Might as well continue in drill sergeant mode for this one. (And why not? I find that I rather like writing in drill sergeant mode, for "mysterious" reasons I'll let you use your own fucking noggin to figure out.)
So, I learn about David Wallace-Wells's book, The Unhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (hereafter TUE), after reading Andrew Sullivan's seemingly well-reasoned piece on the toxic-as-fuck radical trans ideology madness. (I say seemingly, because past experience has made me skeptical about Sullivan; his reckless idiocy about Rand stands out too far, and his verbal fellating of Obama in '08 didn't quite pan out in any sort of transformative presidency.) (I have a fresh draft still in the queue about the latest ultra-toxic trans ideology madness, quite possibly the gravity well that ends up sucking in the entire political left in its already-near-batshit-crazy current form; long story short, if the left's goal is to get Trump re-elected, then embracing the madness as the Democrats appear poised to do might be a wonderful idea. It'll help things along nicely if leftists (continue to) foam at the mouth and basically lie that Trumpism is fascism.) Sullivan's comments on TUE appear at the link below the trans-madness piece. His views echo those of the great majority of goodreads reviewers: it paints a picture of a future that is nothing short of frightening.
I have no expertise on the subject of climate change. Whenever I hear about the latest in climate alarmism I am reminded of Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb from half a century ago; suffice it to say that its alarmist predictions did not come to pass. He lost that resource-scarcity bet with Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource, HINT HINT). But my well-developed (I think) "ring of truth" detector says that the climate change problem is for real, based on a comprehensive body of data which is best explained by man-made CO2 emissions. The observed increase in temperatures appears to be happening at a pace well out of the usual range for such things over geologic time. (Anyway, what do we do if we're still around when that Yellowstone supervolcano blows? I don't know shit.) My "ring of truth" detector also tells me that the American Right in particular has been epistemically reckless about this subject. It's not just that the very stable genius Trump might somehow happen to be right that "climate change is a hoax" (etc.), but rather it's his dogmatic, unaccountable and therefore credibility-shitting way of speaking on the subject, the fucking dickhead. If he has some kind of argument, I haven't seen it. The piece of shit. Speaking of that Ehrlich-Simon bet, Trump should put some of that money where his big loud mouth is and place a bet on climate change outcomes. Also, the fat scumbag could stand to lose some weight.
The wikipedia page for TUE indicates a reception that's more mixed - as in, less ready than the goodreads reviewers to buy into Wallace-Wells' alarmism.
But I'm here to address issues surrounding the climate change debate - e.g., the nature of the debate itself. I'm also addressing it as someone who regularly beats the drum for philosophical education as a comprehensive means of solving a vast range of human problems/challenges; the aim is to facilitate better living by making humans better problem-solvers. And I have certain recommendations for living that make abundant sense in their own right, regardless of whether the lifestyle changes involved are necessary to combat climate change.
First off, the likes of Naomi Klein bring their own (leftist) baggage to this issue. The left has hated capitalism well before climate change ever became a major concern. All the shitty arguments these disgusting creatures made against capitalism has destroyed their credibility. The overall credibility of the left today is in shambles. Just as they are the boy who cried racism, they are the boy who cry that capitalism is inhumane and unjust, and they also happen to be the boy who's been crying climate catastrophe. This is to say that the more we can leave discreditable and toxic leftist politics out of this, the better, and we'd better look for the most credible people we can find who are not affiliated with the political left (especially the far left). AOC's credibility is in that toilet she claims the migrants were told to drink from. Flush her and her ilk down so that we can get serious.
(Besides, anyone who knows about libertarianism/capitalism in steelmanned version knows that there is no such thing in such a version as a right to impose negative externalities. Private property rights so constrained are consistent with ecological health. So this is consistent with stiff penalties for the sorts of lifestyle decisions I prescribe against below. [An issue I am no expert on is how the legal system rationally goes about relying on science to estimate the extent of externalities damages.])
Nuclear energy strikes me as a serious measure to reduce carbon footprint. I don't know if the nuke facilities can be made redundant in their security measures well enough to avoid Fukashima-like fuck-ups.
But the real solutions lies in basic lifestyle changes (and these are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give the general flavor/mindset):
Don't have kids. You don't need them. (Not as a pressing need, anyhow. [Edit: Okay, so it's context-dependent, I guess; context-dependent needs...? I shall think through this more thoroughly, I might be wrong, maybe have fewer kids, etc....] Existing humans are in abundance and a great many of those could use some Aristotelian-eudaimonic social capital to help get their acts together. How about prioritizing things in that direction if legacy-traces is the motivation here.) Easy way to reduce your carbon footprint. Your biology has programmed and perhaps fooled you into thinking it is an imperative within the framework of a reflective sapient creature's meaning-fulfillment. Wake the fuck up. Chances are non-zero that having kids these days will consign them to that uninhabitable-earth scenario. Don't be a fucking moron.
Stop eating so fucking much, you fat fucking pigs, especially you sedentary and slovenly American pigs.
You don't need that big car, and the big house, with that big yard that you wastefully water and manicture. Instead of spending all your time and money on that shit, buy some books and read some more. E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful may not be a bad choice.
Unplug from your devices and screen-time once in a goddamn while at least. (If you must have screen time, why not use it to be a film buff, and fucking listen and learn any and all necessary film references/quotes.) You are dopamine addicts seeking your next momentary fix, you fucking pathetic pieces of shit. Shut 'em off cold turkey if you have to, go outside and exercise (which will require energy but then again your not having kids should offset problems there). Get off your twitter feed, stop caring about getting the "likes." Nobody was ever great by virtue of being liked. No monument has been erected to honor a critic.
Make wisdom and its pursuit the centerpiece of your existence. Learn to learn better. If you're going to be online (2 hrs a day is about the healthy limit), seek out and read philosophy blogs rather than the latest twitter turd-pile. Seek out opposing opinions as much as you can and try to prove your own ones wrong if they haven't been established by exhaustive research. (Have I established by exhaustive research that wisdom(-pursuit) is a really wise idea? Am I reasoning in a vicious circle, or a virtuous one? Is any attempt to refute wisdom-pursuit self-defeating? You tell me, genius; I don't know fuck-all.) You're not entitled to your opinion qua opinion, you entitlement-mentality lazy little shit. Get obsessed with wisdom and character because that's really all that matters, and not all those material consumables. The more wise you are, the better you can meet your ultimate fate (natural death, car crash, inevitable ecosystem collapse, tech-based immortality, whatever it turns out to be).
Learn some aesthetic appreciation if you haven't yet. That'll tune you in better to the beauty of nature and cause you to respect it more. Stop subsidizing factory farming with your thoughtless, inhumane cakehole-stuffing. You'll also develop an appreciation for having an aesthetically pleasing figure rather than that tub of lard you're probably dragging around.
If you're having trouble finding guidance, ask yourself what Aristotle, Jesus, Einstein, Ghandi, MLK, the Buddha might do. Even if you know next to jackshit about these figures, certain shall we say archetypical behaviors and attitudes may pop into mind. Then adapt for your own personality and circumstances as necessary, since in fact only Aristotle is (was) eligible to do what Aristotle would do. What if you draw inspiration from both Aristotle and Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the senior drill instructor (and/or the Snake Diet Wizard, the Fat Shaming King)? Then incorporate both inspirations into your act. Don't stop there. Dialectically synthesize the fuck out of all your positive influences and add your own unique touch, for shit's sake.
When in doubt, try being kind instead of being an asshole. Try not going out of your way to misconstrue someone's statements on the internet, as insecure strawman-mongering pieces of shit do. If you do have to be an "asshole," have a good reason, like motivating some weak-ass limp-dick fools into becoming the versions of themselves they can and should be.
Become more acutely aware that human flourishing is a social activity involving a congeniality of diverse and complementary excellences, and act accordingly. Strive for excellence and nobility and encourage it in others (which is part of striving for excellence and nobility).
===
Is it really hard to believe that if humanity adopts the spirit of these recommendations/guidelines that problem-solving abilities can and will go through the roof? I mean, after all, how much is the problem-solving potential of AI constrained by the quality of those AI is meant to assist?
Here I'm trying to finally get around to delving into Hurley's Natural Reasons (written at the age of 35 by someone with clearly more raw talent than I possess) presumably in preparation for my own treatise, and I keep getting distracted by this other shit? Goddammit!
[Possibly in the queue if/when priorities permit: tying together common strands in Ayn Rand and The Big Lebowski. I am quite possibly the only person on the planet who is very well-versed in both, which should make for some kind of potent combination that manifests itself somewhere/somehow if one makes the effort to look around. They both have had the word "cult" attached to them in some way or other. Let's just say I'm an enthusiast for both, and Rand-bashers are a bunch of fucking amateurs; the dipshits don't have the goods they represent themselves as having. They are high in the running for intellectually laziest worldwide. Their weakness is vanity. Rand went out, overcame obstacles, and achieved while they're just looking for a credibility-handout, pretending that it was she who micturated upon their own credibility. Leftist losers, indeed. I can't solve their problems, only they can. As for Rand herself: wonderful woman, I'm all very fond of her. But as some wiser fella than myself once said, . . . aw hell, I've lost my train of thought here.]
Showing posts with label the future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the future. Show all posts
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
The earth going forward
In a nutshell, the earth going forward will be affected by what human beings do. This is why the era we are entering is now dubbed the Anthropocene. There are two major trends going on right now: (1) technological maturation and (2) Stress on the ecological system. (When I think of ecological stresses it's not just climate change that comes to mind; I also think of the acidification of the oceans, declining insect populations and biodiversity, destruction of the coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, antibiotic-resistant diseases, and other readily googlable troubling phenomena.)
(Also, any educated person these days should be considerably familiar with ourworldindata.org.)
In the light of exponential growth in technology which is now seeing AI or machine learning going mainstream, advances in robotics, nanotechnology on the near horizon, lab-grown meat becoming affordable around this year (which can only put some size dent in the consumption of meat grown even in organic and therefore more resource-intensive and therefore more expensive processes, along with the methane produced from such processes), production automation making goods and services ever more affordable (counteracting to a great extent supposed disemployment effects), and any number of other advances, it becomes very difficult to envision the future of humanity with much detail beyond a few years from now. The most significant of the advances would probably be in the area of AI, for the same reason that intelligence-capable human beings mark a rather radical departure from nature's and life's original courses. And you have to imagine AI helping humans solve problems in conjunction with their use of all the other new emerging technologies.
Climate change and other actual or potential ecological crises would definitely be a major problem going forward, if present human trends using present technology continue. But the latter is not going to happen. Do we really have any way of telling what the earth is going to be like in half a century? By then will biodiversity be engineered by humans, the coral reefs restored, agriculture moved to laboratories, etc.? How about any advances in human culture, e.g., philosophy (and therefore superior rationality, and ultimately Aristotelian-caliber rationality or intellectual perfectionism) for children becoming mainstream? Will AI help humanity transcend its addictions to rationality-undermining facets of social media, which people are already well becoming sick of and looking for solutions to?
This seems to be a good time for bets to be placed as to whether this or that ecological challenge will be met by technological advances, and when. If people have too little information to go on to make such bets, then that just reinforces my point here: we really don't know how the earth is going to look going all that much forward. And maybe that's the source of present-day anxieties. (We may be living dangerously, with all the psychological consequences of that.)
We might try to go 50 years into the past for some guide to what we might expect to transpire over the next 50 years. 51 years ago, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. (It was also one year before man first landed on the moon.) There was inevitably some amount of speculation on Kubrick's (and author of the book version, Arthur C. Clark's) part, such as the form that advanced AI might take, with the eventually villainous HAL 9000 ("I'm sorry, Dave..."). But there was only so much that could be done even at the level of speculation, which the film's "mysterious" ending is meant to convey. As Kubrick explained in interviews at the time, the Star Gate sequence and the resulting Star Child are meant as symbolic and/or allegorical depictions of humanity taking a "leap" to a higher level of being. (The musical cue from "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Richard Strauss's musical tribute to Nietzsche's novel, appears in the film where the ape advances into man, and then when the man advances into the Star Child, which Kubrick directly refers to in interviews as a kind of superman.) But the symbolic or allegorical treatment is replacement for literal depictions of futuristic humanity or contact with alien species (represented indirectly by the black monolith), because at that point we just wouldn't know.
This reveals a problem with a lot of non-Kubrick science fiction. Take even such lauded sci-fi as Blade Runner, which occurs in Los Angeles of 2019. At that time, there would be humanoid replicants who almost thoroughly successfully mimic human beings. Somehow, humanity would have gotten to the point of creating such replicants without first thinking through the implications. But it's precisely such cultural resources as Blade Runner that gets humanity to first think such things through. It's why the year 1984 came to pass without the world becoming like Orwell's novel. As China begins implementing its "social credits" system here very soon, it invites warnings and comparisons to Big Brother. (It's hard to tell whether the concerns here are overblown.)
Another common element in a lot of sci-fi, save perhaps for Star Trek: the futures depicted are often dystopian -- i.e., that humanity misused its technology with the result often being that a tyrannical government or corporate entity used that technology to control or dehumanize people, use them for gory entertainment purposes, consume them, limit their lifespans, manipulate their minds, and so on. Even with Star Trek and Star Wars, we see wars occurring, but what would motivate beings who are that technologically advanced (and, presumably, intellectually advanced as they use their technology to learn how to become more morally and aesthetically perfect?) to go to war? The movie Independence Day (1996) depicts a hostile alien race - which has mastered interstellar travel - coming to earth to use its resources. Perhaps going forward, humans will increasingly demand that movies with such dubious and intelligence-insulting premises not be made? That alone would be a cultural improvement, and less wasteful of storytelling resources. And becoming smarter and more efficient with resources is just part of humanity's technological improvement.
The same year as 2001's release, Paul R. Ehrlich foresaw doom with his book, The Population Bomb. In 1980 he made a wager with economist Julian Simon, "betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. ... Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period." This strikes me as an instructive example of doom and gloom coming up against what Simon referred to as the ultimate resource: “skilled, spirited and hopeful people who will exert their will and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.” In short, the human mind.
Which is to say, that one's level of anxiety over the future of planet earth is probably inversely proportional to one's confidence in the ability of humans to use their mental capacities to solve problems.
I can't say that I'm all that anxious about the condition of the earth going forward.
(My anxiety, if that's what it is, is more about how even intellectually- and culturally-advanced humans would manage to discover lasting meaning if/when they have all that extra time on their hands in a 'post-scarcity' era; I just hope beauty would always remain fulfilling, seeing as how 'living to kalon' - for the sake of the beautiful or noble or fine, where our values or needs are in harmonious proportion in a hierarchy (and wherein we discover our unique form of self-actualization or eudaimonia) - is ultimately the best theoretical accounting for our widely-shared commonsense standard of value that I can think of. Perhaps that means humans eventually becoming essentially aesthetic-creative beings. Is that what Nietzsche had in mind with the 'overman' idea?...)
(Also, any educated person these days should be considerably familiar with ourworldindata.org.)
In the light of exponential growth in technology which is now seeing AI or machine learning going mainstream, advances in robotics, nanotechnology on the near horizon, lab-grown meat becoming affordable around this year (which can only put some size dent in the consumption of meat grown even in organic and therefore more resource-intensive and therefore more expensive processes, along with the methane produced from such processes), production automation making goods and services ever more affordable (counteracting to a great extent supposed disemployment effects), and any number of other advances, it becomes very difficult to envision the future of humanity with much detail beyond a few years from now. The most significant of the advances would probably be in the area of AI, for the same reason that intelligence-capable human beings mark a rather radical departure from nature's and life's original courses. And you have to imagine AI helping humans solve problems in conjunction with their use of all the other new emerging technologies.
Climate change and other actual or potential ecological crises would definitely be a major problem going forward, if present human trends using present technology continue. But the latter is not going to happen. Do we really have any way of telling what the earth is going to be like in half a century? By then will biodiversity be engineered by humans, the coral reefs restored, agriculture moved to laboratories, etc.? How about any advances in human culture, e.g., philosophy (and therefore superior rationality, and ultimately Aristotelian-caliber rationality or intellectual perfectionism) for children becoming mainstream? Will AI help humanity transcend its addictions to rationality-undermining facets of social media, which people are already well becoming sick of and looking for solutions to?
This seems to be a good time for bets to be placed as to whether this or that ecological challenge will be met by technological advances, and when. If people have too little information to go on to make such bets, then that just reinforces my point here: we really don't know how the earth is going to look going all that much forward. And maybe that's the source of present-day anxieties. (We may be living dangerously, with all the psychological consequences of that.)
We might try to go 50 years into the past for some guide to what we might expect to transpire over the next 50 years. 51 years ago, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. (It was also one year before man first landed on the moon.) There was inevitably some amount of speculation on Kubrick's (and author of the book version, Arthur C. Clark's) part, such as the form that advanced AI might take, with the eventually villainous HAL 9000 ("I'm sorry, Dave..."). But there was only so much that could be done even at the level of speculation, which the film's "mysterious" ending is meant to convey. As Kubrick explained in interviews at the time, the Star Gate sequence and the resulting Star Child are meant as symbolic and/or allegorical depictions of humanity taking a "leap" to a higher level of being. (The musical cue from "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Richard Strauss's musical tribute to Nietzsche's novel, appears in the film where the ape advances into man, and then when the man advances into the Star Child, which Kubrick directly refers to in interviews as a kind of superman.) But the symbolic or allegorical treatment is replacement for literal depictions of futuristic humanity or contact with alien species (represented indirectly by the black monolith), because at that point we just wouldn't know.
This reveals a problem with a lot of non-Kubrick science fiction. Take even such lauded sci-fi as Blade Runner, which occurs in Los Angeles of 2019. At that time, there would be humanoid replicants who almost thoroughly successfully mimic human beings. Somehow, humanity would have gotten to the point of creating such replicants without first thinking through the implications. But it's precisely such cultural resources as Blade Runner that gets humanity to first think such things through. It's why the year 1984 came to pass without the world becoming like Orwell's novel. As China begins implementing its "social credits" system here very soon, it invites warnings and comparisons to Big Brother. (It's hard to tell whether the concerns here are overblown.)
Another common element in a lot of sci-fi, save perhaps for Star Trek: the futures depicted are often dystopian -- i.e., that humanity misused its technology with the result often being that a tyrannical government or corporate entity used that technology to control or dehumanize people, use them for gory entertainment purposes, consume them, limit their lifespans, manipulate their minds, and so on. Even with Star Trek and Star Wars, we see wars occurring, but what would motivate beings who are that technologically advanced (and, presumably, intellectually advanced as they use their technology to learn how to become more morally and aesthetically perfect?) to go to war? The movie Independence Day (1996) depicts a hostile alien race - which has mastered interstellar travel - coming to earth to use its resources. Perhaps going forward, humans will increasingly demand that movies with such dubious and intelligence-insulting premises not be made? That alone would be a cultural improvement, and less wasteful of storytelling resources. And becoming smarter and more efficient with resources is just part of humanity's technological improvement.
The same year as 2001's release, Paul R. Ehrlich foresaw doom with his book, The Population Bomb. In 1980 he made a wager with economist Julian Simon, "betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. ... Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period." This strikes me as an instructive example of doom and gloom coming up against what Simon referred to as the ultimate resource: “skilled, spirited and hopeful people who will exert their will and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.” In short, the human mind.
Which is to say, that one's level of anxiety over the future of planet earth is probably inversely proportional to one's confidence in the ability of humans to use their mental capacities to solve problems.
I can't say that I'm all that anxious about the condition of the earth going forward.
(My anxiety, if that's what it is, is more about how even intellectually- and culturally-advanced humans would manage to discover lasting meaning if/when they have all that extra time on their hands in a 'post-scarcity' era; I just hope beauty would always remain fulfilling, seeing as how 'living to kalon' - for the sake of the beautiful or noble or fine, where our values or needs are in harmonious proportion in a hierarchy (and wherein we discover our unique form of self-actualization or eudaimonia) - is ultimately the best theoretical accounting for our widely-shared commonsense standard of value that I can think of. Perhaps that means humans eventually becoming essentially aesthetic-creative beings. Is that what Nietzsche had in mind with the 'overman' idea?...)
Thursday, February 14, 2013
The primacy of the intellect
[I was originally going to title this posting "America's healthcare affordability crisis," but I just kept integrating to wider and wider principles as I proceeded; the progression unfolds below.]
By this point, regular readers of this blog are most likely used to an inductively-established pattern I'm big on, namely that a great many human existential problems are primarily intellectual problems at their source. That the intellect - how (well) it is used or misused - has more primacy in human affairs than any other human characteristic, is at the very core of the doctrine I have named P/perfectivism. I think the distinction between "primary" and "only" is also well-known to Rand-influenced readers; that the intellect is the prime mover in human affairs, doesn't make it the only mover. But in terms of a correct mode of analysis of human affairs, at the greatest level of fundamentality (and that which is fundamental in any context being what philosophers are supposed to discover), I don't know of anything more fundamental for purposes of explanation than the characteristically human mode of consciousness, i.e., a conceptual or abstractive one (the key faculty of abstraction being the intellect).
And so it is by this mode of analysis that one can only truly get to the root of such a concrete issue as the USA's healthcare affordability situation.
The connection between these two things would probably be met with incomprehension or incredulity among many of today's political observers. How can something so (seemingly) abstract as the human mode of consciousness come to affect something so concretely-impacting as one's (or one's neighbors) healthcare situation?
I figured I would address this concrete issue in particular after having just had a discussion with Canadians about the qualities of its healthcare system. The basic message I took from this discussion is that Americans are very ill-informed about the ways in which their own healthcare payment and delivery system compares with others in the industrially-advanced world. Here in America a cancer diagnosis can wipe out people's life savings; that sort of thing is unheard of in a country like Canada. (How Obamacare is supposed to address that concern is not clearly spelled out as far as I know.) But to hear the American national discourse on the healthcare issue, the average American simply does not have the information (or an adequate grasp of it) to make well-considered decisions regarding policy (through direct support or indirectly through voting for leaders), even when some medical situations can be financially devastating to them under current policy. It sounds like playing with fire, doesn't it?
The way that the issue and the debates about it get framed is all too easily corrupted as long as the polity remains in the dark; we cannot expect to have an integral exchange of ideas about causes and solutions under such conditions. The healthcare affordability crisis is bad enough; this corruption of the discourse - and it has deadly consequences - is disgusting in its own right. I mean, if Americans were well-informed about the various alternative healthcare payment and delivery frameworks in place around the world, and still made the determination that, on balance, all things considered, this system is still the one to have in place, that would presumably reflect epistemically-responsible behavior. (Without some extensive analysis, it isn't all cut-and-dried, as leftist reddiots would have you believe, that transitioning over to a more "social-democratic" model would be a net improvement.) But that's not what we have here; we have a healthcare affordability crisis coupled with widespread (and deadly) ignorance as to its causes and possible solutions. That should make one pretty fucking angry, I would think.
Now, just in case this claim (as to Americans' massive ignorance in regard to healthcare systems and causes and solutions) meets with skepticism, we must take into account a wider context: Americans are demonstrably very-ill-informed about a whole range of issues. From that standpoint, that the healthcare issue falls within this range is the to-be-expected, not something that should come as any surprise. And from that standpoint, we have an all-encompassing, inductively-established pattern concerning the average American's state of knowledge and awareness. And from that standpoint, it's virtually a clear path, right on through the levels of abstraction involved in drawing wider and wider inductively-established conclusions, to the most broad, all-encompassing, abstract conclusion we can reach in this context, i.e., that the average American's state of knowledge and awareness stems from the average American's state of intellectual knowledge and awareness. That is, the average American's state of knowledge and awareness concerning things like current pop-culture (e.g., knowing precisely the differences between American Idol and America's Got Talent) is a selective and compartmentalized knowledge that can still leave the average American oblivious to other issues (e.g., politics) impacting their lives. That problem - compartmentalization - is also symptomatic of the problem for which the primary diagnosis has already been made: a lack of intellectual awareness, such as the awareness of the cognitive need to integrate the seemingly disparate areas of knowledge concerning matters that affect their lives.
In fact, I do quite firmly believe that many of the various cognitive maladies one could identify as a leading underlying cause for various observed problems can all be inductively-grouped on the basis of the primary underlying cause of all those underlying maladies, that is, the widest integration possible in this context which I have formulated in essence as: a crisis of intellectual awareness.
You'll find many amateur intellectually-minded folks on places such as reddit trying to come up with the most sense-making and at the same time the widest, most all-encompassing, most abstract causal explanation for America's existential trends. Some of them (many of them, on reddit) locate the primary problem in a corporate plutocracy's stranglehold on the political system. Stopping short of an underlying explanation for that would indicate the amateur explanation-giver's ascription of primacy to material economic factors. In the meantime, many a religious right-winger would trace the nation's existential trends to a supposedly growing secularism - a "departure from God" - and then proceed, unsurprisingly, to point to all kinds of data points purporting to support this explanatory hypothesis.
For those familiar with Miss Rand's "Censorship: Local and Express", these dueling modes of analysis can be understood in terms of a more fundamental mode of analysis which she offers: a material/spiritual dichotomy, with each side - the "liberals" on one and the "conservatives" on the other - giving primacy of emphasis to what they respectively consider to be the most metaphysically important. Miss Rand sums up the essence of this dichotomy as applied to politics here, and - now just as then - it packs lots of explanatory punch, and that being the case within the context of the yet-wider inductively-observed pattern providing a shit-ton of explanatory punch for America's - or any nation's - existential trends, that is, the pattern having to do with the prevalence of reason vis-a-vis unreason in a given culture. Consistent with Miss Rand's pattern of expertise at identifying the issues of most fundamental explanatory importance - a pattern of expertise that must characterize the philosopher qua philosopher above all else - it is the efficacy and supremacy of reason which Rand explicitly stated was the primary concern of her work, and "the essence of Objectivism."
The primacy-of-something-else amateurs are usually unaware of Rand's core emphasis on the primacy of reason because their standpoint assigns primacy-of-explanation to other things, and so their (lack of understanding) of Rand is filtered through that perspective. (That's their problem, not hers.) And so - as a slam-dunk standing-on-one-foot test of someone's level of understanding of Rand - if a person has led her/himself to believe that the primary, fundamental virtue in Rand's ethics is "selfishness," that tells you about that person's frame of reference, but not much about Rand's. "Selfishness" is, of course, not a primary - it can't be, not without some framework that tells a person what to be selfish about, or what selfishness consists in. If Rand holds - as she did - that the standard of a person's moral perfection is unbreached rationality, then that makes a good 95% of the usual interwebbed hit-pieces on Rand's egoistic ethics quite entirely worthless as facilitators of understanding. But what if these intellectually-incompetent hit-pieces are merely symptoms of the wider, more fundamental causal explanation I've offered for the nation's existential direction? Where else would the chain of explanation end? What could Rand herself provide as a more fundamental terminus qua "the essence of Objectivism" than the supremacy of reason? Rand saw that the primary key to addressing human existential challenges - the endeavor which she would call a selfish one - was to be found in how efficaciously human beings employed their reasoning capacity. Where else would the primacy of emphasis for this existential task be found?
Wouldn't Jefferson agree on that, for sure?
(The right-wing religionists who "explain" the USA's existential path in terms of a "departure from God" tend almost uniformly to speak of the country having been founded "on Judeo-Christian principles," that it was the Framers' alleged (right-wing style?) religiosity that informed the nation's founding documents. What context has to be dropped to claim such a thing? Right-wing religiosity had been abundant throughout the ages prior to the founding of America, and never managed to generate a constitutional republic founded on individual rights. That was a historical constant; did it just suddenly work out that right-wing-style religiosity in the minds of the Framers is what made the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Common Sense, the American Philosophical Society, and so on a practical reality? What's a better fundamental-level explanation for all that: ages-old, right-wing-style religiosity or the very-new Enlightenment culture of learning and boundless intellectual curiosity? What's the variable of primary or greatest importance in this context? The economistic Left doesn't fare any better; their mode of explanation comes down to the economic interests that the Framers had in gaining independence from the British Crown: rather than the King exploiting these rich white land-owners, the Framers sought the political framework in which to do (capitalistic) exploiting themselves. Apparently, all the Left sees as fundamental about America is a history of conquest of economically-underprivileged and non-white peoples, and only after FDR's reforms was the Great American Middle Class made possible. Seriously. The GOP party base offers theocracy as the way to go; the Democrat party base offers FDR-style interventionism as the basic alternative. The pragmatists in both parties are at a loss as to what to do, other than to succumb to mentality prevailing in the District of Cynicism.)
The true explanation and solution - for the nation's healthcare challenges and for everything else - are right under our noses. There's one public intellectual from the last half-century that has been shouting this from the rooftops to a greater and more potent extent than anyone else. To the clueless, it would seem outright crazy that some blogger self-identifying as The Ultimate Philosopher would be touting this particular public intellectual, over and over again. But what other reasonable conclusion is there to draw? One would presume that the professional philosophical community would be all on board with this true explanation and solution and, as a consequence, go out of its way to shout the very same thing from every available rooftoop, lectern, op-ed page, manifesto, and what have you - to identify, along with Aristotle and Ayn Rand - the primacy of intellectual flourishing to human and cultural flourishing. I mean, isn't that supposed to be the very spirit animating their own profession, for crying out loud?
What we have here is a failure to integrate. It would be quite the fucking shame if this failure stemmed in significant part from the (by and large politically left-leaning) intellectual community's reactionary attitude toward the politically capitalistic nature of this leading contemporary source of the intellectualist eudaimonism staring them right in the face, now would it not. But is there some other plausible explanation for this reaction, aside from its being a politically-motivated one? Sure, their jobs might well be in jeopardy were this thinker's ideas carried out (for one thing, many would lose a lot of credibility for having failed to be Aristotelian intellectualist eudaimonists), but then job-security-motivated behavior wouldn't credibly qualify as philosophical behavior, now would it. Anyway, this is just some stuff to think about when tying our current healthcare affordability crisis to fundamental intellectual factors. Much as the intellectuals profess to hate that very crisis, whom else, exactly, do we have to thank for it, in the end analysis?
A subject to which I have been giving some thought (well, more in the way of questioning) is: In a hypothetical world populated (to a considerably greater extent than at present) by learned Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents, just what would the general attitude toward "social welfare" issues such as healthcare payment and provision be like? If you listen to the mainstream of academic political philosophy, a majority of well-informed agents would be (tah dah!) a lot like them: leftish Rawlsy social democrats who assign a crucial role to the coercive state in matters of provision of goods - in ensuring the provision of goods, as a matter of right and social-political justice - that would foster in individuals the capability to flourish. If, on the other hand, these agents are eudaimonist libertarians, the provision of these goods would be left up to private institutions - indeed, that were we to come to such an enlightened state of affairs whereby communities were very much concerned with the cultivation of individuals' self-actualization capabilities, they would already have quality institutions in place for that very purpose, without the need for a coercive state apparatus in fulfilling that goal. What would be the dialectical resolution in debates between the eudaimonist libertarians and advocates of Rawlsy social justice? We have to assume of course that each side is amply familiar with the mindset behind the other side's views, as Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents would be. I'm thinking that it resolves toward eudaimonist libertarianism in practice (de facto), while the Rawlsies would assert a theoretical trump card in the form of a question: However provision of these self-actualization-capabilities goods is carried out, wouldn't the enlightened agents of our hypothetical society affirm a de jure right to such goods - i.e., that provision of these goods would be guaranteed as a basic "safety net" condition of such a society? They would supplement this question with a hypothetical: If private institutions didn't prove fully sufficient at providing these goods, wouldn't the state have the rightful authority to assert coercive powers to make up the difference?
That would move the dialectic up the ladder to another level: Without begging questions, how do we determine the content of a set of compossible rights upon a eudaimonist foundation, where rights are understood to be enforceable claims based on the requirements of human flourishing? Freedom to exercise one's independent judgment is such a requirement, but so is the effective possession and use of such Maslow-hierarchical goods as food, clothing, and shelter. A Rawlsy argument would hold that the structure of a set of compossible rights is determined through a conception of moral reason presented via the "Original Position" and "veil of ignorance" devices, which would derive rights to such things as food, clothing, and shelter. The eudaimonist libertarian would object that the coercion necessary to implement this Rawlsy framework of supposed rights constitutes an unacceptable deprivation of the freedom of the talented creators, the "men of the mind," based on the principle that the freedom to exercise one's intellect in the pursuit of one's chosen ends is, in effect, morally axiomatic. The Rawlsy response might be in effect to re-assert that a conception of moral reason represented by the Rawlsy argumentative devices is a superior conception at least insofar as it better tracks pretheoretical intuitions and makes for a more satisfactory reflective equilibrium. The eudaimonist libertarian in effect (quite plausibly!) re-asserts the same thing about the freedom to exercise one's own judgment using one's own intellect. Where does the dialectic go from there?
Keep in mind that in this hypothetical enlightened society, not all the agents are sitting around in the academic classrooms; some of them have businesses to run and, besides, short of a "pure" moral rationality devoid of economic incentives, the business community has to more or less be on board with any transition to some social order or other, practically speaking, right? And, besides, what burdens are the business folk supposed to shoulder over and above doing a lot of heavy lifting, involving maximal use of their intellect, of course (remember, this is an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian dialectic we're talking about here), in making available goods and services on the market, under a rule of law that has a "socially conscious" dimension (pertaining to acts, not outcomes), etc. And, for that matter, if we are talking about some point in a hypothetical future in which the adoption of Aristotelian-Jeffersonian principles of living has snowballed in positive effect over the course of generations, just how self-sufficient would people end up being, anyway? And, for that matter, if we're going to hypothesize a dialectic between very-well-informed agents (given the presumed informational benefits made possible by advanced information-age technology), maybe the terms of any dialectic to be had at all will already be advanced well beyond our current ability to predict. Keep in mind that a hypothetical society built upon the primacy of the intellect would bring with it all-encompassing effects on people's ways of living - more all-encompassing than debates (and their existential effects) within political philosophy. Keep in mind that change in that direction occurs at the margins, but with snowballing effects at the newer and newer margins until, eventually, the whole of society is engulfed in the new intellectualist ethos (since there's no coherent opposition to be had against intellectualism, and only abundant benefit to be had by its adoption).
Such a line of hypothetical questioning ends up placing the current healthcare affordability crisis in quite a different perspective, doesn't it? I mean, whatever the hypothetical enlightened society comes up with as a solution, it's sure bound to be a lot more effective and all-encompassing than what we would be able to come up with now, wouldn't it? (This of course should not be taken as any sort of argument for not putting our best efforts into doing what we can do now, or for waiting around for everyone to be Aristotelianized/Jeffersonianized before we can solve the big problems. The whole idea is to get better and better at the margins at addressing these problems as time goes on, and actualizing a snowballing effect. If we have a deficient vision for how fallible humans could make this happen, we just use our noggins to think up a better and more workable vision and make necessary adjustments as we proceed, is all. Yes we can.)
The somewhat strange thing here is that, given my context, the very activity of discussing this subject matter is no-brainer stuff, because for me the primacy of the intellect in human affairs is no-brainer stuff (and it keeps being confirmed by observations, to the point that the novelty has begun to wear off for me); and yet, it seems no one else out there is saying it - and it's not because it's such common wisdom that it goes without saying. (How could it be, given the way the culture is right now?) I even have to ask why Rand herself didn't make the sorts of futuristic extrapolations that I have - because that's what these hypothetical discussions are: extrapolations from the initial no-brainer (to me) inductively-certain principle. And these discussions also bump up against some inherent limitations; how much further can I even go? What possibilities do I think of next, from the philosopher's armchair more or less, for how an "ultimate culture" might play out? I think I really might be speaking of an intellectual-cultural singularity here, with all that such a concept entails. There's the increasingly-well-known concept of the technological singularity, a point in the not-distant future beyond which we can make no extrapolations beyond foreseeable nearer-future trends. The futurists talking about the tech-singularity may be tech-centric enough not to be ideas-centric, else they'd be philosophers first and foremost. What do I do as a philosopher in regard to the idea of a technological singularity? I think up other possible singularities pertaining to some number of key avenues of human endeavor. The cultural singularity would, I think, take the form of a widely-adopted intellectualist eudaimonism (what other form would it take if not that?) extrapolated into the currently-unknown. Now we have two abstract-concretes, if you will, awaiting an inductive treatment: will there be a science singularity, an economic singularity, a political singularity (what would that be if not subsumed under a cultural singularity?), a media singularity, or others in addition to the technological and cultural ones? And to extrapolate, how would all these intertwine? Doesn't an accelerated intellectual progression speed up the technological one yet further, with a positive-feedback loop? What happens if/when all "sub-"singularities converge into a Big Singularity?
And that's not even factoring in the effects of people maximally Saganizing their cognition by way of optimal use of cognitive-performance-enhancing substances....
And where does the discussion even proceed from here? What are the current limits on the widest-possible, most all-encompassing philosophical abstractions? What's there left to talk about once you identify the primacy-of-intellect principle and extrapolate? My best answer right now: under consideration here is a Big conceptual file-folder which contains a whole hierarchy of sub-folders (and sub-sub-folders, etc.), all of the folders considered as (mental) units which ultimately reduce to perceptual units. And there's plenty of stuff in the sub-folders to inquire about in the meantime, before everyone has gotten on board with the primacy of intellectual principle and run with it. And I do have in mind what I want to post about next, but that'll remain a private possession for now. ;-)
By this point, regular readers of this blog are most likely used to an inductively-established pattern I'm big on, namely that a great many human existential problems are primarily intellectual problems at their source. That the intellect - how (well) it is used or misused - has more primacy in human affairs than any other human characteristic, is at the very core of the doctrine I have named P/perfectivism. I think the distinction between "primary" and "only" is also well-known to Rand-influenced readers; that the intellect is the prime mover in human affairs, doesn't make it the only mover. But in terms of a correct mode of analysis of human affairs, at the greatest level of fundamentality (and that which is fundamental in any context being what philosophers are supposed to discover), I don't know of anything more fundamental for purposes of explanation than the characteristically human mode of consciousness, i.e., a conceptual or abstractive one (the key faculty of abstraction being the intellect).
And so it is by this mode of analysis that one can only truly get to the root of such a concrete issue as the USA's healthcare affordability situation.
The connection between these two things would probably be met with incomprehension or incredulity among many of today's political observers. How can something so (seemingly) abstract as the human mode of consciousness come to affect something so concretely-impacting as one's (or one's neighbors) healthcare situation?
I figured I would address this concrete issue in particular after having just had a discussion with Canadians about the qualities of its healthcare system. The basic message I took from this discussion is that Americans are very ill-informed about the ways in which their own healthcare payment and delivery system compares with others in the industrially-advanced world. Here in America a cancer diagnosis can wipe out people's life savings; that sort of thing is unheard of in a country like Canada. (How Obamacare is supposed to address that concern is not clearly spelled out as far as I know.) But to hear the American national discourse on the healthcare issue, the average American simply does not have the information (or an adequate grasp of it) to make well-considered decisions regarding policy (through direct support or indirectly through voting for leaders), even when some medical situations can be financially devastating to them under current policy. It sounds like playing with fire, doesn't it?
The way that the issue and the debates about it get framed is all too easily corrupted as long as the polity remains in the dark; we cannot expect to have an integral exchange of ideas about causes and solutions under such conditions. The healthcare affordability crisis is bad enough; this corruption of the discourse - and it has deadly consequences - is disgusting in its own right. I mean, if Americans were well-informed about the various alternative healthcare payment and delivery frameworks in place around the world, and still made the determination that, on balance, all things considered, this system is still the one to have in place, that would presumably reflect epistemically-responsible behavior. (Without some extensive analysis, it isn't all cut-and-dried, as leftist reddiots would have you believe, that transitioning over to a more "social-democratic" model would be a net improvement.) But that's not what we have here; we have a healthcare affordability crisis coupled with widespread (and deadly) ignorance as to its causes and possible solutions. That should make one pretty fucking angry, I would think.
Now, just in case this claim (as to Americans' massive ignorance in regard to healthcare systems and causes and solutions) meets with skepticism, we must take into account a wider context: Americans are demonstrably very-ill-informed about a whole range of issues. From that standpoint, that the healthcare issue falls within this range is the to-be-expected, not something that should come as any surprise. And from that standpoint, we have an all-encompassing, inductively-established pattern concerning the average American's state of knowledge and awareness. And from that standpoint, it's virtually a clear path, right on through the levels of abstraction involved in drawing wider and wider inductively-established conclusions, to the most broad, all-encompassing, abstract conclusion we can reach in this context, i.e., that the average American's state of knowledge and awareness stems from the average American's state of intellectual knowledge and awareness. That is, the average American's state of knowledge and awareness concerning things like current pop-culture (e.g., knowing precisely the differences between American Idol and America's Got Talent) is a selective and compartmentalized knowledge that can still leave the average American oblivious to other issues (e.g., politics) impacting their lives. That problem - compartmentalization - is also symptomatic of the problem for which the primary diagnosis has already been made: a lack of intellectual awareness, such as the awareness of the cognitive need to integrate the seemingly disparate areas of knowledge concerning matters that affect their lives.
In fact, I do quite firmly believe that many of the various cognitive maladies one could identify as a leading underlying cause for various observed problems can all be inductively-grouped on the basis of the primary underlying cause of all those underlying maladies, that is, the widest integration possible in this context which I have formulated in essence as: a crisis of intellectual awareness.
You'll find many amateur intellectually-minded folks on places such as reddit trying to come up with the most sense-making and at the same time the widest, most all-encompassing, most abstract causal explanation for America's existential trends. Some of them (many of them, on reddit) locate the primary problem in a corporate plutocracy's stranglehold on the political system. Stopping short of an underlying explanation for that would indicate the amateur explanation-giver's ascription of primacy to material economic factors. In the meantime, many a religious right-winger would trace the nation's existential trends to a supposedly growing secularism - a "departure from God" - and then proceed, unsurprisingly, to point to all kinds of data points purporting to support this explanatory hypothesis.
For those familiar with Miss Rand's "Censorship: Local and Express", these dueling modes of analysis can be understood in terms of a more fundamental mode of analysis which she offers: a material/spiritual dichotomy, with each side - the "liberals" on one and the "conservatives" on the other - giving primacy of emphasis to what they respectively consider to be the most metaphysically important. Miss Rand sums up the essence of this dichotomy as applied to politics here, and - now just as then - it packs lots of explanatory punch, and that being the case within the context of the yet-wider inductively-observed pattern providing a shit-ton of explanatory punch for America's - or any nation's - existential trends, that is, the pattern having to do with the prevalence of reason vis-a-vis unreason in a given culture. Consistent with Miss Rand's pattern of expertise at identifying the issues of most fundamental explanatory importance - a pattern of expertise that must characterize the philosopher qua philosopher above all else - it is the efficacy and supremacy of reason which Rand explicitly stated was the primary concern of her work, and "the essence of Objectivism."
The primacy-of-something-else amateurs are usually unaware of Rand's core emphasis on the primacy of reason because their standpoint assigns primacy-of-explanation to other things, and so their (lack of understanding) of Rand is filtered through that perspective. (That's their problem, not hers.) And so - as a slam-dunk standing-on-one-foot test of someone's level of understanding of Rand - if a person has led her/himself to believe that the primary, fundamental virtue in Rand's ethics is "selfishness," that tells you about that person's frame of reference, but not much about Rand's. "Selfishness" is, of course, not a primary - it can't be, not without some framework that tells a person what to be selfish about, or what selfishness consists in. If Rand holds - as she did - that the standard of a person's moral perfection is unbreached rationality, then that makes a good 95% of the usual interwebbed hit-pieces on Rand's egoistic ethics quite entirely worthless as facilitators of understanding. But what if these intellectually-incompetent hit-pieces are merely symptoms of the wider, more fundamental causal explanation I've offered for the nation's existential direction? Where else would the chain of explanation end? What could Rand herself provide as a more fundamental terminus qua "the essence of Objectivism" than the supremacy of reason? Rand saw that the primary key to addressing human existential challenges - the endeavor which she would call a selfish one - was to be found in how efficaciously human beings employed their reasoning capacity. Where else would the primacy of emphasis for this existential task be found?
Wouldn't Jefferson agree on that, for sure?
(The right-wing religionists who "explain" the USA's existential path in terms of a "departure from God" tend almost uniformly to speak of the country having been founded "on Judeo-Christian principles," that it was the Framers' alleged (right-wing style?) religiosity that informed the nation's founding documents. What context has to be dropped to claim such a thing? Right-wing religiosity had been abundant throughout the ages prior to the founding of America, and never managed to generate a constitutional republic founded on individual rights. That was a historical constant; did it just suddenly work out that right-wing-style religiosity in the minds of the Framers is what made the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Common Sense, the American Philosophical Society, and so on a practical reality? What's a better fundamental-level explanation for all that: ages-old, right-wing-style religiosity or the very-new Enlightenment culture of learning and boundless intellectual curiosity? What's the variable of primary or greatest importance in this context? The economistic Left doesn't fare any better; their mode of explanation comes down to the economic interests that the Framers had in gaining independence from the British Crown: rather than the King exploiting these rich white land-owners, the Framers sought the political framework in which to do (capitalistic) exploiting themselves. Apparently, all the Left sees as fundamental about America is a history of conquest of economically-underprivileged and non-white peoples, and only after FDR's reforms was the Great American Middle Class made possible. Seriously. The GOP party base offers theocracy as the way to go; the Democrat party base offers FDR-style interventionism as the basic alternative. The pragmatists in both parties are at a loss as to what to do, other than to succumb to mentality prevailing in the District of Cynicism.)
The true explanation and solution - for the nation's healthcare challenges and for everything else - are right under our noses. There's one public intellectual from the last half-century that has been shouting this from the rooftops to a greater and more potent extent than anyone else. To the clueless, it would seem outright crazy that some blogger self-identifying as The Ultimate Philosopher would be touting this particular public intellectual, over and over again. But what other reasonable conclusion is there to draw? One would presume that the professional philosophical community would be all on board with this true explanation and solution and, as a consequence, go out of its way to shout the very same thing from every available rooftoop, lectern, op-ed page, manifesto, and what have you - to identify, along with Aristotle and Ayn Rand - the primacy of intellectual flourishing to human and cultural flourishing. I mean, isn't that supposed to be the very spirit animating their own profession, for crying out loud?
What we have here is a failure to integrate. It would be quite the fucking shame if this failure stemmed in significant part from the (by and large politically left-leaning) intellectual community's reactionary attitude toward the politically capitalistic nature of this leading contemporary source of the intellectualist eudaimonism staring them right in the face, now would it not. But is there some other plausible explanation for this reaction, aside from its being a politically-motivated one? Sure, their jobs might well be in jeopardy were this thinker's ideas carried out (for one thing, many would lose a lot of credibility for having failed to be Aristotelian intellectualist eudaimonists), but then job-security-motivated behavior wouldn't credibly qualify as philosophical behavior, now would it. Anyway, this is just some stuff to think about when tying our current healthcare affordability crisis to fundamental intellectual factors. Much as the intellectuals profess to hate that very crisis, whom else, exactly, do we have to thank for it, in the end analysis?
A subject to which I have been giving some thought (well, more in the way of questioning) is: In a hypothetical world populated (to a considerably greater extent than at present) by learned Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents, just what would the general attitude toward "social welfare" issues such as healthcare payment and provision be like? If you listen to the mainstream of academic political philosophy, a majority of well-informed agents would be (tah dah!) a lot like them: leftish Rawlsy social democrats who assign a crucial role to the coercive state in matters of provision of goods - in ensuring the provision of goods, as a matter of right and social-political justice - that would foster in individuals the capability to flourish. If, on the other hand, these agents are eudaimonist libertarians, the provision of these goods would be left up to private institutions - indeed, that were we to come to such an enlightened state of affairs whereby communities were very much concerned with the cultivation of individuals' self-actualization capabilities, they would already have quality institutions in place for that very purpose, without the need for a coercive state apparatus in fulfilling that goal. What would be the dialectical resolution in debates between the eudaimonist libertarians and advocates of Rawlsy social justice? We have to assume of course that each side is amply familiar with the mindset behind the other side's views, as Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents would be. I'm thinking that it resolves toward eudaimonist libertarianism in practice (de facto), while the Rawlsies would assert a theoretical trump card in the form of a question: However provision of these self-actualization-capabilities goods is carried out, wouldn't the enlightened agents of our hypothetical society affirm a de jure right to such goods - i.e., that provision of these goods would be guaranteed as a basic "safety net" condition of such a society? They would supplement this question with a hypothetical: If private institutions didn't prove fully sufficient at providing these goods, wouldn't the state have the rightful authority to assert coercive powers to make up the difference?
That would move the dialectic up the ladder to another level: Without begging questions, how do we determine the content of a set of compossible rights upon a eudaimonist foundation, where rights are understood to be enforceable claims based on the requirements of human flourishing? Freedom to exercise one's independent judgment is such a requirement, but so is the effective possession and use of such Maslow-hierarchical goods as food, clothing, and shelter. A Rawlsy argument would hold that the structure of a set of compossible rights is determined through a conception of moral reason presented via the "Original Position" and "veil of ignorance" devices, which would derive rights to such things as food, clothing, and shelter. The eudaimonist libertarian would object that the coercion necessary to implement this Rawlsy framework of supposed rights constitutes an unacceptable deprivation of the freedom of the talented creators, the "men of the mind," based on the principle that the freedom to exercise one's intellect in the pursuit of one's chosen ends is, in effect, morally axiomatic. The Rawlsy response might be in effect to re-assert that a conception of moral reason represented by the Rawlsy argumentative devices is a superior conception at least insofar as it better tracks pretheoretical intuitions and makes for a more satisfactory reflective equilibrium. The eudaimonist libertarian in effect (quite plausibly!) re-asserts the same thing about the freedom to exercise one's own judgment using one's own intellect. Where does the dialectic go from there?
Keep in mind that in this hypothetical enlightened society, not all the agents are sitting around in the academic classrooms; some of them have businesses to run and, besides, short of a "pure" moral rationality devoid of economic incentives, the business community has to more or less be on board with any transition to some social order or other, practically speaking, right? And, besides, what burdens are the business folk supposed to shoulder over and above doing a lot of heavy lifting, involving maximal use of their intellect, of course (remember, this is an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian dialectic we're talking about here), in making available goods and services on the market, under a rule of law that has a "socially conscious" dimension (pertaining to acts, not outcomes), etc. And, for that matter, if we are talking about some point in a hypothetical future in which the adoption of Aristotelian-Jeffersonian principles of living has snowballed in positive effect over the course of generations, just how self-sufficient would people end up being, anyway? And, for that matter, if we're going to hypothesize a dialectic between very-well-informed agents (given the presumed informational benefits made possible by advanced information-age technology), maybe the terms of any dialectic to be had at all will already be advanced well beyond our current ability to predict. Keep in mind that a hypothetical society built upon the primacy of the intellect would bring with it all-encompassing effects on people's ways of living - more all-encompassing than debates (and their existential effects) within political philosophy. Keep in mind that change in that direction occurs at the margins, but with snowballing effects at the newer and newer margins until, eventually, the whole of society is engulfed in the new intellectualist ethos (since there's no coherent opposition to be had against intellectualism, and only abundant benefit to be had by its adoption).
Such a line of hypothetical questioning ends up placing the current healthcare affordability crisis in quite a different perspective, doesn't it? I mean, whatever the hypothetical enlightened society comes up with as a solution, it's sure bound to be a lot more effective and all-encompassing than what we would be able to come up with now, wouldn't it? (This of course should not be taken as any sort of argument for not putting our best efforts into doing what we can do now, or for waiting around for everyone to be Aristotelianized/Jeffersonianized before we can solve the big problems. The whole idea is to get better and better at the margins at addressing these problems as time goes on, and actualizing a snowballing effect. If we have a deficient vision for how fallible humans could make this happen, we just use our noggins to think up a better and more workable vision and make necessary adjustments as we proceed, is all. Yes we can.)
The somewhat strange thing here is that, given my context, the very activity of discussing this subject matter is no-brainer stuff, because for me the primacy of the intellect in human affairs is no-brainer stuff (and it keeps being confirmed by observations, to the point that the novelty has begun to wear off for me); and yet, it seems no one else out there is saying it - and it's not because it's such common wisdom that it goes without saying. (How could it be, given the way the culture is right now?) I even have to ask why Rand herself didn't make the sorts of futuristic extrapolations that I have - because that's what these hypothetical discussions are: extrapolations from the initial no-brainer (to me) inductively-certain principle. And these discussions also bump up against some inherent limitations; how much further can I even go? What possibilities do I think of next, from the philosopher's armchair more or less, for how an "ultimate culture" might play out? I think I really might be speaking of an intellectual-cultural singularity here, with all that such a concept entails. There's the increasingly-well-known concept of the technological singularity, a point in the not-distant future beyond which we can make no extrapolations beyond foreseeable nearer-future trends. The futurists talking about the tech-singularity may be tech-centric enough not to be ideas-centric, else they'd be philosophers first and foremost. What do I do as a philosopher in regard to the idea of a technological singularity? I think up other possible singularities pertaining to some number of key avenues of human endeavor. The cultural singularity would, I think, take the form of a widely-adopted intellectualist eudaimonism (what other form would it take if not that?) extrapolated into the currently-unknown. Now we have two abstract-concretes, if you will, awaiting an inductive treatment: will there be a science singularity, an economic singularity, a political singularity (what would that be if not subsumed under a cultural singularity?), a media singularity, or others in addition to the technological and cultural ones? And to extrapolate, how would all these intertwine? Doesn't an accelerated intellectual progression speed up the technological one yet further, with a positive-feedback loop? What happens if/when all "sub-"singularities converge into a Big Singularity?
And that's not even factoring in the effects of people maximally Saganizing their cognition by way of optimal use of cognitive-performance-enhancing substances....
And where does the discussion even proceed from here? What are the current limits on the widest-possible, most all-encompassing philosophical abstractions? What's there left to talk about once you identify the primacy-of-intellect principle and extrapolate? My best answer right now: under consideration here is a Big conceptual file-folder which contains a whole hierarchy of sub-folders (and sub-sub-folders, etc.), all of the folders considered as (mental) units which ultimately reduce to perceptual units. And there's plenty of stuff in the sub-folders to inquire about in the meantime, before everyone has gotten on board with the primacy of intellectual principle and run with it. And I do have in mind what I want to post about next, but that'll remain a private possession for now. ;-)
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Reddit's /r/philosophy: a fucking joke
(and a silver lining)
Exhibit A
It's all too obvious from this example (and it's only one among many) that the malicious, cowardly Rand-hating thugs who infest this otherwise-important social-media outlet for widely-viewed intellectual discourse don't care to have an argument on a level field of play. (Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS!) The downvoting patterns are specifically directed at burying Yours Truly's eminently sensible, factually-supported responses to the well-upvoted anti-Rand idiocy that is rampant there. That's not philosophy, that's a playground mentality intended to deceive the readership about the true nature of the discussion taking place there. This is the kind of crowd grown and bred by the university philosophy departments these days? That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the disgusting, pathological, politically-motivated pattern of behavior by a number of "eminent figures" in that profession.
I really don't know how this problem could be solved; it's a failing of the format that would not happen on a genuine Usenet-style format of old. It's a problem that reddit itself is going to have to fix by some useful and workable change of the format.
(There's also some other software problem that has been resulting in a whole lot of my posted comments being filtered by a spambot for reasons not yet ascertained by the mods there. Oh, well. It's discouraging enough to see what I spend much time posting there get buried by anonymous cowards when my comments do show up. (This is aside from the general feel someone such as myself gets from discussing Rand on /r/"philosophy": that I'm wading through a crowd of irrational bigots, probably much like trying to defend theism on /r/atheism. [Oh, if you think religious people can be irrational bigots, just watch the way so many of those in the "new atheist" movement react like poo-flinging monkeys toward anyone religious. "Liberals" can be much lower than the "conservatives" they so often stereotype.]) Discouragement is the malicious cowards' motivation, of course. I shall have to adjust my own course of action accordingly. One thing I'm sure of, however, is this: this epistemic aggression will not stand, man. Not in the long run. BUP.)
Perhaps the most discouraging thing of all - as a general proposition, not just in terms of concrete instances of injustice or against whom such malicious behavior is directed - is how the stifling of pro-Rand voices has implications beyond merely that for the nature and quality of philosophic discourse. As Peikoff explained at great length in Chapter 8 of OPAR, on the virtues, the effects of a little dishonesty, by the nature of reality and how all rational cognition is integrated, cannot but spread like a cancer to more and more facets of the dishonest person's existence. (The case of Nathaniel Branden's progressively worse and increasingly all-encompassing deceptions of Ayn Rand until it blew all up in the end - as it had to - serves as a striking illustration of the principle.) As anyone who reads this blogs regularly knows, this culture desperately needs an infusion of Aristotelianism in order to address its problems and challenges (much less move above and beyond toward a positive: big-time cultural flourishing). I don't know how many times it has to happen, for people to get the point that where Aristotelianism (or something like it - e.g., Jeffersonianism) is alive and well, cultures and societies have flourished in ways they didn't before.
As it happens, the single most influential intellectual figure on the American public scene for the last half century up until the present (who else would it be besides Rand?) is - as some of the nation's leading scholars of Aristotle will tell you - also a neo-Aristotelian. This makes it quite inescapable that in any serious discussion about how to move America forward into a period of enlightenment and flourishing - about what ideas to preach, what behaviors to encourage, what strategies to pursue - the name "Ayn Rand" cannot just somehow be pushed off to the side as irrelevant. This is simply the nature of things, an unalterable reality, an undeniable absolute. I think that if there were some way around that, I would have thought of it by now. But the (perfectivist) principle involved precludes it. It has to. Rand shares too fundamental a similarity to Aristotle and Jefferson for it not to be so. One doesn't have to like this reality to acknowledge it. Me, I've simply become accustomed to it; it matters not what my feelings about Rand are. I'm a perfectivist, and she's a forerunner of the idea, and that's all there is to it.
So, given all this, assuming that it's an infusion of Aristotelianism that we need, why couldn't we just say "let's go with Aristotle and/or Jefferson, they provide the best examples to follow." Okay, but how then do you manage to evade the logical consequence that Rand must enter the discussion? I can't think of a single fucking way it can happen. It's either-or. Either you accept Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism - and therefore accept Rand in some fundamentally important sense - or you reject Rand and thereby in effect reject Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism. The reddit /r/"philosophy" thugs, and all too many people in the academy, have chosen the latter course. What are the American People going to think about that when they come to find all this out? "mouse, meet Cat."
If these entities paid attention to Rand like they're supposed to - as Aristotle and Jefferson themselves would if they were around today, since their policy is not one of evasion but integration, particularly with respect to culturally-significant author-figures (this is no-brainer shit, is it not?) - then of course Aristotle would become their center of attention as well. One need only look at how the really smart people very much influenced by Rand end up being big-time Aristotle fans as well.
As things stand at the moment, most of the non-Randian crowd are completely oblivious to what Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses are all about. These courses used to be in the hundreds of dollars each, making them prohibitively expensive to the very people - college undergrads - for whom they would make the most difference. Now, they're marked down to around 10 bucks apiece. The completely-oblivious crowd does not know what this portends, but I do, and so do those who've listened to and absorbed the material contained therein. It spells doom for the oblivious ones (if they don't clean up their act). There's just no getting around the fact that when college undergrads by the thousands upon thousands get their digital hands on these courses, coupled with a growing academic literature on Rand, the older generation of intellectuals is going to be replaced over time by a bunch of Randian-Aristotelians - all for the better, of course. If I knew of a way around this eventuality, short of Apocalypse stepping the way, I think I would have figured it out by now. But, well, you know, A is A. ;-) And /r/"philosophy" is a fucking joke.
But seriously, what do the Rand-haters do in the event that a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins? Now that's an ultimate hypothetical right there, a cultural-singularity type of event beyond which we can hardly predict. Perhaps the question to be asked first, is: will a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins in the reasonably near future? If so, why? If not, why not? To listen to the Rand-haters, one might think they don't take such an eventuality seriously because, well, of course (for them) Objectivism is obviously shit and always will be. But they haven't listened to Understanding Objectivism, though, now have they. So what you then have to ask is whether someone could listen to Understanding Objectivism and come out of it not taking Objectivism seriously. But all the evidence I've inductively observed tells me that the chances of that happening are slim to none, but then again what if the available sample size is already biased and too small? (Huh. What a question to ask. I wonder what cognitive methodology would boldly facilitate one's asking such questions aimed at establishing the full context. Gee, lemme think....) But what if it isn't? Then what?
Well, then it comes down to an issue of how many of those intellectually-eager undergrads are going to buy up these $10 courses and proceed to go hog wild with their classmates and professors, a scenario where understanding Objectivism becomes the cool new hip fad in a way it just wasn't before. That might depend in good part on the use of existing media for advertising this material to the right demographic. That's a fairly capitalistic concept, ones that the people at the Ayn Rand Institute might be more well-attuned to more than just about any of the ideas-merchants out there. First off, they have Rand books selling like hotcakes, year in and year out. In the middle of those books are those postcards telling you where you can get more information on things like newsletters, campus clubs, recorded lecture courses, and so forth. You have a large number of existing Objectivists who've taken these courses telling the newer students of Objectivism on Facebook or wherever that "you've got to hear this course, it will really amplify your comprehension of the philosophy." It'll be all in (near-)unison directed toward the "newbies." And guess what, they won't cost an arm and a leg, either! You could get a couple dozen courses for what used to be the price for only one! And it's all Leonard Peikoff in his brilliantly engaging and entertaining lecturing style, too! Wow! What a fucking bargain, huh? A steal. Like, could this be for real? Did the ARI really do that? Why listen to music online for free when you could listen to Peikoff for 25 hours for $10? And maybe instead of getting drunk at the frat party the undies will spend that time doing the more cool thing by listening to a Peikoff lecture. Just maybe.
What was that about BUP again? You know, I'm feeling so much better now than when I began this posting. Took a negative and turned it into a positive. Lesson: don't let the filthy, scummy, slimy fucks get you down. Thanks for guiding me in this direction, /r/"philosophy," keep up the bad work! :-D
You can't refute perfectivism. :-)
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| "Checkmate, asshole." |
Saturday, February 2, 2013
An ultimate hypothetical
As an ideas-merchant I try to keep well-attuned to how an audience responds to framing. Example: I propose the idea of a perfectivist utopia characterized at root by people maximally exercising their intellects. The response may well be characterized by disbelief, incomprehension, cynicism, defensive cognitive bias or outright evasion, or who the hell knows what. (Hard to predict, see, just in how many ways people can fail to recognize a good idea for what it is. The best I can hope to do is to figure out ways to cut them off at the pass, do an end-around, be as dialectically comprehensive as I know how to be, set up as many safeguards 'twixt cup and lip . . . and then maybe there will be some success at getting the idea across.) One problem in framing the issue in terms of an intellectualist perfectivist utopia is the sheer unfamiliar-ness of the idea to so many. How can it possibly be concretized in their minds to their satisfaction given their limited context of knowledge? Concretes do help a lot, after all.
So the concrete I'll use for framing is one Thomas Jefferson. He's the guy that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence in 1976. He's more well-known, more visible to the average citizen, than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. (In other words: If you polled the American citizenry and asked who authored the D of I, half of them might actually give the right answer. Ask them who authored the Nicomachean Ethics, you might be lucky to get one in five answering correctly. So the idea of presenting the latter as a basis for the cognitive revolution we so desperately need has a considerably greater chance of fuck-up on the transmission line.) Another concrete to pair Mr. Jefferson with might well be that guy whose face shows up on the $100 bill, but probably not that guy who authored The Rights of Man and Common Sense (notwithstanding how well-known and influential as that guy was among the early Americans). Perhaps the term "polymath" would draw blank stares, serving to throw the audience off the scent. Perhaps "excellence in all endeavors" would convey the(Aristotelian) idea to more populist effect. Jefferson and that guy on the $100 bill were polymaths strove for excellence in all endeavors.
How some guy ends up on the $100 bill, might very well intrigue a few in the audience. Perhaps that could lead in some interesting directions.
It so happens that these two comprehensive-excellence-pursuers were either founder or president of the American Philosophical Society. But so as not to distract the average citizen, one might want to avoid saying something like "if everyone lived the way the great philosophers did, . . . " because that would lead those who easily miss a point to wonder who would then do all those vitally important things like engineering, running businesses, conducting scientific research and development, raising kids, hitting home runs, cooking restaurant meals,growing the cannabis (oops, distraction) brewing the beer, directing the movies, balancing the books, performing open-heart surgery, etc. etc. etc. etc. - all those things "the philosophers don't do."
So we have to reframe this in terms of something like: constantly striving for improvement, which takes continuous learning, growth, intellectual curiosity and insatiability, development of talents, health-conscious lifestyles, cultivation of social relationships, seeing things from others' point of view rather than merely through one's own cognitive biases or filters, recognition and respect for human dignity and freedom, and other things listed on that hierarchy of needs thingy by that one psychologist guy.
Now, as it happens, carrying out these things successfully requires a love of wisdom, no question. That doesn't require that one sit atop the rock like that thinker statue whatamacallit with the chin resting upon hand all of the time - just some of the time at very least - and even that requires a good developmental environment from an early age, which includes decent nutrition, decent parenting, decent educational opportunities, and so forth. A decent community would do whatever is within reason to ensure that its young members have as much of a good developmental environment as possible. (Does this create a chicken-and-egg problem? How do the not-young people figure out how to be so, um - is "virtuous" the appropriate term here? - kind and decent in intention and efficacious in action so as to foster such developmental excellence for the young'uns? How do they do that, while also holding down a job and coming home tired, etc.? Well? Am I supposed to have all the answers?)
So, anyway, with that preamble out of the way, here's the hypothetical:
Say that the American People came to a broad minimal consensus: If weemulate (too distracting a word?) follow the example of behavior set by the greatest of the nation's Founding Fathers, especially TJ and the $100 bill guy - that is, if we sought to secure for ourselves and our family, friends, neighbors, and other community members the most optimal conditions for our flourishing (yeah, I think that is a good term to use - that mad-as-hell guy in Network uses it, too), that is to say, if we as a people sought to cultivate and foster the conditions under which people could flourish the way these gentlemen did in numerous endeavors be they science, philosophy, arts and letters, community and civic participation, statesmanship, business and entrepreneurship, education of one's fellow Americans, ethical and moral excellence, spiritual fulfillment, and so forth, then what kind of society might we come to inhabit?
(There's that pesky, distracting matter of their having owned slaves. We shouldn't follow their example in that regard, of course. Surely we can set aside that tree for the sake of the forest?)
Imagine our having a hypothetical conversation with these two men, asking their advice on how to improve the state of affairs in this country. Assume if you possibly can that in our hypothetical conversation these men have some 200 years of hindsight that they did not actually possess in their time, but which they would have if they were alive today. What would they think about what has become of the nation since their time - but more importantly, what advice would they offer for improvement? Might they appeal to various historical figures for inspiration? For example, Jefferson in some of his letters touted some ancient guys with names like Epictetus and Epicurus as deliverers of moral and practical wisdom. Also, while Jefferson didn't believe in the traditional God of theism, he did believe in a Creator who set the world in motion (a view popular at the time, known as deism), and also praised as a genius one Jesus of Nazareth; as framing for the average American citizen goes, that's some pretty good stuff, but Jefferson would (of course) urge us to seek wisdom from all kinds of sources (hence his knowledge of those ancient Epi-something guys, among many others).
I do believe Mr. J would lament the polling data pointing to unacceptable levels of ignorance among the citizenry, but he would also be pro-active about solutions. Beginning with the ignorance of the very political system he and his buddies founded, he might ask such things as: Why are the people this ignorant? Is it because they're just intellectually lazy, or has their political system gotten to where they are apathetic or too discouraged about participating in the political process? If we can devise a fix whereby they become genuinely interested in the political goings-on around them, their knowledge of such things will naturally expand. Were I interested in the fate of the Green Bay Packers, I'd know quite a bit about them. And while there's no obvious reason why every citizen ought to be interested in the Packers given their limited time and priorities, it's a plausible proposition that every citizen ought to be interested in our political system and ought to be able to pass a basic science literacy test even years after being a fifth grader. (That unbelievably awful show would have no place in a Jeffersonian culture.)
Now, in presenting such a hypothetical one might well encounter stubborn cynicism:
"People are just the way they are, hardwired and stuff, or Original Sin, you can't expect them to improve." (UP: Speak for yourself! Also, what about what that Harvard psychology guy has been saying about the decline in levels of violence over human history? I can dig up the reference if you're curious. Or how about slavery no longer being a societal norm? And, to cite this one 20th century author lady, if we have free will as the proponents of the Original Sin idea nevertheless say we do, then why couldn't the idea of Original Virtue make just as much sense?)
"IQ's will always be centered around 100, how do you expect people to get smarter?" (UP: Aren't literacy rates a lot higher these days than in the Dark Ages? Same basic genetic structure, yet better outcomes.)
"Those are great men, how do you expect ordinary people to live up to such lofty standards?" (UP: Who said anything about everyone becoming a Jefferson or $100 bill guy? Let's start with a more realistic idea: a considerably greater number of people of their caliber than at present - in effect, a shifting of the cultural bell curve. Besides, we're talking in essence about excellence of character.)
"You're trying to sneak in the idea of a Utopia under the guise of widely-implemented Jeffersonianism. But people - even reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people - will always disagree among one another about various things. In a Utopia there isn't supposed to be such disagreement, since everyone is supposed to be 'perfect'." (UP: Call it what you will - Utopia, Jeffersonianism, Nicomachean Ethics-ism - what you're talking about is a strawman. This societal ideal need only meet certain minimum requirements, like nonviolence, stable social unions, a rule of law. Now, to get to such an ideal would take some amount of time and, in short, education. There's a good reason to think that in order to get to those minimum requirements just stated, the necessary process of education would lead to widespread improvement in moral character, which turns this society into not simply a "liberal, freedom-respecting" one, but also a highly virtue-encouraging one as "communitarian" theorists argue for. A niceintegration/synthesis reconciliation of these seemingly competing ideals, isn't it? And if some people even in such a social order somehow find it to their advantage to be among a criminal element, that's what the rule of law is still there for. But most likely by then those who comprise the society would have discovered much better ways of preventing and responding to criminal behavior than they do now. That's what you'd expect in a society in which intellectual curiosity and insatiable learning are a cultural norm rather than an exception.)
At this point, I'd have to leave it up to the hardcore cynic to come up with objections that even I have not yet anticipated. (I mean, shit, if they're that persistent and that creative at coming up with objections, how does that not just reinforce theperfectivist Jeffersonian point that humans can get pretty good at things if they set their minds to it? Now, is that an ultimate flanking of the potential opposition, or what? You can't refute Jeffersonianism. :-)
I.e.:
So the concrete I'll use for framing is one Thomas Jefferson. He's the guy that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence in 1976. He's more well-known, more visible to the average citizen, than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. (In other words: If you polled the American citizenry and asked who authored the D of I, half of them might actually give the right answer. Ask them who authored the Nicomachean Ethics, you might be lucky to get one in five answering correctly. So the idea of presenting the latter as a basis for the cognitive revolution we so desperately need has a considerably greater chance of fuck-up on the transmission line.) Another concrete to pair Mr. Jefferson with might well be that guy whose face shows up on the $100 bill, but probably not that guy who authored The Rights of Man and Common Sense (notwithstanding how well-known and influential as that guy was among the early Americans). Perhaps the term "polymath" would draw blank stares, serving to throw the audience off the scent. Perhaps "excellence in all endeavors" would convey the
How some guy ends up on the $100 bill, might very well intrigue a few in the audience. Perhaps that could lead in some interesting directions.
It so happens that these two comprehensive-excellence-pursuers were either founder or president of the American Philosophical Society. But so as not to distract the average citizen, one might want to avoid saying something like "if everyone lived the way the great philosophers did, . . . " because that would lead those who easily miss a point to wonder who would then do all those vitally important things like engineering, running businesses, conducting scientific research and development, raising kids, hitting home runs, cooking restaurant meals,
So we have to reframe this in terms of something like: constantly striving for improvement, which takes continuous learning, growth, intellectual curiosity and insatiability, development of talents, health-conscious lifestyles, cultivation of social relationships, seeing things from others' point of view rather than merely through one's own cognitive biases or filters, recognition and respect for human dignity and freedom, and other things listed on that hierarchy of needs thingy by that one psychologist guy.
Now, as it happens, carrying out these things successfully requires a love of wisdom, no question. That doesn't require that one sit atop the rock like that thinker statue whatamacallit with the chin resting upon hand all of the time - just some of the time at very least - and even that requires a good developmental environment from an early age, which includes decent nutrition, decent parenting, decent educational opportunities, and so forth. A decent community would do whatever is within reason to ensure that its young members have as much of a good developmental environment as possible. (Does this create a chicken-and-egg problem? How do the not-young people figure out how to be so, um - is "virtuous" the appropriate term here? - kind and decent in intention and efficacious in action so as to foster such developmental excellence for the young'uns? How do they do that, while also holding down a job and coming home tired, etc.? Well? Am I supposed to have all the answers?)
So, anyway, with that preamble out of the way, here's the hypothetical:
Say that the American People came to a broad minimal consensus: If we
(There's that pesky, distracting matter of their having owned slaves. We shouldn't follow their example in that regard, of course. Surely we can set aside that tree for the sake of the forest?)
Imagine our having a hypothetical conversation with these two men, asking their advice on how to improve the state of affairs in this country. Assume if you possibly can that in our hypothetical conversation these men have some 200 years of hindsight that they did not actually possess in their time, but which they would have if they were alive today. What would they think about what has become of the nation since their time - but more importantly, what advice would they offer for improvement? Might they appeal to various historical figures for inspiration? For example, Jefferson in some of his letters touted some ancient guys with names like Epictetus and Epicurus as deliverers of moral and practical wisdom. Also, while Jefferson didn't believe in the traditional God of theism, he did believe in a Creator who set the world in motion (a view popular at the time, known as deism), and also praised as a genius one Jesus of Nazareth; as framing for the average American citizen goes, that's some pretty good stuff, but Jefferson would (of course) urge us to seek wisdom from all kinds of sources (hence his knowledge of those ancient Epi-something guys, among many others).
I do believe Mr. J would lament the polling data pointing to unacceptable levels of ignorance among the citizenry, but he would also be pro-active about solutions. Beginning with the ignorance of the very political system he and his buddies founded, he might ask such things as: Why are the people this ignorant? Is it because they're just intellectually lazy, or has their political system gotten to where they are apathetic or too discouraged about participating in the political process? If we can devise a fix whereby they become genuinely interested in the political goings-on around them, their knowledge of such things will naturally expand. Were I interested in the fate of the Green Bay Packers, I'd know quite a bit about them. And while there's no obvious reason why every citizen ought to be interested in the Packers given their limited time and priorities, it's a plausible proposition that every citizen ought to be interested in our political system and ought to be able to pass a basic science literacy test even years after being a fifth grader. (That unbelievably awful show would have no place in a Jeffersonian culture.)
Now, in presenting such a hypothetical one might well encounter stubborn cynicism:
"People are just the way they are, hardwired and stuff, or Original Sin, you can't expect them to improve." (UP: Speak for yourself! Also, what about what that Harvard psychology guy has been saying about the decline in levels of violence over human history? I can dig up the reference if you're curious. Or how about slavery no longer being a societal norm? And, to cite this one 20th century author lady, if we have free will as the proponents of the Original Sin idea nevertheless say we do, then why couldn't the idea of Original Virtue make just as much sense?)
"IQ's will always be centered around 100, how do you expect people to get smarter?" (UP: Aren't literacy rates a lot higher these days than in the Dark Ages? Same basic genetic structure, yet better outcomes.)
"Those are great men, how do you expect ordinary people to live up to such lofty standards?" (UP: Who said anything about everyone becoming a Jefferson or $100 bill guy? Let's start with a more realistic idea: a considerably greater number of people of their caliber than at present - in effect, a shifting of the cultural bell curve. Besides, we're talking in essence about excellence of character.)
"You're trying to sneak in the idea of a Utopia under the guise of widely-implemented Jeffersonianism. But people - even reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people - will always disagree among one another about various things. In a Utopia there isn't supposed to be such disagreement, since everyone is supposed to be 'perfect'." (UP: Call it what you will - Utopia, Jeffersonianism, Nicomachean Ethics-ism - what you're talking about is a strawman. This societal ideal need only meet certain minimum requirements, like nonviolence, stable social unions, a rule of law. Now, to get to such an ideal would take some amount of time and, in short, education. There's a good reason to think that in order to get to those minimum requirements just stated, the necessary process of education would lead to widespread improvement in moral character, which turns this society into not simply a "liberal, freedom-respecting" one, but also a highly virtue-encouraging one as "communitarian" theorists argue for. A nice
At this point, I'd have to leave it up to the hardcore cynic to come up with objections that even I have not yet anticipated. (I mean, shit, if they're that persistent and that creative at coming up with objections, how does that not just reinforce the
I.e.:
 |
| "Checkmate, unimaginitive naysayers." |
Now: What would America end up looking like if it went wholeheartedly back to its Jeffersonian roots, i.e., to what made the country's founding and the country's greatness possible in the first place? What might America look like? If the American people can't even so much as entertain this thought experiment, then they might very well be fucked doomed. But what, in principle, is there to stop them from entertaining it and going on to act accordingly, besides nothing?
ADDENDUM: Oh, by the way, for those of you not out of your element: is that one scene near the end of the pretty good story that the Stranger unfolded, that scene with the nihilists, is that about overcoming nihilism accompanied by a diminution of the Appetitive Soul? And what about that goldbricker pretending to be a millionaire? What does he symbolize? There's a vanity theme there to be sure. And how about the slut nympho that poor woman, or, for that matter, the known pornographer whom she's been banging? And what about the strongly vaginal artist, and the video artist with a cleft asshole? And how about the Stranger? Is he a daimon of sorts? A lot of strands to keep in my head, man. A lot of strands in UP's head.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Glenn Beck's new 'Utopia'
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| Source: glennbeck.com |
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| Source: wikipedia |
This post is for the purposes of having a little bit of fun, while tying the subject to deeper and more long-range issues.
On Thursday, Glenn Beck unveiled his blueprint for what he called Independence, USA (or alternatively, "Galt's Gulch"). Very shortly after I saw the image of the planned site (first image above), my mind went to the pictorial depiction(s) of Sir Thomas More's Utopia which was written nearly five centuries ago. Inductively speaking, it's the same basic idea, in essence, particularly given both More and Beck's devout belief in a Divine Creator. So I figured I'd poke a little bit of fun at the parallels, as I do above.
But more seriously, while I take great issue with Beck's various paranoia-spreading proclamations about our government - the Obama Administration in particular (ever heard of Agenda 21? The U.N. plans to come take our guns away! or something to that effect; it's hard to keep track of all the efforts afoot at the highest levels to destroy the American Way of Life) - there is one thing that he gets that seemingly 80% of the rest of the nation does not: the American Framers were effing geniuses who set an example for how we can be a great nation once again.
Is his envisioned Independence town built on the same principles that America was founded upon? Presumably so, given his unceasingly high praise of the Founders. And it's called Independence, after all.
This idea has drawn derision from various quarters, including the usual predictable ones (left-wing smear websites), but let's examine the basic concept. We'd have some kind of self-sustaining community built on Jeffersonian ideals. Lifelong learning would presumably be at the center of the community ethos. Derivatively, industry and creativity and entrepreneurship would be inculcated from a young age. For those who are temporarily out of work due to the "creative destruction" of the free market, there would be a plan in place for (non-sacrificial) mutual aid, retraining, and so forth. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? Why isn't everyone else on board with the basic concept, huh? Surely we wouldn't want to cut off our noses to spite our faces by shooting the messenger; that would be vicious.
Now, my envisioned utopia - which the very term 'Perfectivism' might well have tipped off some readers to - is more ambitious than that: it would not simply be confined to some village located somewhere in Redneck Central, TX (a red flag in terms of the desirability of living in this envisioned Independence village), because it would not be necessary to build it in one place. Instead, it would be everywhere. So what stands in the way of this?
Supposedly, some "inherently corrupt" human nature stands in the way. That's cynicism speaking. I'm not a cynic; I'm an idealist. And why am I an idealist? Because I think that through education, people can become more civilized. Further, if we have any meaningful adherence to the classic concept of free will, this is a real possibility open to us as a people. If people are appropriately educated in the philosophical arts from an early age, then as they grow they find (a) little eudaimonic incentive in being vicious, and (b) the cultural mainstream of one's community would be such as to discourage misbehavior in a much more radically effective way than at present. (And, even better, it wouldn't be a matter of conformity to the mainstream that would encourage virtue; it would be each person's own mind independently recognizing the desirability of virtue, as well as the not-conformist but understandable and desirable natural human sense of wanting to belong to a highly-functional and supportive community of people who've reached the same very-appealing conclusions about right living.) So, the cynical response to such an ideal should easily fall by the wayside one we've framed this subject properly. Moreover, the course of human history demonstrates that, as learning and knowledge advance and accumulate, this has a civilizing effect on people. (Steven Pinker's recent work arrives more or less at the same conclusion.)
Moreover, we have the historical precedent of the Enlightenment and (imperfect by present standards) American Founding to point to as a guidepost. As I've pointed out on this blog a few times already, this nation's third President was also president of the American Philosophical Society, a fairly close parallel to the original real-world "philosopher-kind," Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome in the 2nd century A.D.), who - unlike Jefferson - has the unique distinction of being a political ruler who also made a lasting contribution to the history of philosophy, with his stoic Meditations. (Jefferson's most historically-significant philosophical insights derive from those of John Locke a century earlier; otherwise, his ethics were derivative of Epicurus and Epictetus as well as the historical Jesus of Nazareth.)
Thomas More's version of utopia - literally, "no place" - might be taken as a subtle satire on the very concept of utopia given the imperfections of human nature. But this utopian theme runs all the way back to Plato's Republic. (Is Jesus's 'Kingdom of Heaven' on earth a utopian ideal? Supposedly we're corrupted by Original Sin, but once/if we all follow his lead, doesn't it sound like the result would be utopian?) Some have suggested that Plato's Republic is also not to be taken seriously, that it could be implemented only by a select few philosopher-kings but not by society as a whole. One thing to point out is that in Plato's time, literacy and learning were not as widespread and prevalent among the population-at-large as they are today (as abysmal as today's state might seem - and it is, by perfectivist standards). The ordinary plebs just didn't have the knowledge, training, disposition, or sophistication to see how to rule wisely. It must be kept in mind that Socrates was sentenced to death by a democratic majority - for something that he wouldn't be sentenced to death for today. (Likewise, a heretic in the West today would not meet the same fate that Servetus met at the hands of that totalitarian fuck John Calvin and his beloved Inquisition. See? Progress.)
This utopian impulse (as it might be called) is not limited to Plato but runs throughout the history of philosophy. The two most famous political philosophers of our era, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, seriously entertained the idea of utopia. Kant's 'Kingdom of Ends' has a very utopian-sounding flavor to it. Rand, of course, depicted her vision of a utopian society in part three of Atlas Shrugged, with the original "Galt's Gulch." What might explain philosophers' tendency to entertain what the rest of those in their societies have tended to consider unrealistic? After all, is it wise to entertain that which is unrealistic? Here's where some confusions need to be cleared up. First, it's been an unremarkable tendency among moral philosophers to think we have free will in a relevant sense. Second, there's been a perhaps-more-remarkable tendency among philosophers to think that the rest of society can see the merits of learning and virtue just as they do - if they would just exercise their capacity for reason, dammit. And various things have gotten in the way of people coming to see what they do, the widespread lack of the right education being a big one. (See the mentality that produced Nazi Germany, even in the post-Enlightenment period of history - and I'm not speaking just of Hitler's psychoses or the dysfunctional state of the German intelligentsia which tended toward nationalism and socialism, Mises's refutations of state-socialist planning notwithstanding; see also the willingness of a critical mass of the German People to follow a charismatic "savior" even to the very gates of Hell.) One thing that needn't stifle our human potentials for utopian living is the self-fulfilling cynicism that consumes so many people. To combat that requires a change in attitude along with being presented a realistic blueprint for a path to utopia.
The Aristotelian utopia that I have proposed appears to provide such a realistic blueprint. I want to clarify something, however: I don't even think that this utopia is specifically Aristotelian (or Randian, or Nortonian, or...), because it would be built upon a realistic citizenry-wide program of philosophical education in general. I call it Aristotelian because, for one thing, my idea was sparked in good part by Prof. Homiak's essay on "An Aristotelian Life," but also because Aristotle is traditionally understood to have been most keen on the perfection of our intellectual capacity as the basic prerequisite for moral, aesthetic, spiritual and social improvement. But at root, what people require is an education in critical thinking, and the rest (e.g., overcoming cognitive biases, which non-philosophically-informed psychologists seem to take as a given - as "naturally" ["normally"?] ingrained in our cognition) follows. (Note, in contrast to a potential point-missing criticism, that this is not indoctrination, as that would be anathema to critical thinking.) What's more, we have the tools and resources to make this happen with minimal investment.
So Beck is on the right track, but his proposal can be perfected so as to expand his ideal to everyone who is willing to open their minds to thinking as philosophers think. It doesn't take native genius to make this happen, either; it takes the right sort of training to actualize the cognitive potentials that are already there. What I see here, given the far-seeing philosophical perch upon which I rest, is a ("dialectical"; inductive) convergence that's been in the making in western culture (with some fits and starts here and there) for about 2,400 years now. I call the eventual result the cultural singularity.
Given the priority of ethics over politics, the reforms required here - as much as they may require some measure of investment of public funds short-term - require a revolution in our ethical paradigm long-term, for which we have plenty historical literature to serve as promising, uh, leads. And, given the priority of epistemology to ethics, what this ethical revolution presupposes is an intellectual revolution, and for that, all we need to do is follow the lead of the (best) philosophers in their quest for truth. As Peikoff said at the end of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (uh-oh, a messenger to be shot!), "To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think."
How could Glenn Beck - or anyone else, for that matter - possibly (coherently) disagree with that?
Let's get 'er done, shall we? ;-)
(I mean, it's going to happen, sooner or later with the inevitable advance of worldwide knowledge-integration, as long as the human race doesn't wipe itself out first - just as with the technological singularity. So why not sooner rather than later? Countless lives - in terms of both survival and flourishing, both of which depend on actualizing intellectual potentials - hang in the balance, after all, and if you're like me, you feel a huge sense of urgency about this. Well, do you? Spread the word as best you know how, then.)
P.S. A realistic utopia would be a virtuous-capitalism (capitalism = private property rights with voluntary association), with mutual-aid institutions. Beck's (and Rand [I think! - see Galt's discussion about the conditions on which one provides aid to (virtuous) others] and Nozick's) vision fits that description, while Plato's and More's does not. For explicit criticism of the latter (socialist = collective ownership) sort on economic grounds, see Mises.
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