Tag: philosophy

I’m sorry, Peterson fans, but now that I have begun to look more closely at him, it increasingly appears your intellectual hero is a complete joke at best. At worst, he is a insane monster of inhuman ethics. Assuming that others have understood him correctly, his definition of “truth” is absolutely and utterly false – which explains his lack of intellectual integrity – and his Darwinian ethics are not only incoherent, they don’t even rise to the functional level of Sam Harris’s hapless utilitarianism.

Harris, who is far from my idea of a formidable intellect or coherent debater, has absolutely no trouble resoundingly dismissing Peterson’s shoddy logic:

I recently interviewed the psychologist Jordan B. Peterson on the Waking Up podcast. As I said at the beginning of our conversation, I’d received more listener requests for him than for Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Edward Snowden—or, indeed, any other person on earth.

The resulting exchange, however, was not what our mutual fans were hoping for. Rather than discuss religion and atheism, or the relationship between science and ethics, we spent two hours debating what it means to say that a proposition is (or seems to be) “true.” This is a not trivial problem in philosophy. But the place at which Peterson and I got stuck was a strange one. He seemed to be claiming that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false. As I tried to show, this view makes no sense, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that Peterson actually held it.

I found this extremely hard to believe too, and I won’t utilize it until I confirm it from Peterson’s own writings, but the basic idea keeps cropping up again and again when I read what others have written about the man’s ideas, as well as in the man’s own words. Right now, I’m still at the “you have GOT to be fucking kidding me” stage; I am starting to suspect that this guy’s genius lies in piling up so much highly compressed bullshit that the bedazzled reader only sees a mirror of what he wants to believe.

• Events as they occurred are only factual but not necessarily true. True is a judgment call and is therefore open to interpretation. The claim of ‘something’s’ validity can only be made when one can see ‘the bigger picture’ — the wellbeing of humanity or ‘life’ itself. Only then can we know if something is true rather than just factual or ‘materialistically true’. – Peterson
• If it doesn’t serve life, it’s not true. – Peterson
• He seems to claim that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false.
• Why is Peterson dishonest in some ways? I think he explained this in the debate with Sam Harris, where he said things like ” something which not benefits /potential harms humanity cant be true”.

This is worse than moral relativism, this is existential relativism. Harris correctly demolishes this absurd, childish, and narcissistic conception of truth in his post-interview response.

In the year 2017, the question “How should we act in the world?” simply isn’t reducible to Darwinism. In fact, most answers to this question arise in utter defiance of the evolutionary imperatives that produced us. Caring for disabled children would most likely have been maladaptive for our ancestors during any conditions of scarcity—while cannibalism recommended itself from time to time in every corner of the globe. How much inspiration should we draw from the fact that killing and eating children is also an ancient “archetype”? Overcoming tribalism, xenophobia, honor violence, and other forms of apish barbarity has been unthinkable for hundreds of millennia—that is, until now. And our moral progress on these fronts is the basis of our most enlightened answers to Peterson’s question.

We didn’t evolve to do science, or to build institutions that last for generations, but we must do these things to thrive. Thriving requires the survival of the species, of course, but it’s not reducible to that. Getting our genes into the next generation simply isn’t our only (or even our primary) goal—and it surely isn’t the foundation of our ethics. If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to continually donate sperm to sperm banks so that he could sire thousands of children for whom he’d have no further responsibility. If we really viewed the world from the perspective of our genes, no other answer to the question “How should we act in the world?” would seem more fitting. I’ll let readers judge how closely this maps onto the human minds with which they’re acquainted.

Peterson believes that there is an inverse symmetry to our views on the relationship between facts and values. According to him, I see “ethics as nested inside scientific realism,” whereas he sees “scientific realism as nested inside Darwinian competition” (which he views in ethical terms).  A clearer way of stating this is that he thinks I locate all values within a system of truth claims, whereas he locates all truth claims in a system that selects for a single value: survival. Hence our stalemate.

Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

But I have always said that the scientific worldview presupposes the validity of certain values—logical consistency (up to a point), explanatory elegance, respect for evidence, and so forth. This is why I think Hume’s famous gap between “is” (facts) and “ought” (values) is misleading on the topic of morality. We can easily reverse direction and discover that we won’t get to “is” without first obeying certain “oughts.” For instance, to understand what the cause of an illness is, one ought to pay attention to regularities in the body and in the environment that coincide with it. (Additionally, we now know that one ought to emphasize material causes, rather than sympathetic magic or the evil eye.) Facts and values are connected.

However, the fact that some values lie at the foundation of our scientific worldview does not suggest that all scientific truth claims can be judged on the basis of the single (Darwinian) criterion of whether the claimants survive long enough to breed.  On the contrary, this assertion is quite obviously false (as I believe I demonstrated throughout our podcast). We can easily imagine our species being outcompeted by one that has no understanding whatsoever of the cosmos. Would a lethal swarm of disease-bearing insects possess a worldview superior to our own by virtue of eradicating us? The question answers itself—because no insect could even pose it. Mere survival doesn’t suggest anything about the intellectual or ethical achievement of the survivors.

Some who listened to my conversation with Peterson thought that in objecting to his conception of truth, I was endorsing materialism or denying that the mind could play any role in determining the character of reality. But that isn’t the case. I was merely arguing that Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

Peterson is so philosophically incompetent that he quite clearly does not fully comprehend that his idiotic ethical system not only fully justifies the Holocaust, it can actually be logically utilized to require future repetitions on a regular basis! I suspect he may harbor a dim awareness of this, which would explain why he is clinging so desperately to the 115 IQ myth that I disproved.

I have not yet confirmed for myself that the way Peterson characterized his definition of truth during the interview is fully representative of his actual thinking on the matter, or that Harris and other commenters are correctly describing it. But if this “evolutionary pragmatism” is genuinely the basis for his conception of the truth, then I have absolutely no problem dismissing the man as an architect of an evil philosophy, an intellectual charlatan, and a false prophet whose works merit complete and comprehensive demolition.

Spare me the “oh, he does so much good for the broken little boys” argument. If this definition of his conception of truth is correct, then Jordan Peterson is not doing anyone any good at all, and unlike more honest atheists like Dawkins and Harris, he is a philosophical wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Pied Piper who is attempting to transform those broken little boys into unethical monstrosities. He appears to have blown up his Gamma delusion bubble into an ethical system and a philosophy of life. I am even beginning to suspect that he isn’t just comprehensively wrong, but that he is mentally ill. Not unlike Google muttering “don’t be evil, don’t be evil” to itself, Peterson is desperately seeking an antidote to the chaos of his mind.

So, if you’re a Peterson fan, you might want to buckle up. I just read the transcript of the Harris interview, then put 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning on my tablet. The baleful eye of the Dark Lord is now focused squarely upon the man. And we’re not just looking at the possibility that the emperor has no clothes here, we’re being forced to consider the very real possibility that the emperor is actually a recently shorn sheep that sincerely believes it’s a cat.

Last week, I was asked how the Israelis regard the Diasporans and their refusal to join the rest of the Jewish nation. This post by a Jew who lived for nearly 30 years in the USA before moving to Israel  is on the harsh side, but it generally sums up the contemptuous attitude of most of the Israelis I know:

I want a divorce. Not from my wife, whom I love dearly, but from the liberal and progressive American Jewish community. From those American Jews who believe that they have a special right to judge and advise the state of Israel because their parents were Jewish…. Your Jewish DNA does not make you any more knowledgeable than anyone else, nor does it give you a greater stake in the Jewish state, unless you decide to accept the generous offer it has made to all Jews everywhere by its Law of Return.

The fact that you had a Bar or Bat Mitzvah does not mean that your piece in the Forward or your letter to the New York Times in which you explain why, as a Jew, you are traumatized by Israel’s efforts to defend her southern border, should be published any more than that of any other person’s.

Even the fact that at some point in your life you have experienced antisemitism doesn’t qualify you to talk about how Israel should behave toward her own antisemitic enemies. If antisemitism in the US is problem for you, there is always that Law of Return.

There is no reason that the pronouncements of “If Not Now” are any more worth listening to than those of the American Nazi Party. Peter Beinart isn’t a more authoritative source about Israel and the Arabs than David Duke just because he has a bigger nose.

The head of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, likes to talk about how the demands he makes of Israel are made out of “unconditional love,” because he wants to “repair it” according to his notion of tikkun olam. What he calls “love,” I call hypocrisy. He owns an apartment in Jerusalem. He should live in it, send his kids to be combat soldiers in the army, pay taxes, and learn to practice situational awareness when he walks the streets or gets on a bus. Then he can try to fix things here (he probably would still give wrong advice, but then at least he would suffer the consequences).

It shouldn’t be surprising that the Israelis are little more inclined to put up with the eternal backseat-driving and unrequested tikkun-olaming of their nomadic kindred than anyone else is. The difference is that unlike most other nations, they aren’t hesitant to call out the Diasporans for their hypocrisy and their enmity-inspiring behaviors, especially since the latter tend to actively damage Israel’s standing in the world.

For example, attempting to eliminate the First Amendment rights of Americans in the name of slowing down the BDS movement is a horrifically bad idea. There are few things more likely to lead to the USA cutting off all foreign aid to Israel; even the most philosemitic Christian Zionist is not going to legally amputate his own tongue for Israel.

Anyhow, this is the sort of thing that NN Taleb means when he talks about the importance of skin in the game; it is a very clear example of how those with skin in the game are always disinclined to respect or pay any attention to those who lack it.

I have been let down by all of my heroes and role models. Not some of them. Not most of them. All of them. Except one.

I was taught to save by my father. When I bought my first house, he very generously wanted to help me and even offered to contribute something to the down payment. I declined when I found out that I had more money in the bank than he did. He joked that his companies were his savings account; we all know how that turned out.

I was taught character, courage, and taking responsibility by my grandfather. Towards the end of his life, having exhausted his resources on caring for my grandmother, he walked away from the beautiful, twice-mortgaged house he had owned for three decades and left it for the bank.

I was taught leadership and personal sacrifice by my uncle. After attaining fame and great power, he was awarded an important position at one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. He did not resign from it when its crimes were revealed to the public.

I revered Umberto Eco for his great learning and his intellectual insight. When I read Belief or Nonbelief, his debate on religion and God with Carlo Maria Martini, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Milan, I was astonished and bitterly disappointed by the shallow, superficial, and petty nature of his arguments.

I admired and looked up to one of my father’s friends of more than thirty years. I considered him to be the epitome of a good, smart, successful, civilized man. I could not believe it when my father asked him to be a character witness at his trial, and he demurred for fear of how it might look and what people might say.

I always considered The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to be the philosophical gold standard and Aurelius himself to be an exemplary man. Then I read more human history and realized that his son and successor was Commodus, and that he had uncharacteristically failed to prepare an adequate succession plan for the empire over which he ruled.

I cannot tell you how many authors I perceived to be great, only to learn that they were charlatans, conceptual plagiarists, plodders, experts in literary sleight-of-hand, learned historians rather than brilliantly original creators, and in some cases, the apparent beneficiaries of a sprinkling of pixie dust by a flighty passing muse.

Do I look down on any of these men because they lacked the perfection that I naively perceived in them? Do I reject their teachings? By no means! To the contrary, their failings only served to teach me that they were mortal men, not demigods, and that I, too, can hope to surmount my own failings and character flaws. They remain my heroes and my role models today, I merely see them in a more mature and realistic light that shows their strengths in contrast with their weaknesses.

The fact that your heroes are not perfect does not make them any less heroic. It actually makes them more heroic, because their failings are a glimpse into the struggle they faced, every day, with the manifold temptations of a fallen world.

Who was the one hero who never let me down? JRR Tolkien. I loved his books deeply and passionately from the time I read the first page of The Two Towers, and everything I have since read of his, and everything I have subsequently learned about the man has only given me more cause to admire him. One reason that it takes me so much longer to write Arts of Dark and Light than other fiction and non-fiction is that I am always striving to write something I consider worthy of Tolkien’s influence, and of which he would approve if he were ever to read it.

To Jordan Peterson’s milquetoast millennials.

All I can say is that if I ever screwed up as thoroughly, and as publicly, and demonstrated such a flagrant lack of intellectual integrity as Peterson has, I would damn well expect every single member of the Dread Ilk to jump down my throat with sharpened spurs on.

Instead, what do we see here? Oh, poor Jordie, it’s just so difficult for him? It’s so hard! How can a philosopher be expected to simply tell the truth? He’s done so much good that we shouldn’t criticize him when he’s running around calling people cowards and failures because they point out the obvious to him! Don’t be mean to Jordie and make him cry!

Excuses. Complaints. Rationalizations. Whining. Accusing. Anything but holding the man accountable for his deceitful words and his lack of intellectual integrity. I’m unimpressed enough with the man, but it’s his followers that really have me rolling my eyes.

WTF? Is the guy such a delicate depressed flower that he’s going to kill himself over being called on acting like an uncharitable and uninformed jackass? I thought this was supposed to be the fearsome debater, the formidable man of principle who isn’t afraid to go into the belly of the beast to tell it like it is?

Let me make one thing clear. I do not give a fragment of a flying fuck about poor little Jordie or any other public figure with whom I am not personally acquainted. I have not read his books nor watched his videos. I care about the truth and the Truth, and I do not cut any intellectual figure any slack in that regard, including myself. I ask for neither quarter nor mercy from anyone, least of all my supporters.

When I get it wrong and you can conclusively prove it, then show me! If you’re correct, I won’t attack you, much less call you a coward and a failure like Peterson did, to the contrary, I will be grateful to you for helping me get back on the correct path of true understanding.

FN postulates an explanation for legalistic religious sophistry:

I think these crazy-seeming reinterpretations of the plain meaning of the Old Testament are partly motivated by a desire to seem clever. “Look how smart I am, I can understand it better than anyone else! No, it doesn’t really mean what the words say, it means this subtle thing that nobody but I can see!”

I have no doubt that is partly true, but mostly it comes down to wanting to have sex with children. Evil always comes up with some way to rationalize that. Here is a reliable heuristic for evil: does it justify, rationalize, excuse, defend, encourage, advocate, or require sex with children in any way, openly or covertly, directly or indirectly? Then it is evil, topped by an evil sauce, with a side of evil.

Martin van Creveld has some VERY strong words for his fellow countrymen:

I am ashamed to be an Israeli.

And not because the IDF killed some fifteen residents of Gaza during the demonstrations that took place on the 30th of April. I was not there, and neither was any of my acquaintances. So I cannot say whether the killing was “justified”—whether, in other words, the soldiers who opened fire really were in danger of their lives. Although I must say that, since the demonstrators did not carry weapons and since a great many of them were women and children, the number seems quite high. The more so because not a single Israeli was killed or injured.

Most of my readers not being Israelis, I cannot blame them for never having heard the name of Kobi Meidan. I myself hardly open my radio except to listen to classical music; hence I cannot say I am terribly familiar with the name either. I think I once talked to him over the phone, but that is all.

Mr. Meidan is a journalist. He works for Galei Zahal, the military broadcasting station that is one of the most popular in Israel. Referring to the demonstrations, he wrote that he was ashamed to be an Israeli. Please note that he did not say so while on the air. He did so on Facebook, in his capacity as a private individual in a free country.

No sooner had he done so than all hell broke loose. All over the country people demanded that he be fired.

While I certainly admire Martin’s characteristic courage in standing up for Kobi Meidan’s right to express his feelings about the most recent Gaza massacre, I think he is perhaps being a little hard on his country here. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I think his expectations of it are perhaps a little higher than I would expect of Israel, the USA, or pretty much anywhere else.

The short-lived age of free speech, such as it is, is observably over. I am considerably less outraged by Israelis attempting to speech police one of their own who is criticizing their country than I am by Judeo-Christians in the United States launching a direct assault on the First Amendment rights of Americans by successfully criminalizing private and corporate speech that advocates the anti-Israel boycott, divest, and sanction movement.

But these are the new rules of the game, apparently. And we don’t make the rules. So, lament them if you are so inclined, but also learn them, master them, and begin enforcing those blasphemy and obscenity laws that are still on the books from more civilized, more Christian times.

As I have repeatedly observed, there is no such thing as equality, the grand rhetorical flights of Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding. The artificial distinctions that conservatives attempt to make between equality of opportunity and equality of result, and between equality before the law and  equality of condition, simply do not exist. Literally every day we see material evidence to the contrary.

A rookie cop whose dad is an NYPD chief avoided getting fired after an off-duty arrest for groping a woman at an Atlantic City casino, police sources told the Daily News. The department’s handling of Officer Joseph Essig’s case raises questions among police sources who suspect high-ranking officers and those close to them are treated with kid gloves in discipline cases.

Just 15 months into his brand-new NYPD career — on Oct. 8, 2015 — Essig was arrested at Harrah’s Casino in Atlantic City on a felony charge of criminal sexual misconduct. New Jersey authorities downgraded the charge to a health code violation. Essig pleaded guilty, was ordered to stay away from the victim, and paid a $1,000 fine.

Officers facing similar charges with less than two years on the force are typically fired, say sources. But Essig remains on the job. A police source said that’s “shocking.” “Other probationary cops have been fired for way less,” said the source.

This is not at all surprising, of course. Just as one does not expect off-duty police to receive speeding tickets or DUI citations, one does not expect the influential or their family members to be treated just like anyone else in the courts of law. But as petty as it is, this episode serves to effectively demonstrate that the conservative concept of equality is just as fantastic, just as utopian, just as nonexistent, and just as ludicrous a basis for societal policy, as the leftist concept of equality.

God does not believe in equality. Nature does not believe in equality. Neither should Man believe in it, must less attempt to order his societies around it, because it does not exist.

The reason that Jefferson found it necessary to claim it was self-evident that all men are created equal is because he could not find a single observable example of that imaginary equality to cite, not in religion, philosophy, history, nature, or law. The assertion is not a self-evident truth, it is nothing more than a logical and empirical falsehood, and easily proven to be so by every possible standard.

For a deeper dive into the mythical nature of equality, one cannot do better than to read Equality: the Impossible Quest by historian Martin van Creveld.

Takimag’s elimination of its comment section underlines why the moderators and I act so swiftly, and ruthlessly, to eliminate commenters who even appear to be inclined to attempt disrupting the discourse, hijacking the mic, changing the subject, or disqualifying and discrediting me.

While we would prefer to have a free and open forum for our readers, a few bad eggs seem incapable of communicating as though they were in good company and have in so doing, ruined it for the the rest of you. So in a way, yes, you can blame (((them))), or at least those who blame (((them))), for this gag.

However, many of you do have something to add, and we would like to hear from you. Please email the mailroom so that we may post a selection of letters from our readers on a weekly basis, and in so doing, perhaps raise the bar above the pale from where it fell off.

As many of you will appreciate, Takimag is run like a dictatorship, rather than a nanny state, and therefore a moderated site is not an option we are considering at this time. Up until now moderation has been ineffective and seems to only encourage the bastards who ruin the exchanges many of you enjoy and will likely miss.

At this point, we would be ever so grateful if you would kindly give the steady stream of childish threats to abandon Takimag forever a rest and be grateful we provide this platform for you and our writers, and that they have something intelligent to say week after week.

For more than a decade, we kept the comments open and anonymous while primarily focusing our moderation efforts on the trolls, of the psychologically unstable, ideological, and professional varieties, as they popped up. This approach was fairly effective, but time-consuming. However, as our understanding of the socio-sexual hierarchy has developed and deepened, we’ve come to understand that there are certain classes of commenters who will reliably, over time, become disruptive even if it is not their intention to do so. We also found the task of moderation to be increasingly Sisyphean, as the more stubborn trolls simply changed their names again and again and again. Hence my decision to lock down the comments and limit them to registered commenters.

Now, one of the strengths of this blog is the pattern recognition possessed by both me and the long-term commenters. If we haven’t seen it all before, we’ve seen an awful lot of it. So, if you’re a monomaniac, an attention seeker, or someone who is “just having fun”, the chances are that you’re not going to last long before going into the spam trap. To summarize, if you insist on creating work for me and the moderators, for any reason, then we don’t want you here. Don’t ignore or blow off a warning, because the chances are there will not be a second one. The blog was here before you started commenting and it will be here long after you stop.

Given the trouble that some commenters appear to be having with Blogger not playing nicely with their browser, I should also point out that I will always tell you that you are being spammed. If you have not been so informed, then you should assume that the issue is with your browser, not your commenting status, and that the only possible fix is on your end. So, if you are having problems commenting, please don’t ask me or inform me about it. There is literally nothing I can do for you in that regard, except tell you to try different browsers and browser settings.

It’s been two months or so since I locked down the comments and I have to say that despite a few dire predictions, the end result has been entirely satisfactory. Traffic remains strong, the number of trolls has been significantly reduced, and the amount of spam has fallen by more than 95 percent.

The more I contemplate the universe, the more I am convinced that the fundamental core of Man’s philosophy must revolve around a single question: to pretend or not to pretend. So much human evil stems from the fact that we deceive ourselves, we deceive each other, and we seek to deceive God. And one of the primary locuses of deception is the language we choose to employ.

Parents of a Texas high school student who was reported missing in late January had abused their daughter after she refused an arranged marriage, leading her to run away from home until she was found in mid-March, police said.

Maarib Al Hishmawi, 16, was reported missing on Jan. 30 after she was last seen leaving Taft High School in Bexar County. She was located in mid-March when she was taken in by an organization that cared for her after she ran away, KSAT reported.

Authorities on Friday said Al Hishmawi’s parents — Abdulah Fahmi Al Hishmawi, 34, and Hamdiyah Saha Al Hishmawi, 33 — had allegedly beaten their daughter with a broomstick and poured hot cooking oil on her when she refused to marry a man in another city.

“Texas teen.” Sure. What happened to Miss Al Hishmawi sounds like something that might have just as easily happened to any other true blue Texas family from the Lone Star State, does it not? What an unfortunate and unexpected fate for a Southern belle!

Words have meaning. We can pretend otherwise, but reality will shine through sooner or later.

I uncovered four old videotapes a few weeks ago. Originally there were six, and unfortunately the missing two were of my 1997 interview with Umberto Eco, but what I found contained about two hours of unique footage of interviews and public interactions with the great dottore. I arranged to get them digitized for use in a potential future Voxiversity, or perhaps even a documentary. Here is one screencap from the last tape, which shows Doctor Eco with Spacebunny and me at St. John’s University.