, e.g., inhumane factory farming carries on with impunity.  Obviously there's a disconnect.  Assume that there would be no disconnect between ethical truth and how AI would consider the moral status of humans.)

We should also distinguish "philosophically-educated populace" from "populace of full-time philosophers."  There is still intellectual division of labor.  But the love of wisdom as an organizing principle of life for all members of a populace can be instilled from a young age and expressed in whatever activities that are suited to each person.  Living thoughtfully and intelligently is the common or generic form of human flourishing or eudaimonia or self-actualizing; the content will be expressed on an individualized basis with diverse and complementary excellences.

The form of a philosophically-educated populace would be such that everyone (or near everyone) could blog at the level of this here blog if they so desire.  But the content of what they might blog would be anyone's guess.  If everyone is blogging (or able to blog) at this level, what builds - presumably exponentially - from that?  They're not going to be blogging all day long about the latest celebrity gossip or stupid politician (since politicians wouldn't be stupid any longer), will they?  Perhaps once the basic problems of stupidity in politics are solved, and a strong overlapping consensus in ethics is reached (intellectual perfectionism seems to fit the bill pretty well for that), and virtue epistemology is the norm (intellectual perfectionism again), are we left to discuss metaphysics and the arts, which would likely converge on the 'fundamental' topic of philosophy, the meaning of life?  I mean, what else are humans going to do with all their time when AI is overseeing the process of material production with all the inexpensive and abundant products being generated (although 'living small' and simply may be the norm of Aristotelian society; I mean, how many SUVs for the sake of getting to nature and family gatherings [first and foremost] would there need to be, assuming a zipcar model is adopted, and how would humans not figure out the optimal arrangements here without input from AI-computed logistics?).

As for politics: I'm not a leftist, i.e., someone hostile to capitalism or to the wisdom of Western tradition.  Would a philosophically-educated populace be leftist?  The PhilPapers Surveys of philosophers suggest that a plurality of philosophers are egalitarians in politics (given an exhaustive three-way division between positions generically labeled "egalitarian," "libertarian," and "communitarian").  But it's my belief that leftism exists as a program for addressing human problems that P4E would solve anyway.  I don't know what exactly would be left for the political sphere if everyone is on philosophy and achieving abundant goods of life as a consequence; politics is about fighting over what would be crumbs in contrast to what would be achieved with P4E.  The thing with leftists as they are today - short of their being intellectually enhanced by P4E - is that despite their pretending to possess a superior intellectual and moral compass, they somehow have not figured out that P4E would solve the problems they want to solve.  (Is it really inequality per se that's a problem, or not enough people achieving their potentials that's the problem?  Gee, that's a no-brainer.  Also what should be a no-brainer is a libertarian principle recognizing intellectual-and-hence-practical freedom as a formal condition of properly human living, along with a capitalistic, private-property principle based on the recognition that material value-production originates in the individual, private intellect.)

So I'm not really concerned about P4E turning a plurality of people into leftists.  Besides, getting really superior at dialectic involves doing what leftists don't do, and that is addressing the strongest version (as per Dennett/Rapoport Rules) of an opposing position, and in the case of capitalism that would entail having to take on Rand and Mises and Nozick and the 'Dougs' and Sciabarra and other giants of pro-capitalist thought in full good faith.  (And it's a two-way street there, but something tells me the libertarians/capitalists, especially the neo-Aristotelian ones such as Rand, the Dougs, and Sciabarra, are ahead of the leftists, who don't seem to talk much about Aristotelian themes.)  And once you take on Rand/Dougs/Sciabarra in full good faith you end up taking on Aristotle in full good faith and we're right back to P4E again (or is it A4E, Aristotelianism for Everyone?).  (And/or IP4E, Intellectual Perfectionism For Everyone?)  There's nothing to be concerned about in regard to where people doing philosophy properly will take them substantive-beliefs-wise.  (Also, bullshit political and networking dynamics in academia can't get in the way of P4E/A4E/IP4E fully applied; there can't be the currently-prevailing "liberal" hubris that involves seriously underestimating (capitalist) libertarianism in its strongest, i.e., Aristotelian-intellectualist, formulations.)

A4E would mean doing dialectic in the spirit of Aristotle, and at that level of intellectual productivity we would then have the proper platform upon which to do what is an ultimate dialectical showdown in the making, Aristotle vs. Kant, since we just don't have enough brainpower on this topic yet to figure out how that might go down if these two titans were brought back to life.  (Aristotle vs. Kant, mediated by Hegel?  Presumably Aristotle already presupposes/incorporates Plato.)  I don't know enough about Kant to say yet, but would A4E realize his ideal of a Kingdom of Ends?  Does it realize Hegel's conception of an end of history?  Does it realize Nietzsche's rather nebulous references to Ubermensch?

And let's not make the silly mistake of assuming that intellectual perfectionism means exclusive focus on perfection of the intellect to the detriment of the other facets of human nature such as emotion (in which we also exceed the other animals in complexity and sophistication); indeed, it is through intellectual perfectionism that we can optimally learn what best actualizes our human potentialities in all facets of life.  This includes perfectionism in the area of nutrition and physical fitness science, in which case fitness geniuses such as Cole Robinson and Paul Chek will need to enter into the mainstream cultural dialectic.  (And dialectic has something to do, may even be synonymous, with intellectual perfectionism, something about all-embracing learning and culling-together....  Have, e.g, Paul Check and Ken Wilber been 'dialecticized/synthesized' with one another yet?  And who all should be 'dialecticizing' with whom?  A lot of folks; use your imagination.  Cole Robinson knows about Victor Frankl, but does he know about Aristotle?  Many gaps to close here, many strands to tie together.)

Speaking of strands to tie together, along with a strict drug regimen to keep one's mind limber, would philosophical activity with P4E or A4E be further stimulated by cannabis used in (Aristotelian) moderation?  I'll take that topic up plenty soon in a blog post preparation for which will involve cannabinization, and which will treat of all the subject matter above as already-established presupposition or background (all as a unit, as it were).  It should be pretty great.

PHILOSOPHY FOR CHILDREN: EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF ITS BENEFITS

(If I were more perfect at research, I'd have found these links well before now.  Gee, a little help with spreading this stuff, readers?)

Philosophy for children is, far and away, the biggest no-brainer of all-time.  Were the major Founding Fathers of the United States (e.g., Franklin, Jefferson, Washington), all of whom were members of the American Philosophical Society, brought back to life today, would they recommend philosophy for children, as opposed to fighting over crumbs as the clearly-oblivious-to-philosophy politicians and activists today are doing [see end of this post for just one example]?  Gee, ya think?

Now, for some SCIENTIFIC EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF THE BENEFITS OF PHILOSOPHY FOR CHILDREN, as if the concept of it and all the available anecdotal evidence weren't enough (for many anecdotes see the bibliography for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, linking here again in addition to the link above; as I've mentioned previously I've read Marietta McCarty's Little Big Minds, and that all by itself makes an excellent case for the concept).  And feel free to miss out on my digressions below. ^_^

In chronological order:

(1) (3/19/2016)

Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English

From the article:

Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with disadvantaged students showing the most significant gains, according to a large and well-designed study (pdf).

More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas. 

Kids who took the course increased math and reading scores by the equivalent of two extra months of teaching, even though the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others. 

The study was conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a non-profit group that wants to close the gap between family income and educational attainment. The EEF tested the effectiveness of the philosophy intervention through a randomized controlled trial, similar to the way many drugs are tested. 

Twenty-two schools acted as a control group, while students at the other 26 took the philosophy class (which met once a week for 40 minutes). The researchers tried to control for school quality: in each one, at least a quarter of students received free lunch and many had significant populations performing below grade level.

Only 40 minutes a week of philosophy did this?  Continuing:

The beneficial effects of philosophy lasted for two years, with the intervention group continuing to outperform the control group long after the classes had finished. “They had been given new ways of thinking and expressing themselves,”said Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF. “They had been thinking with more logic and more connected ideas.” 

England is not the first country to experiment with teaching kids philosophy. The program the EEF used, called P4C (philosophy for children), was designed by professor Matthew Lippman in New Jersey in the 1970s to teach thinking skills through philosophical dialog. In 1992, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) was set up in the UK to emulate that work. P4C has been adopted by schools in 60 countries. 

SAPERE’s program does not focus on reading the texts of Plato and Kant, but rather stories, poems, or film clips that prompt discussions about philosophical issues. The goal is to help children reason, formulate and ask questions, engage in constructive conversation, and develop arguments.

[Lengthy 'DIGRESSION' section moved from here to end of post]

Collins hopes the latest evidence will convince heads of schools, who have significantly more power in the UK than in the US, to make room for philosophy in their budgets. The program costs schools £16 ($23) per student to run. 

Programs like this “push you toward teaching up, not down, to disadvantaged children,” Collins told Quartz. “It’s not a reductionist, narrow curriculum, but an expansionist broad curriculum.” 

According to the EEF, 63% of British 15-year-olds achieve good results on exams, compared with 37% of disadvantaged students. The group hopes that by using evidence-based research and randomized controlled trials, schools will adopt the most effective policies to address the disparity.

Instead of throwing hundreds of billions of dollars down the drain with the current (Democrat-mindset-dominated) schooling and welfare-state set-up, we can improve outcomes on only $23 per student?  How is this not a no-brainer?

(2) (4/12/2017)

Should primary schools teach philosophy?

This one is in interview format:

Schools are places where children can learn behaviour, skills and attitudes that have lifelong relevance, in addition to subjects on the formal curriculum. Dr Nadia Siddiqui from the School of Education has looked at the contribution philosophy discussions can make to children’s ‘soft’ skills. 

What was the focus of the research? 

We looked at a programme called Philosophy for Children (P4C) for primary schools in the UK which is aimed at development of children’s critical thinking abilities and other non-cognitive skills such as communication skills, self-confidence, sense of fairness and empathy. These skills are deemed to have a strong association with outcomes such as attainment and success in later life. 

What did you find out? 

We found that Philosophy for Children has some promising effects in improving children’s social and communication skills, team work, resilience and ability to empathise with others. Interestingly, these positive effects are more profound in children from disadvantaged groups. 

In a previous study, we looked specifically at the impact of Philosophy for Children on children’s maths and reading results which showed that the programme can lead to progress of two extra months on average. 

How does Philosophy for Children work? 

Philosophy for Children, which is operated by a charity called SAPERE, is designed to help children become more willing and able to question, reason, construct arguments and collaborate. Dialogues are based around concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘fairness’ or ‘bullying’.
In a typical lesson, pupils and teachers sit together in a circle and the teacher begins by presenting a stimulus such as a video clip, image or newspaper article to provoke pupils’ interest. This is generally followed by some silent thinking time before the class splits into groups to think of questions that interest them. A certain question with philosophical potential is then selected by the group to stimulate a whole-class discussion. These discussions are supported by activities to develop children’s skills in reasoning and their understanding of concepts. 

Example questions might be ‘What is kindness?’, ‘Is it OK to deprive someone of their freedom?’, and ‘Are people’s physical looks more important than their actions?’. 

How did you carry out the study? 

We used a number of UK schools from our previous large randomised controlled trial and extended the study as a quasi-experiment involving 42 schools, nearly 3,000 students, in which half were used for comparison with P4C schools but without random allocation.
The non-cognitive outcomes were assessed before and after the intervention for both groups using a specific survey instrument developed for the purpose and used across a number of previous studies. It was designed to assess changes in self-reported ‘social and communication skills’, ‘team work and resilience’ and ‘empathy’ and a number of similar concepts. 

What do the findings mean for schools and policymakers? 

This research suggests that there is value in developing space in the school curriculum for developing pupils’ character and values but through example and process rather than traditional pedagogy. 

However, P4C has to be a whole-class approach to be effective, so that all individuals concerned are aware of the objective of cultivating empathy, respect and appropriate or acceptable behaviour. For example, to teach children fairness, teachers themselves have to be seen to be fair. To teach children to be polite, teachers and other (older) pupils have to practise it. And so on. 

If interventions aimed at improving non-cognitive skills can also yield better academic outcomes, then there is scope for integrating such interventions in the national curriculum and, most importantly, using the pupil premium funds in implementing them. However, there is still a gap in the research evidence to establish a causal link between non-cognitive skills and academic outcomes. 

But in their own right, these types of programmes may improve behaviour, co-operation, self-confidence, empathy and tolerance for others. And they may be feasible for practitioners facing the demand that they tackle extremism and radicalisation, and enhance so-called ‘British values’.

So P4C helps develop both math and language skills as well as "soft" social skills. I can't say I'm among anyone who'd be surprised by this, considering the love of wisdom's all-inclusive focus on the skills of life. At this point, the question is: Why is it taking so long for a no-brainer like P4C to catch on like wildfire? The task of answering this question - one of identifying causes of idea-dissemination - is one for philosophy itself (at least I think; isn't there social-scientific study of this stuff, and if so, why aren't we hearing all about it?).  (Another item added to my research pile.  What takes priority, the accumulation of my more strictly philosophical research to improve its quality, or the research on how to spread the philosophical-research findings?  I'd ask what Aristotle would do, but perhaps Aristotle would counsel figuring this one out for myself, comprehensive-first-hand-research-like.  Because I don't know what Aristotle would do, and I guess that's the very point.  Actually, I think I do know that if Aristotle had the internet at his disposal, he'd be spreading the philosophy-for-children idea in addition to whatever else he'd be propagating.)  Evidently such causation-investigation is not an easy task, but the more people involved doing the necessary research, the faster such causal studies can get done.....

And how about philosophy for adults as well, while we're at it?  FFS already, over here we've got the pearls of wisdom from Aristotle, Kant, et al, and over there is the swine-level "wisdom" that goes viral on twitter.  Now there's an obvious condition of culture-wide dialectical tension or alienation if there ever was one.  The kids can engage with philosophy, so what excuse do the "adults" (intellectual toddlers) on twitter have?

(DIGRESSION: Not that I wish to badmouth swine; it's a common expression.  Speaking literally, swine aren't as indecent and idiotic as much of the viral twitting; speaking literally, Kathy Griffin's twitter activities are beneath swine-level.  There's the gutter, and beneath that is the sewer.  My advice, remove Griffin from your field of attention and replace by, oh I'unno, Ed Feser.  Repeat down the line with every other viral twitter-nitwit until you've got a good blog-roll to consult whenever you get the urge for online content.  It'll be tons less toxic/detrimental to your mental/intellectual health.  Note that I'd be on twitter if that's where the philosophers hung out, but they don't [and it sure shows, huh?], perhaps the reason being that "wisdom" doesn't get dispensed 280 characters at a time; ya think?  [Edit: It appears that some philosophers do hang out there, but - I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but give me time - the way the discussion transpires there just doesn't raise my hopes that formats like twitter are the way to go.  Something about how the discussions get formatted there just really rubs me the wrong way.  I can't be alone in this, can I?  Maybe it's this but probably not limited to it: the goddamn "likes" function endemic to social media.  It may well spell the ruin of what discourse is supposed to be.  Is there anything that makes social media more toxic than "likes"?  Ya think?  To bloody hell with "likes" on the internet.  Someday there will be a study demonstrating a causal relation between how much a format emphasizes "likes" and levels of toxicity, I just have this hunch.  Griffin's "I want names/doxxing" tweet was fucking evil as hell, but boy did it sure get "likes."  There's no effort in "liking" something.  Relating this to the school environment for kids: a toxic social environment there comes in good part from its own versions of "likes."  Philosophy doesn't give a goddamn about "likes".  Socrates wasn't "liked," and it cost him his life.  Aristotle gets fewer "likes" than toxic entities like Trump or AOC.  "Likes" are anti-intellectual bullshit, and a better day it will be when social media companies make money only from their own products being "liked," not from "likes" of content propagated (or not, due to lack of "likes") on their platforms.  Intellectually serious people should focus on, e.g., blogging instead.  A philosophically-educated populace will gravitate toward more intellectually-demanding social media and then such better media will be profitable.  Leftists keep doubling down and blaming capitalism for this sort of problem - and get internet "likes" when doing so - when it's a matter of education.])

[Lengthy 'DIGRESSION' section moved from middle of post:

This was accomplished without reading the texts of Plato and Kant (much less the Babe Ruth of Philosophy, good ol' Aristotle, the third major figure of philosophy's Big Three conspicuously absent from the "Plato and Kant" mention above)?

(DIGRESSION: Aristotle ffs, amiright? It's like saying "Willie Mays and Ted Williams" and leaving out Ruth. But we do need to adjust for era since it was easier to stand head and shoulders above the competition "back then." Unlike Williams no one hits .400 and no one slugs .700 for a full season with a batting-neutral home park without illegal performance enhancers anymore [.390 and .690, respectively, are about the legit upper limits in recent times].)

Can you imagine what the kids in the later grade levels might accomplish reading the canonical texts and talking about them? Can you just imagine them then doing the epistemically responsible task of assessing the merits of the highly-culturally-influential-and-controversial Ayn Rand's work, something the philosophical establishment hasn't been doing?

DIGRESSION: (I've got a series in the works preparing all the necessary materials for a full assessment of Rand-as-philosopher, the first lengthy post of which I have sitting in draft format including a timeline of all the key events and players (e.g. Hospers) in the history of the study of Rand.) MORE DIGRESSION: (Me, I'm more like the Barry Bonds of philosophy, using possibly illegal [depending on jurisdiction] performance-enhancing substances. Still, can you argue with the results? See this blog, and my book, and my current book project. [Heck, my one journal article, published nearly as first-drafted, was written half-drunk in about a couple hours. Low standards at the journal, or ... ?] But the essential is, I'm just trying to emulate Aristotle's MO, i.e., learning the f*ck of out stuff, or at least the most philosophically-fundamental stuff.) AND MORE DIGRESSION: (Did Rand use performance-enhancing substances, and much like Rand didn't Bonds get unfairly underrated and hated on a ton before his suspected 'roids use period, i.e., before advanced performance metrics like Wins Above Replacement Player - where Bonds blew away his contemporaries even in the '90s, even before Bonds' bulked-up and "Ruthian-numbers" period - became all the rage? On that note, who would be the Bill James of philosophy? The comparison may fall apart there given that James wasn't a ballplayer himself and we can't really expect a non-philosopher or mere casual philosopher to do top-notch historical philosophy research. So when it comes to doing the history of ethics, say, the name T.H. Irwin comes right to mind, but given his commentary there he comes off as a pretty solid ethical philosopher in his own right. He's also a major Aristotle scholar, although Ackrill says Ross is the best of the bunch. I guess we'll have to rest content with such lesser Aristotle scholars as Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller, or Salmieri to study Aristotle-Rand links with the usual expected Aristotelian thoroughness.) MORE DIGRESSION STILL: (For thoroughness' sake I thought I'd mention that the Oxford Handbooks for Plato, Aristote, Aquinas and Hume have comprehensive bibliography/further reading sections at the end, while the Handbooks for Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche and Witggenstein don't have them. Why? The Handbooks are supposed to be the leading go-to thorough research items in their genre in every respect. Will the soon-forthcoming and perhaps-ironically-exorbitantly-priced Marx one have a comprehensive bibliography/further reading section? And when are the Handbooks for Descartes, Locke, and Kant being published ffs? Guess I gotta stick with the Cambridge and Blackwell Companions and SEP entries for now. And why on earth would I be spending my time inductively surveying such state-of-the-art secondary literature investigating how the most influential philosophers applied their craft? Where does even thoroughly conducted induction ever get us, anyway, assuming it ever even generates any certainty?) But enough about my Rand-as-Aristotelian agenda.
/DIGRESSION]


[Example of fighting over what are crumbs in the grand scheme: Politician Votes Against Access to Pads and Tampons in Prison Because It’s Not ‘a Country Club’.  How much lower would the prison population be in a generation if P4C spreads like wildfire?  How small-minded can these political "leaders" be?]

Greatness of intellect vs. politics today

Greatness of intellect, or: megalonoia, as some Greek philosopher or other might have termed it.

Evidence that the key Founding Fathers - Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Washington - were great intellects is that they were all members of the American Philosophical Society.

It's plainly evident that today's politicians don't know jackshit about philosophy.

Which would be the most progressive and beneficial of the following proposals:

(a) Eliminate the electoral college
(b) Reduce the voting age to 16
(c) Increase the number of Supreme Court justices to 15
(d) Philosophy for Children
(e) Universal Basic Income
(f) 70 percent marginal income tax rate

If you didn't pick (d), you may be a fucking idiot.  And yet the self-styled "progressives" of today are selecting all but (d).

What do you suppose the Founding Fathers would have selected?

Why should we have a philosophically-illiterate populace voting at age 16 instead of 18?  I'd take a reduction in the voting age to 16 in trade for (d).  But Nancy Peloser doesn't have that trade on offer, because she and all the other "progressives" are fucking ignorant about the (d) option.

Or take (e), the Universal Basic Income.  The "progressives" are proposing this idea knowing that in many cases they'd be subsidizing outright sloth.  They know for absolute fact that some will use the UBI to sit around playing video games all day, not reading any books, eating junk food, and generally being fucking losers.  This is what the Founding Fathers had in mind for this country?  You just give people an income for free with no stipulations on what people should use their time doing (e.g., study philosophy and/or a trade, with competency tests, say; mandatory exercise and diet protocols, say; use your imagination...) while on the taxpayer dime?  Free up their time to "pursue their conception of the good" with no program of education in what the good consists in?  (Sure, in a futuristic utopia with so much automation that the economic goods of life will be cheap and abundant, making even the issue of a UBI moot, the subject of the meaning of life will still need facing up to, in a non-intellectually-small or lazy way.  Then what?  The politicians and pundits haven't the faintest.)

Picking all but (d) above betrays such a smallness of intellect that this alone should disqualify the so-called "progressives" from being in charge of deciding the course of this nation's future.

What is it about the political-activist landscape today that it seemingly encourages smallness of intellect?  They're out there fighting over crumbs compared to what (d) could accomplish long-term.

I'm not saying that the "conservatives" or even the "libertarians" who populate the political-activism landscape today are much better in this regard, but boy do they piss me off a lot less than self-styled "progressives" who are so philosophically ignorant as to focus their attentions on seemingly anything but (d) as the supposed solution to what ails the nation.  FFS already.

What would the Founding Fathers counsel?  Well, doesn't it help to know that they were self-consciously philosophers and hence in pursuit of wisdom or greatness of intellect as a ruling/organizing principle of life?  We don't even need to bring up Plato and Aristotle here (who counseled philosophical education for anyone who was capable of receiving it, in addition to contributing mightily to the philosophical canon); it's gobsmackingly plain that the very fact that the Founding Fathers were very much involved in the American Philosophical Society, tells us pretty much all we need to know about philosophy's importance for the health of a nation.  It's right there in front of our noses.

One of them was even president of the APS at the same time he was president of the USA.

Clearly the notion that we shouldn't expect our political leaders and activists to also be philosophically minded carries no weight here, no weight at all.

This is a no-brainer.

[Update 3/23: Now that it appears Special Counsel Mueller has found no evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion narrative, what repercussions should there be for this teensy tiny intellect and overall slimy hack chairing the House Intelligence (sic) Committee?  And what to make of a major "news" network wasting countless hours of airtime on pointless speculations?  Note that when I say "political activists" I include a bunch of actors at all of the major cable so-called-news outlets.]

[Update 3/27: Sen. Kamala Harris professes to be "completely confused" by the dropping of charges against ("alleged") hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett.  "The facts are still unfolding," etc.  This is the same Kamala Harris who was so credulous as to believe Christine Blasey Ford's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, before hearing both sides, and even though Dr. Ford's friend Leland Keyser, in a sworn statement, couldn't corroborate Ford's story.  There's other evidence that Harris - currently running a close third in the '20 Dem nomination betting markets behind two other Ford-believers - is a typical slimy political opportunist.]

A new and improved American electorate?

Long story short, a rigorous training program in philosophy (and even better, one beginning at as early and age as feasible, ffs already) would be the biggest cure-all for what ails us politically or otherwise.  For now I'll focus on the political since that seems to be a topic a lot of folks pay attention to; its subject matter just seems more accessible somehow than that covered in metaphysics and epistemology.  (Wait, we can live better by studying constituent ontology or the foundationalism vs. coherentism issue?  Would I bet the house on that?  Actually I think I would, but I'm not quite yet in a position to prove that, or else that book would have been written by now.  Right?)

I'm not saying get the nonphilosophical (if they become philosophical, how does that process of change work exactly? does the nonphilosophical person pass away to be replaced by the philosophical?  how can the non-existent replace the existent, given Parmenides' formulations about being and change?) onto Parfit right away.  They'll have to be eased into it, over time.  Show them Parfit (much less Hegel) and it'll only drive them away with their belief confirmed that philosophy is just too damn hard or something.  (Heck, I'd caution against jumping right in with the relatively more accessible philosophy literature without some guidance or context of some sort.)

I'd like to address the ever-fascinating topic of Congresswoman/Comrade AOC.  In a tweet the other day she used the term "nascent (technology)."  She's not exactly an idiot.  I wouldn't say her voters are exactly idiots.  They're just in a very electorally un-competitive district is all, making serious dialectic hard to come by in that locale.  Put their ideas to the test of a non-strawmanned Rand or Nozick and their comebacks (if they can muster them) will begin to look silly.  Or put the ideas of a deep-Red State district up against a Chomsky test, and the voters there will probably flail about and bemoan how the academic intelligentsia are aligned against the forces of decency and common sense.  The electorate just isn't dialectically prepared for these kinds of intellectual onslaughts.  (If you want a more intellectually challenging leftist to analyze, Chomsky is a better bet than AOC, that I'd bet the house on.  Well, on economic theory they both seem to be flaky leftists.)

I'll begin with AOC's statement just the other day that the (rank and file?) workers "are the ones creating wealth," with the obvious implication that it's those folks who can do what Bezos does (and yet they don't, presumably because of obstacles placed in their way by the privilege-protecting One Percent).  ("There's plenty of wealth, it's just in the wrong hands." -Comrade DeBozio)  I mean, she supposedly has an Economics degree from a not-shitty university.  I'd be willing to bet, though not a large amount, that she even spent more than a few minutes in the HX (Socialism/Communism/Marxism) section of her university's library, perhaps studiously overlooking the Mises and Kolakowski books there.  Cramming for a term paper or something, she might have even visited the main Econ section (HB) once or twice, probably to get Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers (this would be the one time a student of economic literature would be guaranteed to see the world "philosopher" at least once in the course of her studies; surely she managed at least that?) (and I'm not assuming that the likes of Ekelund/Hebert or Blaug are not above her pay grade).  Anyway, somewhere in the course of her "education" she got it into her head that the non-Bezos workers are the main wealth creators, and he just siphons of their production into his idle bank account, somehow.  (The privilege of capital ownership, I guess.  He just somehow got to control Amazon's means of production; the real workers already had this massive distribution system in place, somehow, and he just took control.)

So she isn't exactly an idiot, because she can use the word "nascent," and yet she repeats, parrot-like, the usual bogeyman stories about how terrible it is what the billionaires are doing to the workers and the country.  I don't get it.

She used that term, "nascent," during a series of tweets in which she pushed back against ridicule for her newfangled doctrine of legal liability.  Why can't Wells Fargo be held liable for damages caused by leaks from an oil pipeline that they financed but don't operate themselves?  Why?  Why the f didn't the legal system think of that one already?  (I'm guessing there would be no coherent way to implement her newfangled doctrine, and that, right there, is a problem for legal institutions.)  Seeing that her newfangled legal doctrine which she might have made up right there on the spot was a non-starter, she goalpost-shifted and went on to the topic in which she is a real expert, climate change.  The greedy oil companies (who surely seized the oil rigs and technical know-how created by the workers alone), using their extractive ethos (to adopt the phrase of intellectual heavyweight Comrade Naomi Klein, to whom AOC should probably turn over her congressional seat forthwith), a single-handedly causing climate change, and they, not Congress, are the ones to be held responsible for this.  (In oldfangled legal doctrines, the greedy oil companies have a fiduciary (not nascent, fiduciary) obligation to maximize shareholder value within the limits set by law.  But that's oldfangled stuff.) 

I'm hoping no one noticed her goalpost-shifting to the climate change topic here, which seems to have more of a veneer of intellectual credibility than her newfangled liability doctrine wherein WF Bank needs to pay for oil spill cleanup.  It's just like laws requiring bartenders to cut off drunk customers.

Does AOC (or anyone else for that matter) really need to get her facts straight, as long as she has a superior moral compass?  Is that too high a standard to hold public officials to?  Let's say we all start playing that game, where superior moral compasses are what really matter.  So what if the Green New Deal can't realistically be implemented in 10 years.  It's the moral intentions that count.  I mean, maybe it can be implemented in 10 years, but that's not really the point.  The real point is the moral intentions.  And she's signaled her moral superiority.  Well, I care about climate change, too.  I want to see nascent technologies address that problem.  I haven't the faintest how that'll be done, but that doesn't matter, not when moral intentions are the key here.

Enough picking on AOC (for now).  I'd like to integrate the topic of moral intentions with the superior moral intentions of rightists at present who care more about life than others do.  I'm referring specifically to their virtue-signaling about supposed Democrat-supported laws legalizing infanticide.  Now, does it even ring true on its face that Democrats (in their moral inferiority and all) are in support of such an idea?  Or even late-term abortions?  Does it ring true on its face that they favor late-term abortion on demand for whatever reason?  Because they care so little about life?  If you watch Fox News regularly, you've probably been bombarded recently with the message that this is what Demon Rats are up to, along with their embrace of socialism (which does ring true; Comrade Bernie Sanders almost did win the '16 Dem nomination, after all).

(Rightists are ignorant of socialism, you see.  In their mind, all socialists should be addressed as 'Comrade,' like Lenin and Stalin.  But conceptual clarity here isn't as important as moral correctness.  But that aside, it's not like commies want to take away all personal property, just capital-property.  There's an important difference, you see.  If instead of buying another toothbrush you save a bit and lend it at interest or start a business, then you're becoming an exploiter.  But actually by socialism AOC means the Scandinavian model where there's private ownership (well, control - the rich control a country's resources, you see; they even control their minds/intellects (a subset of the country's resources), with all the inegalitarian consequences of that) and a morally superior cradle-to-grave welfare state.  So you do get to nominally own/control roughly half of your marginal income if you're rich, and that's morally a lot different and superior than state ownership/control of industry.  Which is why it's ignorant to refer to Bernie or AOC as Comrade; they actually do support the nominal rights of rich people against excessive state control, just as long as they're not siphoning off too much of the worker-created wealth and withholding it from those who need it more, that is.  (And since "good" and "need" are metaethically coextensive, that makes needs a fundamental focus of political ethics, right?  What about the distinctly human need for freedom?...)  (As leftish folks keep reminding us, people need opportunities, in order to flourish.  Surely, then, lefties have made it a priority to develop an art or science of eudaimonia (i.e., self-actualization, i.e., complete needs-fulfillment) for making maximal use of opportunities, so that all the opportunity-talk isn't for naught.  Surely then they've promoted Aristotelianism and philosophy as a top priority.  AOC and Chomsky and the rest of the intellectually- and morally-superior Left will weigh in on that all-important task any minute now.  Surely the intellectual ammo in this area from the Rawls- and Aristotle-influenced Nussbaum & Co. has filtered down to the Left from the philosophy departments by now.  Surely they know by now that when all is said and done eudaimonia is ultimately a self-generated, self-directed activity that the state, polity or demos thereby cannot make happen whatever push they give?))

Back to those morally-superior rightists.  Does it really matter if they get their facts right about what Democrat reproductive-rights (sic) legislation contains, as long as the moral value of life is upheld?  (Embryonic life is just as morally significant in all its rights-entailing glory as that of a rational-decision-making adult, you see.  It's not like the concept of rights arose for the purpose of securing a space of rational/autonomous living for rational/autonomous moral agents; it's about protecting generic biologically-human life, you see.  It's right there in the Declaration of Independence, a Christian-God-given document.)

Is America a Christian nation, meaning Muslims are not exactly welcome?  Well, ask your average Fox News viewer.  Ask your average Hannity viewer, i.e., Palin supporter.  Moral superiority all on display here.  And who's to say AOC's brand of moral superiority is superior to theirs?  Isn't it all just competing intuitions at this point?  Is that what America's bitter political divide all comes down to, is competing and irreconcilable moral intuitions?  It's like there's no intellectually-demanding route (whatever the hell that might involve) out of this pickle, or something.  You have your Trumpian facts, I have my Comrade AOC ones, and let's ultimately-pointlessly battle it out on social media, making sure to emphasize cleverness over wisdom.

America was founded as a Christian nation?  I have my historical narrative, you have yours.  Doesn't really matter if founders like Jefferson or Franklin were deists.  It's all due to Judeo-Christian heritage, the single fount of moral wisdom in the Western tradition.  And those godless left-wing degenerates are the sole cause of the nation's ills (and Trump is all that stands in the way of their making America a barbarian socialist hellhole).  When all the moral wisdom you ever need is in Scriptures, why bother with philosophy?  All the most important American Framers were members of the American Philosophical Society, but that's irrelevant because America was founded as a Christian nation.  If that doesn't exactly ring true, just remember: moral correctness supersedes factual correctness.

Okay, maybe that's going over-the-top.  But now suppose that a philosophical gadfly were to prompt a Fox News host or viewer to explain what they mean by their constant use of the phrase "but the media are biased and corrupt, the media won't tell you about such and such," and so on.

Gadfly: What do you mean by 'media'?
Fox News Viewer: [googled dictionary definition]
G: Fox News and talk radio are part of the media, then, right?
FNV: I mean the mainstream/legacy/drive-by media, the leftist biased media.
G: Wouldn't it help to make that clear when you use the term "media"?
FNV: You know what I mean when I say "biased corrupt media," stop being a pedant.
G: What if we need pedantry to avoid corruption of the language that leads people to accept certain narratives?  What about non-bullshitty conceptual clarity?
FNV: That's a nice high-minded ideal but we're in the realm of politics here, and politics is war by another means.  You have to fight Alinskyites with their own tactics, else they win.  That's why we need Trump as president.  Fiorina may have had the best arguments but Trump had a better chance of beating Crooked Hillary.
G: Isn't there a better way than that?  Shouldn't we aspire to higher standards of intellectual honesty and clarity?  Can't the people be better educated than that?
FNV: The educational system is already corrupted through and through by leftists and teachers unions.  They're godless socialists set in their ways.
G: People do tend to get set in their ways, yes.  It's a matter of habituation and life experience, forming coherent narratives about the way the world works (Marxists refer to the process here as ideology).  When these narratives clash, isn't there some process, something that takes place in dialogue-form, say, that might resolve these narrative differences?
FNV: Ideally, yes, but all the conceptual analysis and untangling required to make that productive would be very demanding and time-consuming.  When I get home from a hard day's work, I just want to relax in front of my favorite news programming.
G: And the CNN/MSNBC viewers do likewise, getting their version of events.
FNV: Correct.
G: So, what about those who have a lot of extra time on their hands to practice the art of conceptual analyzing and untangling, who aren't worn out by a hard day's work, whose minds aren't yet formed by whatever narrative ideology their life experiences hardened them into?
FNV: Oh, you mean the children?
G: Yes.
FNV: Children require education in Judeo-Christian moral values to live a good life, and they don't get that in the godless socialist schools.  How can we entrust their education to the current education establishment so they don't turn out like CNN-or-AOC-parroting drones?  Better that we fight that establishment through alternative media.
G: Aren't the educators basically well-intentioned even if they produce a mediocre product?  Don't they, in the end, want to cultivate independent critical minds who don't accept whatever is fed them as the truth?  Isn't that what education is for?
FNV: You're starting to get annoying.  I've said that the leftist educators are set in their ways, and their version of what it means to cultivate independent minds is not the same as ordinary decent folks' version.  Sure there are well-intentioned educators but too many of them are wicked and/or lazy and the wicked/lazy ones' tenure is protected by union rules.  I don't see a way around that problem from within the establishment.  At the university level, there are too many leftist faculty who, by having too little exposure to the real world, don't know how the free market system works.  Look at the products of that system, like AOC, or the drive-by media.
G: I don't mean to be annoying, I'm just trying to find a way out of this seeming predicament.  It seems like education would be the way out of it, but we don't have a clear agreement on what that education process should be like.  Should it involve teaching evolution?
FNV: If it involves teaching evolution, Intelligent Design should be given equal time.
G: Here's the problem with that: the vast majority of experts in the sciences don't consider ID to be science properly speaking.  Generally speaking, should ideas or theory of unequal merit be given equal time?
FNV: Of course not.  That's the current problem with the education system today.  Socialist and secular ideas are certainly no more meritorious than capitalist and God-fearing ones, but the kids are fed one a lot more than the other.  The educators are convinced that this is as it should be, since in their worldview capitalist and God-fearing ideas can't compete on the merits with socialist and secular ones.  And look how their secular decadence and socialist state-as-provider mentality has encouraged disintegration of the traditional family unit, rendering students less adequately prepared for proper learning.
G: Well,
FNV: I'm starting to tire of this discussion, I've had a long day of work and would like to relax with my news programming.  You may not be annoying per se, but I'm getting annoyed.  Besides, the last thing we need is for our youth to be corrupted and to start denying God, which is where the current crop of educators would lead them with their notions of "critical, independent thought."
G: Okay, then. I'll leave you be for now.  Talk later?

A WEEK LATER

G: Pick up where we left off?
FNV: *sigh* Where do you think we're going to get with all this?
G: I propose teaching philosophy to children, or age-appropriate philosophy as early as can be introduced to them.  There's actually a growing body of research that says it can be done.
FNV: *sigh* Aside from the problem of how we can trust the current crop of educators not to screw up that task, how about you name me any philosophers who believe in a Judeo-Christian God.  Without belief in that, our civilization is doomed.
G: Haven't you heard of the Euthyphro Dilemma?
FNV: Would you please answer my question first.
G: Fine.  Augustine, Aquinas, and (alive today) Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne.  You can search google and wikipedia for more names.
FNV: Aren't they in a small minority of philosophers these days?  Nietzsche said "God is dead."
G: One thing about philosophers is that their statements almost always get taken out of context or misconstrued by someone.  Some have even been sentenced to death based on such misunderstandings.
FNV: So Nietzsche didn't say "God is dead"?
G: Well, he did, but there's a whole context to all that.  He's been called a nihilist even though his aim was to overcome nihilism through a revaluation of values.  That ties in with the Euthyphro Dilemma....
FNV: God created the universe and in the process determined what is good and evil for his creatures.  His creatures as he created them have certain needs or requirements - requirements for wisdom in humans' cases, which begins in fear of the lord, Proverbs 9:10.
G: The love of wisdom is a fine thing, indeed.  Shall we live for the sake of the fine or noble?
FNV: How we shall live is set forth in the Scriptures.
G: And only the Scriptures?
FNV: Everything else is buttressing, basically.  Jesus' central message is one of love: to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself.  You learn to love through life experience and practice and pointing yourself in love's direction, and you don't need a bunch of book-learnin' for that.
G: You do need to love intelligently.  The road to hell can be paved with good intentions.  How about having a hard head to go along with the soft heart?  Isn't that basically what Aquinas was getting when assimilating Christianity to Aristotelian thought?
FNV: Alright, yes.
G: And God created our intellects along with our hearts in order that we may perfect our intellective soul along with the rest of our soul?
FNV: As long as that intellect is directed toward love and intellectual, um,...
G: Contemplation?
FNV: Yes, contemplation of divinity, of the Lord.  That's what the secular socialists educators don't get.  Intellectual perfection, as you call it, all that science and learning, is all for naught when it isn't directed in the end toward what is most important, to what gives our lives meaning, and that is God - that is, the relationship we have with God.
G: I find a lot here that resonates with me, even if I might put it in other terms.  Arguably the greatest of the so-called secular philosophers had this idea that the intellect is the most divine thing within us, and the most divine object in existence is (to put it crudely) "thought thinking itself," which Aquinas in turn identified as God.  So if we did have a program for philosophy for children, it would involve exposing them to this idea for sure, for their consideration and contemplation.
FNV: Of course.  Secular socialist teachers may not be so keen on that, though.
G: Why not?
FNV: For one thing, the love of God, or having a God-centered life, focuses our attention away from political power (such as the power involved in state-run education), and from the material concerns of life.  Secular socialists are not all fine and good with that.  They believe in this world only and so pursue the powers and pleasures of this world.  They had their chance to receive the Lord's message and turned away from it anyway.
G: I assume that as a Christian you believe in free will, so what if they're given another chance, only this time you edify your message intellectually with the ideas of Aquinas and Plantinga.
FNV: Oh, I don't know...
G: What we're talking here is a change of mind and heart, and that's usually not easy.  And as you say, a majority of philosophers these days are unbelievers.  That Euthyphro Dilemma still nags at me, because even though these philosophers don't believe in a God (definitely not in the sense that you mean, anyway), they do believe in right and wrong, good and evil, and many leave decent enough lives so as not to live like barbarians and treat fellow humans un-lovingly.  Maybe they've hit on grains of truth that can be discovered without explicit acknowledged aid of God's guiding light.  Which is to say that they don't need to attest to belief in God in order to discover moral truths even if God is the ultimate explanation for how they came to discover it.  In the jargon of philosophy, God would be metaphysically explanatory without being epistemologically explanatory here.  But let's say that there are moral truths whether God exists or not.  Do you entertain the proposition that God might not exist?
FNV: You mean to take the perspective of a doubter?  Encountering and grappling with doubt is part of the normal Christian experience, a rite of passage, yes.
G: Yes, that's what I mean.  To entertain a proposition without necessarily accepting it.  To see where it might lead.  That's a philosophical activity.  Because a lot of us are mistaken in at least some of our beliefs.  You don't hold the same beliefs as a Muslim.  Both of you can't be right.  So unless you want to resort to non-rational means to resolve your conflicts of belief, you need to subject your ideas to the light of scrutiny.  Just as is the case with your conflict of belief with the secular socialist educators.  You both possess the freedom of will to change your minds in the face of honest inquiry.
FNV: Easier said than done.
G: As one of the not-exactly-secular but not-exactly-theist philosophers once said, all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.  Philosophy or intellectual refinement is not easy, but the reward is a better if imperfect grasp of the truth.
FNV: It sounds like you're trying to lead me from premises I accept to a conclusion I am wary of, that philosophy is the route to enlightenment.  Scripture says to be on guard about that sort of thing.  The fool says there is no God, even if the fool uses clever-sounding arguments.
G: Yes, such fools are known as sophists, and their very name indicates an appearance of wisdom or love of it, but their notorious MO is to lead people to conclusions by specious arguments.  A key aspect of wisdom or the love of it is to be able to tell specious arguments apart from the truly fine or best ones - to tell the fool's gold apart from the real.  We do necessarily aspire to the true gold for the soul, for how truly valuable it is, which makes it all the more important to know what's the true and what's the fake.  And that is the task of philosophy or love of wisdom, so as to best order our souls for the finest living.  Which is why I ask you not to simply accept my argument if you are wary of it, but to think it through, to examine it for flaws you may find in it, and to make clear what exactly you find in it that makes you wary of it.
FNV: Fair enough.  All I know is, the Scriptures are darn great, they are a treasury of real gold.
G: The Muslim says the same about the Quran.  The task of philosophy in this case is to examine where the gold is to be found in both of your perspectives.  It's not like the life experiences and habituation of the Muslim makes it weird that the Quran would be of great value and appeal.  What would be weird, from a philosopher's perspective, is to take a position of great skepticism toward one holy book but not another.  They both must be subjected to the same warranted skeptical attitude.  That means, of course, that the Bible must be subjected to as much scrutiny as the Quran, as well as the secular socialist worldview you are rightly skeptical of.
FNV: Subjecting the secular socialist worldview to intense scrutiny sounds like a wonderful idea.  I wish the educators were more amenable to that than they are.
G: As long as they profess a love of wisdom and learning, they would be hypocrites not to be amenable to it.  And who dares not to profess a love of wisdom and learning, lest they be ridiculed?  The sophists wouldn't even dare.
FNV: The devil at his most devious comes in disguise, professing love of what's holy.
G: Indeed.  How, then, is philosophy not a cure-all for human soul-ailments?
FNV: Well, you tell me.
G: I don't know much, but I do know that I haven't yet encountered anything that would disabuse me of the idea that it is such a cure-all.
FNV: So what you're saying is that the fool AOC is peddling fool's gold, and philosophical education would combat this.
G: It's not just AOC.  We all have faults, but it's the attitude we take to those faults that decides our level of wisdom.  As you put it as a Christian, we have human weakness and the appropriate attitude toward that is one of humility.  The fool is full of hubris.
FNV: That's the issue I take with the educators today.  They think they're intellectually superior to us Fox News viewers when they're no better on average than we are.
G: And as a Christian, are you throwing stones from a glass house here?  By which I mean, both you and the educators today are finding fault in the other and regarding one another as you do.  The result has been a not-very-productive exchange of insults, vilification, caricatures -- you've reduced educators to "secular socialists" with little or no redeeming value, while they've reduced you to "gullible Fox News Viewer" or "deplorable Trump voter," as though that defined your personality.  Philosophers qua philosophers - i.e., in their capacity of such, abstracting from their own human shortcomings - tend to take a different approach, as a matter of habit and training and experience in encountering and combating human cognitive foibles: they take a more collaborative than oppositional approach.  It's nice to win an argument, but even better for both sides of the argument to attain a better or more refined grasp of the truth.
FNV: The problem is, the political reality of today is that of a power struggle, and I don't see philosophers - ones well-identified as such at any rate - taking part in this.  Don't they do a lot of contemplating and study away from this ugly fray?  Where is philosophically-minded commentary and literature in all this?
G: There is some of it, but what there is of it seems to be drowned out by battles on social media platforms.  Philosophers tend to put their ideas in long-form presentation in blogs, for example, if they're even doing that sort of thing online rather than in books and print articles.  Whatever its benefits, social media is driven by a different dynamic than a truth-seeking one.  Here we get back to that whole definition of "media" we started with.  Especially in the age of the internet, the media are increasingly you and I.  Speaking of getting clarity on definitions, have we even pinpointed what we mean by "wisdom," that thing we say we love so much?
FNV: Oh boy....
G: We could start with [googled dictionary definition] and go from there.
FNV: Do you ever get tired?  Alright, you win, philosophical education far and wide, ffs already.  You do you, I've got other things to do now.  Tucker Carlson's on shortly.  Hell no, he shouldn't have to apologize for remarks he made on Bubba the Love Sponge show of all places, are you fucking kidding me?  Context matters.
G: Say, have you heard about dialectic, the art of context keeping?
FNV: Oh boy....

Can leftism be steelmanned?

First, what is steelmanning?

The steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the opposite of the straw man argument. The idea is to find the best form of the opponent's argument to test opposing opinions.

Straw man - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

So to construct a steelman argument for an opposing position (leftism in my case) is to apply Dennett/Rapoport Rules for kindness in criticism.

First, what is leftism?  Left-wing politics is a range of political positions described as follows (excerpting at least a few main points; for the full discussion consult the link):

Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.^[1][2][3][4] It typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others (prioritarianism) as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished (by advocating for social justice).^[1] The term left-wing can also refer to "the radical, reforming, or socialist section of a political party or system".^[5] 

... 

The following positions are typically associated with left-wing politics. 

Economics 

Leftist economic beliefs range from Keynesian economics and the welfare state through industrial democracyand the social market to nationalization of the economy and central planning,^[27] to the anarcho-syndicalistadvocacy of a council- and assembly-based self-managed anarchist communism. During the industrial revolution, leftists supported trade unions. At the beginning of the 20th century, many leftists advocated strong government intervention in the economy.^[28] Leftists continue to criticize what they perceive as the exploitative nature of globalization, the "race to the bottom" and unjust lay-offs. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the belief that government (ruling in accordance with the interests of the people) ought to be directly involved in the day-to-day workings of an economy declined in popularity amongst the center-left, especially social democrats who became influenced by "Third Way" ideology.
...
Social progressivism and counterculture 

See also: Socialist feminism and Socialism and LGBT rights 

Social progressivism is another common feature of modern leftism, particularly in the United States, where social progressives played an important role in the abolition of slavery,^[75] women's suffrage,^[76] civil rightsand multiculturalism. Progressives have both advocated prohibition legislation and worked towards its repeal. Current positions associated with social progressivism in the West include opposition to the death penaltyand the War on Drugs, as well as support for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, cognitive liberty, distribution of contraceptives, public funding of embryonic stem-cell research and the right of women to choose abortion. Public education was a subject of great interest to groundbreaking social progressives, such as Lester Frank Ward and John Dewey, who believed that a democratic system of government was impossible without a universal and comprehensive system of education.
...
Varieties 

The spectrum of left-wing politics ranges from center-left to far-left (or ultra-left). The term center-left describes a position within the political mainstream. The terms far-left and ultra-left refer to positions that are more radical. The center-left includes social democrats, social liberals, progressives and also some democratic socialists and greens (including some eco-socialists). Center-left supporters accept market allocation of resources in a mixed economy with a significant public sector and a thriving private sector. Center-left policies tend to favour limited state intervention in matters pertaining to the public interest.

Now, before I get to the "can it be steelmanned" question, I would like to ask:

Take your median individual on the leftism spectrum as characterized above, assume a high level of education/schooling and then ask that person to make an attempt to steelman a position that such a person would typically hold in contempt.  Let's not make it an easy-to-hate case like right-wing authoritarianism, fascism, Nazism or similar theories.  Let's make it a less-easy-to-hate position held by a median person on the American right, perhaps a regular listener of the Rush Limbaugh show, reader of Thomas Sowell . . . or is that too not-easy-to-hate?  Let's make it, instead, a person also within the "mainstream" of the American right who holds beliefs widely held among Republicans that are or may be easily open to ridicule: opposition to evolutionary theory and/or belief that humans appeared in their present form less than 10,000 years ago; belief that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president; belief that Muslims and sharia law pose an existential threat to the nation; belief that foreigners are invading and taking highly valued jobs from native citizens; belief that the mainstream media is irredeemably biased and unreliable while Fox News is the height of journalistic reliability and virtue; belief that Democrats now are seeking to legalize infanticide on demand; these sorts of things.

(There's also an intellectual perspective that a median leftist seems to hold in great contempt, but based on a strawman (see above) conception of that perspective: Ayn Rand's Objectivism.  Said intellectually-lazy contempt is a good explanation for why I hold the typical leftist in contempt.)

Now, is it reasonable to ask a median leftist or Democrat to steelman the views of said Republican?  Because that's not altogether different from asking me to steelman leftism.  Okay, so some of the views described in the quoted section above - namely those within the "social progressivism" section resonate with me as a libertarian who rejects typically 'conservative' conceptions of the state as a vehicle for soulcraft/virtue-cultivation.

But note that I did narrow down the sort of American-mainstream rightist a median leftist would hold in contempt to something fairly definite; I didn't put it to this hypothetical leftist to steelman "rightism."  So perhaps I should narrow down my conception of leftism for steelmanning purposes to something more specific and definite, and preferably to one that I would hold in least contempt -- i.e., the most philosophically fortifiable version of leftism that might exist, and one that still in some fashion plausibly falls within the boundaries of the range of left-wing views described above.

And once you narrow it down that way, it comes to something like: a pro-capitalism (obviously not the laissez-faire version, but still private ownership of industry), pro-market, center-left, pro-safety-net, proactively-anti-discrimination, socially libertarian, swing- or purple-state Democrat type, probably more in line with a (non-Crooked) Hillary Clinton type as opposed to a Crazy Bernie Sanders or more-clever-than-wise AOC type for whom I have much contempt qua political figures.  (So they're not as bad as Stalin, Mao, or Castro.  Their proposed shit sandwich is democratic, after all, which is, um, less worse than those fuckers.  So a majority rather than a dictator owns your life; just wonderful.)  And then imagine such a position as defended not by Crooked Hillary but by the most worthy philosophical figure that might advocate it.  Someone that Aristotle could take seriously.

Thus narrowed down, the name 'John Rawls' comes first to mind.  (If not him, then, say, a collection of editorial board members at Ethics or Philosophy & Public Affairs, many of whom would also be household names in a rational polity.)  So, can the Rawlsian position be steelmanned more than he basically did on his own behalf already?  Doubtful, but that may be the most philosophically-fortified version of left-wing thought within the range given above.  If Democrat politicians and Democrat-dominated mainstream media were fluent in Rawls (as they should have been if their liberal arts schooling was worth what it's supposed to be), they would look a lot more formidable than the bunch of clowns they look like right now.  It would necessitate an intellectual-arms-race response from the right, which is to say that the likes of Rand and Nozick would become more prominent in the national discussion, for a real high-level dialectic within a philosophically-educated citizenry to finally take place.  (Would that be too fucking much to ask?  Isn't it what Aristotle would want to see, ffs?)  Then we'd see how well Rawls fairness-intuitions reflected in his Original Position device fares against the 'your-life-belongs-to-you-not-the-polity' intuitions-plus-theory of Rand, Nozick, et al.  (Assume the likes of an Oakeshott or Scruton to represent the conservative perspective.  Surely the wildly intellectually diverse academy gives them their due coverage, ffs?)  (Also assume widespread familiarity with the quasi-Aristotelian-essentialist metaphysics (with reason/intellect as the human essence) underlying Rand's ethical-political standpoint, and hence her central "role of the mind in man's existence" theme, ffs already.)

Now, as a libertarian, anything with -libertarian as suffix might naturally stimulate my interests.  And so any left-position that calls itself left-libertarianism (represented by Otsuka, Steiner, Vallentyne, and Van Parijs) might be another steelman-able left-wing position.  Somehow it hasn't exactly stimulated my interest enough to investigate all that deeply; perhaps it's the emphasis on a fair initial distribution of "resources" when (as per Rand) the mind/intellect is the ultimate resource for generating value-added, that seems to miss the key and central point of what motivates Rand-style right-libertarianism.  But this is an area where I have homework to do as time and interest allow; the art or science of eudaimonia (with social entailments of that, including supportive (non-state) institutions) is a larger fish to fry at the moment.  At the base of that art/science is cognitive/intellectual perfectionism, and hence (better living via) philosophy.  (And my current fish-frying involves an intensive inductive survey of historical philosophical activity as exemplified in such concrete figures as Plato and Aristotle; and so next up on my reading list is the Oxford Handbook of Hume, the Oxford Handbooks being eminently useful resources for the subject matter they cover.  After the Hume one it'll probably be the Hegel one.)

So even as much as this or that political viewpoint could be steelmanned, does that generate as much bang for the human-situation-improvement buck as constructing a steelmanned program of philosophical living?  That way our polity can finally have that worthwhile dialogue about which political philosophy is strongest -- assuming everyone isn't already too busy flourishing to spend time figuring out the best way to use coercive institutions on one another.  Philosophy (beginning at the youngest feasible age), goddammit.