Tag: philosophy

Sometimes people make the mistake of asking what I’ve been reading lately. This post may explain why they seldom make that mistake more than once. Now, I may be among the more vehement critics of the dishonest Socratic logic presented in Plato’s dialogues, but even I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the correct reading of Plato’s totalitarian Republic is to conclude the exact opposite of what is written in it, as Patrick Tinsley does in his very unusual paper entitled “Plato and the Spell of the State“:

[W]e will contend that totalitarianism is not at all Plato’s proposed solution to the problem of untrustworthy politicians. His mistrust runs too deep for that. Far from advocating the totalitarian state, Plato opens it up to the light of truth, exposing it as an unjust and literally unnatural breach of the convivial social order. And he does something else as well. As we shall see, Plato attempts to show that the totalitarian state is an abomination not only for its victims, but also for its rulers. This is so, it turns out, because the desire to rule is an unruly desire; it corrupts, corrodes, and even colonizes the soul that it seduces. In the end, the desire to possess the body politic will possess the body of the politician. Whosoever would be master is doomed to be a slave….

Before we understand Plato’s rhetorical strategy, therefore, we must see that the view of Plato as totalitarian proceeds from the false assumption that Plato’s dialogues express the author’s true beliefs, typically through the character Socrates. In fact, Austrians from Menger to Rothbard fail even to acknowledge that the Platonic Socrates is a literary character. They simply read the dramatic elements out of Plato’s plays and treat them as treatises instead. According to them, Plato believes what Socrates says, and nothing besides. But this way of reading Plato produces a paradox. Namely, that if Plato believed the words that he wrote for Socrates, then he should never have written them.

The way out of the paradox is to substitute a literary reading of Plato for a literal one. We cannot take Plato, or Socrates, at his word. Instead, we must read between the lines. In order to understand Plato, we must understand that his meaning, very often, is what he leaves unwritten—and that what his characters say in dialogue, Plato delights in deconstructing with dramatic details and unspoken textual cues. His text “knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.” If Plato speaks through Socrates, then, it is only because Socrates’ speech is so frequently
ironic, concealing his true beliefs behind a veil of silence.

It would be an understatement to say that I do not find this argument persuasive. To be honest, I find Sam Harris’s arguments not only more compelling, but less indicative of past drug use. Tinsley’s conclusion strikes me as the bizarre result of combining libertarianism, Plato-worship, post-modern literary interpretation, an obsession with the English Vice, and an imagination unfettered by the limits of reason. This is not a paper that is likely to convince the average conservative Republican that libertarians don’t smoke marijuana. Or marijuana liberally laced with angel dust followed by a crack-infused chaser of tiger’s blood, for that matter.

To begin with, the supposed paradox is no such thing; few would be so foolish as to seriously argue that because Socrates happened to say a few negative things about writing, everything that Plato wrote down about his words is therefore completely and necessarily invalidated. Tinsley builds up a mountain, and a very strange mountain at that, from an insignificant molehill. But he’s just getting started, we haven’t seen anything yet.

One need not assume that Plato agreed with absolutely every word that Socrates uttered to take them at face value. From the ideological perspective, it doesn’t actually matter if the dialogues are faithful recreations of actual conversations in which Socrates participated or if the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues had no more connection to the historical Athenian than the dreaming Scipio of Cicero’s dialogues had to do with the historical Roman to take the words of those dialogues literally.

In fact, it doesn’t even matter if Tinsley is correct and Plato was actually a libertarian opponent of the totalitarian state. As an Italian admiral once told me: “In the end, it all comes down to Plato versus Aristotle. It always does.” Regardless of whether it was his intention or not – and based on what Rothbard tells us of the Greek’s philosophical focus on the polis rather than the individual, I am quite confident it was his intention – Plato has long been the ultimate champion of the collective. His writings serve as the foundation for the intellectual defense of the State and have been utilized as this manner by his fellow statists for centuries.

Even though one could not possibly accept it, one might be inclined to take Tinsley’s argument more seriously if it did not veer off onto a lengthy tangent on “the depraved depth of the tyrant’s erotic abnormality.” What on Earth, one finds oneself wondering, does any of this have to do with Plato, let alone the State?

“This anal orientation can also be found in the Sphinx’s riddle, which, by suggesting the two-, four-, and three-footed sexual positions associated with sodomy, “quite clearly [calls for] a pederastic explanation.” Oedipus must solve the riddle of his father’s crime. That the Sphinx’s “riddle of the foot” plays on the relationship between pedia and pederasty is confirmed by several ancient sources.”

It turns out that the point of this anal extravaganza is to inform us that Plato has constructed Socrates as the anti-Oedipus, who we are instructed was apparently was a passive sodomite in addition to being a parracide and a literal motherfucker. What we are supposed to conclude from all of this is that Plato is attempting to show us, in a subtle manner so subtle that it has been lost on classic scholars for more than two millenia that “when a tyrant perverts the natural order, the natural order perverts him, afflicting him with the most revolting and unnatural appetites”. This, apparently, is a “unique method for dispelling the state”.

Unique? Most definitely. Effective? Highly dubious. The correct reading of the author of The Republic? Let us just say that I remain unconvinced. But let us not speak too harshly of “Plato and the Spell of the State”, as what it lacks in compelling argument it more than makes up for in pure, unadulterated comedic appeal. I couldn’t care less if Tinsley is right or not, because on a scale of one to ten, I would give “Plato” a twelve. Because in this case, eleven just isn’t enough.

David Brooks explains, though only in part, why enlightenment humanism has failed:

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions….

[The present] body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

Brooks is looking in the right direction, but he’s not looking far enough. Man is not merely an emotional being, but a spiritual one. He seeks purpose and meaning in addition to happiness and joy. A new humanism that attempts to incorporate emotion into its rationalist models will certainly improve upon the dreadful performance of the previous models, but is still going to fall considerably short of effectiveness as the continued failure of utilitarianism in all its various permutations demonstrates.

The humanist model of the British enlightenment is certainly superior to the French one. But so long as humanists cling stubbornly to their dogmatic secularism, in the face of an increasing body of scientific evidence demonstrating the superiority of the religious models in terms of health, demographics, societal stability, and human happiness, even their improved models of human behavior are doomed to certain failure.

I have pointed out many times before that man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing creature. Man’s behavior cannot be understood or reliably anticipated until both his rationalizations and his purposes in concocting those rationalizations are reasonably understood.

In which RS Bakker affects the pose of a philosopher, to comic effect:

I find myself wondering about the people who read through Theo’s blog entries, nodding their head and thinking, “Yes–Yes!“

What, if anything distinguishes us from these guys? Are we every bit as chauvinistic as they are, only in different ways? For a long time now, this has been my impression of many you find in the humanities: self-serving dogmatism concealed behind a facade of pseudo-critical homilies. Only sophisticated where Theo is crude, adroit where Theo is clumsy.

In teaching practical reasoning I’ve always been troubled by two specific fallacies: the arguments ad hominem and ad populum. If it is the case that we cannot help but unconsciously game ambiguities to secure status and prestige (which is to say, confabulate rationalizations), and if it’s also the case that the our cognitive incapacity and the complexity of the world are such that anything may be rationalized, then the who of the argument becomes all-important, doesn’t it?

Chauvinistic. Clumsy. Unsophisticated. Overdeveloped rationalization module. A dearth of humor. False sense of intelligence. Thinks – presumably falsely – has hit the cognitive jackpot. Buying own bullshit.

What a delightfully descriptive portrait! How fortunate it is that Bakker is “troubled” by the fallacious ad hominem argument… at least when teaching practical reasoning. He would appear to be considerably more comfortable with it when wielding it in a passive-aggressive manner he can barely bring himself to attempt disguising. Like most mid-witted academics, he has no idea what to do when forced to deal with arguments presented by a member of the cognitive elite that are over his head, so he is forced to resort to the usual character assassination in order to explain why this incomprehensible personage is inferior to his noble, self-questioning self instead of trying to address the arguments.

I don’t find myself thinking at all about the people who read through Bakker’s posts and agree with them. They’re morally confused individuals who suffer from either insufficient intelligence or a surfeit of modern secularist dogma which renders them unable accept the conclusions that logic forces them to confront. So, like overmatched mid-wits usually do, they attempt to move the goalposts, desperately attempt to avoid admitting that they’ve been shown to be incorrect, and launch bitchy little passive-aggressive assaults in an attempt to maintain their self-image as rational and intelligent individuals.

The thing that I find so tremendously amusing about the half-educated and moderately intelligent is that they so seldom recognize the obvious limits to their knowledge and capacity for reason. They primarily concern themselves with the superficial aspects of the intellectual life rather than its substance; their conversation is replete with references to their credentials, the name-dropping of authors they haven’t really read, and ideas they only dimly recall. It was entirely typical example of this type when James claimed to have “read everything Nietzsche has written that I could get my hands on including two biographies” but nevertheless didn’t recognize the term “Preachers of Death” even though I had quoted the entire passage related to it and credited the quote to “Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, IX”. They don’t recognize or understand their own intellectual heritage because they don’t actually know much about it. So, it should be no surprise to learn that Bakker’s assumption of the superiority of his own sophistication and moral courage is neither a new nor original action:

But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.

Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.

What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? “Thou-shalt,” is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion saith, “I will.”

“Thou-shalt,” lieth in its path, sparkling with gold—a scale-covered beast; and on every scale glittereth golden, “Thou shalt!”

The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus speaketh the mightiest of all dragons: “All the values of things—glitter on me.

All values have already been created, and all created values—do I represent. Verily, there shall be no ‘I will’ any more. Thus speaketh the dragon.

My brethren, wherefore is there need of the lion in the spirit? Why sufficeth not the beast of burden, which renounceth and is reverent?

To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating—that can the might of the lion do.

To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion.

To assume the right to new values—that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey.

As its holiest, it once loved “Thou-shalt”: now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture.

Now, I obviously disagree with those who think themselves lions and pronounce themselves superior on the basis of their rejection of the values of “the great dragon”. (The Biblically astute reader will note the satanic inversion of the metaphorical images there.) Still more do I oppose those who have undergone the third metamorphosis and think to construct their own value systems capable of serving as a standard by which previous moral values can be judged. But I can only be amused by the claws of the lion kitties, who scratch harmlessly away as they attempt to build their value system on that shaky foundation which declares “doubt as the highest virtue”, especially when they do it in obvious ignorance of the well-worn path they are treading.

Bakker and his readers simply do not understand what morals and moral standards are, which is why they are not equipped to even begin the discussion from which Bakker has retreated. The irony is that Bakker was extolling the virtues of 8-bit greyscale by favorably comparing it with the crudity of the three primary colors, before turning to contemplate the unsophistication of those who he believes can only perceive those three simple colors. And in doing so, he has revealed how he completely fails to grasp that those three primary colors are all that is necessary to produce the 16.7 million colors that he cannot see.

I don’t expect Bakker and his kind to agree with me. I don’t even expect them to understand me. Let’s face it, if they couldn’t grasp the moral/color analogy, “lion kitty” is going to be about as intelligible as “hno4^d39fu”. But we can hope that perhaps one day Bakker will intellectually mature and learn that the step that follows self-questioning is answering those questions. Some people appear certain because they have never asked themselves any questions about their underlying assumptions and beliefs. Others do because they have asked all of the pertinent questions and decided upon what reason, research, and experience indicate are the best possible answers. It is apparent that Bakker can’t tell the difference… which is unsurprising considering that he cannot tell the difference between libertarian morality and conservative legality either.

One of the things I have continued to find interesting about discussing the topic of morality with those who believe that Man is capable of collective moral progression is their frequent reference to the supposed self-righteousness of those who subscribe to more conventional and traditional moral standards. Consider Ludovici’s notes on Friedrich Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which are at the end of the book in the Common translation available at Project Gutenberg.

“‘[T]he good and just,’ throughout the book, is the expression used in referring to the self-righteous of modern times, those who are quite sure that they know all that is to be known concerning good and evil, and are satisfied that the values their little world of tradition has handed down to them, are destined to rule mankind as long as it lasts.”

But what is intriguing about this nineteenth century attitude, (which is shared by many of today’s moral progressives under the false impression that it is something new), is that it is not only morally blind and philosophically ignorant, it is also logically backward. Setting aside the obvious ignorance of the basic concept of Natural Law it entails, the idea of the “self-righteous moral traditionalist” doesn’t even begin to make sense.

Think about it. If a moral tradition has been handed down from previous generations, then it quite clearly is not a subjective standard. If a man is deemed, by himself or others, to be righteous when measured against that traditional standard, he cannot reasonably be described as “self-righteous” because the standard is wholly external to the man. It is particularly absurd to attempt to claim that a Christian is “self-righteous” given that one of the primary tenets of the Christian faith is that righteousness comes only through the grace of God and the person of Jesus Christ.

A “self-righteous Christian” is an intrinsic contradiction in terms. One can reasonably call the self-righteous individual’s Christianity into account, but one cannot reasonably describe the Christian’s adherence to Christian standards as being self-righteous in any way.

Moreover, logic dictates that the accusation of self-righteousness not only can be directed, but must be directed at those who a) subscribe to a subjective moral standard of their own device by selecting bits and pieces from existing moral standards, or b) subscribe to what Bakker described as “naive moral relativism”. Their righteousness, to the extent it can even be said to exist, is entirely based on their own self-references. Therefore, we can safely conclude that the accusation of “self-righteousness” so often directed at those who subscribe to traditional moral standards by those who do not is little more than an obvious case of psychological projection. Just as liars believe everyone else is lying, those who deem themselves to be good by virtue of their own subjective moral standards believe everyone else must be self-righteous too.

As for the question of what standard of morality will rule mankind as long as it lasts, one’s opinion will depend upon whether one believes in the concept of an underlying Natural Law that can be discovered through reason, an arbitrary Divine Law that may or may not be amenable to being discovered through reason and observation, or a Dynamic Law that is created by Man, is enforced by Man’s might, and is therefore intrinsically mutable.

The logical incoherence of the moral progressives can be seen in their adherence to the Dynamic Law concept, forgetting that while its dynamic nature means it will be always changing, the direction of the change is innately indeterminate. In the end, what we see is that what the moral progressive actually means by “self-righteous” is daring to hold another individual accountable to a moral standard. But even if we resort to this practical definition, we can see that the moral progressive is always guilty of self-righteousness.

I spent a rather pleasant morning finishing de Legibus today, and was inspired to begin putting together some thoughts that I anticipate sharing at some future date. In the meantime, however, I was more than a little amused by these two passages, the first from Book One and the second from Book Two, particularly in light of having read The Moral Landscape. As a general rule, if your argument has not only been anticipated, but brutally dismissed, some 2,000 years in advance, you should probably consider rethinking it.

“As for those who go in for self-indulgence and are slaves of their own bodies – people who measure everything they should seek and avoid in life by the yardstick of pleasure and pain – even if they are right (and there is no need to take issue with them here) let us tell them to preach in their own little gardens and let us ask them to keep away for a little while from any participation in public life, an area of which they know nothing and have never wished to know anything….

What can be more certain than this, that no one should be so stupid and arrogant as to believe that reason and intelligence are present in him but not in the heavens and the world? Or that those things which are barely understood by the highest intellectual reasoning are kept in motion without any intelligence at all? As for the person who is not impelled to give thanks for the procession of the stars, the alternation of day and night, the regular succession of the seasons, and the fruits which are produced for our enjoyment – how can such a person be counted as human at all?”

I think we can be confident that the great Roman humanist would not only be unimpressed with the proposed science of morality based on the happiness/suffering metric, but like most Americans today, he would be more than a little reluctant to cast a presidential vote for an atheist.

Since Zoegirl seemed surprised at my comment that I tend towards narcissism rather than psychopathy, I thought it perhaps a modicum of evidence might be in order. So, I took an online version of the psychopathy test to see if the results on the Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised were in harmony with my admittedly biased observations. As with all tests of this sort, it is transparently easy to direct the results, but I gave honest answers that my friends and family would generally be able to confirm. The result was as follows:

Narcissus: You scored 12 on Emotional Detachment and 9 on Chaotic Lifestyle. You are not quite a psycho, but you have problems in one of the aspects of psychopathy: emotional detachment.

What I find amusing about the test is that I simply don’t see a reasonable amount of emotional detachment as any sort of problem at all, considering how many problems are observably caused by the way in which so many make use of emotion in the place of reason in their decision-making. It’s not as if I don’t have the same emotions everyone else does, I simply have the ability to take them into account or not most of the time rather than being ruled by them. What one calls emotional detachment another might as reasonably call self-control. Of course, one of my biggest challenges in relating to others over the years has been dealing with what I tend to see as a complete inability to grasp what is quite clearly in their own interest, which was why I had to construct a non-judgmental MPAI philosophical framework before I was able to find any success in convincing people of even the most obvious things.

What I’ve learned that until you can ensure that the clear-cut logical path is not in direct opposition to someone’s emotional inclinations, (or better yet, is at least somewhat in line with them), you will find it nearly impossible to convince them of what a less-biased party would consider irrefutable. This is hardly news, for as it has long been said, “one convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” But it is one thing to be familiar with the aphorism and another to actively account for it as a regular practice.

It’s almost a pity I’m not a psychopath, though, as it appears I am Incredibly Well-Read: “Your level of Well-Readliness is 100 %! *Applause* You. Are. Amazing.” If only I’d scored higher and could cook, I might have been a Hannibal Lector. On the other hand, I don’t think much of chianti. Also, note that notwithstanding the reported results, it is a 30+ score that indicates genuine psychopathy, not 20+.

It is not a new one. Sam Harris’s moralistic brand of scientific utopianism is merely the latest in a long line of philosophical ideologies that end up killing large numbers of people in an attempt to remake them. One thing I have discovered in delving deeper into what can be broadly labeled “scientific humanism” is how little its advocates realize that they are only beginning to consider important concepts that have been active matters for intensive debate by economists for two centuries.

Consider the following quote from Ludwig von Mises from Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, published in 1920:

“All socialist systems, including that of Karl Marx, and his orthodox supporters, proceed from the assumption that in a socialist society a conflict between the interests of the particular and the general could not possibly arise. Everybody will act in his own interest in giving of his best because he participates in the product of all economic activity. The obvious objection that the individual is very little concerned whether he himself is diligent and enthusiastic, and that it is of greater moment to him that everybody else should be, is either completely ignored or insufficiently dealt with by them. They believe they can construct a socialist commonwealth on the basis of the Categorical Imperative alone. How lightly it is their wont to proceed in this way is best shown by Kautsky when he says, “If socialism is a social necessity, then it would be human nature and not socialism which would have to readjust itself if ever the two clashed.”

It’s interesting how many philosophical ideologies, including scientific humanism, rely upon one form or another of this illogic. One sees some form of this argument not only made by the secular humanists of the New Atheist cabal, but also by the advocates of global corporatism and AGW/CC activists as well as the Ricardian free traders. (There is, of course, a certain amount of ideological overlap between these groups.) Ironically, those who are prone to relying upon these utopian and purely philosophical arguments almost inevitably claim to be realistic empiricists despite the fact that the observable and empirical evidence tends to be stacked rather heavily against them.

But it isn’t their ignorance that makes them dangerous. The danger lies in their inability to recognize the logical consequences of their arguments. Those who believe in the perfectibility of Man are inevitably bound to find themselves eventually advocating the culling of imperfect men.