Lost Generation Philosopher

There Is No Such Thing As “Settled Science” (Here’s Why)

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Steven Yates

When deciding what to write and post on this blog, I am generally torn between two conflicting impulses. The first is to take note of and comment on those things that eventually drove many of us Lost Generation Philosophers from U.S. academia: the rampant dishonesty of many academic “searches,” the adjunctification of the profession, the structural misallocation of resources in many if not most universities, the sense of having to be an entertainer in the classroom to keep students’ attention, and more besides. There is certainly room for such discussion, and several good blogs cover at least the second item on the above list. The other impulse is just to comment on philosophical problems and their various applications from an outsider’s perspective. That is, from the perspective of someone with no allegiance to the fashions that get people hired and tenured nowadays, or who questions the dominant assumptions of what philosophical conversation exists today (materialist naturalism, for example).

The next problem is actually getting the material read. The Internet, after all, is not what it used to be. Blog entries done ten years ago had much more hope of being read by people who weren’t experts in driving traffic to websites; I know, because I was writing a blog then, which I mistakenly stopped because it was drawing too much of the wrong sort of attention (trolls). Today, on the other hand, the World Wide Web is so saturated with information that it’s a crap shoot. If your piece has a dramatic human interest angle, and appeals to people’s emotions, it might be picked up and tweeted all over creation and “go viral.” On the other hand, it might sit unnoticed (the fate of better than 99.99% of what gets posted on the Web now). One way of getting noticed on the Web is to say something easily perceived as threatening. But that, too, has the potential to garner the wrong sort of attention, and fairly quickly!

Many of us, therefore, would prefer to publish the bulk of our material on established online publishing platforms, which of course now means confronting many of the same problems afflicting mainstream hard copy publishing, starting with staying in the good graces of the editor / editorial board who rightly has the final say on what goes on his site. And of course, said editors / editorial boards invariably gravitate towards an inner circle of familiar writers. Thus sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. This piece was sent to three different platforms, has not appeared on any of them (it might appear on one next month), but still strikes me as important enough to appear somewhere. This is as good a place as any. It would be nice if someone sees it. Feel free to leave a comment; feel free to redistribute, but please do me the courtesy of linking back here.

There Is No Such Thing As “Settled Science” (Here’s Why).

by Steven Yates, Ph.D.

Recently, Thomas DiLorenzo published a piece on the infantilization of university students. To those of us who did time in mainstream American academia and eventually escaped, DiLorenzo’s remarks are obvious. But elaborating this point isn’t my purpose here. In one paragraph he comments on that wonderful phrase settled science, a phrase often used to defend man-made climate change as established fact and stop all further debate. I wish to expand on this, as the basic problem may not be obvious to readers, especially if they trust academic science.

The influence of science on the modern world is a given. One would be foolish to think we haven’t come a long way in the past few centuries — since 1543, the year Copernicus published his landmark De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium which challenged the Aristotle-Ptolemaic theory of the solar system. That same year also saw Andreas Vasilius publish his On the Fabric of the Human Body which revolutionized the study of human anatomy. Isaac Newton’s famed Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared in three volumes in 1686-87, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Most leading modern philosophers have been interested in science. How does it achieve its results? How does it justify them? What are its assumptions, and how do they differ from those of, say, religion? Are they better? Does science have a special method, the scientific method, guaranteed to yield truth? Is the invention of new scientific ideas a rational process, or more a matter of fortuitous circumstances? What separates science from pseudoscience? And so on. There have been vigorous debates on such questions for over a century now, and yes, philosophers of science have gotten results worth noting, often by paying attention to the history of science instead of listening to what scientists themselves say.

To make a long story short, the upshot of these debates is that there is no such thing as settled science. How we get to this conclusion is a very interesting story.

Let’s begin in the 1830s, right after William Whewell (1794 – 1866) coined the term scientist which replaced Newton’s natural philosopher. Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857), best known as the founder of sociology but also of the philosophical ideology of positivism, offered his Law of Three Stages. An advancing civilization, Comte argued, passes through three stages or states or conditions. The first stage is characterized by various forms of supernaturalism and faith: the theological or fictitious stage, he called it, indicating what he thought of it. He did see the single God of Christianity as superior to the squabbling deities of ancient Greece and Rome. The second stage is characterized by grand system-building philosophy: edifices of thought from Plato and Aristotle down through Kant and Hegel. He called this the metaphysical or abstract stage. He thought better of it, but saw it as having substituted abstractions (e.g., “natural law” and “pure reason”) for supernatural agencies.

The third stage is the scientific or positive: we give up childish abstractions air castle building, and look at what reason actually does, which is to begin with experience and test, step by step, general statements we can make about the world. We arrive at hypotheses subject to the tribunal of further empirical test and utility. With scholars having given up the quixotic effort to find absolute certainty, theories that stand up to the best tests scientists can throw at them deserve to be called knowledge. Comte’s thinking established philosophy of science as a discipline. Its working assumption was that science was tied to experience and disciplined inquiry at every point. It’s a nice idea, but it isn’t true and never was.

The fall of Newton’s physics in the face of Einstein’s relativity suggested to many thinkers that there is more to science than testing theories against experience — that science, no less than philosophy, works with grand systems of thought of a more restricted sort, and that scientific disciplines have undergone wholesale revolutions, as new sets of concepts replace old ones from the ground floor up. This idea sat undeveloped (by philosophers, anyway) for a long, long time.

In 1962, doctoral candidate in physics turned science historian Thomas S. Kuhn (1922 – 1996) published his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which tried to outline proposals for what happens when an old theory is replaced by a presumed better one. It was the most controversial book about science of that decade. The basic ideas are well known. A mature science is dominated by its paradigm — a presumed body of achievement consisting of solved problems, the basic concepts and methods used to solve them, along with any number of remaining problems awaiting solution by “normal science,” the implication being that the methods used to solve the grand problems of the past will continue to work on lesser ones in the future. A scientific paradigm is often embodied in a major work, such as Newton’s Principia. Kuhn thought the advantage of paradigms is that scientists could explore parts of nature in detail without having to dwell on fundamentals which need not be questioned. This may work for a time, but only up to a point. A few problems will resist solution; these anomalies will accumulate over time. Scientists will try to fit them into the familiar mental boxes of the paradigm.

A few (usually younger) will sense this is impossible. Gradually, allegiance to the dominant paradigm will break down, discussion will turn back to fundamentals, and “revolutionary science” will begin. It will end with the formulation of a new candidate for paradigm and what Kuhn calls the ensuing battle over its acceptability. If it creatively solves the problems that got the old paradigm into trouble while suggesting new lines of research, it may win the allegiance of the scientific community’s leaders, the journals will fill with accounts of their triumphs, and a scientific revolution will have taken place. A new period of “normal science” will begin, but the discipline will have changed its understanding of itself. The examples Kuhn developed in some detail included Newton’s physics replacing Aristotle’s cosmology, Antoine Lavoisier’s oxygen-based chemistry replacing the phlogiston-based chemistry of his predecessors, and Einsteinian relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics. Kuhn’s point was that a successor theory may use much of the same vocabulary but does not bring the same concepts to its understanding of its subject matter, so that for Newton mass is fixed whereas for Einstein it increases as its velocity approaches that of light. Other concepts just drop out. To Lavoisier’s predecessors, phlogiston was a principle released into the air by combustion. In his chemistry, in which combustible substances combine with oxygen, there is no such thing.

Paul Feyerabend (1924 – 1994), in Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge first published in 1975, went further than Kuhn. According to Feyerabend, deep changes in science meant that there was no permanent, enduring method involved in science at all. Neutral experience, moreover, was also a myth; we always approach nature from within a theoretical perspective or worldview (my term, not Feyerabend’s). Many ideas — Platonistic, Christian, astrological, numerological, etc. — had contributed to the scientific revolution. Kuhn’s “normal science,” moreover, was a bad idea to the extent Kuhn was right. What it did was turn science into rigid dogma more suited for a church. Healthy science embraced a proliferation of competing and often mutually inconsistent ideas, as it had always been improved by competing, mutually inconsistent lines of thought. Dominance of a single paradigm was more the product of the politics of scientific communities than intellectual argument, positivistic mythology notwithstanding.

These ideas may seem complicated. In a lot of respects, they are. I’ve only scratched the surface, without providing the details of the extensive debates they provoked within the philosophical and philosophy of science communities. They are worth thinking about if we want to understand both the impulses that lead many people, not all of them scientists, to embrace the idea of settled science, while helping us realize why there is no such animal. Science has always changed its assumptions. Narratives about reality once dominant have invariably fallen. There is no reason to think ours have any special standing.

Both Kuhn and Feyerabend were accused of introducing irrational elements into science. It was a source of frustration to both that their critics lumped them into a single “school” called “historicism,” since many of their ideas were different as day and night. Kuhn denied the allegation; what he’d said was that scientific change could not be shoehorned into the logical formulations then in vogue in analytic philosophy. Feyerabend made fun of it, responding with satire and ridicule. His “anarchism,” he insisted, had never been more than an ironic expression of the rationalist’s predicament if the rationalist honestly compared his abstract theories of science to the real thing in all its messiness. Science is not the product of thinking machines, but human beings in specialized communities. These communities always have a hierarchy and therefore both political and economic dimensions; normally, someone has to fund them, and this introduces nonscientific overseers into the mix. We thus have one of the issues with academic and corporate science — and one of the primary reasons for skepticism about its objectivity. This comes before we hear from scientists who will claim to have been ostracized for rejecting the official climate change (or some other) narrative, and some who have quit major organizations because they believed those organizations’ embrace of the narrative was political instead of evidence-based.

I trust it is clear how all this applies. First, what does the climate change narrative assert? It can be divided into at least two parts. There is the idea that the world, on average, is warming — that the climate as a whole is changing, which includes increasingly hostile weather in some locales. Climate change advocates, by the way, are right to distinguish weather from climate. Weather is what it is doing outside right now (sunshine, overcast, rain, sleet, snow). Climate is what happens around the world over a long period of time. This is why arguments that the U.S. and Europe are experiencing hostile winters don’t refute climate change proposals. Let’s avoid that mistake.

In an ideal world, whether the planet is in fact warming could indeed be determined by collecting data — large amounts of data, from various places, over a long period of time, all over the globe. Whether we have been collecting data for a long enough period is a question some ask. Another matter worth considering is whether ice fields and masses in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are growing or shrinking over time.

The next question is conditional: if the world is warming, then is human activity its cause? Here is where you’ll get the “settled science” claims; we’re all familiar with the 97%. This figure is disputed, however. Muddying the waters further is the realization that both sides have their own funding sources with deep pockets. It is clear that globalists such as George Soros are backing the official climate change narrative; it is also clear that the Koch brothers and corporations such as Exxon-Mobil have funneled millions of dollars into the coffers of climate change skeptics. The honest layman might have a hard time deciding who to believe. Worse still is the strong sense that our generation is obligated to get this right; future generations won’t look back on us kindly if we don’t. The claim is that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, products of the burning of fossil fuels entering the atmosphere for decade after decade, have begun to disrupt natural climactic patterns, and the climate’s adjustments explain the hostile weather, violent storms, and extreme cold as well as extreme heat.

From a systems point of view, the idea isn’t crazy. Systems theory tells us that systems — sets of interacting and interdependent parts or processes — always operate in an environment, always face potential sources of disruption, and are always parrying or adjusting as they try to maintain equilibrium. This sort of claim might be necessary as a justification for climate change advocacy, but it isn’t sufficient. By itself, it won’t tell us what is causing any systemic adjustments that are happening.

To opt for the view of man-made climate change — that CO2 and other greenhouse gases produced by industrial civilization are the causes of actual long-term warming — will indeed call for major changes in how we generate and use energy. Those contending that burning fossil fuels will need to be phased out on a global scale if we wish to avoid disaster are correct (how many major cities are located on coastlines and will be inundated?)! That is what is at stake here!

The fact that there is little reason to trust academic science is working against us. There may, in fact, be no rational resolution to this dilemma. It might have sounded, to idealists, like a good idea to keep science free of politics, but given that Kuhn and Feyerabend were right: given that nearly all science is done by human beings in organizations that do not finance themselves, this being impossible in a culture that values entertainment more than science (entertainers become multimillionaires while non-celebrity scientists beg for grant money).

It is conceivable, however, that other forces at work today will solve this problem for us. Kuhn’s ideas about the rise and fall of paradigms in science are echoed, somewhat, by the trajectory empires take: they rise and flourish for a time, but invariably find themselves unable to solve mounting problems they face and go into decline. Empires fail for some combination of the following reasons: aggressive behaviors towards others that breed blowback, moral confusion and debauchery bred by materialism, financial corruption and destruction of the dominant currency, an inability to transmit their traditions to future generations via education, invasion and colonization by unassimilable immigrants, or official policies by governments that sabotage the very thing that enables a civilization to stay prosperous: productive activity. When its masses consume more than they produce, as short-term pleasures displace long-term thinking and planning; when the majority grows soft and dependent, and an ethos of entitlement is built into official policy, populations become parasitical. The more resourceful members of the civilization’s intelligent and productive minority begin to flee. They take their entrepreneurial or other skills elsewhere. This usually means the decline is irreversible. History books tell multiple variations on these themes.

Western civilization has probably done the most to curb air pollution. Many Latin American cities still suffer from pollution, however; and Chinese cities are still terrible polluters. The Chinese are starting to follow the West into mass consumption, however, and will end up in the same place as consumptivism leads to entitlement. As I have argued at length elsewhere, we are not far from a major global reset. Our civilizational paradigm has been one of unlimited progress amidst centralization, war, debt, open borders, moral subjectivism, and dependency. This paradigm is beginning to fail massively. Those who have made long term thinking and planning a priority in their lives will be ready for the coming reset, and will not worry overly about the when — I grow weary of people either trying to pin a date on it or asking me for one. The point is, it will happen. History and mathematics do not lie, like mainstream politicians and economists.

When the reset occurs, it will become possible to devolve power from the center and begin progress towards a world of small states or other autonomous ventures (some of which will embark on projects of statelessness), along lines advocated by Leopold Kohr. As small, self-ruling polises proliferate, Feyerabend-style, one will see wide differences in philosophy and economic arrangement. It may be, in fact, that millennials flocking to Bernie Sanders will get a chance to try democratic socialism — on an actual Denmark-sized scale or smaller! If they aren’t bothering the Galt’s Gulches of the world, there will be no reason to stand in their way. We will find out which systems generate better lives for their participants.

None of these small entities, I submit, will tend to pollute their surroundings. Having attracted the best and the brightest, one or more of the new polises may well develop technologies for energy generation and use that do not rely on fossil fuels. This idea is no crazier than were those of heavier-than-air commercial flight or wireless communications or space travel. I see nothing wrong with pursuit of such technologies by those who choose and have voluntary support, regardless of the truth or falsity of the climate change narrative. Such efforts will encourage self-reliance. If by some chance the narrative contains some truth, we will heal the planet by having healed ourselves, at least in part. If it is false, by abandoning empire we will still have better and healthier communities than we have now. Along the way, those who have chosen to do so will have eschewed materialism and reconnected with God. These are the folks who will have achieved true happiness.

Posted in Higher Education Generally, Philosophy of Science, Political Economy, Where is Civilization Going? | Tagged Against Method, climate change, climate science, corporate science, denialism, global warming, infantilization in academia, Koch Brothers, Leopold Kohr, Lost Generation, Paul Feyerabend, philosophy of science, scientific method, settled science, small state world, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas DiLorenzo, Thomas S. Kuhn, trust in science | 1 Comment

Why Do Highly Intelligent People Do Extremely Stupid Things?

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Steven Yates

Academia, those who have spent any time there may have noticed, is a very strange place. Among other things, there is a certain amount of truth to those colorful anecdotes about absent-minded professors who, back in the days when chalkboards existed, would fill their chalkboards with equations, but walk around unkempt with shoes untied, and be likely to have left their watch or wallet somewhere. And many have been prone to alleviate their social awkwardness towards the fairer sex with a “hi cutie” or two, usually privately as they entered class.

Unfortunately, not all such events are mere anecdotes, and not all are funny. Some are career destroying. They raise questions of why obviously intelligent people do the things they do, especially when some of those things are just plain stupid in this day and age.

Several months ago, not long after I first started this blog, I wrote about the now-discredited gang rape allegation at the University of Virginia. It was never my position that unwanted sexual advances and rapes do not take place on campuses. Obviously they do. Not as frequently as feminists say, but my point here is, they do happen, and we critics of political correctness never said otherwise. Cases easily describable as sexual harassment also happen.

Consider the case that seems to have begun back in fall of 2011 between reasonably well-known British philosopher Colin McGinn, then at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and a graduate assistant named Monica Morrison. McGinn’s credentials are well known. A prolific writer, he has numerous books in both the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language as well as dozens of journal articles. He recently pushed a few disciplinary boundaries with his latest book, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (MIT Press, 2015). He, along with a colleague and his former university, are being sued by Ms. Morrison.

If we can rely on this account, here is what appears to have happened. During academic year 2011-12, Ms. Morrison was assigned to work with McGinn. Right off the bat we have the basis for a major power asymmetry. McGinn is well known, and so working as his grad assistant would be a plumb assignment. Successful work might mean of very positive letter of recommendation later. Such letters are almost essential for finding any decent academic employment at all these days, even for women. Hence a strong motive for subservience.

McGinn began expressing an interest in Ms. Morrison which looks to have gone well beyond the appropriate and professional. As the months ensued they began exchanging emails, with McGinn expressing most of the interest and Ms. Morrison growing increasingly uncomfortable, as the emails had gone from complimenting her legs to comments about erections, hand jobs, and references to her as his “beloved pet.” McGinn, incidentally, was 62 and she was just 26. Huffington Post claims to have reviewed hundreds of pages of emails exchanged between the two.

Ms. Morrison reluctantly expressed increasing discomfort with the situation. McGinn did not back off, and so she complained to university authorities, whom she now alleges did not act seriously on the complaint. McGinn contended — still contends — that the relationship was consensual, and this was the university’s judgment although McGinn was called onto the carpet for not reporting the relationship. I have to wonder how a reasonable person can claim that a relationship is consensual when one of the partners is relatively famous and has written to the other that she would be “much better off with my support than without it.” That’s what’s known as a power-play.

Both left the university. Morrison resigned as McGinn’s graduate assistant in early September 2012, filing her complaint a few days later. McGinn announced shortly before the end of the year that he would resign instead of fight the allegation; he says he was not forced out. You can read the specifics on the article I linked to above, if you are so inclined. That article also references significant passages from the emails — passages which, one should note, are pretty damning. It would be hard to say they were “taken out of context” or something along those lines.

Which brings me to the main point of this post. What on Earth is any university professor doing putting references to his having an erection or wanting a hand job into an email sent to any female student at his university, much less to his own graduate assistant?

One explanation is humorous bad judgment of the sort I noted at the outset which got a bit out of control in this case. Intelligent people are prone to it. All of us who had the dubious fortune of being born with strong inclinations towards intellectual work know, if we are honest with ourselves, that we have sometimes serious failings in other areas of our lives. I am a much better writer than conversationalist, for example. Many of us are socially awkward, borderline Asperger’s cases who can’t handle small talk, or have poor aptitude with mechanical things. I can do predicate logic in three place relations or with definite descriptions while explaining them step by step to students — but the last time I had a flat tire, I had to track someone down who could help me remove the tire and put on the spare (at least I had a spare).

The other possible explanation is a bit darker. McGinn, who is British, received his BPhil in 1974 and began his teaching career immediately. It is probably fortunate he isn’t an American, since that was right around the time the job market in the U.S. was starting to collapse. So if McGinn isn’t Lost Generation, he missed being such by the skin of his teeth — by not being an American and having been born in 1950. At 65, he may be the youngest person to have contributed both original and worthwhile material to the field with his new mysterianism: the idea that our minds just aren’t equipped to solve the problem of consciousness. The idea is intellectually serious, and can be expanded on: I am not sure our minds are equipped to understand either God’s existence or such matters as how (and when) time began or when the universe began. Our ignorance is vastly, vastly greater than our knowledge.

But never mind that here. My other possible explanation draws from the fact that McGinn was the last of the lucky generation, one might call them — those who came up before job prospects for those with advanced degrees in subjects like philosophy fell apart. Everyone in today’s academic one percent (one might call them) falls into this category. I know of no exceptions. I’ve often commented that, in U.S. philosophy anyway, there is almost no one younger than 70 doing serious philosophical work actually advancing the field, whose contributions cannot be dismissed as political (books on radical feminism, for example).

Perhaps, as an academic one percenter, McGinn thought he could get away with lack of professionalism with a graduate student. He found out otherwise — in this case (we have no idea how many instances of this sort go unreported, of course). This will taint his future in the discipline no matter how many books he writes. One of McGinn’s former colleagues came to his defense in a personal confrontation with Ms. Morrison, some minor-leaguer I never heard of named Edward Erwin, who alleged that she had ruined McGinn’s career. This earned him inclusion in the list of defendants in Ms. Morrison’s lawsuit, which also charges defamation in the face of generalized threats of retaliation. The fallout from this case may prevent her from having any future in the field at all.

What such cases do is give the radical feminists more ammunition. (All one need do to see this is read the comments section under the HuffPo article.)

Sadly, academic men now inhabit an environment in which a male professor is out of his mind if he approaches a female student — any male professor, and any female student. He is even stupider if he approaches someone enrolled in his class, and to make amorous advances toward someone working directly under him is taking stupid to the nth power! (Just think: if an adjunct or even someone full time but without tenure were to do it, that person would be gone faster than you can say sexual harassment.) This Lost Generation Philosopher’s recommendation, which is not limited to academia: never get involved with, or make advances toward, someone you work with.

Why do I say sadly? Because I have known older faculty members who met their future wives this way, as former students or former grad assistants. That, of course, was a long time ago, when there was more sexual sanity in our culture, and more maturity generally.

Posted in Culture, Philosophy | Tagged Colin McGinn, radical feminism, sexual harassment, University of Miami | 1 Comment

The Age of Atheism and the Eight Veils.

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Steven Yates

Over the past month or so I’ve been reading Peter Watson’s The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (2014). I’ve almost finished it. If you are a believer in any sense of the term and you pick up this book, expect to find it somewhat depressing, but Watson is mostly reliable in his account of how mainstream thinking has developed over the past couple of centuries in many areas from the sciences to the arts and the humanities, including professional philosophy. Not that I believe his is the final word on his subject matter. I’ve read two of his previous books: The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2000) and Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud (2005). The former gives a rousing account of the rise of energy technology, but without once mentioning Nikola Tesla (not even in an endnote). The latter treads close to the idea that Jesus Christ never really existed, much less died on a cross and was supernaturally resurrected. This will give you an idea of what to expect. While this is not a review of Watson’s books, even if you find these ideas repellent Watson’s books should be read if a reliable account of mainstream thought matters to you. If you reject mainstream thought, it is important to have an account of what you are rejecting, as well as why.

Two paragraphs early in the final chapter of The Age of Atheists leaped out at me when I read them. Watson writes: “We need to remind ourselves one last time that many people—and perhaps the quieter souls among us—see no problem in God being dead. For them his death is no source of anxiety or perplexity. Such individuals may call into question Robert Musil’s claim that even people who scoff at metaphysics feel a strange cosmic presence, or Thomas Nagel’s comment that we all have a sense of looking down on ourselves as if from a great height. But such individuals are not ‘metaphysical types’ and seek no ‘deep’ meaning in existence. They just get on with their lives, making ends meet, living from day to day and season to season, enjoying themselves where they can, untroubled by matters that so perplex their neighbors. They have no great expectations that ‘big’ questions will ever be settled, so devote no time to their elucidation. In some ways, they are the most secular people of all and perhaps the most content.

“Countless others live in circumstances so meager, so minimal, so fraught with everyday material difficulties that there is no time for reflection, circumstances where such an activity is beyond their means. By such people’s standards a concern with meaning, a preoccupation with the difference between how to live a good life and how to live well, is something of a luxury, itself the achievement of a certain kind of civilization. We must accept that the search for meaning is, by this account, a privilege” (pp. 532-33).

About this, Watson is entirely correct. There are people so busy struggling to make ends meet that they don’t have either the time or the energy to pursue philosophical problems or think about their relationship, if any, to a “higher power.” But even among those who have a bit more leisure, those of us fortunate enough to have been born into relatively advanced civilizations, it is clear that the majority, even though they have the time, do not have the interest or the inclination. They may be believers, and if so, they believe because their parents and peers believed, and it never occurred to them to believe otherwise. These are the people who will look out over the Pacific Ocean from hotel balconies at a beautiful sunset and see God, or wonder how such things could be if there were no God. It is not that they would react against a scientific explanation of the sight or the colors. Such an explanation would go in one ear and out the other. They have no interest in it. Or such folks may be unbelievers. Perhaps they were never exposed to church when they were children. Or they just don’t see the relevance of belief in a God to anything in their lives, or anything in this world. A few such people may have a sense of evil, via suffering they have experienced personally or seen others experience, or perhaps they’ve read about the Holocaust or Stalin’s purges, and respond with the idea that anyone who believes there’s a God in charge of this mess has rocks in his head. Then they don’t give the matter further thought.

I am reminded of a curious essay I encountered online a number of years ago: “Slavery and the Eight Veils” by someone named Don Harkins who edited a publication called The Idaho Observer before he passed away a number of years ago. I know nothing of Harkins or his credentials and little of his publication, nor whether the ideas in his essay are original with him or if he borrowed them from an earlier unreferenced source. But the essay stood out in my mind enough that I eventually penned a piece of my own, “Piercing the Veils” which looked at Harkins’s ideas and made some changes in them. The basic theme still seems sound to me, and would explain Watkins’s account of how so many people simply accept the “death of God” in secular civilization, if indeed they give the matter more than passing thought; or why other people believe, also without giving the matter much thought despite having the leisure to do so.

Consider this scenario for a civilization at any level of advancement: 90% of its people live out their lives with no serious or concerted interest in anything beyond what it takes to make ends meet and (as Harkins puts it) keep their lives together. In less advanced civilizations, of course, the percentage may be higher. In ours, it may be slightly lower. They live their lives behind the First Veil, and we may call them First Veilers.

The other 10% penetrate the First Veil. They take an interest in those matters affecting their community, or nation, that may not affect them directly and personally, such as politics. They have a position on the issues of their time, and may be able to defend it reasonably. They will trust and support their leaders, up to the point of going to war with a foreign nation if their leaders say war is justified. But 90% of this group never go further, because they live their lives behind the Second Veil, we will call it, and we may call them Second Veilers. Ten percent of this group penetrate the Second Veil and discover the cycles of history, the rise of civilizations, the influence of documents important in history such as the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, and others. They will use such documents as a means of evaluating their leaders rather than just following them. But Third Veilers remain trapped behind the Third Veil.

What happens to that 10% who penetrates the Third Veil? They may have suspected earlier that, e.g., the drift of the U.S. away from Constitutional government wasn’t a mere accident, and wasn’t simply a necessary adjustment to the supposed failures and excesses of laissez faire capitalism. This 10% postulates, in different ways, the following idea: behind a number of semi-secret organizations (semi-secret here means that they neither seek nor dwell in the limelight, doing work which manages to be massively influential without publicity of any kind) is a number of very wealthy and very powerful extended families who, via ownership or co-ownership of banks or other corporations able to influence politicians and trends with money, shape economies and world events, in effect taking history in specific directions. Fourth Veilers who perceive this, often through laborious studies conducted on their own or with like-minded others, are simply dismissed by Second and Third Veilers as “conspiracy theorists,” a phrase with a specific origin (I won’t get into that here). But Fourth Veilers will often note how those behind the Second and Third Veils see First Veilers as little better than cannon fodder, to be sent (along with their children) off to fight in the wars they have caused. Ninety percent of those who penetrate the Third Veil to find themselves in this “brave new world” will remain trapped behind the Fourth Veil. For the other 10%, things begin to get very interesting — and possibly relevant to our remarks on Watson’s paragraphs. The people he describes who are untroubled by unbelief, and those I described who believe without mental struggle or perplexity (and don’t much care whether you agree with them or not), are First Veilers. Many of the intellectuals, artists, and others Watson describes are Second or Third Veilers. Philosophers such as John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty are unquestionably Third Veilers whose take on the human condition is circumscribed by language and its limitations instead of politics, as well as by contemporary academic culture.

Many Fourth Veilers look at the present scene and conclude that the situation is hopeless. They have the global elites — the wealthiest, most powerful, and influential extended families — on pedestals. What can we do?

For the 10% who penetrate the Fourth Veil, I hypothesize in my essay, the materialism subscribed to by Third Veilers and by many Fourth Veilers is shortsighted, for this world really is the scene of a titanic struggle between godly forces and satanic forces. For the 10% who penetrate the Fourth Veil, the supernatural is real! God is in charge! He has revealed to us what He wants us to know! How does this 10% know this? They would not say they are simply reading it out of the Bible. They would say God is speaking to them through His Word, and in a variety of ways.

Crazy religionists, right? One of the features of those who have penetrated higher veils is the difficulty they have explaining themselves to those behind lower veils, assuming they are inclined. First Veilers who have the time do not have the interest. To Second and Third Veilers, Fourth Veilers are simply nuts, and many won’t hesitate to say so. To many Fourth Veilers — which incidentally would include the global elites themselves — Fifth Veilers are either nuts or simply irrelevant. As Harkin explained it, those behind lower veils can no more see what is behind the higher veils than you or I can see what is behind an opaque curtain.

Assume just for the moment there is something to this “veils scenario,” and it places belief (in God, in the supernatural, etc.) on an entirely different footing. It makes knowledge of the Divine Order (if you will) esoteric in the original sense of that term.

But wait a minute!

Harkin said there were eight veils. This means that those who see things in terms of godly versus satanic forces are Fifth Veilers, still behind the Fifth Veil. It implies — extending our numbers again — that 10% of those whose level of consciousness reached Fifth Veiler status will penetrate the Fifth Veil and become Sixth Veilers, and that 10% of those will see what is behind the Sixth Veil, and so on. Seeing what?

I don’t know, and in a culture still quite influenced by Christianity, whether supportive of it or attempting to reject it specifically (as Nietzsche did when he first proclaimed the “death of God”), those who penetrate the Fifth Veil will have a much harder time explaining what it is they claim to see. Are God and Satan members of some extremely advanced alien race? Are they composite beings? Are they entities we have no means of describing, as we utterly lack the vocabulary and the concepts? Did God create the world as some kind of science project? Or art project? Do such questions even make sense?

Some will say that the entire “veils scenario” collapses into unintelligibility at this point — especially if we insist that there are Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Veils, and something specific behind them. Idle speculation, and nothing more.

I have no idea why Harkin postulated eight veils, and I don’t suppose I ever will. I do not claim to have the final word on any of this. I only note it as interesting, because it is clear that different people do have different levels of perception and cognition. Sometimes these are sufficiently extensive that the metaphor of their inhabiting different worlds is useful. This is self-evident, and explains why many people have no special interest in science, much less philosophical theology. They have no interest in understanding, e.g., the principles behind electricity just so long as their light switches work. It takes a certain level of consciousness to understand why a Søren Kierkegaard struggled with his faith, as opposed to just accepting his salvation based on Church authority. Perhaps, at a higher level of consciousness, faith both is and has to be a struggle. It takes an equivalent level of consciousness to understand why some people take for granted that they have free will and why many philosophers find the idea very perplexing at best and unintelligible at worst.

Might such ideas also explain why there are people who will find the materialist metanarrative lurking behind accounts of the “death of God” unsatisfying? Our culture, especially our academic culture, does not encourage this kind of speculation despite its pretenses to the contrary. For my part, even if we have decided in advance that our pontifications on being behind or penetrating “veils” is only another instance of somewhat clever wordplay, I have to wonder about the potential gains of refusing to be limited by a specific academic culture in a specific civilization at a specific point in its history. I am willing to put forth these and other speculations, in full light of the fact that beyond a certain point this is all that they are, since none of us has any way of knowing in advance whose speculations will eventually bear fruit, or what that fruit may look like.

Posted in Culture, Philosophy | Tagged Academic Culture, atheism, Conspiracy Theories, Death of God, Don Harkins, Eight Veils, Intellectual History, Peter Watson, Philosophy, Piercing the Veils | 1 Comment

My Kantian-Kierkegaardian Christianity

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Steven Yates

In accordance with my standing as an outsider, I’ve been increasingly inclined over the years to make up my own mind about matters of philosophical theology, attendance of religious ceremonies, and matters of faith. I am unimpressed by the tenured faculty member who proudly proclaims his atheism, unless he can show that he or she has actually read a few lines of the New Testament — or has an explanation for those curious events many of us have experienced that don’t quite add up, given the materialist view of the universe.

These days I think of myself as a Kantian-Kierkegaardian Christian. What does that mean, and how does it differ from some kind of fundamentalism?

First, I’ve long accepted the idea that Western civilization is the scene of a long cold war between two worldviews. One is that of Christendom in a broad sense — the worldview of Christianity. The second is materialism, or materialist naturalism. There are other worldviews, but they are not major players, at least not at the moment. And there are several variations on both Christianity and materialist naturalism. There are the many Christian denominations, that is, leading to struggles over how you identify a person as a Christian. And there is Marxist materialism, which differs quite a bit from the varieties of materialism found in the so-called capitalist world.

I am more interested in what they have in common than where they differ. What all forms of Christianity have in common is the existence and centrality of the Christian God, and the believer’s fealty to His dictates, including how Christian salvation occurs (Jesus Christ). Can God’s existence be proven? is one of the most longstanding debates in philosophical theology, or in Western philosophy generally. The upshot of over 2,000 years of conversation is: probably not. The three most widely studied arguments for God’s existence of interest to philosophers, the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, all face well-known and daunting criticisms. But where do we go from here? is the really interesting question. We can, of course, simply become atheists. But atheism does not follow logically from the failures of the arguments. How about agnosticism? Agnosticism might seem to be on safer ground epistemologically, but not existentially. Sooner or later, you must choose. Do I believe, or do I disbelieve? You must commit to one or the other. And be willing to accept the consequences. To refuse to talk about it and live a life under the assumption that belief in God has no part to play in it is to commit to God’s nonexistence. Are there grounds for belief, absent a decisive argument for God’s existence? Is an argument for the existence of a Being such as God even a good idea? An argument is possible that it is not, that such arguments really are a misuse of whatever rational faculties we have, however construed.

From the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) we obtain the idea that the human mind is structured to operate in a world of three dimensions plus time. He developed this idea in great detail in Critique of Pure Reason. To make this as easy as possible and hopefully without oversimplifying too much, Kant had the idea that the world of experience is a kind of construction of consciousness, via forms of intuition (space, time) and categories of the understanding. Reality apart from the constituting human consciousness is an unknowable Ding-an-Sich (thing-in-itself). To make this a tad more accessible, all we need to say is that we cannot step outside our humanness, to see what reality looks like from a totally neutral vantage point, outside the structure our conscious intellects bring to experience. You cannot cease being human. You don’t have a “God’s eye point of view.” If God exists, only He has a “God’s eye point of view,” standing outside of space and time. Subtract the theistic element here, and we have what has been a common theme of much subsequent philosophy, explaining the increasing importance assigned to such matters as historicity, culture-centeredness, and so on. For if it is true that we cannot cease being human, nor can we cease being members of particular cultures. How to construe these apparently genuine limits on our cognition remains a problem, because if they are pursued too far in the extreme, they lead to various forms of self-stultifying relativism and subjectivism.

A realist, non-constructionist version of Kant’s ideas is possible that would enable us to avoid a variety of problems. It would hold that our world of experience, of physical nature, is real insofar as it goes, as indicated by our ability to act effectively in it. The objects of experience, that is, are real, but our experience is only of certain elements of them. I have a visual experience of the table my computer is sitting on as I type this, that is, but not of the atoms and molecules which comprise the table, and given the limitation of my visual perception resulting from the way my eye, optic nerve, and visual center in my brain is put together, this is to be expected. Physical nature extends beyond the senses, in other words, and this is the testimony of modern theoretical physics.

Physical nature, too, hardly needs to exhausts reality (as materialism asserts). Theoretical physics supports this idea as well. Theoretical physics is based on higher mathematics, not experience; higher mathematics is, in turn, based on necessity. It is not arbitrary, even if we can find many cultures that make no use of it. The mathematics of, e.g., superstring theory, appears to require higher dimensions: nine, according to one count (the number may have increased). The details are unimportant for our purposes. All that is required is that we be realists about mathematical objects and their ontological implications, as it is unclear what our being something else (nominalists?) would amount to. We find ourselves in a transcendental reality vastly different from the world we experience, something that was evident over a hundred years ago when Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) was writing.

The most advanced modern science, in this case, is at variance with the requirements of materialism but compatible with Christianity. Note carefully: compatibility is a logical relation. Two propositions are compatible if both can be true in the same possible universe. Physical science may not prove or even offer direct evidence for the existence of any deity, or set out to do so. It, like experience, begins with the assumption of a physical universe of three spatial dimensions plus time, at least until reasons appeared for questioning that assumption. Its presuppositions that this universe is both ordered (not chaotic) and that its order is comprehensible to the human mind, are suggestive. For are these presuppositions true? What does it mean to ask this?

All of which brings us to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855). Some historians of ideas label Kierkegaard’s philosophy “Christian existentialism.” He himself had no label for it, and would have rejected labels. And he would have been suspicious of the above presuppositions, which are just too easy — thrown into doubt by what we would today call “black swan” events.

Kierkegaard emphasized that God’s existence is impossible to prove. He singled out the design argument, popular in his day, and still popular now among many Christian theists, who use the term Intelligent Design even though neither does Intelligent Design necessarily entail that the Designer is the Christian God. The point is, perceived disruptions in the design would cause the perceiver to throw out the whole thing (cf. Philosophical Fragments, ch. 3), in the context of the absence of logical entailment from “Intelligent Design” to Christianity’s God. An agnostic friend once reasoned to me, “There’s no proof.” It dawned on me later that day: that’s true, and it’s the key! Christianity is based on faith, on a Kierkegaardian “leap” (his term), and cannot be based on anything else.

Nor can any other worldview be based on anything else. Materialist naturalism seems to me refuted by recent findings of theoretical physics, the many experiences we have that do not align with it, as well as careful attention to what goes on with language and our understanding of it (not a material process). I know that any materialists reading this will complain that I don’t understand materialism. It is always possible to reinterpret experience so that it fits a favored point of view, usually by ignoring or discounting those elements that “don’t fit.” The point I would make is, materialism is not a finding of any science. Nor does any scientific theory entail it, not even the ones on which there is largescale consensus, like Darwinian evolution. Those who believe otherwise, all they have to do is lay out the logic leading from specific findings of these sciences to the general thesis that materialism is a true account of reality. I submit that this cannot be done. Materialism is, if anything, a presupposition of a certain way of looking at physical reality alone through science. Empirical science, therefore, has not refuted Christianity, nor could it do so. Much modern philosophy of science begins by having science on an epistemic pedestal (except for a few writers such as Paul Feyerabend): positivism and its immediate descendants. Remove it from this pedestal, and this becomes instantly and abundantly clear.

We can say all this before we even get to ethics, or political philosophy, or legal philosophy, with all the practical problems they lead to. I submit: in all three of these areas, if our goal is to base our conclusions on reason instead of obedience to secular authority, materialism leaves us completely at sea. You can see this by googling the essay by British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), “A Free Man’s Worship,” and reading it carefully. It is a classic statement of the secularist’s stance based on purported findings of modern science … and dilemma. In different ways, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881) and the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), each had far more dramatic and compelling accounts of the actual consequences of “God [being] dead.”

But this should be sufficient for now. Normative matters require a far different discussion than we’ve provided here. I will discuss them in a future post. Just as a teaser: while it is possible to quarrel with Christian ethics, or claim that there are many points where the Christian worldview is unclear, all I can say at this point is, Christian ethics is no worse off than any of the available secular theories, all of which fail miserably if the idea is to establish them with something more than, “This is where I make my stand.” As for legal philosophy, I will invoke the idea of legal positivism: the idea boils down to the law being whatever those in power say it is. Legal positivism stands unnoticed in the background behind social issues ranging from abortion to Kim Davis’s refusal to put her name on marriage certificates for gays, and behind Judge Bunning’s contention that natural law would set a terrible precedent. It would at that, because it would destroy the entire edifice of legal positivism! But … I get ahead of myself. More on a future occasion. Where we will end up … there are propositions worth believing … even if you cannot prove them true! This ought to be compatible enough with all the modern and postmodern tendencies to be of some interest!

Posted in Christian Worldview, Philosophy | Tagged "God is dead", A Free Man's Worship, agnosticism, arguments for God's existence, atheism, Bertrand Russell, black swans, Christian God, Christianity, Dostoevsky, Einstein, Feyerabend, God, higher dimensions, Intelligent Design, Kant, Kierkegaard, metaphysics, Nietzsche, Philosophy, positivism, proofs of God's existence, realism, Transcendental philosophy | 1 Comment

Theses on Political Economy (Pre-Meltdown of 2015?)

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Steven Yates

A borderline-panic has gripped U.S. markets, which experienced their worst two-day drop since 2008 (roughly 890 points). This may be just a prelude of things to come. Before going on: I sincerely hope this analysis is wrong! It may not be, and if you live in a big city in the U.S., my advice would be to pack up and get out!

In my book Four Cardinal Errors I spoke of the Meltdown of 2008, which ended with the infamous bailout of the very financial institutions whose reckless behavior caused the meltdown in the first place. But I could cite writers the rest of the day — many of them outsiders like myself who see the forest because we aren’t blinded by the trees — who believe the real financial holocaust is still ahead. With its epicenters the bubble economy in China as well as banker-dominated Europe (following the resignation of Alexis Tsipras in Greece) as well as the U.S., this holocaust could be about to begin.

We must revisit first premises in political economy. A philosopher is obligated to do this. Anyone may challenge me who believes any of these theses are wrong. Show me where!

1. Real wealth (as if there is any other kind) must be produced. It cannot be conjured out of thin air by, e.g., a central bank. The latter idea is magical rather than rational thinking. There are premises here which could have been earlier theses, but they go outside political economy. The physical universe is indifferent to our fate. Nor is God going to “drop us a sandwich” from on high. Hence the necessity of human action. Mises had that right. Actions — the conscious employment of specific means to achieve specific ends — are directed at solving problems, the first of which is ensuring our ability to eat and maintain shelter over our heads.

2. People increase their real wealth legitimately by producing more than they consume, within their communities. This involves cooperation as well as competition. Indeed, people must cooperate on many things if they are to live in a community.

3. A sustainable advancing civilization must therefore emphasize production and not just consumption. It must also encourage voluntary cooperation and trust. Voluntary is best, but as Hayek observed in The Constitution of Liberty (1962, ch. 4), coercion is avoidable only to the extent people act responsibly and predictably.

4. A sustainable advancing civilization must be able to pass its sustaining principles on to ensuing generations. This means taking education seriously, encouraging a variety of enterprises and endeavors to further it.

5. One’s moral compass should recognize the fundamental benevolence of production; it should also recognize both that “freedom is not free” and is not an absolute license to do anything one wants, because both ideas and actions have consequences, some of them unintended. Such ideas should be built into all education. And we should be able to revisit our goals and change course if actions to achieve those goals are causing harm we did not foresee. In other words, a moral view of the human world is a necessity, as is flexibility and a certain pragmatism. Morality should recognize the intrinsic value of persons, with all that ensues from this. A person is genetically human, and not just with a right to life but a right to live to the fullest possible without infringing on similar rights of others. To this extent, the libertarians have the right idea. What they get wrong is that people do suffer setbacks not of their own making, or begin with disadvantages not caused by themselves. And they get too old to work, and must be taken care of if not by family than by someone. To this extent, limited welfarism and safety nets are understandable.

6. There is a minority in any population that appears to lack a moral compass, however we understand it. This sociopathic minority adopts a fundamentally criminal mentality that plunders rather than produces.

7. A sizeable fraction of this minority is fascinated with power, and is driven to obtain power … and may well produce for a time (think Rockefeller in the late 1800s), intending to use its wealth not for the benefit of civilization but to buy favors from others, and eventually a political class of surrogate plunderers. This minority has also grown very skilled, almost instinctively, over time, at exploiting every secular materialist and ethical relativist philosophy, and every group-derived source of division and distraction, to sow confusion and disorder wherever possible, pursuing a “divide and conquer” strategy. Issues such as gay marriage, the so-called campus rape culture, and “black lives matter” fall into this category today.

8. Our civilization is failing in large part because we failed to identify, much less understand the mindset, and place checks on this minority … originally the infamous “robber barons” whose minions went on to create the Federal Reserve System in the U.S., followed by European central banks and the Bank for International Settlements in Europe. They understood a remark made by the early John Maynard Keynes that the system would begin the process of consolidating wealth and power in the hands of the few while discouraging saving and other responsible actions on the part of the many, doing so “in a manner that not one person in a million is able to diagnose.” They saw the masses as sheep who responded to conditioning, and designed educational philosophies and systems accordingly. (Think: John Dewey, who was discovered at Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago and received his initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.)

9. It is over a century since the Federal Reserve System was created, and the descendants of this minority now have the financial systems of all the major economies of the world in a stranglehold. They are what I call the superelite (a term I use to avoid confusion with visible national political elites most of whom are bought). They have discouraged production in advanced nations in favor of financialization. They have encouraged those working for lower wages to continue spending as if there is no tomorrow, going into debt to maintain the same standard of living. They have created a single globalized network, whereby if, e.g., China drops into a massive recession, the ensuing economic effects will ripple across the rest of the world. They operate primarily through central banks and the corporations that have grown up around them. Although these institutions are technically private corporations, they do not really produce anything. They do not add value to the world. They merely manipulate paper (or its electronic equivalent). They engage in the magical acts of invention, creating complex instruments such as derivatives the combined paper wealth of which exceeds the real wealth on the planet.

10. It became conventional quite some time ago to blame “capitalism” for this situation … although the merging of private and public we see in the real world (as opposed to the fictitious worlds of ideologues of various stripes) is more characteristic of fascism. Since historically, fascism has always been openly totalitarianism and nationalistic, while the system we see is covertly totalitarian at best and globalist, the terms corporatism or global corporatocracy or technofeudalism are surely better. But clearly, casting this issue as a clash between capitalism and socialism greatly oversimplifies the matter at hand.

11. The proper strategy is to pursue decentralization … a devolving of power away from the center, away from central banks, leviathan corporations, and bloated governments whose bureaucracies enact the will of the superelite and bought-and-paid-for political classes. This strategy emphasizes the small over the large: small businesses, small and highly mobile educational enterprises of a wide variety, etc. This is the only way of ever recovering a world where we produce more than we consume, generate real wealth, and can also be at peace with each other and with the environment as a whole. See Leopold Kohr for some good ideas. His book The Breakdown of Nations, published in 1957 and completely ignored by mainstream academia, should be required reading.

12. The only way to pursue this strategy realistically is through a reawakening of skills-building and critical thought at all levels. The skills must include agricultural (growing things) as well as manufacturing (making things) and technological (coding, etc.). Critical thinking is an absolute must, as a means of achieving sufficient mental independence and grasping the logical structure of one’s surroundings. The result is that one can plan one’s actions rationally (i.e., recognizing that ideas and actions have consequences, some of them unseen). Part of the reason we are in our present predicament is the gutting of critical thinking as part of the gutting of liberal arts learning generally … to create the kind of obedient sheep fit to live in the covert (or inverted – to use Sheldon Wolin’s term) totalitarianism of the globalized order the superelite have been gradually constructing.
This last is the foremost political-economic reality of our time. If it is dismissed mindlessly as a “conspiracy theory” and not recognized and acted upon, none of our problems will be solved. Many people, moreover, will continue to pursue ideological fantasies or create political heroes of the day (Donald Trump is the best present example despite his getting some things right), and our civilization will continue its present decline. Under these terms those not connected to the superelite as functionaries or to the political class as bureaucrats will find themselves living in third world conditions, having to begin again from scratch, and with far fewer resources than are available now! Wouldn’t it be better to address the problems now, before an unprecedented global-financial emergency takes the world to that point?

Posted in Political Economy, Where is Civilization Going? | Tagged capitalism vs. socialism, central banks, Chinese economy, consumption, corporatism, corporatocracy, Crash of 2015, critical thinking, decentralization, Donald Trump, Dow plunging, economics, Federal Reserve, fiat money, financial crisis, financialization, Greece, Hayek, higher education, Keynes, Leopold Kohr, libertarianism, Meltdown of 2008, Mises, money printing, political class, political economy, production, Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefellers, skills building, superelite, technofeudalism, two-day drop, welfare state | 1 Comment

Worldviews and Christianity: What the Loss of the “Culture War” Means

Posted on July 5, 2015 by Steven Yates

It is Sunday, but I didn’t make it to church this morning. When we lived in Las Condes, our church, San Marcos, was just a few bus stops down the road. Now, it’s over an hour away, and the public transportation is far less convenient (not to mention the six block walk from the metro station at the far end).

And my wife has been a bit under the weather, so I’m staying here. Some of it might be the pollution. Libertarians won’t like the idea, but Chile is likely to need something akin to a Clean Air Act before long. Or the city of Santiago, at least.

Went to church last week. Left with enough to think about for two weeks.

It was in high school that I became conscious of the reality of worldviews, as we philosophers sometimes call them: comprehensive theories or accounts of reality, merely incompatible in some areas but incommensurable in others. (Incommensurable means: unable to be translated into, or brought under, a single vocabulary and/or set of standards and/or values that will resolve core conflicts to the satisfaction of all who disagree. The term originates with mathematics: the incommensurability of rational and irrational numbers. Incommensurability in scientific vocabularies was my dissertation topic.)

Worldviews. The idea simply sat in my brain for a very long time.

The two clearest and closest-to-home examples of worldviews in conflict are Christianity and materialism, leaving aside for now variations within each. The first finds its ground of reality, knowledge, and valuation in a transcendent God as Creator, on which all reality ontologically depends, is inaccessible to the human senses (unless He chooses to make Himself accessible), and whose reality and nature is only partially graspable by the finite human mind. The second limits reality to the physical universe in space and time. Only science and reason, materialists insist, provide reliable knowledge of reality (reliability includes continuous revisability). The latter, they contend, is the key to progress. The former is not.

Christianity offers a transcendent ground of moral values intended to supervene over other sorts of values: aesthetic, epistemic, and economic. Materialism reduces all valuation to the status of cultural artifact: human animals evolved morality in culture because these have survival value. Western civilization as it developed was fundamentally (although not exclusively) Christian. Some writers credit Christianity for the very idea that the universe is both ordered, not random or chaotic, and intelligible to the human mind: ideas that does not exist everywhere. Without them, there is no motivation to do science. Gradually, beginning in the 1700s, continuing through the 1800s and culminating in the 1900s, various forms of Christianity were replaced by various forms of materialism. Materialism is essentially the guiding philosophy of Western civilization at present, and its prevalence I see as one of the main reasons U.S. civilization is failing. I don’t see this as the only reason civilization is failing but it is the most important one: it has precipitated an utter vacuum in morality and in culture, as materialism cannot produce a moral system with teeth in it: where there are actual rewards for virtuous conduct and decisive penalties for heinous conduct. There are only legal controls which are easily circumvented with money and personal contacts. Ask the Clintons. Do not expect an honest reply, however! Ordinary people can circumvent what they perceive as inconvenient rules. The 11th commandment: thou shalt not get caught!

Thus the materialist worldview enables, and encourages, an ethic of cynical opportunism, especially in one’s business or financial and personal affairs; and also especially in government. Both are about power and control over resources — and over people. What does all this have to do with the now-lost “culture war”? Plenty, as it turns out!

The “culture war” is essentially a conflict between the idea that there are universal standards of merit, quality, etc., in literature, philosophy, and so on, and the idea that all standards are local and history-specific, or group-specific. Since at least some standards are history-specific, there is just enough truth in the latter idea that materialism has enabled it to catch on and rise to domination in academia. To those who defend the latter, the former idea, of universal standards, is a delusion — an objectification of the local or group-specific (the group being straight white Christian males, of course). Just yesterday I encountered the strange idea that reason itself is a straight-white-Christian-male construct. The “philosopher” being interviewed apparently doesn’t realize the racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.., implications of his pronouncement (he’s a white male): other groups are incapable of using reason and so are fundamentally nonrational or irrational (take your pick: the position is not clear enough for decidability).

All this is somewhat beside the point. As far as the “culture war” goes, it is clear that Christianity has largely missed the boat. It missed the boat long before the ongoing clash began to be called that. Christians sat on the sidelines during the early civil rights movement, the early women’s movement, issues involving poverty, those involving the environment, and so on. Those arose because of a genuine sense of injustice, or in the case of the last, that commercial products (e.g., pesticides) were, as a matter of objective fact, damaging other species and ecosystems themselves in the name of profitability.

Christians, at one level, what we might call “Christianity of the masses,” were more worried about whether it was sinful to have a beer, go to dances, etc. “Life application” ministries which dominated in many churches trivialized Christian teachings. At another level were those who read Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, became obsessed with the “End Times,” and expected they would be Raptured any day now! They wouldn’t have to worry about it, as Planet Earth went through seven years of Tribulation! (A real eye-opener on this subject for me was Gary DeMar’s Myths, Lies & Half-Truths: How Misreading the Bible Neutralizes Christians 2004, although I’d dissected the insidious influence of Scofieldism on Christianity several years before.)

Secularists thus did all the heavy lifting, as it were, trying to make this world a better place, and naturally every one of those movements eventually went off course. Now their dark sides are on display for all today, just as the dark side of capitalism is on display for all to see. Whether your politics are “liberal” or “conservative,” whether your economics are capitalist or something else, if you combine them with materialism and its failed attempt at a secular ethic, whether based on utility or simply on money, what you get will eventually self-destruct.

The victors in the “culture war” are causing the various cultures that make up America to self-destruct. A few of us outsiders have figured this out. Others will, too, probably when it was too late. Christians, I predict, will not be “raptured.” But they are already being persecuted. They are even being physically attacked.

We saw the beginnings prior to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision in June, with business destroying legal declarations and then pronouncements that openly violate Christians’ rights under the First Amendment. I don’t need to rehearse all these details. But one upshot of last week’s thoughts: there is a sense in which Christian Churches had this coming, as the long term consequences of having dropped the ball long ago. Some of us were warning over twenty years ago that this day was coming. We were either ignored or dismissed as paranoid.

In case you haven’t figured it out, in the dispute between Christians and materialists, I stand squarely on the side of the Christians. If you’ve read this far and you can’t tolerate that, I am sorry for you — but I would suggest that you revisit your conception of tolerance. If you are honest, you might find it wanting.

But we are wanting as well, and I would never say otherwise. Today, sadly, we Christians are widely seen as narrow-minded, bigoted, hateful, intolerant, anti-intellectual, etc.

Secularists of whatever stripe see themselves as informed, open-minded, tolerant, progressive, etc. — even when behaving destructively. It is okay, in their view, to demonize and destroy those perceived as “intolerant.”

For my own part, I do believe the current state of affairs indicates that Christians need to get their own house in order, and be sure of themselves. If one reads the letters of the Apostle Paul and thinks in terms of context, who is he writing to? Is he writing to the Emperor or Rome, or to Roman authorities generally? No. He is addressing Christians. He says, for example, in I Corinthians 10: 6 – 12: “Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. And do not become idolators as were some of them. As it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day 23,000 fell; nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed by serpents; nor complain, as some of them also complained, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.”

Who is Paul talking to? Christians! Who is he referring to, who met with all these unfortunate consequences of bad behavior? Those who fell away, and acted no differently than unbelievers. One of the most striking things is how little Paul has to say directly to unbelievers, or about their practices. There was, after all, plenty of heinous behavior in the Roman Empire besides mere persecution of Christians: suppression of local peoples under the Romans’ heels, violent gladiatorial contests, and plenty of sexual misconduct. I Corinthians 5: 12 – 13: “It isn’t my responsibility to judge outsiders, but it is certainly your job to judge those inside the church who are sinning in these ways. God will judge those on the outside …”

This is not to say Christians shouldn’t engage the world. But they should do so from within full awareness of their worldview and what it requires of them: loving others, accepting responsibility including taking seriously the idea that when God gave us “dominion” over the world (Genesis 1:26) he meant respecting and caring for it, not despoiling and destroying it; and actually retaining the life Christ lived as a regulative ideal. There are themes Christians can glean from the progressives, many of whom are well-intentioned even if the fundamentals of their worldview were bound to steer them off course. Many progressives have a sense of community and of responsibility that is lacking in other ideologies, often just as thoughtlessly steeped in materialism as most progressivism.

It is too late, I think, for Christians to avoid open persecution in U.S. society, where the combination of progressivism, pseudo-tolerance, and hedonism now prevail. But it is not too late for us Christians to get our own houses in order, so that we do not live or act in ways Scripture condemns when trying to engage this world.

Posted in Christian Worldview, Culture, Where is Civilization Going? | Tagged Christian Worldview, Christianity, culture war, gay marriage, homophobia, homosexual, homosexuality, materialism, persecution of Christians, progressive, racism, secularism, sexism, Supreme Court, worldviews | 1 Comment

Modern Moral Philosophy (Part Two—Is the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle Adequate As the Foundation for a Systematic Morality)

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Steven Yates

In Part One (two weeks ago) we surveyed such questions as: are there such things as knowable moral facts, or is morality a cultural artifact? I argued that the former claim makes better sense of what we use ethical language to do, what our usages and living debates actually presuppose. That moral principles are not mere matters of opinion — individual, collective, or that of moral authorities — seems a reasonable working presupposition of any ensuing discussion.

I will assume that most libertarians are cognitivists. Their invocation of the non-aggression principle (NAP) is not intended as a mere sentiment, or opinion. To be sure we have the NAP right, I will state it as I understand it: no person may rightly act aggressively towards others, whether this means initiating force or coercion against them, defrauding them, or appealing to the state or some other surrogate power to initiate aggression on one’s behalf.

Libertarians (be they minarchists or anarcho-capitalists) as I understand them intend this as a prime candidate for basic moral truth, or fact, from which everything else they have to say logically follows. They do not want to impose the NAP on you. That would violate the NAP. There is no logical entailment from the truth of a moral principle to the idea that it should be put into place by force. Libertarians therefore rightly argue in its defense, and try to live lives consistent with its application. The question I now want to consider is: can one do the latter in all circumstances? Is the NAP either a necessary or a sufficient condition for a functional as well as moral society?

Please note: when asking the question, I am not saying that the NAP will not do for the majority of situations where human beings interact. Clearly it will. I am interested in whether there are counterexamples: circumstances where it either does not apply, or would give bad advice and should be overridden, e.g., by principles favoring the preservation of a life. The situation may be analogous to the relationship between Newton’s physics and that of Einstein. When Einsteinian relativity became the dominant paradigm in physics, we did not stop using Newtonian math to put up buildings and bridges. What we showed is that Newton’s ideas are limited to the world of middle-sized objects and situations. Likewise, the NAP may be perfect for our workaday world of business interactions, and a very good justification for keeping government as small as possible (assuming that isn’t still too big). But are there life-and-death circumstances that (dare I use the word?) force us to set it aside because the results of not doing so could be disastrous?

A few years ago I found myself in a quandary. My elderly parents had been in declining health for a number of years, and were reaching the point of near-helplessness. My mom, a stroke patient since 1999, had needed round the clock care ever since due to partial paralysis on her right side and additional internal physical problems. My father had been able to take care of her, but was himself having physical problems and showing signs of dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s disease. These began sometime during 2007. At first they were minor, such as forgetting a password or whether the cats were inside or outside. Then one day he returned from the grocery store, having forgotten what he went there for. He began to misplace things, including money. Gradually problems worsened, as on a couple of occasions he’d lost track of where he was while out driving. My mom was scared to death he’d cause an accident. Or, how long it would be before he put something on the stove or in the oven, forgot about it, the result being a fire that trapped them both inside a poorly-designed house (imho) with just one convenient exit to a carport (another to a back porch with no stairwell down and a third from a basement inaccessible to my mom). It was clear; something had to be done, and I was the one who had to do it since I was closest geographically.

I urged them to sell the house and go into assisted living. When my father did not want to go voluntarily, I basically forced the issue. He’d been injured in a fall, which made matters easier than they otherwise would have been. He’d wanted to return home following a couple of weeks of rehabilitative therapy. I wasn’t about to let him. Instead, I basically used force to get him into assisted living, along with my mom. Another fall, a few weeks later, fractured his hip and put him in nursing care. Had he fallen in or outside the house, with no one but my mom around, he might have lain in one place unattended unless he could attract a neighbor’s attention. That would have been a long shot, as their neighborhood was remote, woodsy, and with houses spread well apart. Neither of my parents had kept up with technology. Neither had obtained cell phones they could use to call me.

My use of force on my father turned out to be the right thing to do, even if unauthorized by the NAP, and I have to ponder whether many parallel circumstances are also justified by the need for certain results, such as the general need to care for elderly people who are no longer mentally able to make their own decisions or are aware of their own best interests — even when they don’t want these decisions made (and my father had fought my decision tooth and nail!).

At the time I wasn’t thinking about the NAP. It dawned on me much later that it would have allowed me to do nothing for my parents. They would have either eventually starved in their house; or my dad would have caused a fire or some other calamity. The NAP gave me no advice in the matter. I could have played hands off, done nothing, without having violated it. You’ve not aggressed against someone by leaving him or her to rot. On the other hand, a libertarian could argue that I did violate the NAP when I used coercion to get my father into a facility where he could be properly cared for, and I would have to agree. It slowly became clear to me, however long after the fact, that the NAP doesn’t help us here, but rather gives us very bad advice: if you have no obligations to others except to “leave them alone,” then you have no obligations to elderly family members in grave danger of injuring themselves or of being left to rot. Never initiate coercion against others, the NAP says. Not even to save their lives when they are unable, physically or mentally, to take responsibility for themselves?

One specific point where the libertarian argument can go wrong is in the assumption that everyone has privileged access to his/her own best interests. In the case of children, this is trivially false, of course. Even John Stuart Mill did not apply his classical liberal “harm principle” to children. Usually (not always!) we restrict our considerations to adults, for ethical deliberations. But not all adults know what is in their own best interests all the time. The Alzheimer’s sufferer clearly does not. It is likely that anyone suffering from an addiction does not. Research indicates that addictions are physical, not merely mental. They involve changes in the brain. Expressed in familiar language, the addict wants more of whatever he/she is addicted to, and will sometimes do anything, including harm others, to obtain it. Can you use force to prevent the addict from harming others? Should you use force, if doing so will have a greater likelihood than not of enabling getting the addiction under control? It seems to me you can make a case for a Yes answer.

We could multiply, it seems to me, counterexamples to the NAP: circumstances in which it allows us to do nothing, when whatever moral intuitions we have are telling us otherwise! Or circumstances in which we have to violate it to fulfill a moral obligation.

I believe I have shown that we have obligations to family members that, other things being equal, override the NAP. The need to preserve the lives of one’s own can justify the use of coercion to do it; the value of life itself defeats eschewing force if force is what is needed. Our legal system, which includes components devoted to elder law, has been built up to recognize this, along with as many checks are necessary to minimize abuse of the system. It seems right, too, that local government can penalize someone who fails to exercise commonsense judgment on such matters, whether with children or with infirm elderly people who no longer possess cognitive faculties.

Were all human beings responsible moral actors, such legal machinery would not be necessary, of course. There is an adage, of course: you cannot legislate stupidity out of existence; you can only attempt to minimize its effects on (often uninvolved) others.

Are there other circumstances, related not to family but to markets themselves, where the NAP can be overridden? This is a truly dangerous question for a libertarian. Markets would seem to be the place where the NAP is of most importance, to be upheld as the closest we are likely to come to a moral absolute.

It should be clear that unimpeded markets, to the extent they exist, simply give the masses what they want: no more, no less. Supply something the masses want in large quantities, or can be persuaded to buy in large quantities, and you will get rich. Simple as that. This is how Bill Gates did it, and it is how celebrities do it. The masses like technology, and they like entertainment. Subjective valuation and all that. Economic values, according to this argument, exist in the minds of individuals; they do not exist in things, or in acts of production (labor). Hence the rejection of the “labor theory of value.”

We do, however, live in an objective universe. That’s a controversial claim, philosophically; I understand that. But our experience in the world confirms it pragmatically. Real causes have real effects. If you touch a hot stove burner, you’ll get burned. If you drink four glasses of wine, you’ll get stinking drunk. Three more, and you’ll probably get sick. With more complex states of affairs determining the exact cluster of causes may be difficult, but it is a reasonable assumption that there are causes. In this sense, cigarette smoking has a propensity to lead to lung cancer. Why someone got lung cancer even though she never smoked a cigarette in her life might be tough to explain, but we never assume it happened for no reason at all. (Kant, a transcendental idealist, contended that we look for causes because that is how our rational faculties work. A realist responds: our rational faculties work this way successfully because that is how physical reality works.)

Now suppose the masses want something we have discovered is destructive, in large enough quantities as to do general health damage, or some other kind of damage within communities. Call this something C. Because population P wants item C, does it follow logically that despite the problems C will cause I ought to supply C knowing that if I supply C I will get rich, because P wants to buy C and give me their money?

What is the exact logical entailment here? Again, we are dealing with a range of circumstances, not all circumstances where people are buying products in markets. There are many products for which there is no reason whatever why I shouldn’t supply them if I’m able and can make money doing it. But if C causes harm…. Harm to whom is then the question. Mill argued famously in On Liberty that persons’ free choices should not be interfered with to prevent them from harming themselves. I tried to show above that there are familial obligations that can override this judgment — in circumstances Mill couldn’t have known about. But on a larger scale, how many actions can we take that risk harming only ourselves? If I smoke cigarettes in public in your vicinity, I am not merely harming myself, I am polluting the air you breathe and thus placing you in danger of harm. Cigarette smoking thus conceivably falls outside of Mill’s argument and can be legitimately discouraged. Of course, if there was a way of isolating all smokers in hermetically sealed rooms so that their actions could harm only themselves, then Mill’s argument might apply. But in the actual world, there appears to be no ideal way of isolating smokers — no sealed rooms where they could contaminate one another’s lungs exclusively.

Most of our actions affect others. That is the problem. And in a complex, advanced civilization in which strangers are constantly coming within one another’s reach (unlike the world Locke and Mill inhabited), “your rights end where my nose begins” becomes much less straightforward. Back in 2000 in South Carolina an issue arose with privately owned video poker machines in private clubs or other facilities. Free marketers defended the companies that distributed them and profited from them, the rights of bar and night club owners to have them on the premises, and finally the rights of people to make the choice to play video poker. Problems had emerged, however. There was a case of a woman who left a very young daughter in a hot car in the middle of July while she went into a bar to play video poker. The child died. Other cases emerged of children asleep on floors in bars while one or both parents played video poker. While the parents may have made a “free choice” to play video poker, their children did not.

In addition, both neighboring businesses and nearby residents could reasonably complain that the clubs and bars sporting video poker machines drew troublemakers, or simply people who irresponsibly threw trash everywhere and sullied the area. These sort of behaviors eventually drive customers away from neighboring businesses, harming them, and drive down property values of both those businesses’ landlords (or the businesses themselves if they owned the property) and residents — additional species of harm. (A partial solution to such dilemmas is zoning, which violates the NAP on a large scale but which is taken for granted in cities and suburbs.)

Moreover, and finally, scientific studies have been able to show that activities such as video poker are actually accompanied by a release of endorphins into the brain’s pleasure centers. They are, in other words, another species of addiction. Some forms of addictive behavior can be explained this way, which throws doubt on the idea that these choices are “free” (hence the scare quotes). While somewhere in here is the longstanding “free will” versus “determinism” controversy, the exploration of which would throw us off track, addictive behaviors, by definition, are not “free” in any reasonable sense of that term, and so again, fall outside the scope of Mill’s harm argument.

We may designate such products that harm not just oneself but threaten harm to all others in one’s vicinity, many of them against their will, D, and then ask, If some population P wants to buy D, and I can make money by supplying them D, then am I morally allowed to supply D? If the use of D is against the will of those of a larger population outside of P, then have I initiated force against them by allowing P to have D?

Where do the rights of those in the larger population begin?

We have arrived at the third party problem: if A transacts with B voluntarily, and their transactions negatively affect a population P against their will, sometimes without their knowledge, then should the transaction between A and B be prevented? Note that P did not sign off on whatever agreement was made between A and B. Were they coerced, or possibly defrauded (promised benefits that never materialized)? It is hard to say they were coerced, but they were clearly negatively affected. Real world example: the millions of people P who lost manufacturing jobs following NAFTA and GATT II, signed off on by corporate elites who had governments bought and paid for, and media shills who rationalized their decisions for the befuddled masses by telling them “free trade” would create jobs when foreign customers wanted to buy new American products. Those foreign customers never materialized, of course; a system built on cheap labor does not generate a population with disposable income. The promised American jobs thus never materialized. Thus if A and B are multibillionaires, their voluntary decisions may impact involuntarily on millions of people. Which militates in favor of legal restrictions on voluntary decisions in very large systems with such large-scale impact: what most economists disfavor and call protectionism.

There is, of course, a huge problem of logistics here — when the multibillionaires have the governments that sign these trade deals bought and paid for. But that’s another post. Here, we are just considering what moral reasoning tells us. Moral reasoning is not economic reasoning, which is limited to material considerations of extraction and production, supply and demand, profit and loss. Much modern economic reasoning makes an assumption I have come to believe is false: civilization consists of individuals running around making autonomous, self-interested decisions. It also places material considerations ahead of all other ones, and thus inclines us towards materialism as a worldview. Civilization consists of systems of a variety of sorts, ranging from personal habits and inclinations to familial systems to institutional arrangements and larger community practices, in which flesh-and-blood human beings are embedded, and in which they interact with a variety of motivations, some self-interested, some not. We need to choose: are we defending the interests of an abstraction, homo economicus (the individual as exclusively economic actor, always self-interested, considered apart from the systems in which he or she is embedded) or actual flesh-and-blood persons as they are found: “the world as we find it.” This includes the information available to them, and whether they have a right to information about the potential harm involved in using a particular product. (In interests of full disclosure, I have never been tempted by cigarette smoking; and I believe I have a right to know what is in the food I consume, and to refuse to eat certain foods if they contain certain ingredients, such as MSG and GMOs.)

In sum: the NAP does not give us a complete moral perspective for a complex, advanced civilization. It works under the arguably false assumption that all persons can assume full responsibility for their lives all of the time, and can (should?) suffer the consequences when they do not. It assumes that we act atomistically, and that we can disregard the effects our actions have on others. It is not rich enough to handle the third party problem: if A transacts with B voluntarily and the results of that transaction negatively impact on person or population P or perhaps cause other externalities (pollution or other damage to the environment being one obvious possibility), then we have a problem since obviously P did not sign off in full knowledge or voluntarily on the transaction between A and B. I would be happy to see a response to this that does not boil down to a question-begging, “Tough luck if you can’t or didn’t assume responsibility; or if you’re in population P. The free market should nevertheless trump these other considerations because of its efficiency.”

Now it is true that the trade agreements I criticized were hardly actual free trade agreements a libertarian could support; they were, to use the libertarian vocabulary, statist through and through. But herein lies the problem: given the realities of today’s world, how would we create actual free trade agreements that were meaningful, or that had any force?

What realities are we talking about? The realities of power. Libertarians appear not to understand (or believe it unimportant) where the locus of power really is. They believe government is the root of all evil, because it represents the power of the sword: the power to coerce and thus to systematically violate the NAP. As a non-producer, they argue, it can survive no other way. The actual locus of power, however, is, and has been for many decades now (if not centuries), global corporations. As economic actors they represent the power of the purse: the power to buy governments, control markets, and dictate terms of employment to the masses by determining what skills are wanted, etc. They have never wanted free market competition, and thus have always worked out ways of circumscribing or constraining actual markets. Their prevalence is not compatible with either a democracy or a republic. They represent plutocratic oligarchy, the system that has arguably fallen across all of Western civilization — as a recent study has shown in great detail.

I would argue that the separate disciplines of economics and political science should be abolished. We should go back to the political economy that was eliminated in the late 1800s by the Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago to hide the political actions taken by ostensibly economic entities, often to thwart the aspirations of competitors and create protections for themselves while continuing to use the language of free markets.

How does one fight plutocratic oligarchy? One cannot do so by refusing to name it, or misgrasping where actual power lies!

We cannot create real free trade agreements, as we do not live in the kind of world where such agreements are possible.

So where do we go from here?

There probably are no systemic solutions other than to allow the plutocratic oligarchic era to run its course and eventually collapse, as empires inevitably do. In the meantime, we can arrange our lives to minimize our contact with it, while agreeing to deal with one another peacefully and voluntarily, and take the moral responsibility to ensure, as much as possible, that our dealings do not harm others. And to fulfill our perceived obligations to others, be they family or stranger. That, I submit, would be easier done in a world of smaller systems, organizations, and communities. We touched on this idea in the material a few weeks ago on Leopold Kohr, who had some of the most interesting ideas along these lines. Remembering that small is better wouldn’t solve all the problems, many of which are products of human nature itself (our default setting is neither automatic rationality nor morality), but it will make them easier to manage.

But for now, it seems that those who would try to reconcile such abstract principles as the NAP with the realities of real human beings living in a complex, advanced civilization where some cannot take full responsibility for their lives, where strangers’ interactions have the potential to harm others on a daily basis, and where massive irresponsibility and outright stupidity is sometimes (often?) the norm, have their work cut out for them.

Posted in Libertarianism, Political Economy | Tagged anarchism, anarchocapitalism, elder care, Ethics, free market competition, free trade, harm principle, homo economicus, John Stuart Mill, libertarian, libertarianism, minarchism, moral philosophy, NAP, non-aggression principle, Oligarchy, On Liberty, our actions affect others, plutocracy, plutocratic oligarchy, political economy, property rights, protectionism, Rockefeller, statism, third party problem | Leave a comment

Modern Moral Philosophy (Part I, Being a Longwinded Inquiry into Whether There Are Any Such Things As Moral Facts, Preliminary to Our Investigation of the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (NAP))

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Steven Yates

Introduction: this post was inspired by a thread on Facebook in which I participated. It raised issues that couldn’t be handled without more depth than is possible in one or two already-lengthy comments. The main topic was the viability and defensibility of the libertarian non-aggression principle (NAP) also accepted by anarcho-capitalists, as well as the broader question of whether morality is a matter of knowledge, opinion, or something else. The former seems to me to presuppose that morality is a matter of knowledge, but others might disagree. To a philosopher (lost generation or otherwise) the question of whether morality is revealed, discovered, or invented is one of the largest in the history of Western philosophy. Professional philosophers will criticize the longwindedness and say this discussion breaks no new ground. For them it might not. I am unaware of new treatments of the subject since the turn of the millennium, which might be a product of my status as an outsider. Be that as it may, I hold no guns to anyone’s heads as I offer what I hope is a reasonably lucid discussion of the main topics. Because of how this material grew in size I finally had to divide it into two parts to make it manageable. Part One provides the conceptual and theoretical background. Part Two looks at the NAP and related applications.

“Can virtue be taught?” asked Meno of Socrates in the Platonist dialogue bearing his name. Plato thought virtue was recollected from the soul’s pre-mortal existence. But whether recollected or gained by some other means, this assumes there is something definitive to recollect or gain — something standing above “mere opinion” and cultural consensus. Today, many people including scholars of undeniable intelligence and insight hold that morality is a matter of mere opinion — or, at most, a cultural artifact. The most sophisticated versions of this idea appear to hold that morality’s purpose is to increase a culture’s chances for survival, a product of evolution with no higher significance. In this post we will explore some of the consequences of the idea that there are no moral truths akin to scientific truths, aside from the higher-order claim of morality equating to cultural artifact. Academic opinion is divided, but were we to seek a semblance of consensus, I am reasonably sure it would be on the side of morality as cultural artifact. Since most academic philosophers are agnostics or atheists, they aren’t going to see it as revealed; and the idea of its being discovered issues in a sense of permanence still lends too much comfort to anti-progressive views seeking radical changes. What are the progressives afraid of? They look back at the past and see moral authority as puritanism emanating from the Church: a source of repression and moral authoritarianism rather than enlightenment. Moral absolutism, in that case, is to be viewed with suspicion as a cover for authoritarians who rule through fear and naturally want to maintain their dominance.

Let us work out the background. Modern Moral Philosophy (from which this post derives its title) was the name of a slim but significant text by W.D. Hudson (1970), written back in the day when textbooks were readable and relatively inexpensive. It began with a distinction that is useful despite somewhat unfortunate terminology: moralism, according to Hudson, tried to tell us what to do, i.e., ethics in the traditional sense. Traditional ethical theories include Christian ethics, Aristotelian virtue theory, Kant’s deontology, Mill’s utilitarianism, and so on. Fans of Ayn Rand will want to add her brand of ethical egoism. Moral philosophy, also called meta-ethics in this context, is the province of analytic philosophers: its purpose was to describe what we are doing when we talk about what we ought to do. Philosophers, in other words, are not moralists despite their past; they should confine themselves to (what else?) moral philosophy. Their questions are not, What should we do? but rather, What do key moral terms such as good refer to (if anything); are the propositions of ethics true or false; can ethical conclusions be rationally justified on the basis of evidence? I will refer to Hudson’s moralism as first-order ethical discourse and his moral philosophy as second-order ethical discourse. I happen to believe both are important. For well over 2,000 years, philosophers have been interested in what we ought to do, whether the source of what we ought to do is a supernatural agency such as the Christian God or whether it has some other source, including the idea that living virtuously is an end in itself. Hence the potential for lively first-order ethical discourse. Traditional systematic philosophers also wanted rational justification for their conclusions; hence the importance of second-order questions, especially if we believe our ethical pronouncements can be rationally justified. Both Plato and Aristotle would have agreed, by the way. When teaching about ethics, I used to distinguish ethics, the discipline, from morality, its subject matter. Ethics, in this case, is the branch of axiological philosophy concerned with the theory of morality (conceived as covering both first- and second-order discourse).

Meta-ethics, emphasizing language and reasoning about morality, tends to divide into cognitivism and noncognitivism. Cognitivists conclude that the propositions of ethics do refer, and can be true or false: that doing ethics is a matter of reasoning, and that moral conclusions are therefore more than matters of opinion. Cognitivism therefore stands at the foundation, so to speak, of most first-order ethical discourse. Noncognitivism rejects this. Beginning with “Hume’s fork” (the division of language into is-statements and ought-statements, the latter not logically derivable from the former), noncognitivists conclude that morality does not consist of matters of fact that can be debated rationally. It is more a matter of passion or sentiment (Hume used both terms), or emotion, or persuasion. Hume was far from believing moral discourse was not useful in society; its primary purpose was social utility. But as philosophers were writing two centuries later, this meant that where first-order ethical discourse is concerned, philosophical analysis has to give way to psychology and sociology, because there are no such things as moral facts about which we can reason, period. Moral fact is, indeed, a contradiction in terms, a failure to grasp the meaning of “Hume’s fork.”

Logical positivists, relying on Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy, regarded all cognitively meaningful propositions as either factual (synthetic), or formal and definitional (analytic). The former are true or false by empirical fact, shown as such by natural science. (To keep this discussion somewhat manageable I am bypassing theories of truth.) The latter are true because of the meanings of the signs they contain, and are not factually informative. Ethical propositions, they noticed, didn’t seem to fall into either category. Statements of the form, X is good, or, I ought to do A, could not be verified, tested, confirmed, falsified, etc., by any natural science. Nor were they true by definition. Logical positivists concluded that they had emotive instead of cognitive meaning: ethical emotivism, according to A.J. Ayer who defended the position forcefully in his Language, Truth and Logic (1936). The idea seemed to make little sense of our actual moral lives and so didn’t last long (even Ayer soon abandoned it). So for noncognitivists, what do ethical propositions do? Hume had the basic idea right. They do involve passions, but accomplish something in society, and this is all we need to clarify. This was easier said than done, however. Another possibility held that the utterance of an ethical proposition is an attempt to prescribe for others (and, presumably, oneself): prescriptivism. A variation on this theme held that such propositions are efforts to propagandize and control, establishing moral authority by psychological means. A final variation, a “self-prescriptivism,” might hold that the adoption of a set of ethical propositions by oneself constitutes an attempt to legislate for oneself without making the assumption that one can presume to legislate for others: a kind of ethical subjectivism.

In the last analysis, though, noncognitivists cannot really “do” ethics. They do not see ethical propositions as true or false. They see them is primarily about influencing behavior. They do not believe there is any such thing as a single morality that applies to all persons. The most they can say, to be consistent, is, “This is where I stand.” The most they can assert or imply (as, e.g., prescriptivists) is, “You ought to stand here, too.” They will say that these are the consequences of rejecting absolutism, the old-fangled view that “morality” is something “out there” somewhere, whatever this is supposed to mean.

Such results are closely tied to cultural relativity, and to ethical relativism. Cultural relativity, which was popular among cultural anthropologists for a time, observes — correctly — that different cultures have different moral belief systems. Ethical relativism infers from this that morality is a cultural artifact. (Ethical absolutism, in this case, is the thesis that morality is not a cultural artifact but is independent of culture, whether revealed or discovered.) Ethical relativism does not maintain that morality is a matter of personal opinion. This is a common misunderstanding. Ethical relativism is compatible with the idea that a common morality is necessary to hold a culture together, and so resurrects the idea of moral authority. The moral authorities are said to “know” something of “morality,” or have special “insight” not available to the unwashed masses. But what is this special “knowledge” or “insight”? The moral authorities will rarely if ever stand exclusively on their own feet. They will appeal to God or the gods, or — in modern times — to Progress (perhaps — the grip of that one may be slipping). One suspects that they have, indeed, gained command over a vocabulary and skillfully given it emotive force. This will generally lead to social sanction against disapproved-of ethical opinions, e.g., those today deemed politically incorrect. Appeal to the majority, however, has never satisfied logical minds; so when such ploys fail, all that truly distinguishes moral authorities is that they can employ majoritarian numbers or sometimes even police power to enforce their opinions. A relativist society is very likely not a free society. Moreover, those asking for the rational grounding of the opinions of the moral authorities are likely to be regarded as dangerous troublemakers who need to be suppressed — as was Socrates.

Hence the chief danger of noncognitivism: it doesn’t just renders ethics a matter of opinion, or even shared opinion for those who happen to agree to “stand” in the same place; it sets the stage for a moral totalitarianism — the very thing the progressives see as abominable in Christian ethics and other forms of absolutism. It should be clear, though, that one cannot really debate morality if it reduces to personal opinion, or even consensus. If my opinion is that abortion is immoral because it takes a human life and your opinion is that it is acceptable because it is a woman’s choice, then if noncognitivism is true there is no further ground we can appeal to: it is opinion “all the way down.” All we can do is go to court over it, let the judge decide, the result being a cultural decision where one side wins and the other loses. We are back to moral totalitarianism.

But consider rape. Surely everyone in civilized society believes rape is wrong, and that the wrong is not merely a legal wrong! There is no debate: no one that I know of will argue that rape is acceptable. Is it merely the law that impels us to reject it as abhorrent, though? How could we even conceive of its being acceptable if we were in a society whose law said nothing, or perhaps allowed members of the elite to rape with impunity (as is the case in a few actual cultures)? So is our rejection of rape still merely a cultural decision and opinion? This implies the possibility that in those other cultures with contrary opinions, rape is sometimes acceptable, and that again in the last analysis, the idea that all we have is opinion “all the way down.” If we deny that such a culture could possibly be moral in its practices, we are granting the idea that there is grounding for morality outside judicial opinion, cultural consensus, or other human authority.

Hence the usefulness of revisiting the likelihood that cognitivism is the more defensible of the two, just based on what we use moral language to do and how we argue our cases. If cognitivism is true, then ethics is not mere opinion, decision, or consensus; moral truths are discovered; or revealed and disclosed; they are not merely invented, decided, or propagandized. Nor did they merely evolve, as here, too, there would need to be reasons why certain kinds of moral codes evolved while their contraries did not. For example, in no culture I know of is wanton lying to one’s fellows a moral imperative (it may be a different matter for strangers and possible enemies, of course). Obviously no culture could survive with that sort of imperative; but this implies a connection between morality and physical reality, the world around us, and conditions for our general survival that would require that morality be more than opinion or decision or consensus. Cognitivism makes sense of our actual moral lives, how morality functions, and how it works in the sometimes-nasty issues that emerge when cultures come into contact or when we speak of progress being made over past stages of our own culture (e.g., the U.S.’s repudiation of slavery). It even makes sense of the deep disagreements over, e.g., abortion, by noting the logical presumption of a moral fact of the matter over which the disputants are disagreeing.

Cognitivism, understood metaphysically, equates to moral realism, the idea that there is a world of moral facts, or truths, not physical themselves but perhaps predicated on physical states of affairs or metaphysical truths which ethics seeks to elucidate. Noncognitivism denies all this. To sum up the predicament of the noncognitivist or moral antirealist: even what we would take to be the most heinous offenses against persons (e.g., rape, or enslavement) come down to matters of opinion, whether personal or cultural, or imposed using police power by a moral authority, as there are no facts of the matter, just strong feelings or predispositions. While the collective opinion and sanction of society or even moral totalitarianism may be enough for the legal positivist mind, it should never be enough for the philosopher who quietly points out that the moral seriousness of our condemnation of rape, or slavery, or genocide, is severely undermined if it reduces to ungrounded consensus or authority — if, indeed, we are in earnest with philosophical inquiry. Those who see philosophy as a debaters’ game played by academics will, of course, disagree. But are we morally serious or not?

So to sum up, when we say that certain actions, other things being equal, have varying degrees of morally rightness (like telling the truth, keeping one’s promises and agreements, securing the needs of elderly relatives who have become infirm, etc.), or that others have varying degrees of moral heinousness (like rape, slavery, telling lies, breaking contracts, etc.), we do not intend to be expressing subjective opinions. Nor are we simply appealing to the authority of societal consensus. The debate over abortion is not a trading of opinions but a debate over whose opinion is better, i.e., grounded in moral fact, or moral reality. We mean to say that as a matter of fact, certain actions are right and should be done while others are wrong and should not be done. Cognitivism rejects “Hume’s fork,” in other words, at least in the sense of their being an absolute fact-value dichotomy with cognitively meaningful and true propositions only being possible for the former. It asserts that there are moral facts, about which we can utter true sentences. That is, when one of us asserts, “Rape is a morally heinous act,” she means to say just that, as a matter of fact (not opinion) that rape is morally heinous, incompatible with a moral view of the universe in which there are definite rights and wrongs.

In this case, is the libertarian non-aggression principle a moral fact? This will depend, as with all basic moral propositions, on what the NAP asserts, what it implies and does not imply, and how it holds up in our moral lives.

(Part Two will appear next week.)

Posted in Culture, Libertarianism, Philosophy | Tagged analytic philosophy, cognitivism, emotivism, ethical relativism, Ethics, ethics as opinion, Hume's fork, libertarianism, moral facts, moral realism, non-aggression principle, noncognitivism, prescriptivism, relativism | 1 Comment

Not-Quite-Random Thoughts on Conservatism, Anarchism, and the Breakdown of Modern Civilization

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Steven Yates

Yesterday I found myself outlining an article entitled “Needed: A New Russell Kirk.” Russell Kirk (1918 – 1994) was a conservative philosopher & author of The Conservative Mind (1953), The Roots of American Order (1991) and other books including some gothic-style fiction. He laid out ten principles conservatives ought to believe. How many of those who presently call themselves conservatives are even familiar with Kirk’s principles, much less understand them, much less believe them, is open to debate. Conspicuously absent from Kirk’s list was support for the exclusively economic view of the world so prevalent today, which lends its support to what presently passes for capitalism. While endorsing the idea that freedom and property are inextricably linked, and while promoting voluntary interactions within the community, nowhere does Kirk endorse absolutely free markets or free trade, or say that because there is a demand for something, the market ought to supply it. This is because economic freedom presupposes social and ultimately moral responsibility. Without these, it breeds the massive accumulations of wealth we have seen in recent years at the top, with increasing dysfunction and misery at the bottom, and in the middle.

I do not know if that essay will get written or not. I have a lot on my plate these days (beginning with the stack of tests to grade sitting here). What I believe we really need is another Leopold Kohr. Kohr, as I noted in an earlier post, was a philosophical anarchist, not a conservative, although their views overlapped in crucial areas. Whether he believed in the “enduring moral order” Kirk defended I am unsure; it wasn’t his main focus. Kohr assuredly did believe in the necessity of a morality in which we respect life and each others’ space. He did not see the need for a mono-culture, and opposed globalization. He would have had no patience with what “neoconservatism” became in the 1990s, and even less with what it has become since: the biggest war machine on the planet. Kohr saw the fundamental problems of modern civilization as problems of size and scale, not structure. Kohr would look at situations such as the riots in Baltimore and their background in the combination of a failed progressivism and a burgeoning police state which aids and abets sociopaths. He would say that all these are products of a society grown too big, too centralized, and hence dysfunctional. Those at the top have no idea of the lives of those at the bottom, or in the middle.

The systemic logic of bigness and centralization began with a slow accumulation of wealth and power regardless of the specifics of ideology. This was well underway before the twentieth century even got here. Study the rise of the Rockefeller dynasty. Bigness and centralization led to dependency of various sorts. What it bred was not merely the familiar dependency of the welfare state. If an employee in a corporation cannot leave his or her job either because other jobs are not available or because his skills at doing other jobs have atrophied, and if he is paid too poorly to have saved enough to obtain more education, is he or she not dependent? From the 1800s to the 1900s, the U.S. went from approximately 90% of people being self-employed to around 5% being self-employed. Do the systems of industrial civilization itself not encourage this sort of dependence? This logic also coerces a specific form of secularization, as the workaday need for scheduling and a focusing on tasks to avoid chaos overwhelms any sense of what endures in time. One’s worship of God, if one worships God, is left for Sunday. The rest of the week is taken up by wheeling and dealing for the bosses and struggling for survival for the masses. Readers might find it interesting to examine this meditation on the true purpose and effects of the 40-hour work week.

As the twentieth century progressed we saw an undermining of crucial family systems (helped along by no-fault divorce), the developing of an urban environment of anonymity in which sociopaths can thrive, increasing societal dysfunction, and policies that only made the dysfunction worse because they often treated symptoms with quick fixes rather sought to identify and correct the real problems. Today, of course, we have the full corruption of a bought-and-paid-for political class that could still deliver a “choice” in 2016 between a member of the House of Clinton and a member of the House of Bush (two of the arguably most corrupt dynasties in American politics). There is massive denial that something has gone seriously wrong, and increasingly desperate efforts to avoid the truth. Add to all this the economic dislocations that really began decades ago when globalization was just getting started, but which worsened in 2008, and we have a collapse in moral sensibilities generally, and the increasingly repressive authority structures we have seen since the 9/11 attacks. Fundamentally good and decent people have withdrawn or retreated into the wilderness to “tend their own gardens” as it were. With real leadership gone, collapse becomes inevitable. All we can say is that we do not know when. Our present-day systems are extremely complex, at a level never before seen. What we can say: the U.S.’s massive debts, both the official national debt and other, off-the-books debts, are unpayable. Default will happen. It’s in the mathematics, which unlike politicians, never lies.

The U.S., and indeed much of Western civilization, is at the point where most moral sensibilities are gone from the public square, as opposed to a do-your-own-thing hedonism. Authority structures, unsurprisingly, are increasing without bound as those behind them know how to exploit moral subjectivism and hedonism for their own purposes. Violence increases both with authority structures and with undisciplined reactions to them. The independent-minded among us have already withdrawn our services, whether in becoming an expat or simply choosing to live on the margins of society. We cannot look to academia for solutions. It is mired in worsening problems of its own, from the microspecialization of most academics to the corporatization of university systems themselves, resulting in organizations whose very output, in terms of ideas, has grown less and less reliable over time.

A massive economic downturn is coming. Of this we can be sure. With civil unrest very likely, the federal government is already preparing for what will amount to instituting totalitarianism. No one in power will call it that, of course. They might not even suspend the Constitution! Semantics, too, has become the plaything of propagandists and deniers. Whatever is put in place won’t work in the long run, of course. It will only work for a time, and during that time it will bring about a huge level of misery. But the miserable won’t be able to say they weren’t warned.

What we are talking about is nothing less than the breakdown of modern civilization, and barring the development of a new source of energy able to power a technological society in the future, a lower standard of living. Such thoughts need not engender pessimism. Empires have risen, peaked, then gone into decline and collapsed many times before. We just happen to be in yet another period of decline now, with collapse likely to follow. Although the collapse of authority structures all around a population of hopeless dependents will mean a period of anarchy, those who can prepare properly and weather this period in their private wildernesses wherever they may be, may discover that freedom and the rebuilding of cooperative systems have again become possible. They may also enjoy breathing cleaner air, and drinking cleaner water! And if you are growing your own food (or purchasing it from someone who is), you have far less worry of what is in it!

Will we get it right next time? That depends on whether we humans ever really learn anything. We know the line from Santayana. History is not especially encouraging on this point.

Posted in Political Economy, Where is Civilization Going? | Tagged anarchism, civil unrest, Clinton vs. Bush, collapse, conservatism, decline of civilization, economic point of view, free market, globalization, hedonism, Leopold Kohr, moral subjectivism, neoconservatism, Russell Kirk | Leave a comment

What Is a Liberal Arts Education For?

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Steven Yates

Liberal arts education has suffered from increasing neglect for a very long time — for at least 40 years, possibly longer. While it continues to exist in a few private liberal arts colleges, obviously, it long ago ceased to be the prevailing philosophy of education either in higher education generally in the U.S. or in society at large. Its influence, i.e., its capacity to affect the national conversation, has waned. The neglect, whether in the form of defunded programs, the poor opportunities for liberal arts graduates who are routinely warned away from certain majors, or the general disdain in contemporary culture for the “products of the intellect,” has helped hollow out philosophy as well as other disciplines associated with the liberal arts (often conflated with humanities).

Some of the harm just within the humanities has been self-inflected, as we’ve seen in previous posts. Be this as it may, it is easy to see that in many respects, liberal arts education in the larger sense has lost its way because, having been overwhelmed by the seemingly more “successful” STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math) it has lost its identity. What is it that liberal arts actually contribute to civilization? This is a fair question, and I doubt that many faculty members in these disciplines could give it a clear answer. It’s possible that if you asked ten professors in the humanities today what their disciplines actually contribute to society, you would get ten different answers assuming they didn’t dismiss the question out of hand as the product of philistinism. The question is worth revisiting, because it can be answered. Fortunately we don’t have to begin from scratch. Authors as well-known as Fareed Zakaria have defended liberal arts education (Zakaria’s most recent book is entitled In Defense of a Liberal Education) and decried education reduced to technical training, calling this emphasis “dangerous in today’s world.”

First, what exactly is a liberal arts education? We can start by analyzing the language. What does the liberal in liberal arts mean? It does not mean liberal as in liberal versus conservative. There is no such thing as a “conservative arts education.” Hopefully no one was tempted by anything so simple-minded. The liberal in liberal arts is derived from the Latin verb liberare, meaning to free. The classical sense of liberal honors this derivation and was in vogue in the 1800s but is mostly defunct today. Arts should likewise not be confused with art in the sense of drawing and painting, or the fine arts, or the performing arts, all of which are recent developments. This word, too, has a Latin root: ars, a generic word meaning skill. Words like artisan and artifact have the same root. Valerie Strauss, drawing on Gerald Greenberg’s material, does a good job of sorting all this out here. What, then, do the liberal arts do? With a nod to Morpheus, in The Matrix, they are intended to develop the mental skills to free your mind. They indeed open a door; the student, must choose to walk through it. What, then, is behind that door? What frees your mind? And from what?

If one goes back far enough in time, a liberal arts education involved a progression through seven distinct domains. The first three were known as the trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric, as Aristotle used those terms. The second four were called the quadrivium — arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Mastery of these was prerequisite for the serious study of philosophy and theology (fancy that!). The liberal arts were contrasted with the mechanical arts, which included agriculture, masonry, cooking, weaving, trade, weapons training, and so on. Some people were more suited for the former; others, for one or more of the latter. This is still true today, obviously.

A liberal arts education thus involves an integrated curriculum — a structured set of courses in writing, humanities (history, philosophy, literature, foreign languages), social inquiry (political economy — prior to the modern artificial division of the two into “economics” and “political science” — sociology, anthropology, etc.), mathematics from basic arithmetic at least through algebra and geometry, essential sciences (physics, chemistry, biology). It is important that content mastered in one domain not contradict content presented in other domains. A liberal arts education should have the intent of bringing about a certain turn of mind: able to think critically and judge independently; respectful of learning, truth, and morality; mindful of the differences that exist between people and how societies have changed through time; willing to ask the questions that need asking; capable of making decisions and understanding their consequences both short and long term. When some of us speak of liberal arts as central to what we call real education, this is what we are talking about. It should be clear how a liberal arts education enables students to examine the ideas they encounter, whether from politicians, employers (would-be or actual), journalists, etc., critically. Are their ideas logical? Do they fit one’s own experience? What do others with different experiences have to say? Does history suggest that a given idea has been tried before and found wanting? And so on.

So individual persons can free their minds from untested dogmas and slogans of various sorts through a liberal arts education. This will clearly cause problems for that minority in power which does not want its policies examined in detail and questioned, and we are not far from an explanation of the dwindling support for the liberal arts in our centralized society. Can liberal arts education free not just our minds but our society? This is a much more difficult question. For a society to remain free for longer than a generation, it is necessary that a critical mass of any population have this turn of mind and be able to transfer it to a critical mass of their children.

By a critical mass I mean a group sufficiently large and articulate to move the larger body and gain respectful notice from that minority in power. An educated critical mass will be able to draw on history for examples of what happens when the problems posed by power are neglected, and it will be able to communicate its concerns to a large enough audience to have a larger conversation: those in power may actually fear being deposed from their comfortable offices, possibly by those working within the rules. The members of this critical mass will be independent minded in more than thought. They will be able to take care of themselves by having achieved as much economic independence as is possible, as opposed to dependence on employment by others. They will have some understanding of what it takes to make a free society work, achieving whatever balances are possible and necessary, at least for a time, between personal aspirations and community needs. Determining the size of this critical mass would be a worthy pursuit, as well as limits on the size of the community. We are not referring to the majority of the overall population in either case, obviously. The majority never assumes leadership responsibility, for it is typically incapable mentally of doing so. Those in the majority can generally direct their own lives competently if trained in one of the mechanical arts, but the larger systems that circumscribe their lives must be put and kept in place for them. Only a benign critical mass can see to it that abuses of these are kept to a minimum.

We’ve sketched a kind of ideal here, and that can have hazards of its own. What can we do in the real world we are stuck in? Liberal arts education today can teach students writing and critical thinking skills steeped in close reading of important texts ranging from ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle to influential modern thinkers from Bertrand Russell to Thomas S. Kuhn, examining patterns of reasoning, identifying assumptions both stated and unstated, and then writing down one’s own responses and questions clearly to size up their accomplishments and the reasons why, as thinkers, they are worth knowing about. Liberal arts education would teach how fallacious reasoning works, and how rhetoric can be used to play on people’s emotions and lead them by their noses. In other words, it would do many of the same things as its ancestor, with an eye to creating that critical mass. If successful, it would teach appreciation for the ideas of others on their own terms, and not merely seen through the lenses of one’s own assumptions. It wouldn’t shy away from the difficult problems of how both physical nature and the human worlds work: what physical and biological laws govern the natural order — both because some of us want to know these things out of sheer intellectual curiosity, and because the knowledge of specifics might impact on situations or prove useful in ways we have not yet envisioned. For this last reason, pure intellectual curiosity should be encouraged, not belittled. We need to know as best we can, finally, what motivates different groups of human beings. What do they want, and what do they need? This includes peoples living on other parts of the planet. What would make their lives better? How can we work together to solve difficult problems?

Ideally, then, an educational system focused on liberal arts education should enable as many people as possible to be productive, contributing members of society who simultaneously have a sense of community and hence of others, while simultaneously accepting responsibility in an environment where we often will not agree on what to do. Those with a real education in this sense will understand such concepts as moderation in all things, an idea also going back to Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean; they will not confuse liberty with license; they will be very cautious with points of view held as absolute. They will be see when a certain policy is not working, or has brought about injustices, and be able to make principled, mid-course corrections that themselves can be checked so as to not lead to abuses and excesses.

Where, in this case, does STEM education fit in? Obviously it is meeting genuine needs, and should not be belittled as philistinism. STEM education is a clear descendent of the mechanical arts mentioned above for an advanced civilization, and can be developed once a liberal arts core (grammar, logic, mathematics, etc.) has been satisfied. The problem today is that STEM education has been ripped free of its educational moorings, these (with the exception of mathematics) dismissed as unnecessary. Education then becomes education for jobs. This is clearly not enough, one reason being a free and humane civilization’s need for that critical mass. Fareed Zakaria identified an important and very down-to-Earth reason why serious education cannot be mere job training. Technology is changing sufficiently rapidly that by the time a student finishes four years of university education, the job he had in mind four years before may be obsolete. He/she will not have the qualifications for what is available. It would be far better to educate students to think, analyze, plan, strategize, evaluate, etc. — all traits a liberal arts education equips a person to do — rather than train him for specific employment. A workplace in turmoil needs such people, as they can think clearly, recognize problems quickly, and work to solve them effectively. Is this not more likely to benefit employers?

Liberal arts educated people will not, of course, be satisfied with many of the employment options available today. They will not want to be temps, for example, as they will know when resources for full time work with decent pay are available (example: large universities). A solution some will suggest is to work for oneself. That is only a solution for those with something immediate to sell, and will prove to be an exercise in frustration and futility otherwise, for they will know this is not the best use of their skills. They will know, moreover, that many of those traits necessary to address some of our worst long-term problems have been ratcheted down within authority structures. These have to do with the consolidation of wealth and power in a few key organizations (mostly leviathan corporations) and extended families, the idea that central banks can control economies by controlling the money supply without causing long term economic dislocations, the relationship between extractive capitalism and the larger environment, and so on. Educated people will understand that the marketplace has a very important place in a free community but cannot solve every problem. Allow it to solve the problems it is equipped to solve, such as the production and distribution of foodstuffs and other basic items, but recognize its limits, as (for example) with people who lose the ability to participate, or with externalities such as the impact of pollution on surrounding ecosystems.

What, then, is a liberal arts education for? It is for those who wish to have free minds and live free lives, in free communities where freedom includes not just self but incorporates a sense of responsibility for oneself, those around oneself, and the world at large. Today, of course, this is increasingly difficult. A vast array of forces — economic, political, cultural, and so on — is working against this kind of education. Here is where the prevailing philosophy of education emphasizing technical training, or training for business skills, goes off course. Employers want skilled workers, but are baffled when university graduates cannot read and understand simple instructions. People generally want to be able to send representatives to Washington (or their state capitols) who represent their interests, and are frustrated when those considered “electable” continue to represent the interests of the rich. The culture seems deviant and out of control, manifesting a clash of worldviews one cannot understand without knowing the relevant history and philosophy (to oversimplify, as the matter deserves a separate lengthy post: Christianity versus secular materialism). What we need is a national conversation on how liberal arts education can be tailored to address these and other issues tearing at the foundations of our civilization.

Having defended liberal arts education, I definitely believe there are certain courses and majors now associated with it that students ought to avoid like the plague. They should stay away from women’s studies or gender studies as it is now sometimes called, and anything focusing on a single minority group. Why? Because nearly all are exercises in collective grievance, a sort of pseudo-liberal educational affirmative action. Sadly, today’s students need to look closely even at traditional subjects like comparative literature and foreign languages. They should find out who the faculty member is, and if that person has a reputation for using his/her podium as a launching pad for political activism. For example, if a professor considers Thomas Jefferson’s having owned slaves more important than his having authored the Declaration of Independence, then to get a real education, steer clear! Sadly, this is probably truer in “private” liberal arts colleges than it is in “public” universities.

A liberal arts education should free one’s mind from untested dogma and unquestioned authority. It should prepare a person to be part of that critical mass that places or maintains checks on power. Pursuing such an education all the way to an advanced degree is not for everyone, surely; but neither is it the mere indulgence of a self-proclaimed and somewhat narcissistic intellectual elite. It is a condition for prolonged freedom in any sense of the term conjoined with necessary community and worldly responsibility in any sense of those terms. Such a critical mass exists nowhere today, and has not existed for a long time. There is hope, however, within the unrest currently existing in the world. In the U.S., some of this unrest is found in Tea Party conservatism which does not, in my opinion, deserve the ridicule it often receives; also in what is left of the Occupy movement. Both are conscious of control by power elites with unearned privileges who control most of the world’s wealth and resources. Opposition is forming, so far not unified. Ranging from the rising tides of protest against the adjunctification universe in American neoliberal universities, joining with the rising unrest against the enormous and growing gulf between the power elites and the majority that must answer to its dictates or risk war and starvation, there exists hope that in the near future, such a critical mass might be built.

Posted in Higher Education Generally | Tagged Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, civil unrest, elites, Fareed Zakaria, free your mind, Kuhn, liberal arts, liberal arts education, Morpheus, Occupy movement, power elite, quadrivium, STEM education, Tea Party, The Matrix, Thomas S. Kuhn, trivium | Leave a comment

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