September 2013

The Counterfeiting Aspect of Morality

By in books, conspicuous crusading, nietzsche, philosophy, science No Comments

What is the counterfeiting aspect of morality? It pretends to know something, namely what “good and evil” is. That means wanting to know why mankind is here; its goal, its destiny. That means wanting to know that mankind has a goal, a destiny.

— Nietzsche

Sam Harris:

It has been nearly three years since The Moral Landscape was first published in English, and in that time it has been attacked by readers and nonreaders alike. Many seem to have judged from the resulting cacophony that the book’s central thesis was easily refuted. However, I have yet to encounter a substantial criticism that I feel was not adequately answered in the book itself (and in subsequent talks).

So I would like to issue a public challenge. Anyone who believes that my case for a scientific understanding of morality is mistaken is invited to prove it in 1,000 words or less. (You must address the central argument of the book—not peripheral issues.) The best response will be published on this website, and its author will receive $2,000. If any essay actually persuades me, however, its author will receive $20,000,* and I will publicly recant my view.

So, I’ve finally gotten around to reading the book. It seems to this layman that the reviews can’t be dismissed so breezily. As to whether or not they refute the book’s central thesis, or whether it’s possible to even do so, well, when there are this many qualifiers and hedged bets in the introduction alone —

I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain — but opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.

…I’m not suggesting that we will necessarily discover one right answer to every moral question or a single best way for human beings to live. Some questions may admit of many answers, each more or less equivalent. However, the existence of multiple peaks on the moral landscape does not make them any less real or worthy of discovery.

…While this leaves the question of what constitutes well-being genuinely open, there is every reason to think that this question has a finite range of answers. Given that change in the well-being of conscious creatures is bound to be a product of natural laws, we must expect that this space of possibilities — the moral landscape — will increasingly be illuminated by science.

— it’s hard for me to determine just what it is we’re arguing against or disproving. That all sounds definitively vague enough for my taste, carry on! Was anyone literally claiming an infinite range of answers to the question of well-being? The only strong impression I’ve gotten from the book is that he’s really impressed by fMRI studies, and he really, really hates extreme relativists.

Use Your Illusion

By in books, nihilism, philosophy No Comments

John Gray:

Christianity was a reaction against corrosive doubt, a condition that took hold partly as a result of the habit of sceptical inquiry inculcated by philosophy: “What was destroying the world was the lack of illusions. Christianity saved it, not because it was the truth but because it was a new source of illusion.” This new illusion came in the form of a claim to truth that all the world had to accept: an inordinate demand that with the rise of the Enlightenment shifted to science, which has become a project aiming to dissolve the dreams in which humanity has hitherto lived. The result is modern nihilism – the perception that human beings are an insignificant accident in a scheme of things that cares nothing for them or their values – and a host of rackety creeds promising some kind of secular salvation.

Leopardi’s account of the paradoxical process whereby a Christian will to truth gave birth to nihilism has much in common with Nietzsche’s – an affinity that the fiery German thinker recognised. Here as elsewhere, Nietzsche was following a path opened up by Schopenhauer, who wrote that it was a tragedy that the world’s three great pessimists – “Byron, Leopardi and myself” –were in Italy at the same time but never met. (I’m not sure that a meeting between Leopardi and Schopenhauer would have been a success. Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter.)

What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness. Matthew Arnold, A E Housman, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Fernando Pessoa (who wrote a poem about the Italian poet) and Samuel Beckett were all stirred by his suggestion that human fulfilment requires a tolerance of illusion that is at odds with both Christianity and modern science.

Innnnteresting. Again, I’m intrigued by this Leopardi fellow.

Happy Ever After in the Marketplace

By in conspicuous crusading, free speech, getting and spending, samesecks, the madness of crowds, tribalism No Comments

Having just enjoyed a riotous laugh at J. Bryan Lowder’s attempt to preserve the Platonic ideal of the concept of privilege, it would only be fair to acknowledge one of his better efforts:

But I would like to take a moment to reflect upon how troubling this and other recent dust-ups regarding some giant corporation’s “feelings” about the gays really are on closer inspection. I’m by no means the first person to say this, but being offended (or for that matter, flattered) by an entity whose sole purpose is to sell things, maybe to you or maybe to someone else, is to unavoidably endorse and enliven the insidious concept of corporate personhood. Barilla is not your enemy and Absolut is not your friend; they are just businesses with PR departments that are at different points along the road toward realizing that influential, “taste-maker” minority groups are worth courting, both for direct patronage and easy image-boost-by-association. It’s unfortunate, I guess, that Barilla (or at least Guido Barilla) is behind the times on this matter, but the earnest anger I’m seeing online about that fact is perplexing. I mean, are you really so starved for approval that you need it to come packaged with pasta?

I realize that the previous paragraph probably makes me sound like an Occupy Wall Street, anti-capitalism type, which is really not the case. My concern with this increasingly common “the gays are for/against X corporation” trope is far more basic than that: I simply resent being told I should change my shopping list every time some old C-suite dude runs his out-of-touch mouth or offers to sponsor my next parade.

The System Will Eat Itself

By in conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, jests japes jokes jollies, the madness of crowds, the statusphere, tribalism No Comments

J. Bryan Lowder:

Only a few years ago, “privilege” was a concept you’d more likely hear discussed on college campuses and other places where people think a lot about how to achieve social justice than in a national publication.

…Some may call it trolling, but the “Privilege Tournament” really only acknowledges that privilege has failed as a social justice strategy, at least outside of more nuanced environs like the academy.

…But denuded of situational context and reduced to a competition between arbitrary categories, the wider privilege discussion has become about points and team pride, winners and losers. In my case, +1 for gay (and maybe .5 for being a little femme), but -5 for white, male cisgendered, middle-class, able-bodied, and allergy-free. So a total of -3.5, tsk tsk. This kind of quantitative score-keeping was never the point. And worse, the turning of privilege into a game has led some to use it to disqualify those deemed to have “too much” from not only participating in the fight for justice, but from even cheering from the sidelines. The ethos of “be quiet, you have too much privilege” is wildly counterproductive, and definitely not the point of any critical exercise.

Ooo, sounds like somebody needs to check his elitist, higher education privilege. Ahem. I mean, yes, by all means, go tell all those social justice warriors to leave the thinky stuff to the educated professionals. I can only imagine the Jacksonian turn that would take: “It’s not fair, it’s not right,” he screamed, and then they were upon him.

As always with intellectuals: the system didn’t fail us, we failed the system. Alack and forsooth, who could have possibly anticipated that an idea like this, rather than serving as a means for gazing upon the bare face of truth, would have been used in service to the same base struggles for power or status that have always been the overriding sociopolitical preoccupation? The idea was perfect; it’s just that you cretins fucked it all up when you got your grubby hands on it. Funny how often that turns out to be the case when the hothouse flowers of academia are transplanted into the soil of everyday life. Featurenotabug.

Autumn

By in poetry No Comments

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

— T. E. Hulme

I Go Out to Meet the Man Who Contradicts Me and Corrects Me

By in foolosophy No Comments

We’ve stored a huge chunk of what we “know” in people around us for eons. But we rarely recognize this because, well, we prefer our false self-image as isolated, Cartesian brains. Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially. We’re dumber and less cognitively nimble if we’re not around other people—and, now, other machines.

Aikin and Talisse:

In short, we argue in pursuit of truth.  The epistemic conception is concerned with rationally engaging others.  It is, after all, through such engagement that we come to see more fully what reasons and evidence there are, and thus we come to occupy a better vantage point from which to evaluate our options, including the beliefs we already hold.  In this way, the epistemic conception sees argument as a critical activity aimed at the evaluation of views.  But note that argument then is equally a self-critical activity, a process by which we can criticize our own views.  The thought is that by engaging together in pursuit of truth, we can help each other to refine our ideas, even in the face of persistent disagreement.

The epistemic view accordingly proposes its own conception of respect.  The rhetorical theory takes respect to consist in the willingness to reason from another’s premises. The epistemic conception locates respect in seeing others as partners in the common pursuit of believing what’s right by believing what the best available reasons and evidence favor.  The rhetorical view has it that I respect you when I take you as you are — with the beliefs you already have — and attempt to rationally compel you to move in my direction.  The epistemic view holds that I respect you when I regard you as a companion in a common struggle for truth, and thus a fellow source of reasons, ideas, evidence, and objections.

Nigel Warburton:

Without conversation and challenge, philosophy very quickly lapses in to the dead dogma that Mill feared. But that does not mean that every viewpoint is equally valuable, or that we should accept that each person finds their own truth. Every great philosopher has been driven by an attempt to get beyond appearances and to say something important about how things really are. Philosophy is a subject that weighs positions, not just airs them. Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions — as William Empson wrote in his poem ‘Let It Go’ (1949):

The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.

However, it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs. As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’

Irrelevant Thoughts

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, socmed No Comments

Alyson Shantell:

Traditional media outlets will still be around to sort out the noise and rumors on Twitter, analyze it and turn it into stories. But no one can beat Twitter for breaking coverage, the fast transfer of thought, and an endless supply of original content that’s easy to consume on the go. Twitter will be – and already is – the only way for us all to stay relevant.

Relevant! You know, I admit it. I clicked on the link to an article entitled “Why You Should Care About Twitter,” because, well, I figured such directness deserved the benefit of the doubt. The title implies that the author is fully aware that many (most) people do not care about it, and thus, one might expect to hear a strong case presented, one that incorporates all the usual criticism and offers a rebuttal. Instead, we get the above excerpt as a conclusion, confirming that, yes, the social web is every bit the vapid fashion catwalk you thought it was. Marketing, branding and spotlight-seeking for its own sake. Anything more than five seconds old or written above a sixth-grade reading level risks irrelevance. Jesus Aitch.

Drinking Sand

By in music 2 Comments

Dorian Lynskey:

You might think that a band letting 17 years elapse between their third and fourth albums was unusual. You might therefore assume that there was an interesting reason for such a hiatus. You might even, recklessly, suppose that they could be pleased to be back. All these thoughts seem reasonable, until you try speaking to Mazzy Star about their new record, Seasons of Your Day.

…There is, I suppose, something impressive about the duo’s unwavering purist militancy – their apathy, bordering on revulsion, towards everything to do with music beyond the act of making it. After a miserable hour for all three of us, I’m no longer surprised that they took 17 years to release Seasons of Your Day; I’m amazed they released it at all. Do they even care if anybody beyond their close friends hears their music?

“Maybe, for musicians, it’s common to release things more frequently than we do,” says Roback. “[We’re] like other types of artist. They make their sculpture or painting, they write books or poems, and whether they have an exhibition is almost irrelevant.”

Is this a difficult line of work for such reticent people? Pause. “Only when shyness is misinterpreted as arrogance,” says Roback. Does that happen in their case? Pause. “I don’t really know.” Of course not.

I love me some Mazzy Star in any event, but in this social media fishbowl, where needy oversharing is like the water you swim in, I’m particularly delighted by such passive resistance. Reminds me of another favorite artist, Mark Sandman.

The Lord Above Gave Man an Arm of Iron So He Could Do His Job and Never Shirk

By in work No Comments

The Weber argument is interesting, but until now no one really knew whether it was true or not. It’s a good story—that much we’ve collectively agreed on—but it was hard to tell if it was Protestantism or some other factor that led capitalism (and affiliated laws and policies) to spread. Certainly there were predominantly Catholic countries that also had capitalism. Weber’s argument seemed compelling, but, like many economic or historical arguments, it was a story without real proof.

Enter a group of Dutch economists, who have discovered that the Protestant work ethic is real.

…In other words, Protestantism may not make you rich, but it sure makes you unhappy when you’re not rich. The old Calvinist doctrine of a livelihood as the source of one’s value, and a sign of God’s favor, wreaks great havoc on people’s lives when that livelihood is gone. What’s more, this is true even when people practice other religions (or none at all) in largely Protestant countries. They experience the same impulses. What this really indicates is just how important Protestantism is to our concept of work—all of our concepts of work.

…As hard workers attempted to prosper in business in order to show that they were God’s chosen ones, over time hard work became the object in itself, particularly in the United States. This is ultimately sort of ironic because, as Tim Kreider wrote in his recent New York Times article condemning busyness, “The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” But there you have it. We work hard because it’s the American way. And it’s the American way because the Puritans did it.

Comment Chameleons, You Come and Go

By in socmed No Comments

Michael Erard:

In the late ’90s, early bloggers expected the level of discourse to be high. In fact, intelligent commenting was seen as a path to gaining respect in the blogging community. At the beginning of 1999, there were only about two dozen blogs (which were mainly lists of interesting Web sites), but as the number exploded, it became hard for bloggers to follow the fragmenting conversations. In 2000, the blog service Blogger introduced permalinks, which allowed each blog entry to have its own URL, and in 2002, Moveable Type implemented the TrackBack, which automatically alerted an author that a permalink from his blog had been posted elsewhere. The TrackBack was meant, at least in part, to blur the lines between commenters and writers; the conversation surrounding one blog post no longer needed to be relegated to the comments section, but could be sprinkled across disparate blogs with the TrackBack as its link. That was great, in theory. But while conversations were the model for interactions, the technology couldn’t sustain what real conversations required.

Chris Clarke:

I think some of the diaspora of commentary on blog posts happened because blog comment threads  are to a first approximation cesspools of stupid hate. As Scalzi says in his post,  the phrase “Don’t Read The Comments” is widely used for a reason. It’s partly because moderating comments is work, and partly because people give inexplicable latitude to vandals whose sole intent is to piss all over your living room rug. Meanwhile? On Facebook? If you post a link to an outside blog post and make a comment on it, and someone replies by insulting you, you have moderation powers. That’s not a bad thing: it’s a democratization of the ability to enforce respectful discourse.

Anyway. What had been a more coherent commentariat for many mid-sized to large blogs has splintered. A provocative blog post might now spawn conversations on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Google+, and a handful of other major venues. With a very few exceptions, I think mainly constituting large blogs that offer their commenters a distinct sense of community, the comment diaspora has happened and I don’t think we’ll be going back to 2005.

My secret to ensuring intelligent discourse in the comments is to have very limited appeal. I’ve never enjoyed trying to have a conversation in a boisterous crowd; why would it be any different in a text-based medium? As the mawkish poet James Kavanaugh wrote, I do not like many people, love; they bore me, or attack me, or talk too much when there is nothing to say. QFT. The less people who stick around to become regulars, the better the chance of conversing with them as individuals rather than two-dimensional ideological symbols, and the easier it is to feel patient and considerate when they persist in arguing wrongheadedly against your superior wisdom. I know Internet currency consists of pageviews, retweets and likes, and by such standards I’m a po’ boy indeed, but at least I’ve had my fair share of good conversations here.

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