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More On Object-Oriented Philosophy

2009-11-18T15:30:00.000-06:00

The other day I said I keep finding myself frustrated in my attempts to engage Object-Oriented Philosophy as a philosophy, rather than as an interesting blogsopheric phenomenon. In explaining why, I linked to a post by Levi Bryant titled "Mereological Considerations in Object-Oriented Ontology." In this post, Levi makes what I consider to be a very strange argument. He starts it off with this:

Now one of the criticisms that commonly emerges in response to object-oriented ontology is the critical question of why claims such as these are not dogmatic. What is it that authorizes these claims? Here my response to this challenge is not to adopt the hat of realist epistemology and make the case that we can represent the black boxes of other objects besides humans, but to show that arguments based on human black boxes are themselves speculative. First, the very fact that we have a debate as to what human black boxes contain (categories and forms of intuition, difference, power, etc), shows that we have no direct access to our own black boxes, but rather only arrive at claims about the black boxes presiding over the production of our outputs through indirect inferences. The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves. Second, by way of analogy we can make the point that speculation about what our black boxes contain are, as speculations, deeply prone to error. Take the example of computer black boxes. If I examine the output of a computer alone I might be led to make all sorts of erroneous influences. For example, when I notice that a blog contains italic and bold faced fonts I might be led to think there is a category in the programming that produces this output. However, the actual computer code that produces italics shares very little resemblance to a category or the font. The point here is that we can’t hit on accurate inferences about what black boxes contain, but that these black boxes are themselves objects of speculation and indirect inference that are not immanently or immediately accessible.

I'm sympathetic to much of this. Or at least, I'm sympathetic to the "anti-realist epistemology" part of it, and the talk of "black boxes." His computer example is a good one, because it demonstrates why introspection is problematic as a science of the mind or a science at all. All we have access to, introspectively, is output data, and even with some knowledge of the input data (though that knowledge is actually in the form of output data), there are an infinite number of ways that the black box could be configured to get from a particular input to a particular output. Or if not an infinite number, at least a whole lot, too many to place any confidence in introspective inference.

In this sense, then, I suppose it makes sense to say that our black boxes are "withdrawn." Of course, this makes for a very strange relationship: our black boxes are what we're using to understand/interpret black boxes, and therefore our black boxes withdraw from themselves. I don't know about you, but this would make me consider our black boxes as poor starting points for an analogy to other black boxes, but Levi does just that in the previous paragraph:

Apart from the thesis that the world is composed of objects– a thesis common to Harman, myself, Whitehead, and Latour –this anti-realist thesis about black boxes is at the heart of all genuinely object-oriented ontologies. Where object-oriented ontologies differ from anti-realist epistemologies is that where anti-realist epistemologies sees this input/output structure as unique to the human-world gap, object-oriented ontologies hold that this input/output relation is true of any and all relations between objects. The relation between a leaf and photons of sunlight is not structurally different than the relationship between humans and objects. Just as humans translate the world around them through their various black boxes, the leaf translates photons of sunlight, turning them into complex sugars.

If this input-output relationship is the same throughout the universe of objects, and not exclusive to human-world relations, whether the leaf's black box withdraws from itself too. And what would it mean to say that it does? Is not this difference between the black boxes of humans (and other animals) a difference that makes a difference, as Levi might say? And what about the "black boxes" that are involved in the relationship between heat energy and a compressed gas? Does the gas's black box withdraw from itself?

There seems to be something very different about the black boxes of humans and the black boxes of leaves and compressed gases, one that might actually underlie the withdrawing of our own black boxes and the other things that withdraw from us (which is to say, everything). Our black boxes reach out to other objects, and even, in a sense, to itself as an object, and it is in this reaching out that objects withdraw from us. It seems pretty clear that the black boxes of all animals reach out to some extent. Does the plants? It may be arguable, though I'm certainly not convinced. The same goes for single-celled organisms. But it seems well nigh nonsensical to say that the gas reaches out to the heat, and that the heat withdraws from the gas, or the gas's black box, or whatever it is that it withdraws from. What would this mean? I have no idea.

Which brings me to Levi's next paragraph:

So what is my argument here? My argument is that all things being equal, if we are speculating about our black boxes, if our claims about our black boxes are not “critical” claims but speculative claims, then there is no reason not to open the door to a generalized speculation that allows us to freely hypothesize about objects independent of humans and how their black boxes function. Notice the strategy of argument here. My move is not to argue, contra the last 200+ years of sophisticated anti-realist epistemology that somehow we have a mysterious immediate access to objects, but rather to show how the anti-realist position contains a speculative core at the heart of its thought.

Here is a leap from epistemology to metaphysics, and one that is difficult (in this case) to justify on its own, but is even more difficult to justify when the leap begins from an obviously flawed analogy. In addition to the problems above, the analogy seems to make all inquiry (save perhaps strictly analytic, in the "relation of ideas" sense, inquiry). It certainly makes science a "speculative" sort of inquiry. My initial reaction to Levi's reference to only Continental scholars was to point out that there is actually a science of our black box, one that uses a lot of different tools to open the black box up. Naturally, it doesn't get the whole black box, but it does illustrate a very fruitful reaction to withdrawn objects: science. That's how we understand what we understand about the leaf's "black box," the "black boxes" of compressed gases, and much of what we know about our own black box. Because our black boxes are withdrawn, we take a third-person perspective much as we would with the objects of the natural sciences. But with Levi's analogy, the sciences are now speculative in a way that is usually used precisely to contrast with empirical science.

I don't mean to imply that science is the only possible or only justified reaction to withdrawal. I'm merely suggesting that if science is speculative, what isn't? And if everything is speculative, is anything? What would non-speculative inquiry look like? And what's more, if we can actually access our black boxes by taking a third-person perspective, doesn't this again call the analogy, and therefore the argument and the leap, into question? A leaf can't pull back from a photon and take a third person perspective to see other aspects of it (and what would those aspects be, anyway? what about a photon is withdrawn from the leaf?). Again, this is because our black boxes reach out, whereas a leaf's probably doesn't.

As an aside, it might be productive in certain contexts to say that the leaf interprets the photon (though it's stretching the definition of interpretation to say so), but at that point, one has to ask what isn't interpretation, and if, as it seems this implies, everything is interpretation, why talk of objects at all?

Anyway, back to the analogy, and the argument: unless Levi can show that the black boxes of leaves and the black boxes of humans are qualitatively the same in a way that causes or invites withdrawal, his analogy fails completely. And I obviously think it does, because I think it is the qualitative difference between our black boxes and those of leaves, or at least gases --namely, the fact that our black boxes are projected into the world -- that underlies withdrawal.

Sartre and the Meaning of Life

2009-11-17T19:27:00.000-06:00

Bill Vallicella of "Maverick Philosopher" has two posts purporting to critique Sartre's existentialism, titled "Sartre's Existentialism and the Meaning of Life" (Part 1, Part 2). They both contain quick summaries of Sartre's main ideas, and thus might be interesting to someone who's never encountered Sartre (and doesn't want to read the Wikipedia article on him), but they don't really contain a critique.

Why I say this will become clear in a moment, but first let me make a general point: disagreeing with someone is not the same as critiquing them. Students often have a difficult time grasping this point, believing that if they write why they disagree with position X, they've critiqued position X, but that's not how critique works. I can say, "I think abortion should be legal because women should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies," but in doing so I haven't critiqued any arguments for the pro-life position, or even the pro-life position itself. I've simply set up my own position in contrast to it.

OK, on to Vallicella's posts, specifically the second one. After describing Sartre's distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-itself, and what this means for humanity, he writes (under the heading "critique"):

One problem, though, is that one cannot give the very fact that one exists in the first place a purpose. A healthy, well-situated adult can assign purpose to his waking life, but that he exists at all is not within the scope of his 'purposing.' I can no more 'purpose' my existence as a whole than I can cause my existence as a whole. I can do various things to maintain my existence. But I couldn't do these things if I didn't already (both logically and temporally) exist. The same goes for 'purposing': I cannot give my existence as a whole a purpose. I remain on Sartre's scheme a fundamentally purposeless purpose-positer. I cannot 'retroactively' give my life as a whole a purpose. At best I can give my lucid hours a purpose, albeit a merely subjective one. I cannot 'recuperate' my entire existence from purposelessness by assigning myself tasks in the present. For example, if I just now 'wake up' in authenticity to my radical freedom and assume the burden of making myself, this does nothing to rescue my past, all the way back to infancy, from purposelessness.

Thus my Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making. And if there is no God, then it is beyond the scope of any divine making as well. Thus the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless, purposeless, absurd. Sartre might say that this is just the way things are. But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning? At most, we give our lucid hours meaning. But the vast backdrop of our lucidity is darkness and absurdity

If Vallicella were offering an actual critique of Sartre, this would be a weird place to start, considering the fact that, for Sartre, this meaningless of life itself is precisely the point. If life itself, independent of my choosing, has meaning, then my choosing is not (absolutely) free. Therefore, while "Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making," and "the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless" is true, in that meaning only comes about through choice. For Sartre, this is a necessary condition of the freedom that is at the center of his thought. So instead of actually critiquing this position, Vallicella is simply disagreeing with it. As he puts it:

But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning?

In other words, he just doesn't find Sartre's position personally satisfying, which is hardly a critique. Vallicella wants meaning in the substratum, and Sartre can't allow it. We have two opposed positions, but nothing approaching critique.

Vallicella next tackles Sartre's position that when one chooses for oneself, one chooses for all men. As Sartre puts it:

I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

Vallicella writes:

A second problem concerns whether the central organizing purpose I choose is worthwhile. Whatever one chooses is open to doubt, and will be doubted by many. The choices I make are merely my choices and there is nothing to validate them objectively. We invent values and in so doing we invent the sense of our lives. We are creative like artists. (364) Aware of this, I must admit in all honesty that none of my choices can lay claim to being objectively worthwhile. Uncomfortable with this upshot, Sartre says repeatedly (e.g. 350) that when one chooses for oneself one chooses for all men. But he never, as far as I can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all. He remains stuck in value subjectivism.

Vallicella's contention that Sartre, "never, as far as [he] can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all" is odd since Vallicella cites Being and Nothingness and "Existentialism is a Humanism," in both of which Sartre gives this position and justifies it (extensively in the former). For example, Sartre writes in "Existentialism is a Humanism":

When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.

In other words, we choose for all when we choose for ourselves because, by choosing, we indicate that we've decided the choice we've made is the best available one in that context. This necessarily implies that, for someone else in that context, it would also be the best available choice. Therefore, by choosing for ourselves, we choose for all. Sartre goes into much more detail in Being and Nothingness. In essence, if I'm acting in good faith, then I recognize that I'm responsible for the choices which make up my life, and therefore my life. If I were to make choices only for myself, and not for others, then one of two things would be true: either I am acting in bad faith, and therefore don't recognize that I am responsible for my choice, or I recognize that I am responsible for my choices, but don't feel that others should be able to choose as I do in the given context. Take stealing for example. If I choose to steal (for fun, say, not out of necessity), then presumably if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't want someone to steal from me. So, either I fail to recognize that I'm responsible for my choice to steal (i.e., I'm acting in bad fath), or I don't feel that others should be able to choose what I have chosen because even though I've decided it's what's best for me in this context.

This is a pretty ingenious route out of "value subjectivism" into the sort of subjectivism that Sartre attributes to his existentialism, namely "that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity." If I am responsible for choosing not merely for myself but for all, then my values are not subjective in the pejorative sense, but only in the sense that there is no other way to get values but through choosing. I suspect that Vallicella would not be happy with that type of subjectivism either, as his distaste for the meaninglessness of life itself in Sartre suggests, but again, disagreeing with it is not critiquing it.

Time Square

2009-11-17T18:00:00.000-06:00

Last night I went to see Time Square at the Alamo downtown for "Music Monday." It was definitely fun, and the movie is as good as I remembered it being. Unfortunately, next week's "Music Monday" showing of Time Square will be the last, possibly ever, in 35 mm, as the Universal Studios fire last year destroyed all but one copy of the film. So Universal Studios let the Alamo use the film for a set number of dates, and after that, it goes back into storage will it will likely remain forever. So, if you're a fan of the movie, and you're in the Austin area, I definitely recommend checking it out next Monday. And if you've never seen the movie, you're missing out, because it's awesome, and it has one of the best soundtracks of any movie in the 80s.

Banging Against the Window

2009-11-10T20:33:00.000-06:00

OK, so I've really been trying to engage the object-oriented ontology (OOO, God) lately, partly because the OOOers and I share some affinities -- mostly Husserl, though, I get the impression they dig Bergson too; wonder if they read James much? -- and because I have a soft spot for speculative, well, anything (when speculative and systematic philosophy became taboo, philosophy lost much of its vitality, its life and connection there to), but mostly because I'm fascinated by the internet's role in its development, and I want to see what a set of serious philosophical ideas (or a set of sets of ideas) that has in large part come out of the blogosphere ends up looking like.

The problem is that, each time I start to engage the OOOers ideas, I quickly become frustrated. You know that scene in Bee Movie in which Seinfeld's bee keeps banging up against the window and saying, "This time! This time! This time!"? That's how I feel. I can see what's on the other side of the pane, but every time I try to get there I run into something that's difficult to see, but that completely impedes my progress. I've been struggling to figure out exactly why this is. The most obvious reason, I think, is that I don't really know why anyone should care about OOO. It's in its infancy, to say the least, and the more I read of Harman, the more I feel like his monadology for the 21st century is pretty arbitrary (it's as though he just digs Leibniz more than, say, Spinoza), and seems to create more problems that it solves, particularly with causation, which for Harman, like for Leibniz, doesn't involve objects (or individual substances, or whatever) interacting, because they never actually interact. It seems to just push causation back a step. Or as one blogger put it:

[Graham's theory of vicarious causation] not only possesses almost no explanatory value of what causation might be, but actually invents in perhaps a non-Occamian profusion, a host of objects imagined to interact in ways that are yet revealed by their author.

But to ask of a philosophy in its infancy that it solve big problems seems a bit much, and maybe I'm just missing the positive motivations (the negative ones, like doing away with anthropomorphism, are clear, even if it's not clear why the things OOO rejects are bad), so I don't think this is the reason I feel like I'm banging into a window. I think it's something else: the OOOers and I seem to speak a different literary language. I find it striking that someone like Levi Bryant can write about the "black boxes" through which we interpret the input of experience, and mention only Continental thinkers (plus Kant, a pre-empirical science of the mind thinker):

The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves.

If this were the only example, it would seem odd, but not, for someone whose education slices through Continental and analytic philosophy, frustrating. But it's a pretty common phenomenon for many OOOers: they will say "everyone" or "no one," but what they mean is "everyone/no one in the Continental tradition." I can't help but feel like it limits the problems they address and the potential solutions they consider. But maybe that's just me.

Austin Coffee Houses

2009-11-10T18:01:00.005-06:00

One of the things I like about Austin (there aren't many, to be sure) is the large number of non-Starbucks coffee shops and coffee bars throughout the city. The coffee's rarely all that good, but again, it's not Starbucks coffee, so you could do worse. I spent way too much time at four different coffee shops: JP's Java, because it's right on campus, Music Cafe, because it's near my apartment, Halcyon, because it's good for people watching and open late, and Hideout (pictured above), for reasons that I can't entirely explain.

I have a terrible habit of showing up at coffee houses when there's an event of some sort. Last week, there was a gallery opening when I decided to do some work at Music Cafe, so there I was dressed like, well, me, typing away on my laptop while everyone else was in their hyper-trendy best listening to an equally hyper-trendy guy do ironic renditions of 60s country songs. I also frequently forget that Mondays are open-mic poetry nights at Hideout, and end up half-listening to (mostly bad) poetry for an hour because I'm too lazy to get up and leave, and I'm afraid that if I leave during someone's poem they'll take it as a rejection, as though my obviously not paying attention isn't one.

There's no real point to this, other than to say that I obviously have a problem with coffee, and that for some reason, I like the atmosphere of coffee houses, even though there's no one coffee house atmosphere. Anyone in Austin who's been to the four coffee houses I listed above will know that they couldn't be more different from each other: JP's is intellectual to the point of being snobby, filled with faculty and grad students often having heady discussions about whatever it is they're studying; Music Cafe is South Austin chic; Halcyon is all about the Warehouse District nightlife, and being across from several trendy gay clubs, it's all about a very well-dressed nightlife at that; and Hideout is pseudo-Bohemian with its open-mic nights, its underground (though above the shop) improv theater in the back, and it's dirty couches. So I'm not really sure what I mean when I say that I like the "atmosphere" of coffee houses. I just can't think of any better way to explain it.

Forgetting Music

2009-11-05T22:18:00.002-06:00

How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines that even God sings songs. - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I've struggled with depression for most of my adulthood. I've had three major depressive episodes since I was 19, and in dysthymia for much of the time in between (my "depressive" days outnumber my non-depressive days, as an adult). Like anyone who's suffered from a debilitating disease for an extended period of time, I've developed coping mechanisms to make myself more productive. For example, I go for long walks by myself in the city, or alternatively, I find a wooded area, preferably one near a creek or small stream, with few signs of civilization, and sit beneath a tree for hours, sometimes with a book, sometimes just listening to the water flow. Usually if I do something like this, I will be more productive for a while afterward. It's something akin to rebooting, I think.

But the simplest and often the most effective coping mechanism I've found is listening to music. Putting on headphones and going about my day with rock, jazz, hip hop, and occasionally "roots" music, is incredibly helpful. Yet, for some reason, one of the symptoms of my depression seems to be forgetting about music. I will go months without listening to anything except when I'm in a store or restaurant with music playing. When I finally "remember" music, I'm always surprised at how it makes me feel. I don't mean "how it makes me feel" in the usual sense, but that it makes me feel. One of the persistent symptoms of depression is a lack of feeling, and music suddenly infuses my entire body with emotion, mostly positive, and it's a revelation. Why then, I wonder, do I always seem to forget music when I'm depressed?

How to Deal With New Atheists, or What's the Difference Between Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand? The Accent

2009-11-03T19:04:00.003-06:00

Last year I visited my parents for Christmas, and while I was there, my Italian mother (gifted with the Italian ability to guilt just about anyone into doing just about anything) talked me into going to church with her and my father. I hadn’t been in a church of any sort in more than a decade, and I’d never been in the sort of church they attend, a small, non-denominational church attended mostly by ex-Presbyterians, so I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. And nothing in my Catholic background could have prepared me for what I witnessed that Sunday morning: the service was basically a conversation, with the pastor talking to us like we were children (even speaking in that voice that most adults reserve for toddlers when explaining something difficult about the adult world); during musical interludes, the musicians (both of them) gave us mini-sermons on the meanings of the songs they were about to sing, using language that, to me at least, was only slightly distinguishable from Jabberwockian nonsense; and either before or after the service, almost ever person in attendance came up to me and offered to pray either for or with me.

What struck me the most about the experience, though, was not the service itself, but the “class” that took place before the service. This “class,” attended by most of the adults in the congregation, was supposed to be a sort of Bible study, headed by the pastor, but since it was the end of the year, the pastor spent most of the class issuing a challenge for the new year, and then opening the floor for discussion of the challenge. The challenge he gave them was to bring one person into the fold in the year to come. It wasn’t clear to me whether he meant one non-Christian or one non-believer, but it quickly became clear how the members of the congregation interpreted the challenge. Those who spoke up during the discussion all said they knew exactly who they were going to target, and not one of them mentioned a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or otherwise non-Christian but religious acquaintance. They all spoke of atheists. So the discussion was almost entirely about how to speak to atheists about Christ.

During this discussion it became obvious that these people had little or no experience talking to atheists, about religion or anything else. A few days later, I mentioned this to my mother, and she suggested that I write an email to the pastor giving him ideas about how to speak to non-believers. For some reason, I took this quite seriously, and started thinking about what to include in the email. I knew up front that there is no one way to talk to atheists, because there is no one sort of atheist, so I decided focused my efforts on explaining how to talk to the most visible sort of atheist, the sort that most Christians now seem to associate with atheism in general, the “New Atheists.” The only problem was, in trying to explain how to talk to this sort of atheist, I came to the realization that I myself have no idea how to talk to them.

I had tried talking to new atheists in the past. My first instinct, as is often the case, was to try to talk to them philosophically. That is, I would want to talk about epistemology and metaphysics, pointing out that the “vulgar positivism,” as someone recently referred to it, that they espouse was deeply problematic philosophically, and that while they frequently claim to believe in nothing that is not verifiable by science, in doing so they were committing themselves to epistemological and metaphysical positions that are, by their very nature, not verifiable by science. What’s more, without at least some of those assumptions, nothing at all would be verifiable by science. In other words, the science upon which they are grounding all belief was itself grounded on metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that they were, if not simply ignorant of, then at least eliding entirely.

The philosophical approach, however, had been worse than fruitless. In fact, I had usually been met with ridicule, with the new atheists telling me that I was trying to sell them quasi-religious nonsense. When I was engaged, it was usually with platitudes and silly clichés about how there is no evidence for theism, therefore atheism is one of if not the most proven positions in the history of science, nay, in the history of the world! How does one answer that claim? Other than shaking one’s head in disbelief, I have no idea. So instead I abandoned philosophical approaches, and I tried to discuss with them the psychology of religious (or at least theistic) belief, the social and cultural aspects of religion, the history of religion, the primacy of morality over metaphysics in religion, etc., but again, to no avail. Intellectual arguments were obviously pointless. The atheists of my youth, who were intellectually curious and open-minded to a fault, were nowhere to be found among these new atheists.

It was clear that I needed a different approach, then, so next I tried practical arguments. I pointed out that new atheism, with its focus on attacking religion and its strong association between science and atheism, was doing a disservice both to atheism and to science. New atheists were playing right into the hands of the American Religious Right by confirming widely held stereotypes of atheists and deeply felt mistrust of them among many evangelicals and fundamentalists (see e.g. this video). If atheists are seen as arrogant, elitist, and out to get Christians and Christianity, as many Christians believe they are, then having someone like Dawkins, who is nothing if not arrogant and elitist, and whose rhetoric can easily be interpreted as showing that he and those who follow him really are out to get Christianity and Christians (whether they are or not), can only aid those leaders on the Religious Right who seek to exploit fear of atheism and secularism to further their agenda of intolerance and anti-science. Myers, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens are little better, and in some cases, even worse. What’s more, by turning science into a religious issue, they are providing fuel for the creationists in their Intelligent Design disguise. How can those fighting against attempts to put creationism in the science classroom argue that it should be excluded on religious ground when Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, and their many, many followers are arguing that evolution leads directly to atheism (without passing Go or collecting $200)? How can we hope to educate those who have been duped by creationist “intellectuals” and public figures, if we begin by attacking their most cherished beliefs? We can’t, and we won’t, and it’s not a coincidence that the Intelligent Design movement has gained momentum, and followers, as new atheists have become more and more the public face of atheism.

Again I was met with nothing but ridicule. I was labeled a “Neville Chamberlain” atheist, an appeaser on par with the appeasers of Hitler, and told that I was more concerned about the feelings of the religious majority than I was about the Truth. During one encounter with a Dawkins/Myers acolyte (at Netroots Nation '08), I was told, after stating my position that Dawkins and Myers were harmful to atheists, that my appeasing of the religious made him sick, and that he couldn't even look at me, much less discuss the issue any further. And at that point I was out of ideas. If neither intellectual nor practical arguments cant even spark discussion with, much less reflection in, new atheists, then my arsenal is bare.

Then a thought struck me: where had I seen something like this before? Where had I seen a complete lack of intellectual curiosity coupled with a blind certainty and hostility to even the slightest dissent? Among the Randians, of course! For a Randian, there is only one correct conclusion, only one correct world-view, and any other possible viewpoint is to be ridiculed or ignored. Dissent, even among those who hold similar viewpoints (not simply other libertarians, but even Randians who dare to question one or more aspect of the Objectivist orthodoxy), cannot be tolerated. And there are deeper similarities between the Randians and the new atheists. They also share a seemingly willful philosophical naiveté, a distrust of anything even remotely speculative, a blind commitment to Reason (as embodied in the scientific method, for the new atheists) and objectivism broadly construed (in both cases, in the form of a strange rationalist-empiricist admixture), and a complete disinterest in history, either intellectual or cultural, except to the extent that it confirms their prejudices (e.g. there have been religious wars, therefore religion kills people). And I should have seen these similarities before, too, because there are more than a few fans of Rand among the new atheists.

Once I saw this obvious analogy between the New Atheists and Randians, I knew exactly how to deal with the New Atheists: ignore them. You can’t talk to a Randian. Talking to a Randian is like talking to a brick wall, only brick walls can produce an echo so that you at least know that it received the sound of your voice. When talking to a Randian, even that is too much to ask. And you certainly can’t convince him (they’re almost all male) that anything he believes is wrong, so the best way to deal with him is to simply ignore what him. This, then, is the best way to deal with the new atheists as well: ignore them. Granted, individually ignoring them doesn’t solve the problem of them being in the public eye. That is a different sort of problem. As long as their message is one designed to be maximally controversial, they will get media attention, their books will sell, they will attract followers among the Randian-type social and cultural malcontents, and they will be seen as the spokespeople for atheism, regardless of whether they are being engaged directly. This means that we, those atheists who find their message as appalling as those of the most intolerant religious zealots, shouldn’t stop publicly engaging their message -- it’s up to us to counteract its influence, and to clean up its mess -- but we should engage the ideas, not the people, because engaging the purveyors of the ideas is pointless, utterly so. They will simply shout us down with insults and frame us as traitors to our own cause. Pithy insults and fiery rhetoric will always beat out careful reasoning and thoughtful discussion in a world of sound-bites and short attention spans. So we should create an atmosphere in which the new atheists are essentially talking to themselves, either in the form of other new atheists, or in the form of the fundamentalists on the other side of the religious spectrum.

And this goes for those among the religious whose reaction to the new atheists is not simply a knee-jerk “Ooh, atheists are evil!” as well. They should feel, for the sake of dialogue between the religious and the a-religious, and for the sake of the promotion of science and science education, that the new atheists’ message must be engaged. But they shouldn’t feel the least bit compelled to engage it by engaging new atheists themselves, because doing so is as pointless for them as it is for us.

So when I finally wrote that letter to my parents’ pastor, it was short and sweet. I told him that he must recognize that “atheist” is not a homogenous category, and that there is therefore no one way to talk to us about religion or any other topic. I told him that he and his congregation should treat us like adult human beings, respecting us by engaging us in dialogue, rather than preaching or lecturing us about the wonders of Christ. Who knows, in actually discussing religion with us, they might learn something, and their minds might be changed too. But, I warned, if you or one of your parishioners should come across an atheist who answers anything you say with ridicule, the best thing you can do is move on to the next one, because with this sort of person, no meaningful dialogue is possible, no learning will take place on either side, and everyone’s time will be wasted.

A Few Only Slightly Connected Thoughts on Rand

2009-11-02T20:43:00.001-06:00

1a.) This New York Times review of a new Ayn Rand biography has been getting pretty harsh treatment in the blogosphere. Most of the criticism is over this passage:

Brandon of Siris, D.A. Ridgely of Positive Liberty, Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy, and several other conservative and libertarian bloggers have pointed out that nothing in this passage implies a contradiction. Brandon’s is the most thorough of these rebuttals.

1b.)Brian Leiter has also criticized Kirsch, the author of the review, for claiming that there is an affinity between the thought of Rand and Nietzsche. He writes:

I’ve always found the positive comparison of Rand to Nietzsche by Randians frustrating, because I’ve never seen any affinity between the two thinkers (they seem completely incompatible, in fact, as Leiter points out), but the comparison is so common that it’s not surprising to see Kirsch invoke it. Still, I’d love to see Rand-Nietzsche meme die, and articles like this in major publications do nothing to hasten that death.

2.) I last read Rand almost 12 years ago. I read The Fountainhead in high school, and found it boring, so I had no intention of reading anything else by Rand. But when I went off to college, I met a bunch of young Randians, and people were frequently suggesting, even demanding, that I read her books. My uncle, for example, upon hearing that I was majoring in philosophy, insisted that I would love Rand (I haven‘t read any of his book suggestions since!). Others thought I would love Rand because of my affinity for Nietzsche. So, I broke down and read Atlas Shrugged.

At the time, I was working as an undergraduate research assistant in a lab during the summer, and was in charge of running one of the lab’s many experiments. The experiment had to be run at the same time every day, and the cruel graduate student I was working under chose to run it at 7 am, so every morning I woke up way too early, showered, and then walked over to the lab armed only with my copy of Atlas Shrugged. I would start the experiment, and then sit and read for the 90 minutes the experiment ran. Reading for 90 minutes a day, it still took me an entire month to get through the book (Galt’s long speech was particularly slow going). That experiment and that book will forever be united in my memory as wholly unpleasant experiences.

I found the book to be worse than awful as a novel, and the philosophy it presented to be even worse than that, but thought that Rand’s obvious lack of talent as a novelist might get in the way of her presenting her philosophy, so I went to the library and checked out some of her philosophical works, The Virtue of Selfishness, i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I forced myself to read through all three, and came away even less impressed with her philosophy (if that was possible). My impressions of her philosophy ranged from finding it thoroughly uninteresting to being offended by it and horrified that she was so widely read. I sometimes wonder if, now that I’m older, my impression of her would be different were I to revisit her books, but my impression was so bad then that I don’t think it’s worth my time to find out.

3.) Anyway, since I haven’t read her or even thought about her work seriously in so long, I can’t really speak intelligently about her philosophy, but the much maligned passage in Kirsch’s review got me thinking about the issue of living the philosophical life that I wrote about last week. Did Rand live a life consistent with her philosophy? Kirsch was obviously trying to imply that she didn’t, but those more familiar with Rand’s work than I have been pretty vehement in insisting that he was wrong in the particular case he chose as an example. Still, Rand’s biographers often highlight the cultish atmosphere that surrounded her close followers, and that she herself promoted. Part of this cultish atmosphere was a complete lack of tolerance for dissent. It was Rand’s way or the highway, with she and her closest followers excommunicating even mildly dissenting members of her sect, and demanding that the remaining members cut off all contact with the excommunicated (even when they were close family members, or spouses!). As a philosopher whose most popular teaching is one of radical individualism, this does seem problematic, does it not?

Or maybe not. I wonder if the perception of Rand as a promoter of individualism is a mistaken one, and that her stifling of individual thought is therefore perfectly consistent with her philosophy. If I remember correctly, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroes, Dagny Taggert, Hank Rearden, and John Galt, all thought alike, and Taggert’s affinity for Rearden was largely due to the fact that their world-views were identical. What’s more, anyone who didn’t share that world view was treated quite harshly in the novel. So maybe Rand’s individualism has less to do with thought than with action: it is about the virtue of selfishness, and acting on one’s own behalf, rather than making up one’s own mind, because for Rand, when one uses reason properly, there is only one set of conclusions that one can possibly come to. If that’s the case, to the extent that Rand’s individualism has to do with thinking for oneself, it is not thinking originally, but coming to the right conclusions independent of the destructive ideas that dominate our culture.

Rural Post

2009-11-01T20:15:00.002-06:00

I love this image from Old Picture of the Day (click for a larger view):

I'm not sure why I love it so much. It could be the details: the mud splatter on the coach, the fact that the coach has a front window (presumably because of the mud spatter; I can't imagine he drives fast enough to get bugs in his teeth), the curious look on the children, the leafless trees, etc. Or it could be that the whole scene reminds me a lot of what my hometown looked like when I was a young child, when many of the roads were still unpaved, and trees like the ones in the picture still dominated the landscape. Granted, the mail man wasn't driving around in a horse and buggy, but the picture still induces a distinct feeling of nostalgia in me, particularly since my hometown doesn't look anything like this picture anymore. You'd be hard pressed to find a dirt road, and the city has become incredibly overdeveloped, so that you have to go out of the city limits to find that many trees of that age in the same place (I'd guess those trees are 50-70 years old; they don't look like old growth).

Leiter on Romano on Heidegger; And the Philosopher Who Lives Philosophy

2009-10-28T17:26:00.007-05:00

Leiter weighs in, in his usual acerbic fashion. He adds little to the discussion, but as usual, his vitriol makes his efforts amusing.

The discussion that has resulted from Romano's article reminded me of something Nietzsche once wrote in "Schopenhauer as Educator" (Dan Brezeale's translation; emphasis mine):

I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. That he is capable of drawing whole nations after him through his example is beyond doubt; the history of Indian, which is almost the history of Indian philosophy, proves it. But this example must be supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books--in the way, that is, in which the philosophers of Greece taught, through their bearing, what they wore and ate, and their morals, rather than by what they said, let alone what they wrote. how completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is lacking in Germany!

Writing this in an essay on Schopenhauer seems appropriate, since, as a rabid misogynist, he had no problem throwing his landlady down the stairs. When she died, and he no longer had to pay her restitution, he famously wrote in his account book, "Obit anus, abit onus," the pretentious 19th century equivalent of saying, "The bitch is dead, the I don't have to pay anymore" (literally more like, "The asshole is dead, the burden departed"). So he was certainly living that aspect of his philosophy.

More to the point, this sentiment seems somewhat strange in 2009, when the vast majority of professional philosophers are working on issues that would be difficult to reflect in their outward lives--in the way that they carry themselves, in what they wear, eat, etc. How, for example, might one wear clothes reflective of one's position on whether the denotation of a predicate is its extension or its intension? What should predicate dualists or eliminative materialists eat? In a time when philosophy has become an increasingly specialized discipline, and increasingly removed from life, it has become increasingly difficult to know what living a philosophy would entail, to say nothing of actually doing so.

Still, I think there's something important in the sentiment that a philosopher should live his or her philosophy, to the extent that a philosopher's philosophy is relevant to living. If nothing else, a philosopher living in a way that is not only consistent with, but actually reflects his or her philosophy shows that he or she takes it quite seriously, and suggests that we, as their readers, should take it seriously as well.

One can apply this maxim to much of systematic philosophy, and to much of the generally asystematic Continental tradition. Heidegger's philosophy, which both systematic and as part of that tradition, is certainly is relevant to living, and thus it's not inappropriate to ask whether he lived in a way that reflected it. We might, for example, explore how well Heidegger's life reflected one of the central ideas in his philosophy, the concept of authenticity (eigentlich), and one of its primary components, "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), in his siding with the Nazi's largely for reasons of personal and professional gain, his efforts to get us to ignore this episode in his life while refusing to apologize for it, his treatment of his friends Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuese, and Karl Jaspers (during the Nazi years, treating them rather poorly, even insulting them, but afterward, when his reputation was in need of repair, calling on them to come to his aid), etc.

Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that resoluteness, again part of authenticity, is "letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty." He had in mind a sort of existential guilt (not unlike original sin, I suppose), in this part of Being and Time, but sees this existential guilt as the ground for all feelings of responsibility and guilt. Yet Heidegger refused to admit responsibility, or show any form of guilt, when it came to his Nazism and other blatantly immoral personal and professional behavior. His refusal to apologize to the very people he'd most directly harmed, his friends and students like Arendt, Jaspers, and Marcuse, shows this quite clearly. Is this Heidegger failing to live his philosophy, or at least an important aspect of it? It's difficult to draw any other conclusion.

How much, then, can we profit from him as a philosopher? How seriously should we take his philosophy in light of the fact that he so blatantly failed to live in accordance with it? I assume we could forgive small indiscretions. Philosophers are no more perfect than any other human beings. But Heidegger's indiscretions were anything but small. At this point, the fact that Heidegger's thought has been so influential probably renders his living of it irrelevant from a historical perspective. We can profit greatly from it in understanding the work of those who came after him. But I am interested in philosophy first and foremost from an individual perspective: what does it tell me about the world, myself, and life in general that I can use in my own life? There is no doubt in my mind that I can take bits and pieces from Heidegger to inform my own thinking (I frequently use his lectures on the Principle of Sufficient Reason in my own thinking on science and ontology, e.g.), but Heidegger's own failure to live his philosophy makes me skeptical of his project as a whole. I don't think his personal failures constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting his philosophy, of course, but it is certainly one rather large quarrel in the critic's quiver.

What do you think?

Added (Slightly) Later: The example I gave is not meant to be the only one in which Heidegger's life is relevant to his philosophy. Nor is "seriousness" meant to be the only reason why living a philosophy is relevant to what we take away from it. Nietzsche himself gives us more reasons in Beyond Good and Evil when he talks of the prejudices of philosophers. A philosophers personality will inevitably be reflected in his or her philosophy, but sometimes indirectly: a philosophy, for example, may be designed to make a philosopher seem like an extremely moral, erudite, or principled person, when in fact he or she is an unprincipled, immoral jerk. In Heidegger's case, his borrowing of terminology from the Nazis (mentioned in the Romano comment thread) show quite clearly how his life affected his books, and therefore how his life is relevant to how we read them, and how much we will profit from them.

A Little Rant About Racism in Austin

2009-10-27T22:05:00.006-05:00

I grew up in a small town in the Old South in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. During my early, formative years, open, public racism abounded. It was not uncommon to hear the n-word spoken in public, or to hear horribly racist jokes told loudly in a restaurant. Many of the white people in town (about 60% of the town's population) genuinely considered black people (most of the other 40%) to be inferior, and would tell this to anyone who'd listen. Their children sopped up their racism, of course, and when I was in elementary school it was not uncommon for their to be fights caused by racism. The Confederate battle flag was everywhere, and I mean everywhere. My schools mascot, from middle school on, was a Rebel, and in both my junior high and high school gyms (where I played on the basketball teams), rebel flags were painted on the walls. By the time I got to high school, though, things had changed dramatically. GM's Saturn plant had opened nearby, resulting in an influx of new residents mostly from northern states, who were less tolerant of explicit racism. Even before that, a change in attitude had been slowly occurring, and by 11th grade in high school, a petition circulated, and was ultimately signed by about 2/3s of the students, the change the mascot (the school's administration, and then the school board, ultimately rejected the change, and the school's mascot is still a Rebel). There was a bit of a countermovement -- my senior year, a group of white students produced "senior" shirts that displayed the rebel flag with a message about being proud of our southern heritage -- but for the most part, by the mid-90s, explicit racism was no longer tolerated. It has been years since I heard the sorts of things I used to hear regularly in the 80s.

Now I live in Austin, TX, an ostensibly liberal city that certainly isn't known for its racism. It should be, because institutional racism is a big problem here, but it isn't. To see this one need only look at the police shootings of the last several years, Austin's nearly complete racial segregation, or the fact that the police presence is fairly small at the mostly white SxSW music and film festival, while the police presence is mind-bogglingly large during the mostly black Texas Relays, which is considerably smaller than SxSW, that takes place a week or two after SxSW. This year, several businesses even chose to close their doors during the Relays, including a reggae club (saying that, in essence, black people don't like reggae) and an entire friggin' mall, citing security concerns, despite the fact that statistically the SxSW crowd produces much more crime than the Relays crowd. But Austin's racism is 21st century racism: it's acted on, often very subtly, but it's rarely if ever openly voiced, and therefore if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.

Today, however, I ran into one man who proudly wears his racism, on his jacket. He was riding the 1L bus from South Park Meadows (in the far south of Austin) wearing a jacket on which he and, if I were guessing, his friends had penned several symbols and phrases, including "White Warriors," "Aryan Knight," and the SS lightning bolt symbol (in several places), along with several anarchy symbols (because nothing is more compatible with the most fervently loyal military wing, the SS, of one of history's worst authoritarian regimes, the Nazis, than anarchy!). I honestly hadn't seen anything like this in years. I had seen KKK and skinheads at rallies, but not just walking around in public, proudly displaying their racism. I found it both disturbing and incredibly offensive. It's upsetting that in 2009, more than 50 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It's just mind-boggling.

The picture was taken without his permission, but fuck the racist bastard, I don't care. I know it's kind of hard to read, because my camera phone sucks, but the word after "White" is "Warriors," and underneath that it says, "King of Kings," and then, "Aryan Knight." The "A" in "Aryan" has been turned into the anarchy symbol. Just above the word "knight" is one of several SS lightning bolt symbols. If you're in Austin, and ride the 1L, be sure to let this guy know what you think of his white supremacist views if you see him.

A friend of mine told me that she prefers that racists be open, because at least then you know what you're getting. But I had always thought the fact that racism had become so shameful that the vast majority of racists were afraid to show their, shall we say, true colors in public, was a good thing. But this guy shows that not everyone has gotten that message, and thus reminds me of just how far we have to go in this country before we can say we're living in a "post-racial" society. Ugh. And I'm afraid that this is the sort of thing that Austin's city government, police force, and many of its businesses, encourage when they tacitly approve of racism through their actions and inaction.

Interesting Comment From a Mormon Opponent of Intelligent Design

2009-10-27T21:46:00.004-05:00

From a post (via) on Michael Behe's talk at BYU:

So called, Intelligent Design is not just the idea that there is a Creator. I think Mormons look at the label “Intelligent Design” created by the evangelical Discovery Institute and think, “Hey we think God was Intelligent! We must believe in Intelligent Design too!!” No. Their intelligent designer has nothing to do with the glory and beauty of our conception of God. Thiers is a bit of a hack who couldn’t get creation right the first time and has to keep dabbling with the process to get it right.

I've never heard that take on Intelligent Design before. Definitely an interesting way to look at it.

Two Kinds of Books on Nietzsche

2009-10-26T23:31:00.004-05:00

Do you seek warmth of me? Come not too close, I counsel, or your hands may burn. For look! My ardor exceeds the limit, and I barely restrain the flames from leaping from my body!

I've spent a lot of time reading the secondary literature on Nietzsche, and I keep coming away with the impression that there are two types of books on Nietzsche. I write that sentence with trepidation, because when someone begins a statement with, "There are two types of..." you can be fairly certain that whatever follows is false. So I don't really mean that there are only two types of books on Nietzsche, just that I tend to classify books on his work into two types.

OK, even that's not true. There are at least three types: really, really bad books on Nietzsche, and OK to good books on Nietzsche that can be classified into two types. The really, really bad books on Nietzsche are the most common type. For example, I just finished reading Prophets of Extremity by Allan Megill. It's an interesting book in its own way, I suppose, but as a book on Nietzsche (or a book with chapters on Nietzsche), it's awful. It's one of those frequent attempts to "postmodernize" Nietzsche, by focusing entirely on his immature aestheticism, and to make that aestheticism into some strange ontology that seems wholly alien both to Nietzsche and to anyone else writing before 1970. For anyone who's actually read Nietzsche, this sort of book is frustratingly bad. Then there's Heidegger's multi-volume series on Nietzsche, which again tries to turn him into a metaphysician, but this time relying almost exclusively on a book that Nietzsche didn't even publish (or write, even) himself: The Will to Power. For Heidegger, this Will to Power is the core of Nietzsche's metaphysics (volume III of the series is even titled "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics"). When you make a concept that appears only rarely in a thinker's published writings the central component of his or her philosophy, you've If you read all four volumes, you will come away asking yourself, "Did Heidegger and I read the same Nietzsche, or was he reading some Bizarro Nietzsche who'd never written The Gay Science or Beyond Good and Evil?"

So when I say that there are two types of books on Nietzsche, I mean there are two types of books on Nietzsche that have some redeeming value as Nietzsche scholarship or independent philosophy. The first type is exemplified by Walter Kauffmann's dry, plodding, and conservative, but excellent and indespensible Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist. This was the first book on Nietzsche that I read, and I've gone back to it repeatedly over the years. It is thorough, it is accurate if at times controversial, and it provides an excellent companion to Nietzsche's own writings, as well as providing excellent pieces of biographical information. This category thus includes books that are fairly straightforward attempts to interpret and situate Nietzsche as a philosopher (or a psychologist, or an Antichrist). They can be relatively dull, particularly when compared to Nietzsche's writings, but they're informative, and reading them can help you a great deal in making your way through an incredibly complex thinker's writings. In this category I would also include most of the more recent books by English-speaking philosophers, like Brian Leiter's book on Nietzsche and morality, the Richardson and Leiter edited volume on Nietzsche, Rudiger Safranski's "philosophical biography," and Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (I'd include Nehemas' book, but it's a sort of tweener).

The second category has fewer members, but I tend to enjoy them much, much more. These books generally don't get all, or even most of the details about Nietzsche right, or they focus exclusively on one aspect of his writing and therefore provide a highly incomplete picture. So they shouldn't be read in order to understand the content of Nietzsche's thought. What these books do, instead, is capture the spirit of Nietzsche, the spirit of the "gay science," of the eternal return, Nietzsche as Antichrist, of giving birth to a dancing star. The book I place most firmly in this category is Georges Bataille's On Nietzsche (which begins with the quote above, from Nietzsche's unpublished notes). In the preface, Bataille openly admits that his book is not an attempt at formal exegesis, but an attempt "to draw out consequences of a lucid doctrine impelling and attracting me to it as if to the light." It is written in his own blood, he says, as Nietzsche's works were. It is not merely a critical reading of Nietzsche, but an "experiencing" of Nietzsche, in an effort to work out what Nietzsche has wrought inside Bataille, and which is driving him to insanity. And it is absolutely wonderful to read. I discovered it in a library, years ago. I started reading it early in the afternoon, and became so engrossed that I read it from start to finish, leaving late in the evening. The next day, I went out and bought a copy of my own, which I go back to as often as I go back to Kauffmann.

Another book that I would place firmly in this category is Graham Parkes' Composing the Soul which, while fairly accurate in its description of Nietzsche's writings, is also extremely limited in that description. It focuses entirely on the psychological dimension in Nietzsche, arguing, to some extent accurately and to some extent futilely, that this is the fundamental dimension of his work. But more than an attempt at exegesis, it is a wonderful exploration of both Nietzsche's mind and the mind in general, and a joy to read. It is even moving, at times, as when it discusses Nietzsche's post-insanity letters. You wouldn't recommend this book to anyone starting out with Nietzsche, because it would certainly steer them in the wrong direction, but for those who like to read, and who are very familiar with Nietzsche, it's a must read. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy is another example of this type of book, though Deleuze is hardly the writer that Battaile was or Parkes is. Reading Deleuze is a usually struggle (Difference and Repetition has to be the most frustrating book I've ever read), and this book is no exception, but it's still inspiring, if not entirely accurate.

Object-Oriented Philosophy

2009-10-25T09:04:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to write a post about object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and speculative realism (SR), but have found it difficult to do so, in part because I keep coming off somewhat mean, and in part because I keep writing way, way too much for a blog post. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of OOP and SR, if only because I'm very sympathetic to speculative philosophy, and I have a soft spot for new ideas (even if they aren't yet so radically new). Plus, I consider myself a realist, though of an somewhat different sort, I think I (I'm a direct realist). But I'm firmly wedded to my anthropocentrism, and I'm not totally averse to what speculative realists call "correlationalism" (see the link above for their definition of this term), so my sympathy only goes so far. Whatever my level of sympathy, I did really enjoy at least the first part^* of Graham Harman's essay on Husserl and Lovecraft (scroll down to page 332), which I definitely recommend reading. Like I said, I dig speculative philosophy.

But what I find truly fascinating of OOP, regardless of what I think of it as a philosophy, is the role that the internet has played in its development. So before I say anything about OOP as a philosophy, I point you to this summary of that role. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in the possibilities that the blogosphere has to offer to serious scholarship.

*Towards the end, he starts criticizing Husserl for not being enough of a realist, which is where my interest started to wane. I recall Camus saying just the opposite: that Husserl was too much of a realist. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't, eh?

Does Martin Heidegger's Nazism Mean We Should Exclude Him From Philosophy?

2009-10-24T16:16:00.005-05:00

This is a question I pose to the couple of people who seem to be repeat visitors, and to anyone who happens by via Google: Does Heidegger's enthusiasm Nazism mean he shouldn't be considered a philosopher? This is the position taken by a recent article by Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in a book by Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger's Nazism. From the article:

"We must acknowledge," Faye says in one fierce conclusion, "that an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher." Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger Industry: "If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?"

To me, this seems like an dangerous position to take. I have no patience with those, including Heidegger himself, who would attempt to explain away or dismiss his Nazism of the 1930s. It is simply inexcusable, and to ignore it is to act as though it has already been excused. What's more, to ignore it is to fail to fully engage some of his most important philosophical works, including Being and Time and his Introduction to Metaphysics. One can be influenced by Heidegger without being influenced by his Nazism, but one can't read Heidegger without reading his Nazism. To do so would be the like reading only the pages of Heart of Darkness that have beautiful descriptions of nature, because all that stuff about the psychology of evil is too depressing. You couldn't then say, "I've read Heart of Darkness," because you haven't.

That said, when Faye writes, "If his writings continue to proliferate... how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?", he is being either obtuse or absurd, or both. I'm quite sure Faye's aware that Heidegger's writings played little or no role in the actual rise of Nazism. Heidegger was, if anything, following on the heels of that rise in a blatantly self-serving manor. It's despicable, and shows Heidegger to be a horrible human being, but it doesn't make him responsible for Nazism. Yet when Faye states that we can expect, if his writings are allowed to be read, "yet another translation into facts and acts," the words "yet another translation" seems to imply that the first instance was also a translation of Heidegger's writings into facts and acts.

There's also something disturbing about his suggestion that we should hide Heidegger away, because he wrote about Nazism in the 1930s, as though we're not strong enough to read those passages and not immediately, or at least over time, gravitate towards National Socialism. But it is not the job philosophers, or librarians, or even publishers, to hide away ideas that we don't like, even if those ideas celebrate obvious evils. Those are the ideas in most need of engagement, and refutation. Hiding them away is more of an invitation for someone to develop them again than reading and openly criticizing them ever will be.

The history of philosophy is replete with justifications and endorsements of evil: Plato advocated infanticide in the Republic, Hume was openly racist (see here for a good discussion), and Schopenhauer wrote the mindbogglingly misogynist essay "On Women" (and he pushed his landlady down the stairs!), yet few would advocate that we should stop reading Plato, Hume, or Schopenhauer because they thought infanticide was a good idea, were racists, or were misogynists, and only slightly more would advocate that they are bad philosophers for these reasons. These things shouldn't be ignored, and should certainly figure into an evaluation of their work, but they shouldn't be the only factors considered. Yet because of his celebration of Nazism, Romano and Faye believe not simply that Heidegger should be considered a bad philosopher, but that he shouldn't be considered a philosopher at all.

I can't close out this post without noting one thing. If you're going to label someone a bad philosopher, you should probably have at least a rudimentary understanding of their core ideas and concepts. Ramono apparently doesn't believe this, as in his article, while discussing the various ways in which Heidegger's philosophy has been praised, he writes:

Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.)

Anyone who's ever read Being and Time, or even the Cliff Notes, will know that "Dasein" does not mean "Human Being." "Dasein" literally means "being there." It's true that "Dasein" refers to the exclusively human mode of being, but referring to human being as Dasein, and describing it as such, is what people are praising in Heidegger's thought, because they see it as opening up new philosophical avenues in the study of being in general and human being in particular. You might think it's not a very productive way of talking about the being of human beings, but simply dismissing it as a fancy way of saying "human being" is no way to address even a bad philosophy.

Sports Prescience

2009-10-24T15:32:00.003-05:00

Sports predicting is notoriously difficult, and baseball is probably the most difficult sport to predict. That's what makes what Seattle Mariners' announcer Mike Blowers did in the pregame show for a game between the Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays on September 27 of this year so amazing. He predicted that the Mariners' rookie third baseman Matt Tuiasosopo would get his first Major League home run in the game. He didn't stop there, though. He predicted in what at bat he would get it (his second), on what count (3-1, or 1-3 for you Koreans), on what kind of pitch (fastball), and where the home run would go (left field, maybe the second deck).

When Tuiasosopo came up to bat for the second time, in the 5th inning, he took the count to 3-1, and Blowers' co-announcer Dave Niehaus began joking about the prediction. Then Tuiasosopo hit the ball hard to left field, and Niehaus went crazy, yelling "I don't believe it. I see the light!" The ball ended up just short of the second deck.

You can listen to the audio of both the pregame show and the 5th inning at bat here.

There Is Nothing Here Which Is Not Zeus

2009-10-22T16:12:00.005-05:00

Here's another translation of that final passage from Women of Trachis, by Michael Jameson, and this time in verse (and I like it much better that way), which I found in an article (JSTOR) on "The Euthyphro Dilemma":

You see how little compassion the Gods
have shown in all that's happened; they
who are called our fathers, who begot us,
can look upon such suffering.
No one can foresee what is to come.
What is here now is pitiful for us
and shameful for the Gods;
but of all men it is hardest for him
who is the victim of this disaster.
Maiden, come from the house with us.
You have seen a terrible death
and agonies, many and strange, and there is
nothing here wish is not Zeus.

What I've learned between writing the previous post yesterday and writing this one today is that there has been a great deal of discussion for some time (like, centuries worth) about whether these last lines (spoken by Heracles' son Hyllus) are meant as an indictment of the gods, or whether Hyllus (and Sophocles) believed that Heracles deserved his fate, and that the gods were acting justly in punishing him so harshly. Since I don't read Greek, I'm hesitant to say which side I fall on. The differences in the two translations show how difficult it is for someone who doesn't read Greek to determine how this passage should be interpreted. One calls the gods' actions "shameful," the other refers to their "cruelty." "Shameful" certainly implies that the gods weren't acting justly; "cruelty" is more ambiguous, though it certainly implies a displeasure with what the gods have done, possibly because it's unjust, or maybe just because it's happening to Hyllus' own family. But these translations are themselves interpretations of Sophocles, so you can't put too much stock in them when trying to figure out what Sophocles himself was trying to say.

Even so, these lines in English, and the play itself, are still interesting in light of the Problem of Evil, and, as the article in which I found this translation suggests, may have contained just the sort of "conception of the divine" that Plato/Socrates was considering in the Euthyphro, from which the Euthyphro Dilemma (which is, it should be noted, not entirely true to the dialogue itself) is taken. What's more, since the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Problem of Evil are not entirely unrelated, Sophocles' play might serve as a useful stimulant for thought on the issues they raise.

Yea, For Thou Art Breaking the Slumber of My Plague

2009-10-22T10:28:00.000-05:00

Women of Trachis (The Trachiniae) is by no means Sophocles' most famous tragedy today (Antigone and the two Oedipus plays, particularly Oedipus Rex, are much more widely read), but it's my favorite for some reason. And not just because Ezra Pound published a, shall we say "creative" translation of it, and I happen to be a Pound fan. It really is an amazing play, full of great lines like the one I used for the title of the post. But at the end of the post I'll get to something I'd never really thought about the play until now. First, a short summary.

The story is pretty simple. Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans) is always out fighting and conquering people, and his wife Deïanira isn't happy about it. One day, while Heracles is still out doing his fighting thing, one of his servants brings home several women as slaves that Heracles had captured in his last conquest. One of the women, Iole, is strikingly beautiful, and is "conspicuous among" the others. Deïanira soon learns that the whole reason Heracles had conquered the women's land was to obtain Iole. This of course makes Deïanira jealous, and she decides to use a love spell that had been given to her by a centaur who had, as she was going to marry Heracles, captured her. Heracles heard her cry when the centaur grabbed her, and killed the centaur with an arrow. The centaur then said:

If thou gatherest with thy hands the blood clotted round my wound, at the place where the Hydra, Lerna's monstrous growth, hath tinged the arrow with black gall,- this shall be to thee a charm for the soul of Heracles, so that he shall never look upon any woman to love her more than thee.

He tells her exactly what she has to do, and so when she finds out about Iole, she makes a robe from the blood, and then sends it to Heracles with the instructions that the robe shouldn't be in sunlight, and only Heracles can wear it.

Soon after sending the robe, Deïanira starts to feel guilty, and throws the remaining centaur blood away, out into the sun, where it immediately begins to boil. She realizes the centaur tricked her, but it's too late, Heracles put the robe on, and was badly burned. Deïanira kills herself out of guilt, and Heracles' suffering is so great that he ends up having himself burned to death. Not a happy ending, but then again, it is a tragedy.

I told you all of that, to tell you this. The last lines of Women of Trachis seems like an ancient Greek version of the "Problem of Evil." Here are the lines (from R.C. Jebb's prose translation, which you can read here, and from which I took the above quote as well; emphasis is mine):

Lift him, followers! And grant me full forgiveness for this; but mark the great cruelty of the gods in the deeds that are being done. They beget children, they are hailed as fathers, and yet they can look upon such sufferings. No man foresees the future; but the present is fraught with mourning for us, and with shame for the powers above, and verily with anguish beyond compare for him who endures this doom.

Maidens, come ye also, nor linger at the house; ye who have lately seen a dread death, with sorrows manifold and strange: and in all this there is nought but Zeus.

Apparently even the Greeks were in need of theodicy.

And the Most Despicable Person On the Planet Is...

2009-10-21T02:00:00.002-05:00

Bill Donohue. Apparently, if you're not zealously anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-creativity, anti-Democratic Party, anti-religious freedom, and anti-diversity, you hate America, its culture, Christians, and most importantly, Catholics. I hope most Catholics feel nothing but contempt for this man who wants us to believe he speaks for them.

If you read that article, you're going to feel very dirty, so in order to make you feel better, I give you this man, who is Donohue's opposite, and his better, in every way:

Ye are many—they are few

2009-10-20T16:18:00.005-05:00

From Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

I've always loved that stanza, and the whole poem. My favorite part of the poem, though, is the last two stanzas:

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again—again—again—

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.'

A 21st Century Investigation of the Conditions of All Possible Experience?

2009-10-20T00:33:00.002-05:00

I remember reading some research on creativity a several years ago, a topic I'm interested in and fascinated by for a variety of reasons, and being struck by one of the claims. Repeatedly, researchers discussed and empirically studied the representations of aliens and mythical creatures by writers and artists in a variety of genres (science fiction, fantasy, comic books, etc.). They concluded that these representations shared several features, one of which was bilateral symmetry, and argued that this is because our creativity is limited by our experience.

After spending some time with the creativity literature and feeling like I had a good grasp of it, I brought it up at a party attended by several biologists. A couple overheard what I was saying, and took issue with it. Specifically, when I brought up the point about bilateral symmetry, they both began to vehemently disagree with me.. They went on and on about how what I was describing wasn't a limit of creativity, it was a limit of biology, and provided me with a laundry list of reasons why extraterrestrial creatures were likely to exhibit bilateral symmetry. At the time I thought they had simply missed the point, but I'm no longer so sure.

In my perhaps warped mind, this discussion got me thinking about Kant. Ever since I had taken a course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I had been skeptical of Kant's stated goal of providing the necessary conditions for all possible experience. I, influenced heavily by the professor of course, had interpreted this to mean not simply human experience, but the experience of any experiencing being, which would include extraterrestrial beings. How could it be possible, I thought, to make an argument which, though transcendental, must be based on at least introspective evaluations of human (or a human's) experience, and have it apply to all possible experiencing beings? This seemed to me patently absurd.

My skepticism of Kant's project was bolstered by my affinity with the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both thinkers were Kantians of sorts, as is just about anyone who studies the mind in the 20th or 21st century, but where they differed from Kant, or at least, where I saw them differing from Kant, was in the role that our own concerns, needs, or goals, and bodies played in determining the nature of our experience, or our experience of nature. For them, as well as the psychologists and philosophers who were influenced by them (and many of their predecessors as well), we are embodied, situated creatures, and the conditions of our experience are necessarily wrapped up in that embodiment and situatedness.

To me, this seemed like a direct challenge to the Kantian project. If our experience is embodied and situated, how can we possibly extract anything universal from it? Wouldn't the conditions of possible experience for differently embodied and situated creatures necessarily be different? The two exceptions, of course, would be embodiment and situatedness. In a way, these are the Gibsonian and Merleau-Pontyan universal conditions for all experience. But any transcendental argument about the conditions of all possible experience beyond that would be impossible, right?

This is where my myopia took me, until that conversation with the two biologists. After that conversation, I realized that something like the Kantian project might be possible if nature limits the possibilities of embodiment and situatedness. That is, with a firm grasp of the ways in which the facts of the physical universe limit our embodiment (e.g., biasing our body plans towards bilateral symmetry, particularly as organisms become more complex), we might be able to suss out a basic set of necessary conditions for possible experience that would apply to all possible experiencing beings in the physical universe.

At the very least, this seems like an interesting line of research, and one that, in true Merleau-Pontyan fashion, would have to rely heavily on philosophical reasoning and empirical science. What would be needed would be a Kantian transcendental argument for the 21st century, utilizing biology, physics, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This would, of course, be a massive undertaking, a sort of science (in the old sense of Wissenschaft) in and of itself, rather than the grand system-making of one person, but it seems possible. Or does it? What do you think?

Did You Mean Intolerant Atheists?

2009-10-19T15:19:00.003-05:00

Someone arrived at this blog earlier from Google, using the search terms "tolerant atheists." So I figured I'd try the search myself, and when I did, something both funny and sad happened. Here's a screen shot:

Don't believe me? Try the search yourself. Clearly atheists have a public perception problem, or at least a Google perception problem.

Leiter on Limbaugh on Swine Flu

2009-10-19T10:52:00.001-05:00

Is it just me, or is a post like this disturbing? Brian Leiter in full:

I realize eugenics is politically and morally incorrect, but I can not say that I am upset that followers of Rush Limbaugh will not get the swine flu vaccine.

At least he acknowledges that it is, in fact, "morally incorrect," which is a pleasant way of saying immoral. I prefer immorality when it's fully self-conscious. Still, even though Leiter was probably making a really, really tasteless joke, I feel like pointing out that if Limbaugh's listeners don't get vaccines, and get swine flu, then others who, say, can't afford the vaccines or otherwise don't have access or knowledge of them, and who are exposed to Limbaugh's listeners might also get swine flu. I know that H1N1 isn't as deadly as was at first believed (I had it 2 weeks ago, and survived, and I have to say it was the worst bout of flu I've ever had, and I'm still weak as a result of it), but joking about anyone getting a highly communicable and potentially deadly disease because you disagree with their politics is just plain tasteless. It's Limbaughian, even.

On Dawkins, Myers, Philosophy, Science, Theories, Facts, etc.

2009-10-17T16:20:00.003-05:00

I just finished reading this post by Mike Flynn (via Siris), cleverly titled "The Imperial March." The post, inspired by the PZ Myers post I linked earlier, takes Myers and Richard Dawkins to task for their ignorance of philosophy (something I've also noted before). My favorite part of Flynn's post:

Consider Dawkins' comment in the first quote: Questions about the existence of the supernatural are actually scientific questions. And then we can ask by what scientific principle this is known? Perhaps the philosopher running beside the locomotive can tell the engineer who, by all appearances has never given this question a moment's thought. No body of knowledge has within itself the competency to examine its own foundations -- although only Mathematics has a rigorous proof that this is so. Physics, which in the original meaning was any knowledge (scientia) of physical bodies, and so includes biology and all the rest, is grounded in metaphysics, which simply means "behind the physics." And that is right where The Metaphysics appears in compilations of Aristotle's works, right after The Physics. It deals with those ontological and epitemological preconditions.

Science as we know it measures things. Some folks think that because they can measure Stuff really really accurately that they are therefore Experts on Everything from theology to barbeque sauce or even in other branches of science. But to measure is to quantify, and quantification belongs to matter (rather than to form, agency, or finality). Therefore, if you focus exclusively on that-which-can-be-measured, you focus exclusively on that which is matter. Like anyone whose only tool is a hammer, after a while everything starts to look like a nail. But in what way does Dawkins suppose that the "supernatural" (whatever he means by that) is a measurable, material body? Heck. Forget about the existence of the supernatural. The existence of an empirical universe is not a scientific question. It is an a priori assumption necessary if one is to do science in the first place. Even the existence of natural laws is not a scientific question, but an assumption scientists must make before they will look for them.

This is a point I've often tried to make to the Dawkinsians I know in person (Dawkins, when he comes here, spends a good deal of time with people I know, because they're kindreds or something). Dawkins wants science to replace religion, because he believes that all religious questions are scientific questions, and science has shown itself to be better at answering scientific questions than religion. The latter part of that statement is obviously true: science is better at what it does than any other institution or system we humans have previously invented. That's why we've been able to go to the moon, wipe small pox off the face of the Earth, and talk to each other on the internet, or in our darker hours, flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first part of the statement, that all religious questions are scientific questions, is where Dawkins goes wrong in big way. Science isn't built to answer metaphysical questions. That's not what science does. One of the worst (intellectual) things a scientist (or anyone for that matter) can do with science is conclude that it proves the truth of materialism. That's equivalent to saying that linguistics proves that all there is to existence is language, because all linguistics studies is language. There's no way to avoid the circularity of this argument, and it's one that Dawkins and his fans make all of the time.

Now, I don't think anything Flynn says in his post suggests that philosophy of science itself is important to science. Where Dawkins, Myers, and others go wrong is not in their science, to the extent that any of these self-appointed spokespeople for atheism are doing actual science anymore. They go wrong when they try to do philosophy based on what they know about science. It is undoubtedly true that in 2009, science is much more relevant to the doing of philosophy than philosophy is to the doing of science, but science can only answer certain kinds of questions, and can only inform philosophy on those types of questions. Where science leaves off, philosophy is often the best vehicle for continuing on.

I do have to say that I think Flynn is wrong in saying that evolution is not a fact, and thus that Dawkins and Myers are right when they say that it is (even if they don't know why it is, as Myers' quoting of Gould seems to suggest). "Evolution," in its barest biological sense, refers to a set of observable events. Now, I haven't read The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory since I took a philosophy of science course in grad school (and from what I understand, there's a fairly large literature, with which I'm not at all familiar, on how to interpret his philosophy of science anyway), but I'm pretty sure that for Duhem there were different kinds of facts (concrete facts, theoretical facts, practical facts, maybe some others¹). It seems reasonable to consider evolution a concrete fact in the Duhemian sense. But Duhem was talking about physics, as the title of the book suggests, so maybe that's not the case. However, in say, a Wittgensteinian sense, evolution is, as a set of observable events, a fact of the world. Theories of evolution are not facts; natural selection is not a fact. These are explanations of facts. Evolution itself, that is the physical, and more specifically genetic, change of organisms and their offspring over time is the set of facts being explained. At the very least, I think this is an arguable position, and it therefore behooves philosophers not to dismiss it out of hand simply because Dawkins is so ignorant of philosophy in general.

1 If I remember correctly, this distinction, specifically the one between theoretical (which are mathematical) facts and practical facts, is very important in his overall discussion of theories and what they do in physics. For example, I'm pretty sure I remember him arguing that there are always a whole bunch of theoretical facts that correspond to a single practical fact, which would have all sorts of implications for how you test theories.

Caused Will?

2009-10-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

From an interesting post by the social psychologist John Bargh, on the subject of free will:

So what, then, if one's will is not ‘free' of internal causation? It is still your will and my will and each is unique: a confluence of genetic heritage, early absorption of local cultural norms and values, and particular individual life experiences. After all, one can claim personal ownership of one's will just as much as one claims ownership of one's name, eye color, and birthday, and be as proud of one's will and its products as one is proud of the exploits of great-great-Grandma the pioneer, even though one's ‘free will' played no role in any of these.

Bargh, and many other social psychologists, believe that free will is a "positive illusion" our minds create, in support of "human striving." In reality, Bargh and others argue (relying on some interesting, though I would say hardly conclusive, empirical data), what we perceive as "free will" is actually the result of many unconscious processes that we have little or no conscious control over.

The linked post has links to some interesting discussion and alternative points of view.

"Schrödinger’s Rapist"

2009-10-15T14:57:00.005-05:00

I just read an excellent post with that title by Phaedra Starling (via). The post's subtitle is, "a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced." An excerpt:

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.
“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”
Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is.

I am continually shocked and horrified by what women go through on a daily, and more often, nightly basis simply to navigate the world without being raped, abducted, or otherwise assaulted simply because they're women. Most of my friends are female, and I've had countless phone conversations during which, as a friend walked down some street at night, was sitting at a bus stop, or was just sitting in a cafe reading a book, she was approached either on foot or by a man in a car and asked if she wants a ride, where she lives (seriously, do they expect someone, male or female, to just tell a strange man where they live?), what her name is, if she lives alone(!), if she wants to go out on a date (usually meaning right then), or if she wants to have sex. Then there are the times when I get calls late at night because a friend is being followed by a strange man, or a strange man won't leave her alone as she walks by herself. One time, I was on the phone with a friend as she walked through a grocery store parking lot when a man walked up to her and asked, "Do you like to get freaky?" I mean, what the hell? Does this ever work for guys? Does a woman ever say to them, "Yes, I would like to have freaky, funky sex with you right now. I live right over here, by myself. Let's go there and get it on?" I can't imagine that ever happens. Or that women ever say yes when a man in a van pulls up to them on a dark street and asks them if they want a ride.

But then, I don't think these men are really looking for women to say yes to any of those queries. More often than not, I suspect, they're scoping out the woman and the situation, looking for vulnerabilities and opportunities for sexual assault and rape. The "yes" is irrelevant.

We will not live in a truly free society until women feel as safe walking down the street alone at night as I do. This would require men learning not only to respect women as human beings, but also understanding the unique difficulties and dangers that women face because so many men are likely to treat them as mere objects. And honestly, I don't have a lot of hope that this will happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: From the comments to the original ""Schrödinger’s Rapist" post:

Interestingly, I’ve been getting more and more comments from men about how these threads prove that if women just talked back and were confident more, instead of being “polite”, the problem would go away.

While I'm not a woman, and therefore can't speak for them, my second hand experience is consistent with this. One of my friends always responds to men who approach her in the ways I described above with a very forceful, "Get out of my fucking face!" or something to that effect. And the men seem to respond to this, usually leaving her space post haste. Sure, they'll occasionally mutter "bitch" under their breath, but better to be called a bitch than to be physically assaulted, right? She does the same thing with men who follow her. She will stop, look at them so that they know that she knows they're there, and if they continue to follow her, she will say something like, "What's your fucking problem?" or "What the hell do you want?" In almost every case they stop following her after that.

My theory is, this wakes the men up to the fact that she is a person, and not simply a moving object, and while I don't think this causes them to respect her in any meaningful sense of the word, it does cause them to respect the fact that she's capable of doing them harm too, with either a swift kick or by letting everyone in the general vicinity know what they're up to. In fact, I've seen her do this in person, and she does it so loudly that everyone within ear shot turns around to see what all the fuss is about. The men often become visibly embarrassed, which seems to disarm them.

My Favorite New Blog

2009-10-15T13:35:00.004-05:00

OK, it's not a new blog at all, but I just discovered it, so it's new to me: Old Picture of the Day by PJM. Each day there's a new old picture, as the blog's title suggests. The photos are from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and PJM posts pictures from his own collection as well as those that his readers send in. He also has name the mystery person contests, which look fun.

The only negative I've seen is the PJM's and many of his commenters' insistence on calling themselves "southern sympathizers," meaning that they were sympathetic to the "states' rights" cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. This pops up in the discussion of many of the Civil War photographs posted on the blog (the post linked in the image above is one example of this). Being from the south, I've met many "southern sympathizers" in my day. They're the sort who insist that slavery was just an unfortunate, small part of the case for southern secession, though it's difficult to tell whether they think it's unfortunate because slavery was morally evil or because it made the Confederacy look like the bad guy of the Civil War. Of course, slavery was the cause of secession. Without slavery, there would have been no Confederate States of America, and no American Civil War. Historical research is pretty much unequivocal on this issue. And as a result of the role of slavery in the Civil War, "states' rights" has become a sort of code word for racism in the south. I don't mean to imply that the blog's author or its commenters are racist, as I know nothing about them personally. I do want to note, however, that they're trading in historical revisionism, and that by calling themselves southern sympathizers, they are associating themselves with the worst sort of southern racists, both in history and today.

Retail Graveyard and the Road From Nowhere

2009-10-14T19:32:00.009-05:00

At least twice a month, I take a bus from downtown Austin to Kyle, about 20 miles south of downtown. The bus drops me off at a taqueria with some of the best breakfast tacos I've ever had. I then have to walk about 2 miles to my ultimate destination. I could walk along the frontage road of IH35, but I'm not suicidal, so I cross the interstate and then walk down a hill next to a Dairy Queen and then walk through what can only be described as a retail graveyard. It was once a large shopping center, but all of the stores closed at least a decade ago, and the buildings were torn down. The area is now completely overgrown, except for the streets that went through the shopping center, and is home to all manner of wildlife. In the last three months, I've spotted at least 10 different species of song birds, buzzards, red tailed hawks and another raptor that I don't recognize, mice, feral cats, a rat snake, and one fat western diamondback rattle snake. Here's a picture of a part of the retail graveyard (looking southeast):

In the spring, that entire area was filled with small bushes, each with dozens of little yellow flowers. It was striking.

There's one feature of the graveyard that strikes me as downright surreal. At the south end is a road that appears, seemingly ex nihilo, out of the woods. It is a road from nowhere:

Here is an aerial view, so that you can see that the street really does come from nowhere (the building just south of the bridge is the Dairy Queen). My favorite part is the left turn only lane, which will be useful to the cars that materialize out of the woods and drive down this street. If you can't tell, this second picture (taken looking east) was taken in winter. The woods at the far end are now quite green. I like to walk back there, down a small hill at the end of the road, and sit under the trees while reading. I just have to remember to brush the ants, rollie pollies, and wolf spiders off my legs now and then.

Philosophy of Science, Who Needs It?

2009-10-14T15:48:00.001-05:00

This post at Siris, and the post it links to at Pharyngula, reminded me of my first methods course, lo these many years ago. The first week or two of the course were spent on the "philosophy of science" and the "scientific method," including a lot of definitions of important concepts like "fact," "theory," "law," "hypothesis," and "model." After those first two weeks, the only concept we actually used in discussing research methods was "hypothesis," and we used that concept in both a very loose and very specific sense: what you start with when designing an experiment. A hypothesis, which in the beginning of the course had a very exact meaning in relation to those other concepts of the scientific method, suddenly became just a position statement of one sort or another, of some level of exactness, that you then tested with whatever study you were conducting.

Later, when I took a philosophy of science course, we spent a lot of time talking about falsification. This was a word I had heard often in the methods courses I had taken (by this time, I'd taken 2 or 3). First, I learned all about Popper's concept of falsification, and then I learned that falsification had some serious theoretical problems, as the Quine-Duhem thesis had shown. Apparently individual hypotheses couldn't be falsified. This would seemingly pose a problem for all those scientists using the methods I'd learned in my methods course, because those methods were all about falsifying individual hypotheses. That's what those methods do. This was disconcerting to say the least.

Finally, I started working in a lab as an undergraduate research assistant, and talking to the researchers, grad students and faculty, about all of this confusing stuff I had been learning in my methods and philosophy of science courses. From them I learned that actual practicing scientists, by and large, don't know much about philosophy of science (several had never heard of the Quine-Duhem thesis, though they all knew who Popper was). It was at this point that I had an epiphany: scientists just care about doing science, and since it turns out that doing science doesn't require knowing much, if anything, about the philosophy of science, most scientists don't really care about philosophy of science. "So you say we can't falsify individual hypotheses?" a scientist might ask, and when the philosopher of science replies affirmatively, the scientist will say, "Well, acting as though we're trying to falsify individual hypotheses has gotten us pretty far, scientifically, so phooey on you!" The scientist will then conduct his or her next experiment designed to falsify an individual hypothesis.

Which brings me to the question, who needs philosophy of science? Now, I will admit having read some very interesting papers on the philosophy and history of science. They've often helped me to place certain scientific ideas and findings in their historical and theoretical context, particularly when those ideas and findings are in sciences far removed from my own knowledge base (e.g., physics or microbiology). What's more, I've read some interesting papers by philosophers attempting to apply approaches from one science to another. For example, a couple years back I read a paper about the role of causation in physics, and the implications for the role of causation in the social sciences. It was really interesting stuff. I've yet to hear of anyone applying it, in any way whatsoever, to their work in the social sciences, but it was still a fascinating read. But finding something interesting, or learning something about another science (that I probably could have learned by reading a book about that science, but I'm lazy), isn't quite the same as actually being relevant to science or scientists and their work. So I wonder, aside from a few exceptions (Popper's falsification being the obvious one), to what extent does the vast majority of philosophy of science matter to the doing of science? I doubt it matters very much. And if it doesn't really matter to scientists, to whom does it matter?

Austin's Other Bats

2009-10-13T18:58:00.001-05:00

Austin is famous for its "Bat Bridge," the Congress Street Bridge over Lady Bird Lake that houses the largest urban bat colony in the world. On any given evening in the summer, you can find hundreds, even thousands of people standing on and around the bridge to watch the nearly 1 million Mexican free-tailed bats leave their roost in a great bat cloud. It's an impressive sight.

But few people are aware that downtown Austin is home to several other, smaller bat colonies. I recently discovered one by complete accident. I was walking at dusk, west on 15th Street between Trinity and San Jacinto (we were coming from Waterloo Park), on the south side of 15th along the 1401 San Jacinto parking garage, when I noticed a bat flying surprisingly low along the side of the garage. Then I saw another bat, and another, both flying really low (I'm 5'10", and they were at about my head level). I took a few more steps, when I suddenly realized that there was a steady stream of bats coming from the parking garage, all flying directly at my head and only swerving away at the last moment. This was initially disorienting, as everywhere I turned I saw another bat or group of bats flying right towards or around my head. So it took me a few seconds to realize that I was standing next to a small bat colony, housed in a one-inch gap between the parking garage's main wall and its façade. The bats had begun leaving for the evening at the very moment I was walking by, and I was just feet away from their exit. After a minute or two I got up the courage to run through the now steady stream of bats, and then watched them flow out for a few more minutes before continuing on.

I've now passed that spot several times just before dusk, and each time I've stopped to listen to the bats chirping. If you look closely, you can even see a few of the bats hanging behind the façade. It's really pretty cool. And in hindsight, I should have known that there were bats living in that spot. I had walked past it dozens of times during the winter (when the bats are in Mexico), and either earlier or later in the day during the summer (when they're sleeping, so I should have noticed the bat guano covering the parking garage's wall, or the smell of guano, familiar to most Austinites, that permeates the entire block.

So if you live in Austin, or are visiting, and you want to see bats up close, head on over to 15th St between Trinity and San Jacinton, on the south side of the street. Below is a picture of the guano covering the wall (you can also see the small gap where the bats exit). If you see this, you'll know you're in the right spot.

Photographic Appeals to Emotion

2009-10-08T16:39:00.005-05:00

If you've spent any time around the University of Texas at Austin campus over the last several years, chances are you've seen 18-foot tall photos of aborted fetuses on more than one occasion. These photos are part of an exhibit by anti-abortion groups that periodically pops up at various spots on campus (sometimes off the East Mall, sometimes near the Student Union). It's a very effective exhibit, too. Not in convincing anyone, though it may do that, but in disturbing people. Disgust and horror is often visible on the faces of many of the passers by.

This tactic -- disgusting people with images -- is the purest form of manipulation. Any first year philosophy student taking a logic course will recognize it as an example of the informal fallacy "appeal to emotion," with the argument going something like this: abortion is disgusting, therefore abortion is morally wrong. The fallaciousness of this argument should be obvious, but if it's not, take another example from medicine: open heart surgery is disgusting, therefore open heart surgery is morally wrong.

I bring this up because I find this tactic even more disturbing when people who should know better use it. Anyone who does use photographic appeals to emotion to strengthen their argument should be ashamed of themselves. And they might want to take a closer look at the position they're taking, as well. If you feel the need to resort to manipulation to make your case, chances are you couldn't make it very well without it.

What Sokal Didn't Do

2009-10-07T22:24:00.002-05:00

From a comment by James Hanley at Positive Liberty:

But let me ask this question, which I do not mean snarkily. How are we to tell when someone is engaged in reasonable exegesis rather than “house of card” building? I hae in mind the great Sokal hoax, in which he clearly demonstrated that post-modernists were engaged in house of cards building.

I hear this quite a lot: that Sokal's hoax demonstrated that "postmodernism," a vague word in itself, is bunk. This is clearly absurd. What Sokal's hoax showed, if anything, is that the editors of Social Text weren't very good at distinguishing good scholarship from "house of cards building." Or at least that the editors of Social Text are not physicists, and are easily duped on the subject of physics. Which isn't at all surprising.

Sokal published an article in one journal. This proves nothing about an incredibly heterogeneous collection of scholars and scholarship. Could the Bogdanov Affair show that all physics is mere "house of cards building?" Of course not. If you wanted to demonstrate that postmodernists were, as a group, engaged in house of cards building, you'd have to do much more than Sokal did.

Another Episode of "Sentences You Never Thought You'd Read"

2009-10-07T17:20:00.007-05:00

So I'm reading the news from back home, when I noticed a story about the reinterment of the body of a Civil War soldier, probably a Union soldier, whose body was discovered at a construction site last May. The body is lying in state starting tomorrow, and then re-enactors are going to perform a "period" funeral service on Saturday. That's interesting and all, but what really got me was this part of the story (emphasis mine):

The city of Franklin has organized a memorial service for a Civil War soldier whose remains were discovered over the summer at a construction site. The sons of two Civil War veterans will speak at the service Saturday.

What?! The sons of two Civil War veterans? Hold on a moment, let me check my calendar. Yup, it's 2009, a full 144 years after the end of the Civil War. What the hell are sons of Civil War veterans doing alive? The article's explanation:

It’s something of a fluke for any child of a Civil War veteran to be alive. Brown was born in 1912 when his father, who had remarried a much younger woman, was 71.

"A fluke" might be putting it mildly.

Perhaps the coolest part is that the father of one of the two veterans actually fought in the battle that took place in the town where the body was discovered, in 1864. And the other one's father was at Gettysburg and Appomattox.

I'm tempted to start digging Europe around for sons of Franco-Prussian War veterans.

The Conservative Bible

2009-10-05T18:28:00.002-05:00

Conservapedia has invented a new Biblical hermeneutics, the Conservative Bible Project. From the site:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

This is genius. I know that interpreting religious texts tendentiously is a long-standing tradition in Christianity and pretty much any other religion organized around a set of canonical texts, but I don't think I've ever seen an example of someone doing so this explicitly. Usually readers would just go into the text and come out saying, "Look, we've found that the Bible supports our political theory!" But Conservapedia is asking its readers to go in and change the Bible so that it supports their political theory. That is awesome!

Simone de Beauvoir on Negativity, Freedom, and the Possibility of Evil

2009-10-05T11:47:00.000-05:00

From The Ethics of Ambiguity:

Only, unlike Kant, we do not see man as being essentially a positive will. On the contrary, he is first defined as a negativity. He is first at a distance from himself. He can coincide with himself only by agreeing never to rejoin himself. There is within him a perpetual playing with the negative, and he thereby escapes himself, he escapes his freedom. And it is precisely because an evil will is here possible that the words "to will oneself free" have a meaning. Therefore, not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears- to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives - like religions - a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

Therefore, in the very condition of man there enters the possibility of not fulfilling this condition. In order to fulfill it he must assume himself as a being who "makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being." But the trick of dishonesty permits stopping at any moment whatsoever. One may hesitate to make oneself a lack of being, one may withdraw before existence, or one may falsely assert oneself as being, or assert oneself as nothing.. ness. One may realize his freedom only as an abstract independence, or, on the contrary, reject with despair the distance which separates us from being. All errors are possible since man is a negativity, and they are motivated by the anguish he feels in the face of his freedom. Concretely, men slide incoherently from one attitude to another.

When I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy, I took several courses on existentialism, and we covered mostly the same thinkers: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Buber, Marcel, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, with a few others thrown in here and there for good measure (Kleist and Berdyaev come to mind). Do you see a pattern with these folks (listed roughly chronologically)? They're all dudes! But the first time I read The Ethics of Ambiguity (I'd already read The Second Sex in a course unrelated to existentialism), right after reading The Myth of Sisyphus, I was absolutely blown away. This woman seemed to have hit on something all of the men had missed, or at least misplaced: a necessary corollary to the absurd, which figures so centrally in existentialism, is the ambiguous. Without the latter, the former leaves us with little of life to live, no matter how strongly Camus believes we should just keep rolling the rock back up the hill. What's more, placing the ambiguous alongside the absurd makes possible a bunch of interesting answers to long-standing philosophical questions, about ethics for example, which de Beauvoir explores at length. I thought then, as I do now, "If only I had read this philosopher earlier, a lot of things would have been clearer to me." Oh well. In a lot of ways, philosophy is still just an old boys club.

A Little Bit of a Regression to Childhood

2009-10-05T08:59:00.000-05:00

But after all, why not?

A little Monday music. Be sure to watch the interview after the performance.

We Are Austin Too, Part I

2009-10-04T15:58:00.005-05:00

The local CBS affiliate here in Austin, KEYE 42, adopted the slogan "We Are Austin" a few years back, and it's been so successful that they've made weareaustin.com their main website's URL. They frequently air "We are Austin" ads that involve their news anchors and reporters, along with residents of Austin, all saying "We are Austin!" with great verve and enthusiasm. Each of the Austin residents is attractive, well-dressed (and likely well-to-do), most of them are white, and UT students figure prominently in the ads, even though UT students are only Austin part of the year, and only for a few years. This makes certain advertising sense, of course, but it's not really very reflective of the way Austin's population really looks. After all, white people make up less than half of the Austin population. Also, a solid 14% of the population lives below the poverty line, there's a huge (and generally under-counted) homeless population, and panhandlers are everywhere. So I thought I'd make my own ads with the aim that, when combined with KEYE's, they might present a more accurate image of the city. Here's my first:

Tolerant and Activist Atheists

2009-10-03T20:17:00.006-05:00

The labels used to describe the positions in the abortion debate aren't really helpful. There's "pro-life," a position dominated by people who are in favor of the death penalty (except the Catholic pro-lifers, of course), and "pro-choice," which basically says, "people who like not being forced to do things they don't want to do." In other words, the labels are either inaccurate or overly broad; they're not exactly overflowing with information about those to whom they're applied.

And as far as I can tell, this is pretty much how labels work in our society. At first, there may be some value to framing a debate in a certain way by force-feeding your audience the labels you've chosen. Thus, for a very short time, "pro-life" might have implied that your opponents were "anti-life," and "pro-choice" might have implied that your opponents like slavery or something, but these days, unless you're a true believer already, it's unlikely the labels have such connotations for you. You just use them the same way you use the word "tiger" to refer to those big, striped cats in the zoo: you don't really pay attention to the origins of the label or its potential meanings, you just point at the thing and say, "tiger."

Which makes PZ Myers' obvious chagrin at the use of the term "tolerant atheist" somewhat amusing. The "tolerant atheist" label comes from this post by some Australian dude who has the temerity, nay, the gall! to give a positive label to an atheist temperament with which Dr. Myers disagrees. In essence, the Australian dude argues that atheists should promote more tolerant religion. This view he labels "tolerant atheism." Like a true adult, PZ goes all I'm-rubber-your-glue on dude's ass, and calls the Australian dude's atheism "do-nothing atheism." Because, you see, if that kind of atheism is "tolerant atheism," then any other form of atheism must be "intolerant atheism," just like anyone who's not "pro-life" is "anti-life," and any cat that's not a "tiger" is "anti-tiger" (oh, it just got all Hegelian up in this hizzy!). No one who knows Myers deep in his soul has ever accused him of being intolerant, so why is Australian dude so mean to damn him by implication? But wait, he may not be intolerant, but PZ does do stuff (or say stuff, at least). So PZ gives us a "snap, snap, oh no he didn't!" then lectures us on the active and the passive (channeling his inner Nietzsche), and replaces "tolerant" with "do-nothing," and "intolerant" with "activist." In your face Australian dude! That's how we do serious intellectual discussions in the United States of Friggin' America!

It is, of course, irrelevant at this point that the Australian dude was arguing for a position that involved doing something, namely promoting tolerant religion (it's doubly irrelevant that the Australian guy never called any other atheists intolerant). This is, in fact, asking atheists to do quite a lot, because intolerant religion seems to be gaining a bigger and bigger foothold in many parts of the world, including the U.S. (I don't know about Australia). But like I said, that's irrelevant, because the labels aren't really going to mean anything to anybody but the choir, should they stick. They won't stick, because they're stupid, but if they did, no one would think that PZ was an "intolerant atheist" because he wasn't a "tolerant atheist," and no one would think that Australian dude was a "do-nothing atheist" because he wasn't an "activist atheist." That's just not the way these things work.

By the way, more accurate labels for the two might be "adolescent atheists," which anyone who reads PZ's post will agree is an accurate description of his brand, and "tilting at windmills atheists," because that's pretty much what trying to have a conversation with adolescent atheists is like. But since labels end up being meaningless, better that they not start out as accurate anyway, right?

Alain Badiou on the State of Capitalism

2009-09-29T19:26:00.002-05:00

From "Is The Word 'Communism' Forever Doomed?" (via):

Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves. Forever growing in inequality, the radical cut between the people of the working classes, of the uninformed, and the middle class, the complete dissolution of political power in the service of property and capitalist profits. Several years of ratiocination, disorganization of revolutionaries, and the nihilist despair of large portions of the youth, the servility of the large majority of them, and the experience of the base obsequiousness of formal groups in the quest of the contemporary means to establish, re-establish, find new definitions for the Communist hypothesis.

All these characteristics are very close to the political situation which was dominant in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Which is why the apparent victory of capitalism, occasion to the second sequence of the Communist hypothesis [1917 to 1976], had been, in fact, a very strong reaction, a very strong return to something very old. The politicization of contemporary capitalism is as you see the return to the cynical capitalism of the 19th century. And it is probably why after the 19th century the question is not for us the victory of the Communist hypothesis, but the conditions of its identity. Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin, and that was the great question of the revolutionaries of the 19th century.

Badiou is arguing that the problems the "communist hypothesis," which is a very broad hypothesis, is presented with today are not like those that gave rise to the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent authoritarianism of the Communist Party, but like those that led to the positing of the hypothesis in the middle of the 19th century. The problem for the Bolsheviks was victory: how to get beyond local action and local successes to the triumph of communism generally. The problem of the 1800s was of how to overcome capitalism and its iniquities, and create a better society. That's where we are today, Badiou argues, and the question once again begs for an answer.

I've often wondered if the crises of today will lead to action and change, or merely a reaffirming of the present institutions. Capitalism, at least in the West, has been quite resilient. When pressed, it bends, but only in order to curve around and tackle the very forces pressing it. And what presses it most, ultimately, is itself. So that it often seems as though capitalism will be the death of itself, only to rise again even more dominant, even more cynical, even more controlling, even more reactive. And what would replace it? I sometimes share Conrad's cynicism in Under Western Eyes. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss? I wish I had more hope. I'm not sure we even have a blueprint for radical change. "Communism" as a hypothesis, as Badiou expresses it, is to abstract. It's little more than "human flourishing" with a ring of equality. And that's barely even a hypothesis. It's more like an impression, and a vague one at that.

How I Lost My Accent

2009-09-29T13:04:00.000-05:00

It's disappointing to see progressives acting as elitists, and particularly so when dealing with people who should be targets of progressive reform, not progressive mocking, as in this post at Pandagon, for example. Many of the comments focus on the guys accent, with the almost gratuitous references to inbreeding, instead of the guys hate and ignorance.

I once had a pretty heavy southern accent. It still comes out now and then, and my short vowels are forever muddled. If I were ever in a life-or-death situation that required quickly distinguishing between a "pen" and a "pin," I would be screwed. Most of the time, though, my accent is all but completely gone, and has been since I was an undergraduate. The reason for this is pretty simple: once I left home, where pretty much everyone had an accent like mine, I got made fun of for my accent. This was especially true when I was among smarter folks, most of whom were from the Midwest. They associated my accent with ignorance and stupidity, and made this very clear to me.

The first time I realized my accent was "different" came during my second week of college. I was in an Intro to Sociology course with about 50 students, one of whom was Antoine Walker. For basketball fans this a big deal. I was shy, and generally didn't speak up in class, even in high school. However, when the professor asked if there was anyone in the class who thought he or she didn't have an accent, I raised my hand, thinking both that I didn't have an accent, because everyone where I'm from talked just like me, and that a bunch of other people would raise their hands too. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both counts. I was the only one who raised his hand, and when the professor then asked me where I was from, I was forced to speak. I replied simply, "Nashville," but in dialect that word is pronounced "Nayshvull." The entire class burst into laughter at that one word. I was horrified. I was being laughed at in front of 50 peers, one of whom happened to be a basketball player of whom I was a big fan.

From that moment on, I was constantly and deeply conscious of my accent, and when people continued to make fun of it, including faculty and fellow students (particularly in the philosophy department, where being snooty is raised to an art form), I consciously chose to get rid of it. And I did.

And that's a shame, because my accent was part a big part of who I am, because where I'm from was and remains a big part of who I am.

Football Quote of the Day

2009-09-28T16:31:00.002-05:00

From a post on Mississippi State's near upset of LSU this past weekend, by John Wilkersley at Kentucky Sports Radio (emphasis mine):

On paper, MSU is the worst team in the league. Throw in the fact they’re transitioning from Sly Croom’s punt-focused offense to the spread, and that State’s already won a conference game and came within a simple outstrectch of the football from beating LSU, is pretty damned impressive.

"Punt-focused offense." That's good stuff.

Working With "Human-centered Metaphor"

2009-09-27T20:35:00.004-05:00

Humans are evolved animals. In order to produce not only a deeper understanding of humans, but also to produce a deeper understanding as humans, this must be taken as a given. What this means is that humans are situated, involved beings, who don't simply come to the world around them as tabula rasae, directly connecting with things as they are, or even with themselves as they are. Humans are part of the world, dependent on it, tasked with navigating it to survive, and as a result, their representation of the world will be geared for navigating and surviving. We enter the world with an understanding designed for use. This representation, opaque as it is as a result of being the product of investment, is further complicated and obscured by the fact that we are not just evolved animals, but evolved social animals. This means that our representations are further situated, not only in what we naively refer to as the natural world, but also the social world, the world of culture and civilization. As animals, this is of course of great benefit to us. Not only does it allow us to learn from those around us, but indirectly, from all of those who came before us and who are out there not but to whom we do not have direct access.

As a result of our evolved nature, our thought and our language are structured around what we need to know, and do, to survive in the world, in culture, in civilization, etc. Our minds are usage-based and usage-built. Whatever they don't need, they discard, and whatever they do need, they need for a reason, which is to say, there's some environmental cause for its necessity, its existence, and its persistence. There is no escaping this: no matter how hard we try to refine language, to clarify it and rigorize it, as science and positivism have tried to do, the beings who are representing, comprehending, and understanding it will still be beings with minds built for use. There is no ideal language, because there is no ideal mind, and without minds, there is no language.

The upside of all of this is that any human endeavor, be it cooking, passing laws, building bridges, carrying out scientific investigations, or doing philosophy, is valuable only to the extent that it helps us to better navigate the world. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is pointless, because there is no such thing as knowledge for knowledge's sake. The more we try to abstract knowledge from our situatedness, and therefore our humanness, the more we remove knowledge from anything like understanding. Knowledge just becomes a mere play thing, an object of entertainment, and as such, paradoxically, the sort of knowledge most connected to our humanness.

In one sense, then, our situatedness privileges what we would generally think of as the practical knowledge of the sciences and engineering over the, let's say, more mediate knowledge of philosophy or art. What we usually think of as practical knowledge is more directly involved with navigating the world. It puts bridges over rivers, makes farms more productive, cures diseases, etc. But philosophy and the arts have their roles as well, and whether we like it or not, their knowledge is ultimately practical knowledge as well. They help us to navigate the world of concepts, the world of representations, the world of emotions and expression and symbols better. They impart knowledge and experience indirectly, often, at least when compared to the sciences, but one of the consequences of being human is that all knowledge in some ways indirect, or mediated, and some things -- at least for now -- have to be approached more indirectly, more mediately, than others.

I bring all of this up because I recently came across the following quote from this site, at this site, via this one (speaking of the indirect):

Vernacular language is simply too infused with human-centered metaphor to ever be useful in talking about how bridges are when no one is looking [my example of the task of speculative realism, which had Latour and Harman in mind, though the latter especially shows how this gets much more complex]. So while I agree that onticology is not a priori a materialistic ontology, nevertheless, mathematical-physical discourse is arguably more useful than philosophical language when it comes to discussing bridges. Afterall, to paraphrase Dretske, engineering discourse will actually allow you to construct a bridge whereas object-oriented “philosophy” will not. Which one then is more truly object-centered

This in the context of a critique, or at least a criticism, of speculative realism.

To which Mike Johnduff (second link) replies:

When you say “Vernacular language is simply too infused with human-centered metaphor to ever be useful in talking about how bridges are when no one is looking,” I think a speculative realist or OOP [Object-Oriented Philosophy] person would say that this proves their point exactly: we need to change vernacular language to bring it away from its use-function, or that which actually ties it to a scientific language that is based, ultimately, on use.

And continues:

Of course the "change" involved is not primarily changing language itself, but rather changing how we see what language (among other things) is already doing.

As the preceding probably makes clear, this last bit is something with which I could not agree more. The purpose of any philosophy that takes language seriously as a problem should recognize that it's not a problem to be overcome, but simply one to be understood. What is language doing? It's doing something related to our situatedness, to our needs as determined by our situatedness. If it weren't, we wouldn't have language. As such, it will always be dominated by human-centered metaphors, and it should be, because that's what makes language valuable: it's being centered around us.

Furthermore, a good philosophy will recognize that there's something to these metaphors. We understand and talk about things metaphorically, or analogically, or however you want to describe it. Good, now what? There must be a reason why particular metaphors/analogies/whatever stick. Maybe a good way at getting at objects, as the object-oriented philosopher and speculative realist seem to want to do, would be to analyze these metaphors and figure out what aspects of the world, and our being in it, they capture for us (and the for us is important: "for whom is it?" is almost always a better question than "what is it?"). What is it that thinking about X in terms of Y, or as related to Y, buys us? And what does that say about our understanding of X and Y? Or about the way in which X and Y relate to us? This is of course easier said than done, because our metaphors don't just reflect our relations to the things that comprise them, but also social and cultural relations, and which metaphors stick are in large part a result of culture. Still, if we're stuck with language as it is, and we are so stuck, then wouldn't it be smart to learn as much as we can about what that language is doing for us, and by extension, what it says about our relations with the things we use language to talk about?

Walt Whitman Commercials

2009-09-27T19:28:00.004-05:00

Levi's is using a Walt Whitman poem in a couple of their jeans commercials. The first uses an actual recording of Whitman reciting the poem "America":

The second uses "Pioneers! O Pioneers!":

This is disturbing. What's next, a Walt Whitman mall? Oh, yeah.

Memory Metaphors: Remembering as Light

2009-09-27T18:09:00.000-05:00

As I said, I like memory metaphors. One I hear a lot, since the song is frequently on the radio (including just now):

I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar, yet I cant seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name.

From Pearl Jam's "Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town." I sometimes think of remembering as shining a flashlight on some memory stored somewhere in my head. A candle is a bit more poetic, I suppose.

Ortega y Gasset on Possibility, Freedom, and Identity

2009-09-26T17:14:00.005-05:00

From "Man as a Project":

Regarding these possibilities of being it is important to comment upon the following:

First: That they are not given to me, rather I must invent them for myself, be it in an original manner or by transmission of other men, even in the ambience of my life. I plan projects of being and doing in light of the circumstances. Circumstance is the only thing that I find which is given to me. It is too often forgotten that man without imagination is impossible without the capacity of inventing for himself a life-figure, and of idealizing the person which he will become. Man is the novelist of himself, be he original or a plagiarist.

Second: I must choose among these possibilities. Therefore, I am free. But understand well: I am free by obligation. I am free whether I want to be or not. Liberty is not an activity exercised by a being which, apart from and before exercising it, already has a fixed being. Being free means lacking constitutive identity, not pertaining to a determined being, being able to be something other than that which one was, and not being able to adhere oneself finally and eternally on any determined being. The only thing that must be fixed and stable in the free being is constitutive instability.

Memory Metaphors: Memories as Pigeons

2009-09-26T12:03:00.005-05:00

I am fascinated by memory and its role in our identities, so I am always on the lookout for talk of memory. And one of the things that fascinates me the most about memory is just how difficult to talk about directly. Most talk of memory is couched in figurative language: images, metaphors, similes, analogies. There's even a book on that subject.

I suppose the reason the reasons that memory is so difficult to talk about are twofold. First, any talk of memory requires memory: memory for concepts, memory for the words that refer to concepts, memory for what the concepts represent, and memory of memory itself: the experience of it, examples of remembering, and so on. So the very act of talking about memory is circular and muddled. The second is that we don't seem to have much conscious access to the inner workings, if you will, of memory. It's not just that we don't get to "see" how memories are stored or accessed, but even the act of triggering a memory is opaque. Why is it that seeing a particular shape or object, smelling a particular smell, or hearing a particular song, elicits the particular memories? Nothing about the experience of remembering answers this question. Or if it does, the answer is not obvious in that experience. All of this leaves memory in a cloud of vagueness and confusion. So the best way to talk about memory, at least outside of a scholarly context (and often even in a scholarly context) is to refer it to something more vivid, something more clear.

I told you all of that to tell you this. When I come across interesting metaphors for memory, I write them down in a little notebook. Today, as I was reading a book that is largely about memory, Remainder, by Tom McCarthy. It's the incredibly strange story of a man who, after being struck by a mysterious (to the reader, at least) falling object, and spending some time in a coma, has some memory issues. On several occassions, the man describes his memories coming back to him as scenes, like in a soap opera (his metaphor). That's not an entirely original metaphor, as memory has been referred to as theater for centuries, and as pictures (moving or otherwise) for some time as well. But on page 91-92, I came across a metaphor for memory that I'd never seen before, and I thought I'd share it with you. Here it is (emphasis mine):

After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually...

Memory as startled pigeons. Now that's interesting.

Nietzsche Myths

2009-09-26T00:40:00.004-05:00

Philosophy Bites has an informative interview with Brian Leiter on myths about Nietzsche. The interview focuses on four main myths: the Ubermensch, Nietzsche's antisemitism, the Will to Power, and Nietzsche the postmodernist. Dispelling the notion that Nietzsche was an anti-Semite is obviously the most important in general, but for philosophers, lay and professional alike, clarifying the roles of the Ubermensch and Will to Power in his philosophy is very important as well.

I always thought it was fairly obvious that the Ubermensch was a tool to make a particular point in one particular book (the only book in which the concept of the overman has a significant role, Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and that, since Nietzsche himself seems to get rid of the Ubermensch in that very work, replacing him with the Eternal Return, focusing on the Ubermensch when interpreting Nietzsche was a sign of a very careless reader¹.

The Will to Power myth is even easier to dispell, since, as Leiter notes in the interview, Nietzsche only mentions it a few times in his published work, and the book with that title (which casual Nietzsche readers should probably not read at all) was published, after being cobbled together and heavily edited by his anti-Semite sister, against his wishes. Also, I wish Leiter had suggested that no one, even Heidegger fans, ever read Heidegger's multi-volume work on Nietzsche. It's the best way to get bad ideas about Nietzsche, even if you've read Nietzsche extensively.

As for the postmodernist Nietzsche, Leiter does an OK job of suggesting where this myth came from. My first serious readings of Nietzsche took place in a class on Nietzsche by Dan Brezeale, who, it just so happens, edited and published a bunch of Nietzsche's early, unpublished writing under the title Philosophy and Truth. So as you might imagine, we talked a lot about those early writings, including the essay that Leiter blames for the postmodernist reading of Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense" (Brezeale translates it as "Non-Moral Sense"). I like that essay, but Leiter's probably right, it hasn't helped. But I think he elides the role of one of Nietzsche's published works (Leiter highlights that the "On Truth and Lies" essay was never published), The Birth of Tragedy. Again, a careful reader of Nietzsche's will see that this early work was written and published when Nietzsche was under the spell of Schopenhauer, and more perniciously, Richard Wagner, a spell he began to cast off sometime between the Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human, and therefore not assign that work too much importance in interpreting Nietzsche's entire corpus². However, in my experience at least, the aestheticism that many readers find in The Birth of Tragedy has had a huge influence on the postmodernist reading of Nietzsche. But as it was a published work of Nietzsche's (we might also add a biased reading of the Part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil) that played a big role in the postmodernization of Nietzsche, Nietzsche himself shoulders some of the blame.

1 A careful reader might also note that Zarathustra says quite explicitly that there has never been an Ubermensch, and afterward, discovers the Eternal Return which says that everything that will be has been. This pretty much excludes the possibility of the Ubermensch doesn't it? Undoubtedly one of the reasons Zarathustra is initially so distraught at the idea of the Eternal Return.
2 Reading the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy would also help a anyone to understand the role that work should play in any interpretation of Nietzsche. It's probably not unimportant that he begins that "attempt at self-criticism" with the phrase (emphasis mine), "Whatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book", and later writes of it (emphasis still mine):

But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found an outlet—what an impossible book had to result from a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences, all of them close to the limits of communication, presented in the context of art—for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science—a book perhaps for artists who also have an analytic and retrospective penchant (in other words, an exceptional type of artist for whom one might have to look far and wide and really would not care to look); a book full of psychological innovations and artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of the intrepid mood of youth, the moodiness of youth, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and personal reverence; in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label.

I AM The Superfluous Man!

2009-09-23T13:31:00.000-05:00

This could now be a portrait of this blog's author.

When I was 16 or 17, I read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, because I had to, being of a certain political and literary persuasion, and I loved it. I loved it so much that I went out and read every novel I could find by Turgenev, from the wonderful On the Eve to the somewhat dated Virgin Soil, but it wasn't until college that I discovered his short stories, which I immediately decided were perfect, especially First Love. But it was his story The Diary of a Superfluous Man that had the greatest impact on me. Not only did I love it, but I immediately recognized myself in it -- as did, I imagine, pretty much anyone who has spent entirely too much time in academia. It was this story that was my entry into 19th century Russian literature, which has since dominated my fiction-reading life. From there, I went to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and of course the apotheosis of the superfluous man genre, Goncharov's Oblomov. I was in heaven: here a superfluous man, there a superfluous man, everywhere a superfluous man man. In other words, in my less confident moments at least, here a me, there a me, everywhere a me me!

Over the last week, I have been laid up with a wickedly obstinate ear infection which decided to merely laugh at the puny prescription ear drops I first tried throwing at it, and thus required much stronger drops and oral antibiotics. Lying in bed, as I've done pretty much constantly since last Tuesday, I've done nothing but think about all of the new projects I'm going to start when I finally have enough energy and get rid of the pain: I'm going to finally get around to writing that paper I've wanted to write, but have been putting off; I'm going to read all of that literature on that philosophical topic I've wanted to read but haven't gotten around to it; I'm going to finally fix those things around the house that I've been meaning to fix since pretty much forever; I'm going to do this, and that, and the other. In other words, my whole life has become making plans for when I'm not just lying in bed making plans. I have finally become Oblomov. I am the superfluous man! There's no denying it anymore. I don't know if this is a good thing.

It also should be noted that it was during this time of mere planning that I started this blog. Perhaps blogging is the ultimate instantiation of superfluity.

All Things Go

2009-09-23T02:56:00.004-05:00

Here in Austin, there's a bit of controversy brewing, or at this point, fully brewed, over the semi-removal of two programs from the local public radio station, KUT. You can read about the hubbub here. I say semi-removed because, while Paul Ray's Jazz and the Phil Music Program, hosted by Larry Monroe, were removed from the station's lineup, as well as the late night program that Ray and Monroe hosted together, they both still have programs on the station, including Monroe's "Blue Monday" (which I listen to most weeks). The shows that were removed have been replaced with programs that are basically commercial radio programs without commercials.

A group comprised of an ex-mayor of Austin, several local musicians, and KUT listeners, are upset at the change in programming, and have started a Facebook group and a website called Save KUT. They argue that this isn't just about getting rid of Ray's and Monroe's programs, but about the overall change in the programming at KUT. But let's face it, it really is about Ray and Monroe (something the website tacitly admits over and over again).

I don't really have a dog in this race, because the one program other than NPR that I listen to regularly on KUT, "Blue Monday," is still on the air. I occasionally caught Ray's jazz program, and only stopped to listen to Monroe's when I heard Robert Earl Keen ("The road goes on forever, and the party never ends!"). I do hope that, if enough KUT listeners really do want the Phil Music Show and Paul Ray's Jazz back, they get it, either by showing their disapproval through their donations, or lack thereof, or by making enough of a fuss to convince KUT that if it doesn't put them back on the air, it will suffer the consequences come donation time.

However, I honestly don't see the big deal. They were two radio shows, one of which (the Phil Music Show) was uniquely Austin, I'll admit, and the two talented DJs are still on the air every week. But ya know, to me it just feels like, well, what happens with stuff in the media all the time. I mean, most of the radio stations I've liked over the years don't even exist anymore, to say nothing of the programs I liked on those stations. TV shows come and go, radio programs come and go, DJs come and go. All things go. C'est la vie.

The amount of money that's been put into these protests -- at least enough for a website, town meetings, benefit shows to raise more money, and $1200 a week full page ads in the Chronicle -- seems to me, in the midst of an economic crisis, when I can't walk 3 steps from my apartment door without seeing people suffering because they were laid off and can't find work, or walk past a food kitchen without noticing how much longer the lines are now than they were this time last year, to be a bit over the top. How many of those people do you think are sitting around worrying about the current direction of KUT programming? There are better uses for this energy, for this money, and for this time, than protesting because two guys didn't really lose their jobs, when so many others are, and because the programming direction of a station isn't to your liking. I mean, log on to the friggin' internet and listen to some jazz or Texas music, or hell, create your own jazz/Asleep at the Wheel station on Pandora. And give your money to a real cause, where it's really needed.

I Know Jack About Economics, But...

2009-09-22T12:54:00.000-05:00

Brian Leiter has a post post containing a long response by Alexander Rosenburg to John Cochrane's response to this New York Times article by Paul Krugman on the failure of economics. A quick summary of the situation: Krugman says that, by failing to predict the recent economic crisis, economics itself has failed, and economists need to seriously reexamine some of their cherished beliefs and assumptions, and Cochrane responds that no they don't, because. You can read Rosenburg's entire response to Cochrane at Leiter's blog, but this particular passage from it caught my eye:

The efficient markets thesis is that the market makes complete use of all relevant information, and the “proof” is roughly that in a perfectly competitive market among perfectly rational agents prices invariably and instantaneously reflects all agents’ real beliefs and real desires. Any one who knows anything that can make him or her money acts on it—buys or sells—and that signal is picked up by every one else, who also acts on it, thus preventing any one from making excess profits—rents--long-term.

The first thing a philosopher notes about this notion is that since most people have false beliefs, especially about the future, an efficient market doesn’t internalize knowledge, but only beliefs. If they are mostly false, then the market isn’t efficient at internalizing (correct) information, it’s efficient at internalizing mostly false beliefs. If false beliefs are normally distributed around the truth, then they’ll cancel out and the proof of a probabilistic version of the efficient markets theorem will go through—market prices reflect the truth most of the time. Too bad false beliefs don’t always take on this tractable distribution. Even worse, when enough people notice the skewed distribution of false beliefs, they can make rents, as the markets crash. This is what Cochrane seems to think can't happen. How many times will it have to happen for the Chicago School to give up the efficient markets hypothesis?

When I read this, I was immediately reminded of a talk I accidentally attended (it was in a modeling session, and came between the two talks I was actually there to hear) a few years ago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the speaker's or his co-authors' names, so I can't credit them, and I don't even remember the specifics of the model, but I do remember what the model showed. What the modelers did, basically, was have a bunch of individual actors behave irrationally (i.e., sub-optimally), and look at the behavior of the system as a whole and see if it was irrational in a corresponding way. The conclusion they came to, after running the thing a whole bunch of times, as modelers are wont to do, was that even when most of the actors behave irrationally, the system as a whole results in a surprisingly rational end state.

Now, this doesn't mean that Rosenburg's wrong in the above-quoted passage. For one, under at least some views of rationality, one can have false beliefs and still behave rationally based on those beliefs. So rationality does not necessarily mean efficiency, especially to a philosopher (which Rosenburg is). And it is one model, presented at a conference by people whose names I can't even remember, after all. But it does make me wonder, and I'm not an economist so this may be a long-ago answered question, whether the move from recognizing that many, if not most actors in a system like the market have (mostly) false beliefs to the position that the behavior of the system as a whole will be inefficient is a logical necessity. Specifically, if people behave rationally, but based on false beliefs (which, to a naive modeler would be equivalent to irrational behavior), or behave sub-optimally in general, does this necessarily doom the system (market) to irrationality? On the surface it seems obvious that it does, but as science has often shown, surface appearances can be deceiving, and the model the speaker presented was designed to show that this particular appearance may in fact be so.

I don't mean any of this as a defense of the efficient market hypothesis. Again, I'm not an economist, but from what I little I do know of economics, and of the recent crisis, it seems pretty clear that the EMH has been empirically falsified. But an interesting question, particularly when picking up the pieces of economics and rebuilding it, is why it failed, and if we simply assume that it's because people have false beliefs, or because people behave sub-optimally (i.e., irrationally), and that this therefore dooms the system to behave sub-optimally, we may be missing other possible explanations. I know EMH supporters tend to assume that actors are rational, but what I'm asking, I suppose, is whether those trying to figure out why the market hasn't been efficient need to treat that assumption as the only way to arrive at the concept of an efficient market, particularly when we're trying to figure out why markets aren't, in fact, all that efficient. Theories, after all, didn't create the crisis (even if acting in accordance with them facilitated it), so we can't just address the theories that people actually hold when trying to answer practical questions and, when we've shown that a theory's reasoning is wrong, be convinced that we've already shown why its conclusions are wrong.

In other words, as with most questions, this seems like an empirical one.

The Virtues of Disunity or Why Civility Is More Important Than Unity

2009-09-21T14:08:00.000-05:00

On the 8th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I was reading my favorite sports blog, when I came a cross a post remembering those attacks. The post had links to a couple videos, including Paul Simon's memorable performance of "The Boxer" on Saturday Night Live, backed by New York firefighters. The post's comments quickly devolved into politics, as you might imagine if you've read anything about the September 11th attacks in the last few years, and several of the commenters remembered with fondness the political unity that followed the attacks, lamenting the relative lack of unity we're seeing in America today. I couldn't have agreed less.

Now I will agree, for the sake of discussion, to forget what that unity actually bought us: two wars, at least one of which was a tragic mistake (and which was sold to us with lies that would likely have been much less convincing without that unity), the Patriot Act, which most members of Congress failed to read (likely for the sake of unity), Guantanamo Bay and indefinite detentions, a second Bush term¹, etc., etc., etc. But even with such agreed forgetfulness, I'm still loath to believe that the post-September 11 unity was a good thing. For one, democracy, only works, to the extent that it does, with healthy debate and discussion, and the sort of unity this country experienced after September 11, 2001 made debate and discussion nearly impossible. Can you imagine what would have happened to politicians who had vocally opposed our going to war in Afghanistan? Oh wait, I'm supposed to be forgetting that stuff.

The other, related problem with unity of this sort is that a lot of stuff that should get done, or should at least be the subject of discussion, doesn't, because it would threaten the unity. Politicians, particularly those who are members of the party that is not in power, are unlikely to broach certain subjects unrelated to the cause of the unity (e.g., abortion, health care, etc.) that are likely to spark dissent. It's probably not a coincidence that Bush's popularity took a nosedive when he went after Social Security. By doing so, he alienated the American political middle who had, by and large, stuck with him since they had become Bush fans on September 12, 2001, and thereby killed the last vestiges of the post-9/11 unity. We were then left with the old divisions -- left, right, and middle/undecided. And it's not as though Bush hadn't been planning to go after Social Security all along. It's just that he waited until reelection so that his reelection bid could benefit from his residual post-9/11 popularity. With unity comes complacency.

If you ask me (and it's not as though anyone actually did, but still), what we need more than unity is civility. The only thing that can rival unity's ability to stifle political debate and discussion is incivility. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a champion of civility for civility's sake: the next time some asshole driver turning right, but only looking left, nearly runs me over while I try to cross the street, the finger I extend and the words that freely flow from my mouth will show just how committed I am to civility in that context. I don't even believe that civility is called for in every discussion. The purveyors² of Young Earth Creationism, for example, deserve nothing but derision dripping with mocking and smothered in secret disrespect sauce. But in political discourse, the goal at least should be to convince people that your position is the correct one. And incivility, of the sort that talk radio and, in "today's 24-hour news cycle" (scare quotes cannot express how much I hate that phrase), TV news channels thrive on, that inspires political signs painting Bush or Obama as Hitler, or causes books and articles proclaiming liberalism to be based on fascist principles or conservatism to be based in mental instability to be widely read and agreed with, makes convincing anyone impossible. Or at least, it leads to a situation in which the only way to convince anyone of anything is to first convince them that your opposition is a bigger villain than the villain your opposition is portraying you to be. This ultimately gets us nowhere.

Witness the health care debate, with its socialist/Marxist/fascist bogeymen and threats of death panels. Sure, this has seemingly changed certain people's minds, given that until recently, the vast majority of Americans favored universal healthcare and even single-payer health care, but now are convinced that Democrats are out to kill their grandmothers, but where do we go from here? The discussion, or lack thereof, doesn't leave us with many outs, even should we decide that government-run health care, in the form of a public option or whatever, isn't the way we as a country want to go. The Baucus bill, which is a result of this political "discussion," is exactly the sort of meaningless incivility. Meanwhile, health care remains in crisis. Unity wouldn't help us here, because if we were united as we were after September 11, 2001, we wouldn't even be talking about health care (we sure as hell didn't talk about it much from 2002-2007), but a little bit of civility might. At least then we'd actually be able to discuss a single-payer health care, a public option, co-ops, or any number of other potential changes to our health care system, and decide where all of that leaves us. Where it leaves us can't be worse than where we are now.

1I know, I know, Bush was reelected in one of the most contentious elections ever, winning by one of the lowest margins (percentage-wise) ever, particularly for a war president, but ask yourself this question: would Bush have had any chance of reelection, given how close the election in fact was, if he hadn't benefited from the residual popularity he had from that post-September 11 unity?
2The purveyors, but not the believers. The purveyors are to be derided, but the believers are to be educated. Education requires trust, and trust requires, at a minimum, civility.

The Use and Abuse of Richard Dawkins

2009-09-20T20:19:00.010-05:00

Brandon of the excellent blog Siris links to a post at the Intelligent Design blog Uncommon Descent, which presents the following argument (as laid out by Brandon):

(1) Atheistic naturalism is true. (assumption)
(2) One can’t infer an "ought" from an "is." (assumption)
(3) All that is is the natural world, and the natural world is all there is. (from 1)
(4) There is nothing in the natural world from which we can infer an "ought." (from 2 and 3)
(5) For any action, there is nothing from which one can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action. (from 4 and 3)
(6) For any action, it is permissible if and only if it’s not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action. (assumption)
(7) For any action, it’s permissible to perform that action. (from 5 and 6)

Brandon and his commenters do a fine job of showing what's wrong with this argument, but I was intrigued by something else in the U.D. post (emphasis mine):

(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.

(2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.

Richard Dawkins is a biologist. Anyone who's read his non-biological writings knows that he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a philosopher. So building an argument based on a philosophical position espoused by Dawkins, whatever the ultimate validity of that argument, seems like cheating, doesn't it? Why not begin with assumptions that atheists who've actually read Hume might (should? should seems ironic given the content of the argument) make?

To be fair to the U.D. poster, Barry Arrington (himself a lawyer, and not a philosopher), atheists seem to have propped Dawkins up as their spokesperson on all matters, be they biological, theological, sociological, psychological, or philosophical (the cultish Dawkins worshiping is somewhat disturbing, in fact), so I suppose they're getting what they deserve.

Dostoevsky vs. Rand

2009-09-20T17:56:00.005-05:00

This is undoubtedly not a unique insight, but doesn't Crime and Punishment strike you as a preemptive polemic against pretty much everything Ayn Rand ever wrote? If nothing else, placing Rand into the light of Raskolnikov brings into stark relief her (ironic?) Napoleonism.

Testing 1,2,3

2009-09-19T01:47:00.000-05:00

Testing... testing... is this thing on?