Gold Standard

The politics and aesthetics of resentment. Warning: this post contains thought crime.

I can not entirely fathom thinking on the right these days. It used to be that policy disputes occured, intelligent people weighed in from across a reasonable spectrum of politics, and legislation was hammered out to push some policy modestly forward (or backward). This was true for civil rights, environmental protection, deregulation, welfare reform, even gay marriage. That seems to be gone now. Whether it is the atomization of attention and thought brought on by social media, or the mercenary propaganda of organs like FOX news, the new mode of politics appears to be destructive, vindictive spite. A spiral of extremism.

It also has a definite air of resentment, as though policy is not the point, nor is power, entirely, but owning the libtards is the real point- doing anything that would be destructive of liberal accomplishments and ideals. We know that the president is a seething mass of resentments, but how did that transform alchemically into a political movement?

I was reading a book (Deep South) by Paul Theroux that provides some insight. It is generally a sour and dismissive, full of a Yankee's distain for the backwardness of the South. And it portrays the region as more or less third world. Time and again, towns are shadowed by factories closed due to off-shoring.  What little industry the South had prior to NAFTA was eviscerated, leaving agriculture, which is increasingly automated and corporatized. It is an awful story of regression and loss of faith. And the author of this process was, ironically, a Southerner- Bill Clinton. Clinton went off to be a smarty-pants, learned the most advanced economic theories, and concluded that NAFTA was a good deal for the US, as it was for the other countries involved, and for our soft power in the post-world war 2 world. The South, however, and a good deal of the Rust Belt, became sacrifice zones for the cheaper goods coming in from off-shore.

What seemed so hopeful in the post-war era, that America would turn itself into a smart country, leading the world in science, technology, as well as in political and military affairs, has soured into the realization that all the smart kids moved to the coasts, leaving a big hole in the middle of the country. The meritocracy accomplished what it was supposed to, establishing a peerless educational system that raised over half the population into the ranks of college graduates. But it opened eyes in other ways as well, freeing women from the patterns of patriarchy, freeing minorities from reflexive submission, and opening our history to quite contentious re-interpretation. And don't get me started on religion!

So there has been a grand conjunction of resentment, between a population sick of the dividends of the educational meritocracy over a couple of generations, and a man instinctively able to mirror and goad those resentments into a destructive political movement. His aesthetic communicates volumes- garish makeup, obscene ties, and sharing with Vladimir Putin a love of gold-gilded surfaces. To the lower class, it may read expensive and successful, but to the well educated, it reeks of cheapness, focusing on surface over substance, a bullying, mob aesthetic, loudly anti-democratic.

Reading the project 2025 plans for this administration, I had thought we would be looking at a return to the monetary gold standard. But no, gold has come up in many other guises, not that one. Gold crypto coins, Gold immigration card, Oval office gold, golden hair. But most insulting of all was the ordering up of gold standard science. The idea that the current administration is interested in, or capable of, sponsoring high quality personnel, information or policy of any kind has been thoroughly refuted by its first months in office. The resentment it channels is directed against, first and foremost, those with moral integrity. Whether civil servants, diplomats, or scientists, all who fail to bend the knee are enemies of this administration. This may not be what the voters had in mind, but it follows from the deeper currents of frustration with liberal dominance of the meritocracy and culture.

But what is moral integrity? I am naturally, as a scientist, talking about truth. A morality of truth, where people are honest, communicate in truthful fashion, and care about reality, including the reality of other people and their rights / feelings. As the quote has it, reality has a well-known liberal bias. But it quickly becomes apparent that there are other moralities. What we are facing politically could be called a morality of authority. However alien to my view of things, this is not an invalid system, and it is central to the human condition, modeled on the family. Few social systems are viable without some hierarchy and relation of submission and authority. How would a military work without natural respect for authority? And just to make this philosophical and temperamental system complete, one can posit a morality of nurture as well, modeled on mothering, unconditional love, and encouragement.

This triad of moralities is essential to human culture, each component in continual dynamic tension. Our political moment shows how hypertrophy of the morality of authority manifests. Lies and ideology are a major tool, insisting that people take their reality from the leader, not their own thoughts or from experts who hew to a morality of truth. Unity of the culture is valued over free analysis. As one can imagine, over the long run of human history, the moralities of nurture and authority have been dominant by far. They are the poles of the family system. It was the Enlightenment that raised the morality of truth as an independent pole in this system for the culture at large, not just for a few scholars and clerics. Not that truth has not always been an issue in people's lives, with honesty a bedrock principle, and people naturally caring whether predicted events really happen, whether rain really falls, the sun re-appears, etc. But as an organizing cultural principle that powers technological and thus social and cultural progress, it is a somewhat recent phenomenon.

It is notable that scientists, abiding by a morality of truth, tend to have very peaceful cultures. They habitually set up specialized organizations, mentor students, and collaborate nationally and internationally. Scientists may work for the military, but within their own cultures, have little interest in starting wars. It is however a highly competitive culture, with critical reviewing, publishing races, and relentless experimentation designed to prove or disprove models of reality. Authority has its place, as recognized experts get special privileges, and established facts tend to be hard to move. At risk of sounding presumptuous, the morality of truth represents an enormous advance in human culture, not to be lightly dismissed. And the recent decades of science in the US have been a golden age that have produced a steady stream of technological advance and international power, not to mention Nobel prizes and revelations of the beauty of nature. That is a gold standard. 

• The theme does strike a nerve.
• In the name of free speech, thought crime will be punished.
• The war against propaganda.
• How fun it is in a culture of cruelty.
• A great drying is taking place.
• Is there no limit to the corruption?
• 200 years of trains.

The Problem of Desire

We got what we want... are we happy now?

I have been enjoying a podcast on philosophy, which as is typical for the field, dances around big questions and then pats itself on the back for thinking clearly. What really got to me was a discussion of why Zizek, who calls himself a communist, couldn't be bothered to frame a positive system for how the world should be run. No, he is merely the philosopher and critic of the screwed up system we are in. Plenty of hard work there! Asking for a way forward, well, that would be like making the visionary have to build the rockets and recruit the astronauts to build the new world. That is someone else's work ... grubby details!

Whoa! The thinker who is just a critic is leaving the job almost wholly undone. Everyone is a critic, after all. The paying work should be in thinking up better worlds and solutions, and standing behind them in the face of the inevitable, yes, criticism. A major obsession of the show and these philosophers (around the 200 episode mark) is capitalism- why it is so terrible, the many critiques and complaints about it, and throwing some love at the anarchists, communists, and other outré comrades ... on the highest philosophical plane, of course. 

But what it all boils down to for me is the problem of desire. The capitalist system is one natural and highly refined way to get what we want. We pay into the system with our toil, and get back the products of everyone else's toil. Fair and square, right? The system is wholly shaped by desire. What the consumer wants out of the system, what the worker knows they need to do in order to be that consumer, and what the capitalist and managerial classes need to do to put the two together, and make a killing for themselves in the bargain. This system is a wonder of labor allocation, providing the most varied and productive forms of work, and of products, ever known.

A still from Chaplin's Modern Times.

And yet... and yet, this system doesn't really give us everything we want, because, well, there are other desires that aren't met in the capitalist market. Desires for love, for community, for a virtuous and just political system, for a wholesome environment. There are a lot of other desires, and letting capitalism gobble everything up and sell itself as the end-all of social organizing principles is obviously not a healthy way to go. Though we have surely tried! Not to mention the warped psychology of pitting everyone against each other in the many competitive planes of capitalism- the labor market, the exploitation by capitalists, assaults of marketing and advertising, and the resulting inequality of income and wealth. There is plenty to complain about here.

The problem is that we have many desires, of which many conflict with the desires of others, and many conflict with each other. Even for the individual person, prioritizing one's own many desires is an excruciating exercise of tradeoffs and negotiation. Imagine what that is like for a whole society. That is why figuring out what is "good" is such a chestnut in philosophy. We all know what is good at some very abstract level, but the variety and relationship of goods is what does us in. 

So it is easy enough to say that the capitalist system is evil, and we would like a new and better system, please. Much more difficult to frame a replacement. Following our desires makes it clear that capitalism is an element of the good life, but far from the only element. Even something as simple as providing toothpaste can not be left entirely to the capitalist system. Our desire for effective toothpaste can easily conjure up fraudulent business "models", where the fluoride is left out, or lead contamination gets in. The government has a role in this most humdrum of capitalist goods, to provide a legal framework for liability, perhaps direct regulation of medical / food products, not to mention guarding against monopolies other forms of business regulation. 

We end up, as we have in practice, with a mixed system where natural capitalist motivations are fostered to provide as much organization as they can, but our many other, often much more lofty and significant, desires lead us to regulate that system extensively. To put a larger frame around this, consider what the good life is in general terms. It is a life where each person is educated to the extent they wish, and contributes in turn to society in some useful way, building a life of mutual respect with others in their community. It aligns very strongly with the American dream of work, striving, and self-reliance, at least once the genocidal clearance of the original inhabitants was taken care of. The Civil war was premised on the abhorrence of slavery, not only on behalf of the abused Blacks, but also as a philosophical system of life where people thought it their right to live parasitically by the sweat of other people's brows. 

This has strong implications for our current moment, where inequality is higher than ever. A well-organized society would reward work with the kind of pay that supports a respectable life. It would not tolerate immiseration and abuse in the labor market. At the same time, it would not allow the incredible concentration of wealth we see today. And especially, it would not allow the intergenerational transfer of that wealth, nor the complexity and laxity of a tax system that provides the majority of work that the rich appear to engage in- that of avoiding taxes. In order for everyone to live a good life, children should neither be born to so much money that they fritter their lives away, nor to so little that their whole futures are immediately wiped away. All this requires a strong and moral state, working in collaboration with a strongly regulated capitalist system.

It has been abundantly proven that neither anarchism, nor communism, nor libertarianism provide the basis for practical societies. No amount of reframing, or consciousness raising, or struggle sessions, will bring such systems to pass. Only theocracies and autocracies have shown a comparably durable basis, though of a distinctly unpleasant kind. Therefore, philosophies that dabble in such utopianism should recognize that they are dealing in abstractions that can be instructive as extreme ends of a spectrum, as well as object lessons in failure. It is simply malpractice to tease people with glimmering alternatives to our communal realities, rather than doing the gritty work of reform within them.

• Case in point... jeans in the DDR.
• Bill Mitchell on the commodification of leisure.
• The Supreme court continues abetting clearly illegal activities.
• Science, schmientz
• Gullible prove resistant to further gulling.
• Yes, this gullible.

Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way. 

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?

• Beautiful? You be the judge.
• Kasparov on freedom and evil.
• Kids should be able to navigate neighborhoods.
• Lies and disinformation are a public health crisis.
• More variants are always coming along.
• We are not doing enough against climate heating.

On the Origin of Facts

Bruno Latour tours the Salk Institute, finds science taking place, and has a hard time deconstructing it.

There is a production process in science, by which the educational background, institutional setting, funding decisions, social accidents, and happenstances that form directions of research, hunches, hypotheses, and insights are stripped away, intentionally and systematically, to produce "facts" in a form ready for publication. This de- / re-contextualization serves to obfuscate the process and shamanize the practitioners, but more importantly it serves to generalize the resulting fact and put it into its scientific rather than social context. And it is the scientific context- the fact's objective existence- not the social context, that makes it powerful and useful for further construction of other facts. The social context forms part of the essential background / input, but the produced facts and insights are not by nature social, nor should they be received as such.

Experiments are instrumental in this transformation process, which goes from a hunch, to a collegial suggestion, to an hypothesis, to a testable hypothesis, to the hunt for alternative hypotheses and thus for experiments designed to exclude them and to support the main hypothesis, (if true), followed by group presentations and critique, outside peer review that adduces more alternative hypotheses and possible experiments, and finally to publication and collegial acceptance (or rejection and refutation). When all this is done, the murky origins of the hunch necessarily fall away and become trivially unimportant, (other than in memoirs and reminiscences), and the fact stands alone as supported with all the armament that science can bring to bear, both in its technical testing capabilities and its social structure of critique. It thence, if lucky, becomes a sentence in a textbook. In Bruno Latour's words, it is "freed from the circumstances of its production"

The above was a recounting of the conventional (and scientist's) perspective on the evolution of scientific facts. Whether this is the case is contested by social constructivism, a movement in philosophy that adheres to antirealism, which is to say that all of what we regard as outside "reality" is socially constructed, and thus science is likewise a social institution that generates conventions that by its social power it is able to foist onto a naive public, who in turn, like sheep, contribute their taxes to keep the scientific community wallowing in money and social power, cranking out yet more obscure and artificial "facts". Indeed, the very status of truth that is given to facts is fundamentally a social construct made up of a community of believing people, whatever their reasons and supposed evidence.

A few of Latour's works over the years. He declines to be post-modern, because he disagrees with the whole frame of modernity, as being somehow different from or non-continuous with the rest of history. And this attitude comes back to his dismissive attitude towards science and the enlightenment as being a break in kind from prior ways of understanding the world. It has just been fetishes all the way down.

Bruno Latour (along with his co-writer Steve Woolgar) waded into this controversy back in the 1970s with a French philosophical and anthropological background, to investigate what really goes on in a laboratory. He embedded himself into a leading laboratory and learned how it operated, informally and formally. This is recounted in the book "Laboratory Life" (1979; recent review), which, as usual for continental philosophers, is challenging to make sense of. The authors tend to straddle the two perspectives, both respecting and recounting the normal scientific activities and perspectives, (if rather laboriously), and then also persistently suggesting their contrary viewpoint and program that they bring to the project.

"Despite the fact that our scientists held the belief that the inscriptions could be representations or indicators of some entity with an independent existence 'out there', we have argued that such entities were constituted solely through the use of these inscriptions. ... By contrast, we do not conceive of scientists using various strategies as pulling back the curtain on pregiven, but hitherto concealed, truths. Rather, objects (in this case substances) are constituted through the artful creativity of scientists. Interestingly, attempts to avoid the use of terminology which implies the preexistence of objects subsequently revealed by scientists has led us into certain sylistic difficulties. This, we suggest, is precisely because of the prevalence of a certain form of discourse in the description of process. We have therefore found it extremely difficult to formulate descriptions of scientific activity which do not yield to the misleading impression that science is about discovery (rather than creativity and construction). It is not just that a change of emphasis is required; rather, the formulations which characterize historical descriptions of scientific practice require exorcism before the nature of this practice can best be understood."

Exorcism indeed! One might posit a simpler explanation- that science is, in fact, in the business of discovery, though with the caveat that what is to be dis-covered is never fully known beforehand, sometimes not even suspected, and thus there is a great deal of intutition, creativity, variation, and social construction involved in the process, and uneven and unpredictable results coming out. While the status of the resulting fact is never perfectly secure, and is supported by another social process of conventional agreement, that agreement is routinely granted once the preceeding critical hoops have been surmounted and leads generally to the vast pool of factual and "objective" information that finds its home in the academic literature, textbooks, college instruction, Wikipedia, etc. A pool that is further confirmed routinely by succeeding work and technical developments that depend on its objective factuality.

Latour does not, in the end, adhere to the hard program of social construction, for the simple fact that the object of the scientific story he recounts, the thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRF), was found, was found to be a specific and real substance, and went on to a respected place in medical practice and the textbooks, not to mention later earning a Nobel prize. There is real comedy in the attempt, however, as the anthropologist takes on the scientists at their own game, analyzing and plumbing their depths for structures and paradigms that they themselves hardly suspect, complete with diagrams of the laboratory, pictures of the roof and other apparatus, graphs of publication trends, and verbatim interviews with protagonists, underlings, etc. It is a sort of depth-psychology of one laboratory.

"But it would be incorrect to conclude that the TRF story only exhibits the partial influence of sociological features. instead, we claim that TRF is a thoroughly social construction. By maintaining the sense in which we use social, we hope to be able to pursue the strong programme at a level apparently beyond traditional sociological grasp. In Knorr's terms, we want to demonstrate the idiosyncratic, local, heteregeneous, contextual, and multifaceted character of scientific practices. We suggest that the apparently logical character of reasoning is only part of a much more complex phenomenon that Auge calls 'practices of interpretation' and which comprises local, tacit negotiation, constantly changing evaluations, and unconscious or institutionalized gestures. ... In short, we observe how difference between the logic of scientific and non-scientific practices of interpretation are created and sustained within the laboratory."

Granted, most of this is overwrought, but the true worth of this work was that these observers came into an eminent lab and paid minute attention to what was going on, and emphasized that what comes out of the sausage machine in publication and other products is far different than the materials that go in. While the conventional approach would emphasize the preceeding scientific observations and technical developments that led the leader of this lab to even contemplate that the purification of TRF from millions of dissected brains was possible and desirable, Latour emphasizes instead, and with some success, the social contingencies that surrounded the original uncertainties, the slow progress, the false leads and constantly discarded "bad results", the huge amount of money and effort required, and other nitty-gritty that forms the day-today of laboratory life. The latter emphasis is useful in accounting for how science gets done, but discards other crucial inputs, and is ultimately not at all convincing as a general theory of what science accomplishes or is.

I think the confusion arises fundamentally (apart from professional jealousy) from the fact that social constructivism is perfectly valid for some areas of our lives, such as arts, fashion, religion, morality, and to some extent, politics. Many problems do not have an objective criterion, and are socially constructed on an ongoing basis with criteria that boil down to what and who is thought good, whether for the individual, family, collective, etc. And the insistant denial of the total social construction of one's own field- as is understandably routine among scientists- is particularly vehement (and unfounded) in the case of religion and has lent the latter bizarre and extraordinary power through the centuries, which the deconstructivist project is entirely appropriate and well-prepared to investigate. And it should be said that many forms of primitive and pseudo-science partake of this form as well, if not of outright fraud. So the line is hardly stable or absolute. But when it comes to science as practiced in the enlightnement tradition, with a variety of safeguards and institutional practices that feature competition, peer review at multiple levels, and final public transparency, the approach falls flat.

• A contemporary accounting of this scientific race, last of a 3-part series.
• TRF is one of a series of "releasing hormones", operating between the hypothalamus and pituitary. Or should the word "is" be put in quotes?
• A critique of the critique.
• Mankiw takes on MMT, and obsesses about inflation, along mainstream lines.
• MMT replies.
• Limited liberty at Liberty University.
• Notes from the Taliban.
• Birds: who cares?
• A cult is exposed.

High Intelligence is Highly Overrated by Highly Intelligent People

AI, the singularity, and watching way too much science fiction: Review of Superintelligence by Nic Bostrom.

How far away is the singularity? That is the point when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence, after which it is thought that this world will no longer be ours to rule. Rick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, doesn't know when this will be, but is fearful of its consequences, since, if we get it wrong, humanity's fate may not be a happy one.

The book starts strongly, with some well argued and written chapters about the role of intelligence in humanity's evolution, and the competitive landscape of technology today that is setting the stage for this momentous transition. But thereafter, the armchair philosopher takes over, with tedious chapters of hairsplitting and speculation about how fast or slow the transition might be, how collaborative among research groups, and especially, how we could pre-out-think these creations of ours, to make sure they will be well-disposed to us, aka "the control problem".

Despite the glowing blurbs from Bill Gates and others on the jacket, I think there are fundamental flaws with this whole approach and analysis. One flaw is a failure to distinguish between intelligence and power. Our president is a moron. That should tell us something about this relationship. It is not terribly close- the people generally acknowledged as the smartest in history have rarely been the most powerful. This reflects a deeper flaw, which is, as usual, a failure to take evolution and human nature seriously. The "singularity" is supposed to furnish something out of science fiction- a general intelligence superior to human intelligence. But Bostrom and others seem to think that this means a fully formed human-like agent, and those are two utterly different things. Human intelligence takes many forms, and human nature is composed of many more things than intelligence. Evolution has strained for billions of years to form our motivations in profitable ways, so that we follow others when necessary, lead them when possible, define our groups in conventional ways that lead to warfare against outsiders, etc., etc. Our motivational and social systems are not the same as our intelligence system, and to think that anyone making an AI with general intelligence capabilities will, will want to, or even can, just reproduce the characteristics of human motivation to tack on and serve as its control system, is deeply mistaken.

The fact is that we have AI right now that far exceeds human capabilities. Any database is far better at recall than humans are, to the point that our memories are atrophying as we compulsively look up every question we have on Wikipedia or Google. And any computer is far better at calculations, even complex geometric and algebraic calculations, than we are in our heads. That has all been low-hanging fruit, but it indicates that this singularity is likely to be something of a Y2K snoozer. The capabilities of AI will expand and generalize, and transform our lives, but unless weaponized with explicit malignant intent, it has no motivation at all, let alone the motivation to put humanity into pods for its energy source, or whatever.

People-pods, from the Matrix.

The real problem, as usual, is us. The problem is the power that accrues to those who control this new technology. Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He stands at the head of multinational megacorporation that has inserted its tentacles into the lives of billions of people, all thanks to modestly intelligent computer systems designed around a certain kind of knowledge of social (and anti-social) motivations. All in the interests of making another dollar. The motivations for all this do not come from the computers. They come from the people involved, and the social institutions (of capitalism) that they operate in. That is the real operating system that we have yet to master.

• Facebook - the problem is empowering the wrong people, not the wrong machines.
• Barriers to health care.
• What it is like to be a psychopathic moron.

En Garde, Libtard!

Review of "Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason", by William Davies

Davies' book offers a deep historical analysis of our current predicament- a post-truth culture of all-out political warfare. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rather disorganized and digressive, despite offering many interesting ideas and pithy mottos. So the reviewer's job becomes one of reconstructing what the argument should have been were it better-edited and organized. A brief outline is that Davies believes that the enlightenment (exemplified by the philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes- no mention of Locke, oddly) generated the idea that a peaceful civic space was possible if the state does two things- monopolizes all violent power, and generates institutions of fact-finding to put policy and political debate on a rational footing, thus founding what we know today as expert/elite-driven technocracy.

Fast-forward to today, and our political space has degenerated back into a semblence of warfare, where information is weaponized, our new internet media is more hospitable to trolls than thought, and political debates revolve around put-downs and insults. The authority of the technocrats has been seeping away for decades, and the natives are restless.

On the whole, I think the philosophical superstructure of this argument is largely trash. Technocracy was hardly heard of till the 50's, when the post-war status of physicists and scientists in general was at a high tide. Civility has waxed and waned dramatically over the decades and centuries, and seems to have more to do with the tides of war and national cohesion than with anyone's philosophy, however influential such ideas can be in the long term in a background way. And Davies' prescription at the end is for the elites to enter the culture and political war at full throttle, since no one cares about their facts, objectivity, or authority any more. That hardly seems to be a philosophically grounded, coherent, or long-term answer to the problem. One can say, however, that the composition of the governing elites has changed over time, from the theologians and aristocrats who are fossilized in the British House of Lords, to the more democratic-minded aristocrats of the enlightenment and American/French revolutions, to the scholarly products of the École normale supérieure, Harvard, etc. who tend to rule the roost, and especially the civil service, today.

"It is scarcely any surprise that politicians, businesses, and civil society actors would want to exploit some of the rhetorical magic of numbers for their own purposes, playing consultants to produce statistics to suit thier interests. ... So much trust has been placed in numbers tht anyone wishing to be trusted (for good reasons or ill inevitably cloaks themselves in a veneer of mathematical reason."

Anyhow, what are some other facets that Davies brings out? One is the varying nature of knowledge as seen by business people, military people, and scholars. While the latter laboriously pile factlet on factlet to create an enduring, public edifice of explicit knowledge, the former operate by the seat of their pants to integrate partial knowledge of the moment for effective action. The former value secrecy and intuition and feelings (especially the anlysis of the feelings of others, competitors, and audiences), while the latter try their best to block feelings from their scholarship, keeping it clean of partisanship and bias.

These are fundamentally different approaches to the world, yet our elite government institutions are largely modeled on scholarship- the painstaking assembly of facts and stakeholders, etc. to come up with well-vetted policy. Again, this is hardly a new distinction however. Davies makes a case that romanticism / nationalism / military thinking crept into the European political systems after the French Revolution, which so dramatically mobilized the populace of France to generate an unprecedented military machine. What were once two distinct things- civil life and military life, gradually became merged into the total war and military-industrial complexes of the current century. And this led to the information-as-warfare situation that we find ourselves in today, courtesy of that DARPA project.. the internet. All I can say is ... no- there is something else going on. We have had a partisan, even warring, press since the founding, and a yellow press, scandals, bickering, and many other media problems.

"As for so many other insurgents, the objective of the troll is not to gain power but to inflict pain. Rather than as a means of representation or reason, words become instruments of violence, which seek out human weakness then exploit it. Libertarians might argue that emotional harm is not 'violence', but this is contradicted by the behavior of trolls, who pursure emotional harm with a militaristic and sadistic relish."

"An alternative perspective on financial securitization and Facebook is that they are further cases of 'weaponization' of everyday institutions and promises. They exploit and weaken norms of trust, without building adequate replacements. Debt, housing, friendship and democracy have been around for thousands of years; the contribution of the financial sector or Silicon Valley over the past thirty years has been to find ways of manipulating and destabilizing them, so that society no longer feels secure. Nothing permanent is constructed by the invention of mortgage-backed securities or Facebook, but a great deal is damaged."

Where Davies gets a little warmer is in a direct indictment of the US and European elites. The most topical and telling example is of US illegal immigration. For decades, the two parties have been happy to encourage immigration, though for different reasons. The Republicans, beholden to business, want cheap workers. So they work to keep illegal immigrants illegal, which empowers businesses against them and makes possible a high-class life for the top end of town, staffed by gardeners, cooks, nannies, ethnic restaurants, and so forth, at bargain prices. Elite Democrats share in these benefits, and additionally get the votes (generally) of those immigrants who manage to become citizens, by way of being marginally more sympathetic to them. Who loses? Workers do. Illegal immigration has held down wages for decades, and enabled whole industries, particularly agriculture, to operate at well below a decent wage scale. Or more to the point, a wage scale that accurately reflects the domestic legal labor market.

".. the conflict between metropolitan and rural values was heightened, adding economic inequality to a set of existing moral controversies. Another way in which this split appears is in terms of graduates vs nongraduates. This conflict has been a feature of American politics since the 1960's, and now more or less determines the shape of the electoral map, with Democrats winning coastal regions, big cities, and university towns, and Republicans winning more or less everywhere else."

In this case the Democratic elites in particular have adopted an agenda that directly hurts its original constituents- working class citizens. The same can be said of NAFTA and of globalization in general. The benefits have flowed up to the top, while the lower classes have been sold down the river. All this is understandable from a theoretical economic perspective, which is a comfort zone for the elites, as total economic growth inarguably goes up with most forms of free trade. China has paticularly decimated working class communities across the country, taking whole industries and supply chains abroad. Davies argues at length that the abstract statistics typically provided and consumed by the elites, such as GDP and unemployment, have, perhaps by design, failed to accurately portray the conditions of much of the population, which is increasingly ignored, flown-over, under-employed, in economic decline, and despondent. And these are the conditions that lead to a sleazy, clownish demagogue, especially when the other candidate in the election exemplifies almost precisely the over-educated and entitled elitism that has lost so much credibility, mostly by being slowly coopted by the rotten values of their purported adversaries.

Another issue is general bureaucratic sclerosis. Nothing can be done or built at any reasonable cost, because between the unionization of public workers, their corrupt participation in elections, and the general growth of legal, environmental, and other liabilities, the capacity of public management to operate has been cut to pieces. Exhibit A is the California high speed train, which is an utter managment fiasco. Each of these developments has been well-intentioned, but together, they result in a system where infrastructure to accommodate all the immigration that Democrats in particular are sympathetic to never gets built, we end up with gridlock, and citizens revolt against mandates to alter zoning to pack more people into the existing, crumbing, infrastructure.

And yet another issue is the romanticisation of nature. Where farmers and the agricultural industry grapple with and against nature on a daily basis, the educated elites take increasingly moralistic and strident stands- against climate change, against habitat loss, against species loss, against cruelty, against meat, etc. Again, all these movements are extremely well-intentioned, even momentously important. But the disconnect between rural and coastal could not be more stark, leading to the kind of resentment politics that we are living through.

In the wake of World War 2, the elites had demonstrated they could not only resolve a depression, manage and win a vast global war, but create the unimaginable ... the atomic bomb. They had maximum credibility, which has been eroding ever since. It was these elites that Trump and the Republicans ran against, apparently unaware that they were in the elite as well, only with the difference that while Democrats seek generally to make our state and civic institutions work better and more fairly, Republicans want to make them work less fairly, or failing that, destroy them entirely.

There are natural cycles, perhaps, of war and peace, of corruption and reform, of division and civility. But over our long history, this administration is surely the lowest point of administrative competence and moral stature. We won't get out of it by hoping for more civility, or that someone would turn off the internet. This book does offer some glimmers of a solution, not in its last chapters, but in its indictment of the Democratic elites in particular. Voters yearn for truth. Trump gave them a breakthrough of sorts, identifying immigration as a (partially valid) source of resentment, and identifying de-industrialization as another one. Both those horses are mostly out of the barn, as is surely / hopefully the fate of the coal industry as well. Trump's policies on all these fronts have been anachronistic, if not cruel, farces.

Real policy and truthful communication on these fronts is what the Democrats are groping for. They need to take workers seriously, not only as a token thread in the rainbow tapestry, but as a core and directing constituency. Warmed-over apparachiks like Joe Biden hearken back to when Democrats were slightly less elitist, thereby generating some support from older cohorts, when compared to the technocratic darlings Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigeig. But the point is.. who will articulate and serve the interests of the working class with serious and effective policy solutions? Who will lay aside the identity politics, the various liberal hobbyhorses, and focus on the demographics that will win the next election, not just through demagoguery, but by facing facts with future-directed and constituent-directed policy? The energy is rightly in the progressive end of the party, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose policies and passion speak to righting the tide of inequality with a far-reaching program of reform and reversal of decades of right wing policies, instead of being coopted by them or compromising with them.

"War provides recognition, explanation, and commemoration of pain, of the sort that policy experts and professional politicians seem unable to provide. One of the curiosities of nationalism is that, despite appeals to famous battles and heroes, it is most often kindled by moments of defeat and suffering, which shape identity more forcefully than victories. For romantic patriots, Britain was never more truly British than when fleeing Dunkirk or enduring the Blitz. The common identity of the American South is forged out of the experience, then memory, of defeat in civil war, as mourned by the Lost Cause movement of thinkers and writers. ... The major achievement of scientific expertise and modern government, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, was to establish a basis for civic interaction, from which violence was eliminated. The boundary between war and peace was unambiguous, and a public respect for facts reinforced this. There are various forces at large in the twenty-first century that test this boundary, including technologies and military strategies that blur the distinction between war and peace. But there are also emotional reasons why that line is becoming blurred. Part of the appeal of war, at least as an idea, is that- unlike civil society designed by the liked of Hobbes, it represents a form of politics where feelings really matter."

Davies points out that the most salient emotion in politics is loss of control. Such losses are destabilizing and can lead to the resentments that can be stoked by demagogues, and result in war, political or military. The Republican Southern strategy was and is built around revanchism against civil rights, among much else. In personal terms, such loss can lead to drug abuse, which gives at least the illusion of control and comfort. Workers have been dramatically disempowered over the last several decades, mostly through the far-reaching ideology of the Republican party. Yet when asked to vote, they voted for a Republican to fix it, apparently because he effectively touched an emotional feeling of hope and resentment, and then offered a pack of lies as solutions. Democrats are surely better, but they have to fess up to their failings, and dedicate themselves to a thorough-going program of reform, reversing decades of their own corruption and anti-worker policies. Will all this be twisted by the right wing media into pretzels of illogic and hate? Yes. But no one can argue that the campaign we are going through right now does not give Democrats the opportunity to make their own case on a virtually infinite number of channels and platforms. It is up to us.

• The search for social peace has infinitely deep roots.
• Why do women do it?
• And now for something different.. a pro-Trump view.
• Labor should be getting far more money.
• Better automatic stabilizers are an obvious way to take a load off the central bank.
• Threats don't work if you are a clown.
• Impeachment can't come soon enough.
• The Taliban is doing very well in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, every time we meet with the Taliban, we degrade the capacity and legitimacy of the Afghan government.
• Arctic ice loss is going to flip the switch.
• China is the worst.

Postmodernism: License to Lie

A continuation of the Enlightenment project turned around to burn it all down, and our political system went along for the ride.

The discontents of modernism are legion. It is soul-less, rational, scientistic, dehumanizing. And the architecture is even worse, exemplified by the glass box skyscraper. Modernism was the stage after the self-satisfied Victorian age, our last unconscious period when Westerners felt confident in our myths, our cultural superiority, and our untroubled right to all the fruits of the Earth. Modernism came in the wake of Nietzsche and World War 1, which left all those certainties in tatters, followed by an even more destructive World War 2. But from America rose a new unbounded ethos of progress through cooperation and science, leading to the UN, the EU, the conquering of air and space, and the comfortable dispensation of the fossil-fueled late Cold War West.

The long-term theme has been increasing consciousness, from the Enlightenment onwards, adopting ever more realistic views of the physical and social world. Art was first to experience this startling realism. Then politics, with the slow destruction of the myth of monarchical and aristocratic superiority. And finally religion, from the work of Nietzsche and Darwin, among many others. Throughout, science has been steadily dis-enchanting the world, removing Earth from the cosmic center, mystical vitalism from the chemistry of life, and God from among our forefathers and mothers. With modernism, we had reached a new level of consciousness. We could look at ourselves as one among many world cultures, accepting "other" forms of religion, art, and world view as good, perhaps even co-equal, with those of the West. Frills and decoration were out, myth was relentlessly exposed, and we sought to plumb the psychological depths as well, exposing our complexes and deep motivations.

Then in 1970's France, the postmodernist school took it up another notch, trying to show that all our remaining certainties were also questionable, and could be deconstructed. Whatever narratives we live by, even the most attenuated reliance on general progress through the evident workings of civic, capitalist, and scientific institutions, were unmasked as just another forum for power politics, patriarchy, and elite control of the society's metanarrative. Build all the skyscrapers and Hubble telescopes you want, it all boils down to Game of Thrones in the end. All narratives were destabilized, and not only was nothing sacred, nothing had meaning at all, since interpretation is an ever-flexible tool that gives authority to the reader/viewer, with little left over for the author (or for "reality"). Anything can be read in innumerable layers, to mean ... practically anything. The narratives we can not help but to live by are all ripe for deconstruction, but then how does reality relate to our (limited) cognition of it? That gets us right back to the foundations of philosophy in the Platonic cave.

This approach clearly follows the modernist and psychoanalytic line of excavating ever deeper into our sources of motivation, meaning, and narrative. Indeed, other disciplines, like anthropology, psychology, and even economics (in its study of institutions) have long preceeded the postmodernists. But one has to ask two big questions. First, is there some limit of analysis beyond which, even if the analysis is valid, human functioning is so destabilized that, for all the intellectual benefits, we end up inert, stripped of larger motivating narratives and reduced to mere units of immediate consumption, mediated by our TV sets and phones? Second, have they gone too far? Is the postmodernist analysis actually valid in all its implications? An excellent article in Areo chews over some of these problems.

Being scientifically and psychoanalytically inclined, I would have to answer no to the first question, and yes to the second. While unproductive over-analysis can lead some people to inertia, any correct analysis in psychological, cultural, or other terms can not help but illuminate the human condition. This is in general a big plus, and not one to be discarded because it is uncomfortable or destabilizing to our customary life and traditions. We dealt with Darwininan evolution, (well, most of us did), and can still reach for the stars. Sources of narrative and motivation are vast and perpetually self-created. Losing the old gods and myths is not a serious problem if we have new and significant tasks to replace them with. For example, nothing could be more dire than global climate heating- it is the central problem of our time, and tackling it would give us collective, indeed eschatological, meaning. What makes this moment particularly painful and fake is not that we lack an animating myth or center, but that we are dithering with regard to the true and monumental tasks at hand, blocked by a corrupt system and various defects of human nature.

The second question more pointed, for if the postmodernist analysis is not generally true, then we hardly have to worry about the first question at all. This is a very tricky area, since much of the postmodernist critique is valid enough. We live by many myths and narratives. But its earthshaking claims to destabilize everything and all other forms of truth are clearly false. Many fields, not just science, have a living commitment to truth that is demonstrably valid, even if the quest is elusive, even quixotic. Take the news media. While the tendency to endless punditry is lamentable, there is a core of factual reporting that is the product of a great deal of worthy dedication and forms a public good. Whatever the biases that go into selecting the targets of reporting, their products, when true, are immune to the postmodern critique. The school board really did fire its superintendent, or put a bond on the next election ballot. The fact that we have a president who fears "perjury traps", labels all truthful reporting about him "fake news", and allies with propaganda outlets like FOX and RT should not put anyone in any doubt that truth, nevertheless, exists.

Why some religious people have cottoned to the postmodern approach is somewhat mysterious and curious, for while postmodernism has mightily attempted to destablize reigning cultural orthodoxies, particularly those of science, it is hardly more kind to clericalism or religion in principle. At best, it may allow that these are at least honest about their (false) mythos/narrative basis, unlike the devious subterfuges by which science channels its bourgeois interests into claims to the really, really true narrative, which thus have posed the more interesting challenge in the postmodern literature. But make no mistake, if religion were the reigning cultural power, the deconstructionists would make mincemeat of it.

What makes Deepak Chopra so laughable?

But postmodernism has nevertheless filtered down from the academy to popular culture, destabilizing verities and authorities. Did they seek to have Republican policians declare that "we make our own reality"? Did they foresee the internet and its ironic capacity, not to make us all Orwellian drones with the same beliefs, but to let us stew voluntarily in propaganda-laced echo chambers, losing touch with reality all the same? At issue is the nature and status of factual authority, which we are so shockingly confronted with in this political moment. Coordinated assaults on our capacity for reason, from the wingnut right and its unhinged media, the new masters of the internet, the Russians, and the lying sleazebag who found his moment amongst the chaos, have posed this problem in the starkest terms. What is truth? Are there facts? What is an authoritative narrative of leadership, of care for the future and the nation? Should public policy be responsive to facts, or to money and nepotism? What is the point of morality in a fully corrupt world? Why is gaslighting a new and trending word?

The postmodernists insisted, as does our current president, that every category and supposed fact is a mask for power. They saw hobgoblins of social construction and violent dominance in the most innocent scientific facts and institutions. Such an attitude might be provocative and occasionally fruitful, but it has been taken way too far, rendering fields most affected (in the humanities) stripped of coherence, let alone authority. Leaving us with a modern art bereft of ideals other than shock, and the most banal literature and identity-based histories. It is also a sort of zero-sum-ism, needlessly oppositional and Manichaean. In their haste to unmask and tear down all idols and intellectual achievements that unify humanity, they have generated a sort of war against all meaning which is deeply anti-human- not just deconstructive, but destructive.

Yes, our narratives are in perpetual conflict. Different religions, political viewpoints, and cultures have distinct narratives and each seeks to win the hearts and minds in order to rule human soceity. The Reformation offers abundant examples of this, as does our current political scene. But at the same time, reality itself forms another, and very influential, locus in this conflict. For all the other narratives claim to be accurate views of reality, whether claiming that god is real, Catholicism is the true church, or that Republicans have a more accurate and effective view of economics and human nature. Each stakes its claims on discernment of how reality works, including the moral and other aspects of what people really want out of their social system. Do they want a king to look up to, or a representative government that may be more moderate and effective?

So narratives are not just thrashing our their conflicts on an entirely archetypal / mythical / power basis, as the postmodernists seem to assume. Rather, they are negotiating views of reality, including moral and social realities, which can be interrogated in large degree by reason generally and science specifically. Creationism and climate change denialism are just the most flagrant examples of narratives that seek social dominance on the backs of religious delusion and/or simple greed. And for all the equivocation of the postmodernists, they can be definitively dismissed given the knowledge we have outside of these or other narrative claims. The growth of mature consciousness means expanding our abilities to judge the reality-claims of narratives in a dispassionate way, considering both physical but also the psycho-social realities we share, and progressively leaving our psychological baggage behind.

• Coal is dead.
• The long road ahead against Alzheimer's. Though that article oversells our ignorance.
• Do shareholders come first, or workers and communities?
• Who is doing the harassing in the Persian Gulf?
• Rachmaninoff 3, after the instructive intro, ~5:30.
• Sanctity of life.
• Endless corruption.
• Better automatic stabilizers?

Ice Cream is True

Many philosophers seem to think that what we like and want may also be true. Critique of "On Truth", by Simon Blackburn

Hardly any academic field is subject to such divergent opinions as philosophy. While most people ignore philosophy and especially what philosophers say, with complete indifference, if not mockery, philosophers see themselves as grappling with the most enormous questions that lie at the very heart of our society and humanity. They are the ones asking the deepest questions of what is good, what is true, what is meaning, and what is being. Why, oh why are they marooned in ivory towers writing tedious monographs that no one reads or cares about? Specialization is particularly pernicious in this field, transforming what might be a pleasant conversational raconteur and dorm room bullshitter into an academic mired in most arcane and pointless hairsplitting, in emulation of fields of actual research, employed solely because university students must, after all, have philosophy courses.

Still, hope springs eternal that the mental firepower so evident in the written work of these fields could come down off the mountain and briefly enlighten the masses about what is true. Such is the project of Simon Blackburn, eminent atheist philosopher retired from Cambridge and other institutions. His book is modeled on that great work of Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. Bullshit happens when the speaker doesn't care about truth at all, whether for it (truth) , or against it (lying). Our current president puts out a lot of bullshit, but mostly he is a pathological liar with a genius for coming up with the most mendacious and divisive lie in any situation. That is why speaking with Muller was deemed by everyone around him to be a "perjury trap". Going further, the new politics we inhabit seems to have left rational discourse behind. The right decries political correctness, which cruelly enforces reason and decency. The solution is to create an emotional discourse full of tribal identifiers but otherwise senseless, making of our politics a simple blue/green contest, ending up, ironically enough, in identity politics.

Blackburn also takes some political shots, which, since he is British, aim mostly at the egregious lying prevalent in the pro-Brexit campaign. But the book is largely a survey / critique of philosophical attitudes towards truth. The starting point, naturally, is the correspondence theory of truth. While called a theory, is it more a definition- that truth consists of mental models that correspond with reality. Heliocentrism is more true than geocentrism, Thucidides is more true than Herodotus, NPR news is more true than FOX news. Blackburn takes those outré philosophers (postmodernists particularly) to task for disputing such basic conceptions.

"At the end of the twentieth century the intellectual fashion known as postmodernism took an ironical stance towards science, regarding it in an anthropological spirit as simply the ideology of a particular tribe of self-selecting people calling themselves physicists, chemists, engineers, and biologists. The standpoint seemed to many to be a sophisticated response to science's claims to authority. It was tough-minded and knowing, and its proponents could flatter themselves as having seen through and exploded spurious claims to authority, as relativists and skeptics typically do. It was all very exciting- until one saw the same sophisticates using iPhones and GPS devices, relying detergents and paints and aeroplanes, vaccinating their children, and doing all the other things that the progress of science has enabled us to do. And then its glamour disappears, and instead it looks more than a little bonkers."

But there have been other, less dismissive approaches to defining truth- the coherence theory and pragmatism. Both take a step back from the correspondence definition, in light of our practical difficulties in knowing when we have gotten to that glorious state of correspondence. Coherence substitutes an agreement among authorities, such as a convergence among physicists of the late 1800's that everything of importance had already been found, and it was only left to work out the details. Global warming supplies another example- if 99% of relevant experts assign it to human causes, then perhaps it is, for all practical purposes, true. Pragmatism takes a similarly indirect approach relying on practical effects for validation of a truth. If planes fly, then much of the aeronautical theory underlying them is likely, again, to be true. I think it is useful to class coherence and pragamatism as methods of ascertaining or approximating truth, not as definitions. The point of truth remains getting us in sync with reality. If we were gods, then no pragmatism or coherence among authorities of lines of evidence would be needed- we would just know what the truth is, but it would still be a matter of correspondence between reality and our sovereign mind.

From there, things really start going downhill. Blackburn makes a diversion into deflationism, which claims that the correspondence theory is not so much a theory as a tautology, therefore meaningless. The problem here is a reliance on absurd linguistics. The word truth is generally not needed in truth claims, like "grass is green", as opposed to "the thought that grass is green corresponds with the facts", or "it is true that grass is green". It should be obvious that in the first phrase, the word "is" does a lot of work, setting out the truth claim quite clearly. It is hardly meaningless, or not a truth claim, thus it is little surprise that adding extra "truthy" qualifiers hardly add anything.

From there, the discussion descends into aesthetics, morality, and religion. Blackburn seems to have a hard time making sense of these fields, virtually giving up critique, and laying out lots of philosophical history and attitudes, which end up putting quite a bit of value on truth talk in these fields. For example, if we all agree that killing babies is bad, then it is true that killing babies is bad. Or, if ice cream is good, then it is true as well. There is a lengthy discussion of the formation of tastes, such that experts with deep knowledge of some art form can educate others to have more refined tastes, which all seems to form an argument for the truth of the tastes and the authority of the experts.

"But if we have been careful and imaginative and profited from the best opinion of others in the common pursuit, we can be reasonably confident that we have done justice to the topic [of some case of artistic evaluation]. We can advance our opinions, which also means we can judge them, perhaps provisionally and in cognisance of our own fallibility, as true."

But here I have to differ fundamentally. Philosophy deals with what is true and what is good. These are not the same things. Just because everyone agrees on something being good ... does not make it true. The criterion is radically different, being our judgement of goodness for human existence, whether for us personally, or for larger social structures such as our family, country or global society. Even if that judgement is putatively objective, such as population growth in response to "good"  policies or virtues, the value of that criterion remains subjective, as it is we who value population growth and flourishing, not perhaps the other animals who may die as a result. So one might claim it to be true that something is good, given expert justification or widespread agreement, but calling things true because they are good, or very good, in some aesthetic, moral, or other subjective sense, is bad philosophy as well as bad language. Whether Blackburn really intends this claim is unclear due to the murky nature of the discussion, unfortunately. At any rate, it is the age-old gambit of religions, to cast what they wish and like as truth. For philosophy to confusedly retain this atavism in its approach to morality and other goods would be deeply mistaken.

• Lawyers and truth.
• Facebook is evil.

Science is not the Answer

Bryan Appleyard has some complaints about the new priesthood and its corrosive effects on the old verities, in "Understanding the Present: Science and the soul of modern man".

This is a genuinely exciting book (dating from 1993) about modernity- our age where science in all its facets has not only transformed practical existence, but also our spiritual lives, de-mystifying nature and tossing religions, one after the next, onto the scrap heap. Appleyard is not happy about it, however- far from. He is tortured by it, and while he can not stomach going back to religious orthodoxy, whether of fundamentalist or mildly liberal varieties, nor can he accept the new regime, which he views, somewhat mistakenly, as scientism. That is the belief, fostered (in Appleyard's view) by the gushing popularizers like Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, and Richard Dawkins, that science can not only solve all our questions of knowledge, but forms a new technocratic morality of reasonable-ness and tolerance which, if properly worshipped, could resolve our social, political, and spiritual problems as well.

The first half of the book is far better than the second. Setting up the problems of modern spirituality is far easier than solving them. In broad strokes, humanity used to be at home in heavily archetypal religious realities. While actual reality did intrude from time to time, the fables of Christianity, to take the main example in the West, were (and for some, still are) magical tales which gave us hope of a benevolent meta-reality and a pleasant afterlife. But intellectuals kept trying to make sense of them, until they "sensed" them completely out of existence. Appleyard cites Thomas Aquinas as perhaps the finest of these intellectuals in the theological tradition. His main work was to reconcile Aristotle, the pre-eminent scientist of antiquity, with Christian orthodoxy. This was taken as the height of theology, not to mention truth in general. But it planted the seed of modernization and logic- if something is logically or empirically true, it must necessarily be consonant with the Catholic religion, which is by definition true. Thence downwards through the enlightenment, Newton, the  industrial revolution, existentialism, liberal theology, to the plague of atheists we see today. The Catholic church tried to draw the line with Galileo and the heliocentric model, but that did not go well, and a few hundred years down the road, they gave up and said they were sorry.

"Science was the lethally dispassionate search for truth in the world whatever its meaning might be; religion was the passionate search for meaning whatever the truth might be."

All religious pretensions to scientific truth have been exploded, and the only choices left, as Appleyard sees it, are regression into fundamentalism, continuation to the endpoint of modernist anomie where humans are morally worthless or even negative destroyers of pristine nature, an acceptance of science itself as humanity's triumphalist project, which through its powers and gifts can give us all meaning, ... or something else. Appleyard spends much of the second half of the book on the fourth option, discussing quantum weirdness, chaos theory, computational incompleteness theories, and related fields which put the lie to the determinist dreams of nineteenth century science. Science does not know everything, and can not know everything, thus there is some gap for us as humans to be free of its insidious, deadening influence- a humanist space.

There are many things wrong with Appleyard's take on all this, some of which are contained in his own arguments and writing. Science has long held to the fact/value distinction, as he discusses at length. Even such a solidly scientistic enterprise as Star Trek recognizes regularly that Spock can neither supply all our values, nor even on his own terms operates without idiosyncratic values and meaning. The world of Star Trek is morally progressive and rational, but its motivations and meaning come from our human impulses, not from an algorithm. Exploration, skimpy uniforms, and great fight scenes are who we are.

"The key to the struggle, it cannot be said too often, is the way in which science forces us to separate out values from our knowledge of the world. Thanks to Newton we can not discover goodness in the mechanics of the heavens, thanks to Darwin we cannot find it in the phenomenon of life and thanks to Freud we cannot find it in ourselves. The struggle is to find a new basis for goodness, purpose, and meaning."

But then Appleyard frequently decries the new scientistic regime as having destroyed morals in general.

"... all moral issues in a liberal society are intrinsically unresolvable and all such issues will progressively  tend to be decided on the basis of a scientific version of the world and of values. In other words they will cease to be moral issues, they will become problems to be solved. The very idea of morality will be marginalized and, finally, destroyed."

This makes no sense, as he himself concludes by the end of the book. It seems to be a matter of looking for morals and meaning in all the wrong places. After a long excursion through the death of scientific determinism, he consoles us that science doesn't, and can't know everything. Thus we can go about our lives with our own values, desires, and dreams without paying much mind to any moral teachings from the scientific priesthood, which didn't exist anyhow. Whew! Determinism is a complete red herring here. Science studies all of reality, whether complicated or simple. If broad swathes can be subsumed into the master equation of gravity, that is wonderful- empowering on practical and psychological levels. But sometimes the result of all this study is a large database of genes and their properties, whose complicated interactions preclude easy prediction or codification (harkening back to the cataloguing of Aristotle and Linnaeus). Or sometimes it is a prediction system for weather which, despite our best efforts, can only see a limited distance into the future, due to inherent limitations to any model of a chaotic reality. That is OK too. Such pursuits are not "not science", and nor does such ignorance furnish us with free will- that comes from adaptability. The results of our studies of reality do not imply much about our meaning and values in any case, even as they defang the oddly materialistic superstitions and totems of yore. Our powers of understanding may be amazing, and fetishized by the educational system and science popularizers, but are not the foundation of our moral humanity.

Scientific studies of ourselves have, however, been enlightening, uncovering the unconscious, Darwinian designs, ancient urges, and a great diversity of ways of being. They have also clarified the damage we are doing to our environment via the wonders of modern life. This has informed our self-image and hopefully our values, but hardly determined them. Humility is the overall lesson, as it has been from all the better religious traditions. Appleyard decries relativism, the liberal tendency towards excessive humility- suspicion of one's own culture, and excessive regard for those of others. But isn't that merely a slight overshoot / correction from the madness of colonialism, slavery, genocide, rampant technology, greed, and war that has been the Western history over the last couple of centuries? Isn't it a spiritually healthy step back? In any case, it is an example of human values at work, perhaps more influenced by our prosperous condition than by any dictates from science.

Appleyard's fundamental complaint is against the new priesthood that has taken over management of the wonders of creation, but has at the same time failed to address our human needs for solace and meaning. Indeed, some of its high theologians delight in telling us that the universe, and ourselves, are utterly meaningless. Appleyard constantly weaves god into the discussion, while taking no exlicit pro-god position. He can not bring himself to bite that bullet, but rather is content to complain about being thrown out of Eden for the sin of too much knowledge. Well, it was always a cheap trick to read our fate in the stars or in goat entrails, and to read our meaning in ancient wonder-tales. These methods were merely externalizing values that came from within. The patriarchial systems of theology express most clearly the interests and desires of the men who run them. So we are, in the modern dispensation, merely reduced to a state of honesty about stating what we want, without the false veils of magic, authority, and supposed moral objectivity. And that change seems, at least to me, beneficial for our moral situation, overall.

• Can morality be reasonable? Which animals are worth helping?
• Typical enviro screed about saving space for nature...
• Forest loss continues apace.
• Roubini forcasts disaster, as usual. With details.
• We saved the wrong people in the last financial crisis.
• Financial sleaze.
• Who cares about truth anymore?
• Our common economic statistics are not cutting it.
• Japan is doing very well, thank you.