Category: Philosophy

Haven’t Had a Good Fight in Ages

So here are some things to fight about:

1. Failing to make the distinction between sexism and misogyny is as unscientific as failing to make the distinction between authoritarianism and fascism.  Precision is important–if we actually want to solve the problem.

2. There is a certain disgust-inspiring smugness that goes with some flavors of agnosticism.  Yeah, sure, if you want to say, “I don’t know the answer, therefore neither do you,” then feel free; but not knowing something is a pretty silly thing to be proud of.  Agnosticism is a very specific epistemological position, and one that I think is wrong.  We can talk about why I think that when you lose your attitude.

3. Speaking of atheism, the fact that some atheists use their belief as an excuse for anti-Muslim bigotry says as little about atheism as the fact that some Christians use their belief as an excuse for homophobia says about Christianity.

I’m on a roll.

4. One more on religion (because if you can’t get into an argument about religion, you just aren’t trying): As an atheist–a materialist–I believe that the history of religious thought is as much a valid subject for scientific investigation as anything else in nature or society.  Indeed, I’ll go so far as to say that only as a materialist can one actually understand the development of human thought, religious or otherwise.  Point being, the atheist who simply condemns religion as an evil without paying any attention to how it developed, to its complex and often contradictory role throughout human history, to how it emerged from and then in turn influenced the society that produced it, is being profoundly unscientific.

5. Concerning literature, I believe two contradictory things: 1) People can enjoy reading whatever they want, and ought not to be judged for it–if you say, “that book is horrible and you shouldn’t have liked it,” you’re just being an ass.  2) One important part of improving our field is to be sharply critical; if we don’t recognize what’s bad, how are we going to get better?  It seems like these two positions ought not to contradict each other, but in practice it always seems like they do.  ETA: This is apart from the content, especially in a moral sense, which is a whole different conversation.

6. Obama supporters keep pointing at things Obama has done that Republicans would have supported if Bush had done them.  And they’re absolutely right; there is a lot of that going on.  They seem to be missing the fact that they attacked Bush for doing the same things Obama is doing.

7. Expanding on something I said a while ago on Facebook: There is a difference between the prejudice felt by an oppressed people, and the prejudice felt by oppressing people.  Lenin spoke of the difference between the nationalism of the oppressor, and the nationalism of the oppressed. To just toss it away with, “prejudice = prejudice” is wrong-headed.  In the real world, A is never equal to A.  The history and experience of oppression makes a difference.  If you find yourself saying, “Black people say….” you are being a racist, an asshole, and an idiot.  If you find yourself saying, “White people say,” you are just being an idiot.

8. Last but not least, something we can all fight about: driving.  People who have the attitude, “I can drive in the left lane all I want as long as I’m going the speed limit,” are jerks.  People who have the attitude, “I should be able to go as fast as I want in the left lane no matter what else traffic is doing and if you’re going slower than I want I’m within my rights to tailgate you and flip you off as I zoom by on the right,” are jerks.  Both fail to realize that driving is a cooperative endeavor, and the more we all work together, the safer and more pleasant it will be.  It’s kind of like life.

 

The Mechanisms of Ignorance

This is one of my favorite kinds of blog posts: where I dive into it not knowing the answer. Usually when that happens, it’s what I write a book about, but some questions I don’t want to turn into novels.

So here’s what we’re starting with: global capitalism cannot meet the needs of the world’s population.  More and more as capitalism demonstrates its exhaustion, we are seeing income disparity, which in turn drives the militarization of local police, increased police state measures such as spying on citizens and extreme persecution of whistle-blowers, and war measures as capitalists who can no longer count on economic bullying resort to violence to secure resources, market share, profit.

As these things increase, we notice something else: a drastic rise in ignorance.  And that’s where I’m mystified.

Let me be clear that in some cases, the ignorance is easily explained: belief in climate change is a direct threat to oil profits, so of course there will be climate change deniers.  And then, as capitalism finds it has less and less need for educated workers, education is slashed, hacked, and burned, so the ground for mass ignorance is being laid.

But there’s more to it, and that’s what I’m not getting.  To be precise, whence comes the rise in anti-vaxxers?  It isn’t just that they view children as property and want to debate who owns them (“The state doesn’t own the children, parents own the children.” — Rand Paul), it is very conscious ignorance and refusal to see reality.  Similarly, those who deny evolution.  In both of these cases, and others, there is a strong correlation to the most appalling right-wing political positions, with the ugliest forms of bigotry, and, moreover, such nonsense has become more widespread as the crisis of global capitalism has deepened, hence I do not accept coincidence as the answer.  What I’m not seeing is why this correlation exists?  Where is the relation between preserving private property as the highest goal, and a literal interpretation of the Bible?  And, above all, what is the mechanism by which these ideas slither down from the conscious reactionary to the merely ignorant?  I’ll be interested to hear what some of you think.

 

Rant: The Study of History

Not long ago, someone I know made a remark that perfectly captures an attitude I have run into a thousand times:  “Something[‘s] been on my mind. History is essentially a fiction, a creative retelling at best. We shouldn’t judge our history on its accuracy but more on whether it leaves us empowered enough to have better lives. This idea has been abused, though.”

Been abused? Similarly, the Bush and then the Obama administrations decided the NSA could spy on US citizens, but this power has been abused. In case you missed it, that was irony; of course it was bloody abused, because its fundamental nature is abusive. The idea that the study of history is fiction starts off as rubbish and then gets worse.

Let me make one distinction right off, because it often seems to be a point of confusion:  there is a difference between history (what happened in the past) and the study of history (our understanding and opinions about what happened in the past). It seems trivially obvious that the object of the latter is to come as close as possible to the former, but, in any case, they aren’t the same.

There is more to the study of history than accuracy, but it must start there, with the struggle to find out what actually happened. It isn’t easy, and obviously any historian is coming at it from a particular viewpoint–the best of them make clear what this viewpoint is. But after we have determined what happened (yes, six million Jews were murdered, even if you feel more empowered believing otherwise; yes, the slaughter of the American Indian and the near destruction of his culture actually happened; yes, Bush really did sanction torture and Obama really is committing murder without due process, no matter how empowering it is to you to deny these things), we need to understand why. Once we have committed ourselves to the ongoing (and very difficult) task of determining what actually happened, we have only begun. Because the point of the study of history goes beyond, “it is good to know what happened.” The point is to be able to generalize–to understand the working of historical laws in order to make them work for us in the same way that we learned about the General Theory of Relativity and now use it in our GPS devices. Of course Einstein’s work was very difficult; and yet, one rarely hears a physicist say, “determining the laws of the motion of matter on the subatomic level is very difficult, so I think I’ll just conclude there are no laws.”

Ah, what is that I hear? Grinding teeth? What is that I see? Rolling eyes? Yes, I said historical laws–the laws of motion that apply to the actions of socially organized human beings over time. The absurdity of those who deny such laws exist is usually self-evident. What is theory? It is merely generalized experience. So let me put it this way:  If you are going to say there is no such thing as historical law, then be aware you are contradicting yourself every time you wave your arms in frustration at the American voter and say, “Didn’t they learn anything the last time we had a <fill in the blank> in office?” That thing you just did was complaining that other people are failing to make the correct generalizations about history. (A note in passing:  I believe that, if you are saying that, you are failing to make the correct generalizations about history, but that is another discussion.)

We know about the law of combined development (that the technology base of a culture can leapfrog, taking what it learned from another culture and, not just catching up, but surpassing it with entirely new technology). We know that economic systems that were an advance at one time–as landlord-based feudalism was an advance over a society built on slave labor–will at some point begin taking society backward and need to be replaced, as capitalism replaced the feudal-monarchical system. We know that there has been a trend, over the vast scope of history, for more personal liberty and greater democracy. Knowing these things permits us to draw important conclusions about what is happening now, and what needs to be done about it. When we see widespread attacks on democratic rights, we need to be able to draw conclusions about whether this is a fluke because some individuals happen to be not nice, or if it is part of a broader, more systemic problem. The study of history is invaluable in making this determination, and this study has nothing whatever to do with how “empowered” we want to feel.

In my opinion, the study of history is in its infancy. We are still, on many levels, postulating the existence of the ether for describing how light travels. We need to understand better. But of one thing I am very certain: this understanding will not come from people who believe that history is fiction.

How Do You Know You Know?

Lurking somewhere beneath many of the political disagreements I’ve encountered here is the question of faith versus science.  In other words, how is it that we know something?  This question is there when the smug philistine announces that “science is just a religion.”  It is there when the idealist earnestly tells us that our belief in the class struggle is just a matter of faith.  It is there when the postmodernist speaks of “historical narratives.”  It is there when the devotee of macroeconomics assures us that the value of commodities is all in our heads.  It is profoundly there when the supporter of identity politics wishes to replace discussion of objective conditions with discussion of personal experience.

Ironically, this question (epistemology, to call it by its name) is one that Americans grow up believing is something only suitable for academics, rather than something that is at the very heart of how we understand our world, how we interact with our world, how we seek to change our world.   We are taught that questioning our method is navel-gazing.  If we accept that, we are helpless before the method that we pick up from our social conditions (I trust no one will dispute that we pick up a method from growing up, being educated, and living in a particular culture at a particular time and place; if I’m wrong, I’ll go back make this post even longer).

So, how is that we actually know something?  Well, obviously, not by thinking about it.  I mean, you can’t prove the truth of your thought by thinking, right?  That way lies solipsism.  Which means either we are defeated before we begin, or must find another way.

Many, many people, of course, are defeated.  They insist that we simply cannot know anything.  Pragmatism, the belief that “truth is what works,” grew out of the needs of an expanding capitalist economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It says,  “since we can’t actually know anything, let’s just find a belief system that makes us happy.  Of course, yours will be different from mine, but that’s all right, because there is no truth anyway.”

Another approach is called empiricism, which emerged with the birth of science as a formal discipline and the roughly simultaneous birth of capitalism, and says that we can know facts, and facts only.  In other words, we can count (more or less, and with some conditions) on our five senses to tell us certain things are true, but the connections, the reasons, the laws, are unknowable.  We can know, because it was witnessed, that the sun rose in the east every day of recorded history, so we assume it will continue to do so, but we can’t know it won’t rise in the west tomorrow, because the laws of astronomy and astrophysics that guide the motion of heavenly bodies are merely ideas, which, to the empiricist, means we can’t actually know them.

So, how do we know we know?

Historically, the development of knowledge is a social, not an individual thing.  What I mean by that is, yes, at some point in the past, someone came up with a way of converting motion to heat (fire). But that technique quickly became part of humanity’s body of knowledge.  It was used, tested, and became the basis for further developments of knowledge, until eventually we found a way to turn heat into motion (the steam engine).  Now, whether  you credit the invention of the steam engine to Hero of Alexandria, or Taqi al-Din, or even skip everyone until James Watt, the point is that the steam engine became a part of humanity’s general body of knowledge, and we, human beings, used this knowledge to change the world.  I’m sure I will get arguments about this or that aspect of what it means “to know,” but I trust no one is going to deny that the steam engine has changed the lives of human beings across history and cultures.

Am I off the subject?  I don’t think so, and that is exactly the point.  Let us return to that first mythical woman who rubbed two dry cliches together to consciously produce the first fire (probably after she or someone else had done the same thing unconsciously).  She did many things, at that moment. She generated heat in a controlled way.  She provided the opportunity to gain more efficient nutrition, thus permitting the brain to evolve more into a more powerful and complex organ.  She developed an element of culture that could be taught to others.  And, just by the way, she proved the relationship between her thoughts and the objective world.  Not by her thoughts, but by her actions.  In other words, as it is most often expressed, “Man answered the question of the relationship between his thoughts and objective reality hundreds of thousands of years before it occurred to him to ask.”

What I am suggesting, then, is looking at “proof” in a different way; not as something that exists as a thing inside someone’s head, but something that happens as a social process.

Proof, for human beings, is not individual, it is social.  It is not passive, it is active.  To focus on the question, “But how do I know this is real?” is to begin with yourself, with what’s in your head.   Take it the other way.  Instead of starting with your own thoughts, start with what is around you.  Strive to understand the movement of history, of the natural sciences.  Approach them from the point of view of, “How can we understand the world in order to change it?” Our confidence in our thoughts comes when we have put our ideas into practice and observed the result.  I propose, then, not proof as contemplation, but proof as activity.

 

 

An Abstract Comment on Abstraction

In the previous discussion on ownership and property, Lee Gold said the following: “I own my thoughts and my actions — at least to the extent that I am willing to stand up for them.”  This is a very interesting remark, and set me to thinking.  Let me see if I can both work this out and express it (usually the same process for me).  We’re going to ignore the fact that this remark makes “ownership” meaningless because it ignores the role of the State, which is what defines ownership.  I’m going in a different direction.

My American Heritage Dictionary (I less than three my American Heritage Dictionary) defines the noun “abstract” to mean, “The concentrated essence of a larger whole.”  More important for this discussion are two of the definitions of the transitive verb:  ” 1. To take away, remove.” and  “3. To consider theoretically.”

To abstract, as I’m using it here, means to mentally pull a part out of the whole. Abstracting, in this sense, is a necessary part of thought.  In order to count the number of books on my shelf, I must abstract the quantity–that is, consider nothing about them except the number.  Abstraction is a prerequisite for object permanence, a vital stage in human development.  That our minds are able to do this is, obviously, a key element of thought; but, “this power must be used only for Good;” that is, we are able to do it incorrectly.  Because we have imagination, we are perfectly capable of making invalid or false abstractions–that is, abstractions that do not accurately reflect real world processes and conditions.  To take an obvious example, we can consider only the backbones of snails, but it won’t get us very far as snails, like Democratic politicians, lack backbones (okay, sorry, that was mean).  We can also abstract the backbones of snakes in order to consider, for example, how snakes move.  But this is something we do in our minds; in reality, if you remove the backbone, you no longer have a snake–you have snakeskin, some random organs, a couple of souvenirs, and a decent meal if you know how to prepare it.

The comment I quoted at the start of the post above is an interesting case.  By saying, “I own this,” or even, “I possess this,” we are abstracting the thing from ourselves.  The idea, “I own my actions,” or, “I own my thoughts,” implies “I possess my thoughts” or “I possess my actions.”  This has as much meaning as, “I own my leg,” or, “I possess my leg.”  This has significance today in, for example, the fight for reproductive rights of women–to what extent do you have the right to the control parts of your own anatomy?  But philosophically, what is happening by formulating it in that way, is that you are abstracting a part of yourself, and treating it as if it were separate from the whole.  Clearly, if my leg were amputated, stuffed, and given to me, no one would argue that I don’t possess my leg.  I should prefer to avoid this experience.  In reality, my leg is a part of me.  I would argue that this is a false abstraction.  I do not possess my thoughts, and I certainly don’t own them–rather, they are a part of the unity that is me.

Okay, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  If you enjoyed reading this anywhere near as much as I enjoyed writing it, seek professional help.  I have no shame, but, hey, at least I own it.