All posts by anomalogue

Happy Holocaust Remembrance Day!

Politics

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today, we are invited to remember the six million Jews who senselessly lost their lives and to ask ourselves how it happened. Many people who believed themselves good supported the persecution and killing, while myriad others stood by and allowed it to happen. As we reflect on this past crime, we must confront a painful question: How do we avoid being complicit in such a crime in the future?

To this end, we should take a moment to reflect on our own personal vulnerability to collective delusion, at the core of which is the conceit: “Had we been there, we would never have gone along.”

The belief in our personal immunity from mass madness — the notion that our own innate decency makes it unnecessary to take active measures to maintain independent judgment against the conventional wisdom of our time — makes us especially vulnerable to mass madness.

Intellectual and moral independence is not an innate personality trait; it is a hard-won accomplishment, which must be perpetually re-won. The default is intellectual osmosis and consequent conformism. If most of what we know is fed to us from contemporary sources, we are almost certainly conformists — even if everyone around us agrees unanimously that we, they, and all who think in lockstep with us are fiercely independent, critical thinkers.

No, had we been alive in a time when we were immersed in anti-Jewish propaganda—on the news, in entertainment, in casual conversation, in the “everyone knows”—and it had been drummed into our heads that Jews had committed all manner of atrocities and that they deserved to be driven out, in all likelihood, we’d have gone right along with it.

Our minds would have boggled at the very notion that our most trusted sources of information about the world were corrupt. Hearing stories of cruel slaughtering of Jews, even designs to annihilate them altogether, we would likely have shrugged our shoulders and assumed it was all Jewish disinformation. We would have assumed the sneaky Jews were trying to manipulate us with lies, and that the thugs, claiming to be the cruelly persecuted ones, were telling us the true truth.

We wouldn’t have bothered reading the manifestos and charters of these anti-Jewish militants, and we wouldn’t have connected their explicitly stated aims with what they were actually doing.

We would have gone with the flow of all our similarly malinformed friends, with smug conformist confidence, perhaps issuing the occasional condescending scold to those who refused to march in step with the right-thinking, right-feeling progress parade.

And somewhere in the back of our minds, we’d have known that there is safety in numbers. If we were dreadfully, evilly wrong, we’d share blame with innumerable others. Our own share in the shame would feel minuscule.

Know thyselves

Enworldment, Etymology, Existentialism, Philosophy

“Know thyself,” Apollo commands.

Okay. But how? And which “thyself”? — for there is more than one. Two roads diverge before us: the path of self-consciousness and the path of self-awareness

Most take the path of self-consciousness, which tries to know the self objectively. One’s self is taken as an object of knowledge. We call it “reflecting on ourselves”. We look into the mirror, and we are absorbed in the image we see there. We identify with it.

But we can also take the path of self-awareness, and take ourselves as subject, the subjectivity to whom objective data is given, including our objective third-person self.

But self-awareness includes an insight that we are given only what we know how to take, and that changing our way of taking  can change our givens.

We can experiment with our taking (our receptivity) and see how observing from various angles or focusing on various aspects changes our objectivity. Or we can experiment with our conceptivity by asking different questions about what seems objectively true to us. Or we can experiment with our selfhood by participating in new realities, physical and/or otherwise.

What we take “self” to mean makes all the difference in who we are, and who we may become.

Etymological cheat sheet:

  • Conceive = together-take
  • Perceive = thoroughly-take
  • Receive = back-take
  • Data = given

 

Untried ideas

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Politics

The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.

The problem of idle thought has nothing at all to do with virtues of industriousness or vices of laziness. The problem with idle thought is that such thoughts are not only untried and likely untrue, but that a great many of them are untriable and cannot even be said to be truth or false, because they are nonsense. They create what Richard Rorty called “theoretical hallucinations”.

This invites a comparison with drugs. We can use drugs for therapeutic purposes. We can also use them ritualistically. And we can use them experimentally. But all too easily what begins with therapeutic, ritual or experimental use lapses into mere recreational use, and from there to recreational abuse and addiction.

People who have zero occasion to put thoughts they consume or think up to practical trial — except to sell or resell them to other, equally idle thought consumers — can become a lot like recreational drug abusers, who maybe deal on the side to fund their all-consuming hobby. The drugs or ideas are for nothing but themselves. A life organized around procurement, consumption and traffic of such intoxicants begins to serve nothing but perpetual intoxication.

Rereading Richard Rorty, I’m realizing I am in a similar situation as when I read Christian scripture. The ideas are amazing and meant to be employed in practice.

But many of the most fervent fans of both of these luminaries just like feeling intoxicated by the ideas. They use them recreationally, but never put them to work in the real world. They’ll memorize words and quote them chapter and verse, but the ideas are their play toys, not their life equipment.

Back in 2016, the smarter regions of the proggosphere lost their collective minds over the uncanny prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. They neatly carved this quote out of its context.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. …members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

What is rarely included was even more insightful prescient explanations of how a thoroughly decadent, idle and alienated cultural left would cause this to happen.

If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supemational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party — namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals — Lind’s “overclass,” the people like you and me.

The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super­-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere — to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.

Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated — and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.

The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements.

And then Rorty continues on.

These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called “power.” This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault’s “haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.”

In its Foucauldian usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot “… confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents… [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.” Only interminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.

The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued… that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman’s civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls “theory” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad. What stories about blue-eyed devils are to the Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftists-the only thing they really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world in which all the daylit cheerfulness ofWhitmanesque hypersecularism has been lost, and in which “liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naivete-for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.

If you buy into this dark, fundamentalist deformation of progressive politics (which I call “progressivism”, similar to “Islamism” and “Christianism” as names for fundamentalist deformations of the religions they pervert) it probably makes perfect sense to you that the occult forces of racism must be coercively exorcised from every institution via “antiracism training”. Doing so might not even seem to be a political act, but a purely ethical one.

One Rortyist (a Rortian can be fundamentalist, too!) appealed to history. His claim was that because the historical fact of racism is indisputable, that the need to respond to this fact is, by extension, also indisputable. So, because the effects of history continue on to the present (which is entirely plausible),  all the disparities progressivists observe and compulsively measure can be attributed to the effects of this history (less plausible), that this effect is concentrated primarily in the institutions where the disparities are seen (institutional racism, which is the furthest thing from indisputable), that progressivists have an effective remedy for this problem (in the form of “antiracist” harassment of employees, which is flat implausible) and that therefore employers have a moral right to use their power to subject employees to cultural political harassment. All this is contrary to liberalism and to Rorty’s ideals, in much the same way that political Christianism is directly contrary to Jesus’s teachings and example.

But back to the original point I was making: “The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.”

What I am saying here is an old thought I’ve been hammering again and again.

John Dewey called his brand of Pragmatism “instrumentalism”. According to instrumentalism, we should understand ideas not primarily as representations of reality, but as tools for responding to reality. A idea that helps us respond effectively in a wide variety of practical challenges can be called true. One that malfunctions can be called false.

I’ve called my praxis, “design instrumentalism“. I think we should evaluate our ideas exactly as designers evaluate their outputs: by Liz Sander’s brilliant framework of useful, usable and desirable. An idea that  gives us a feeling of clarity and reinforces our sense of moral rightness, but which cannot be applied to practical problems lacks usefulness, and in all likelihood, usability beyond clear talk.

Such appealing but  impractical theories are at best, art.

Art is only useful when we take it for what it is — something we experience but do not take literally.

Art that is taken literally and confused with reality is delusional or even psychotic.

The anti-bias bias

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

It is a certain kind of person who is preoccupied with cognitive bias.

It is a kind of person who seems to have a taste for explicit, formal procedures. It is a kind of person who seems to operate via verbal self-instruction. It is a kind of person who always asks for very detailed clarifications on how things ought to be done, and needs every contingency to be planned out. It is the kind of person who shows up to a new job expecting documentation on how everything ought to be done. This kind of person’s eyes light up when “cognitive bias” is mentioned. (Or “motivated reasoning” or “implicit bias” or “institutional racism”, etc. They are all variations on false consciousness claims. They are always pointed outward at objects of critique, and never back at the ideological subject making them.)

To such people, safeguards against bias are no burden, or maybe even a support. It seems that if formalized anti-bias practices were not available, they would seek some other formalized practice. The question for them is whether the explicit practice we adopt and use has anti-bias features or not.

But some people have a very different relationship to practice. They rely more on intuition, and only occasionally verbally work some problem or another out. Much of what they know is tacit know-how, and muck of their understanding comes to be known only response to concrete situations. If, before engaging a problem, you ask them what they plan to do, they struggle to verbalize it, because, unlike the self-instructors, they don’t code their actions in words before executing them. If you ask them after the fact why they did one action rather than another, they will have to ask themselves the same question.

Yet, these intuitive practitioners are often highly effective at their craft and in solving problems, especially novel problems. Further, they are often pioneers in their fields, and in fact were behind the codification of the very practices executed by the self-instructors.

An intuitive practitioner, after successfully solving a problem, reflects on what they were doing, and tries to explicate principles that intuitively guided them. They move back and forth between practical intuitive interaction with their materials and theoretical formulations of the practice. They tack back and forth between explication of implicit purpose in their own practice, and seeing how well those explications work in guiding practice. Gradually, praxis develops.

But the best practitioners still act intuitively in the moment. If asked why they do what they do, they’ll provide an explanation that conforms closely to their intuitive responses, but this account should not be confused with the explanations given by the verbal self-instructors, which is exposing the code they run when executing an action.

But verbal self-instructor do have one huge advantage over intuitive practitioners. If intuitive practitioners are loaded with self-instructing code and told to execute that code, they lose all grace. They become awkward robots, even more artificial than the self-instructors.

In a world where all people are required to verbalize everything, where intuition and tacit know-how are denied the status of knowing, where one is only regarded as an expert when they can list their source-code on demand, where people are given instructions to execute and templates to format their output, the verbal self-instructors reign supreme.

This is, I believe, why verbal self-instructor’s instinctively love the requirement to neutralize bias. It is why they love bureaucratic rigor. It is why they want everything proceduralized. They can adopt these anti-bias and standardized practices without any impediment, but it encumbers intuitive and reflective practitioners and destroys their ability to — let’s just say it outright — to compete against them.

It tilts the playing field against intuitive and reflective practitioners, so the self-instructors can flourish and dominate.

In the past, I’ve complained about anti-bias meta-bias — the bias in what we regard as biased, versus the biases we neglect to notice at all, versus the biases we regard as virtuous, that is our ethical convictions. But there is also a deeper and worse bias prevalent among the verbal and intuitively-challenged — a procedural, rather than substantive bias — to see intuitive judgment, action and unsupervised perception as inherently more vulnerable to bias than formally codified policies and processes. So the starkest prejudices at all, both substantive and procedural, are coded into institutions, to counter what appear to be biases to the highly-biased minds who implement, support and champion them.

“Critical barbarity”

Design, Politics

I (re)finished two Latour essays this morning, “A Cautious Prometheus” and “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”.

A passage in the latter stood out to me, where he describes something he calls “critical barbarity”. This is most certainly a phenomenon, I’ve seen too much of in the last decade, when critique gathered steam and inflated a great many people with hot air. Today people who haven’t cracked a philosophy or sociology book in a decade or more run around dismissing all kinds of things as “constructions” (for instance money, race, sex), while invoking indisputable fact (for instance, history, physics, critical theory) to justify the necessity of all kinds of ideological intrusions.

The selective skepticism and credulousness can seem like hypocrisy, but I believe it is truly innocent. And not only innocent; for all its talk of critical self-awareness, it is naive.

Latour describes how this naivety is maintained:

…the cruel treatment objects undergo in the hands of what I’d like to call critical barbarity is rather easy to undo. If the critical barbarian appears so powerful, it is because the two mechanisms I have just sketched are never put together in one single diagram. Antifetishists debunk objects they don’t believe in by showing the productive and projective forces of people; then, without ever making the connection, they use objects they do believe in to resort to the causalist or mechanist explanation and debunk conscious capacities of people whose behavior they don’t approve of. The whole rather poor trick that allows critique to go on, although we would never confine our own valuables to their sordid pawnshop, is that there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position. This is why you can be at once and without even sensing any contradiction (1) an antifetishist for everything you don’t believe in — for the most part religion, popular culture, art, politics, and so on; (2) an unrepentant positivist for all the sciences you believe in — sociology, economics, conspiracy theory, genetics, evolutionary psychology, semiotics, just pick your preferred field of study; and (3) a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish — and of course it might be criticism itself, but also painting, bird-watching, Shakespeare, baboons, proteins, and so on.

If you think I am exaggerating in my somewhat dismal portrayal of the critical landscape, it is because we have had in e?ect almost no occasion so far to detect the total mismatch of the three contradictory repertoires — antifetishism, positivism, realism — because we carefully manage to apply them on different topics. We explain the objects we don’t approve of by treating them as fetishes; we account for behaviors we don’t like by discipline whose makeup we don’t examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern.

But of course such a cavalier attitude with such contradictory repertoires is not possible for those of us, in science studies, who have to deal with states of a?airs that fit neither in the list of plausible fetishes—because everyone, including us, does believe very strongly in them—nor in the list of undisputable facts because we are witnessing their birth, their slow construction, their fascinating emergence as matters of concern. The metaphor of the Copernican revolution, so tied to the destiny of critique, has always been for us, science students, simply moot. This is why, with more than a good dose of field chauvinism, I consider this tiny field so important; it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbarians more and more painful.

At the end of the essay Latour proposes a new critical attitude, which to me looks an awful lot like the attitude held by designers at their mature best:

The solution lies, it seems to me, in this promising word “gathering” that Heidegger had introduced to account for the “thingness of the thing.” …What is presented here is entirely different attitude than the critical one, not a flight into the conditions of possibility of a given matter of fact, not the addition of something more human that the inhumane matters of fact would have missed, but, rather, a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. Objects are simply a gathering that has failed — a fact that has not been assembled according to due process. The stubbornness of matters of fact in the usual scenography of the rock-kicking objector — “It is there whether you like it or not” — is much like the stubbornness of political demonstrators: “the U.S., love it or leave it,” that is, a very poor substitute for any sort of vibrant, articulate, sturdy, decent, long-term existence. A gathering, that is, a thing, an issue, inside a Thing, an arena, can be very sturdy, too, on the condition that the number of its participants, its ingredients, nonhumans as well as humans, not be limited in advance.

The point here is that each person involved in a matter of concern will bring their own things they believe in more or less, practices and courses of action they prefer more or less, have their own epistemological standards determining what to them seems more or less true and relevant. To determine in advance what will be gathered or not only undermines the sturdiness of what results from the process of bringing social reality into existence.

Cultivating alignment is half the work of solving problems. When we behave as if those who are not already aligned with our way of understanding and acting are interfering with solving the problems we face it exposes a deeper problem: we do not understanding what a political problem is. A political problem is first and foremost an alignment problem! No wonder we can’t solve it — we literally do not know what we are doing.

It is natural for technocrats to confuse technical problems with political ones, but it appears this is no longer going to work. Technocrats will have to forget their expertise bias and relearn politics before we will make any more collective progress.

Reformist revolution?

Design, Philosophy, Politics

In the last week something inspiring has come into clear view for me.

It all started when Susan complained to me that she has a dozen urgent projects to do, which all interconnect and play a part in a single overwhelming goal she wants to reach. All the projects need to unfold simultaneously. I suggested she think in terms suggested by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country:

…Dissent, and the group of writers around it, felt able to dispense with membership in a movement. They were content simply to throw themselves into a lot of campaigns. By “campaign, ” I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called “the passion of the infinite.” They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called “feeling thought.”

Membership in a movement requires the ability to see particular campaigns for particular goals as parts of something much bigger, and as having little meaning in themselves. Campaigns for such goals as the unionization of migrant farm workers, or the overthrow (by votes or by force) of a corrupt government, or socialized medicine, or legal recognition of gay marriage can be conducted without much attention to literature, art, philosophy, or history. But movements levy contributions from each of these areas of culture. They are needed to provide a larger context within which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of which will emerge something like Paul’s “new being in Christ” or Mao’s “new socialist man.” Movement politics, the sort which held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics which Howe came to know all too well in the Thirties, and was doubtful about when it was reinvented in the Sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born.

As I re-read this passage, it brought to mind a beautiful essay from Bruno Latour, called “A Cautious Prometheus”. It begins by describing five characteristics of design, and draws parallels between the evolution of design and Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) re-understanding of scientific truth.

…what is so interesting to me in that in the spread of design, this concept has undergone the same amazing transformations as my own field. STS, that was until a few years back but a small subfield of social science, has now received the formidable support of a much larger movement. What was a slightly far-fetched and a clearly scandalous claim, namely that there are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages, is now fast becoming common sense.

The five characteristics of design he listed can be summarized as:

  1. Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than a foundational acts of creation.
  2. Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft, and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
  3. Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism, and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
  4. Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
  5. Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.

You should read the essay yourself, but I am summarizing these five characteristics of design to provide context for this inspiring passage:

Of course, all five of these dimensions of design as well as the development of STS could be taken as a clear sign of postmodernism, as a quiet and lazy abandonment of the tasks of Promethean modernism. Some diehard modernists do think that way, but I don’t believe this is the case. As I pointed out earlier, the spread of the word “design” doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric of life that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis. What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting. President Mao was right after all: the revolution has to always be revolutionized. What he did not anticipate is that the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical… What an odd time we are living through.

At the risk of undermining Rorty’s advocacy of campaigns (aka social design projects), I’d like to suggest that energetic embrace of designerly reform could be revolutionary.

If a critical mass of people got it in their heads that progress is not measured by proximity to perfection, but rather by how many improvements we can make to the world around us, and took up the tools of design we could improve the world considerably, find meaning in doing so, and because design seeks alignment and collaboration, do so more democratically and inclusively. This way of working generates alignment and solidarity, something sorely lacking today. …and something even more lacking: inspiration.

What is sarcasm?

Philosophy

I think I said this before, but I can’t find it:

Sarcasm is what we do when another shirks their ironic duty, and we do their irony for them by stating their own beliefs with an ironic nonirony.

This notion of ironic duty is based on Richard Rorty’s understanding of irony’s role in liberal-democratic politics:

An ironist is someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies; (2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

 

Reform versus revolution

Design, Politics

I’ve heard Marxists quip that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” implying that anyone who wishes to preserve capitalism lacks the imagination to want something better. But is limitation of imagination the only reason a person might have a conservative desire to defend capitalism?

I see at least two alternative explanations.

First, pro-capitalist conservatives might actually have better imaginations — at least different imaginations — better able to imagine what might go wrong if we make radical changes to the world.

Second, it could be due to an acute awareness of imagination’s limits. We can imagine utopic or dystopic outcomes of change, but in my experience, the future often unfolds in ways nobody imagined. Our imagination always omits crucial considerations that lead to unintended, unimagined consequences.

This is why I prefer reform. If we make slow, incremental changes, we are better able to foresee the consequences and to respond to the inevitable surprises . The greater the scale and speed of change, the less predictable it is and the harder it is to correct if things go off the rails.

A third important reason conservatives are skeptical of revolutions, economic and otherwise, is that conservatives believe societies develop organically, by complex, distributed, localized processes — far too complex for any expert or any group of experts to comprehend, however imaginative, insightful, knowledgable and intelligent they might be.

Experts can effectively influence and shape these organic processes. But the belief that they can create them from scratch is a sign of naive hubris. Friedrich Hayek called this “the fatal conceit.”

Obviously, I share all three of these mistrustful attitudes toward imagining radical futures.

Does this make me a conservative? It is relative. Compared to a revolutionary (whether a left radical or right reactionary), yes, I am conservative. But compared to people who think things are perfectly fine as they are, and therefore not requiring significant reform, then I look like a progressive, albeit a cautious one who respects conservatives. But I’m not so conservative that sensibly-paced, sensibly-scaled socialist solutions to social problems automatically horrify me.

But whatever else I am, I’m certainly anti-revolutionary.

Embracing personal finitude

Philosophy

One thing I’ve picked up from both philosophy and esoterism is cautious humility.

Every philosophical accomplishment feels like arriving at the ultimate goal. After reaching final enlightenment multiple times, and then seeing others arrive at the same enlightenment and do their touchdown dances, we start assuming that these victories are more commonplace than we can know. And we also start noticing the earliest and least impressive insights seem most unprecedented to those experiencing them and they inspire the most extravagant and extraverted eurekas.

It is easy to then go in an opposite direction. We want to transcend the ecstasy of epiphany and level them all down to mere novelties. We try to become objective about the most intensely subjective things. This can seem the epiphany of epiphanies. In fact, it is a mystical self-alienation. It is an objectivist misapotheosis. I’ve called this eclipsis.

I think the best thing we can do is stay squarely inside our finitude and our finite experiences and be as faithful to them as we can. We can try to transcend where we actually are and enter a new place where we will actually be. But knowing that we can always be elsewhere is not being elsewhere or everywhere. While we are where we are, we can remain aware that others have surpassed us and might very well witness our latest accomplishment and see its full modesty.

But why not, in all modestly, feel our full immodest excitement at our own modest accomplishment? Why not just take what happens as given, and do what we do, feel what we feel and say what seems true to us as well as we can? Let’s not stand outside ourselves and look at how we might seem from eternity? This seems the surest route to doing solid, valuable work. And it is the highest privilege of unimportance — a privilege we should not squander.

Hyperobject of knowledge

Esoterism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Religion

The reason I am clarifying my theology is so I can contrast it with Richard Rorty’s inspiring atheistic alternative. But as is so often the case, I share Rorty’s disbeliefs. The God I know is not the “God” Rorty rejects. And a great many of Rorty’s atheistic hopes are hopes that, for me, are inseparable from my religious faith. To put it in his own words, he favors an atheistic description, while I favor a theistic one.

My main point of disagreement with Rorty is over the role of religion in social life, and the importance of maintaining commonality of faith across divergent modes of understanding. Here I find esoterism persuasive. Religious language and practice support a pluralism that supports cultural solidarity and personal spiritual growth and flourishing. But conceiving this truth requires a different mode of thought than science. Those whose understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” is scientistic will find themselves unable to enter this mode of understanding. Worse, they will consider this incapacity a virtue, and reinforce their humble “can’t” with a proud “won’t”. They want’t to break with the past and with those loyal to the past, and actively effect a rupture they believe they merely observe.

Now I’m thinking about where I disagree with esoterists. First, I do not believe in their absolute hierarchy of development. I do think there are degrees of understanding of esoteric truths, and I these truths are common across traditions. But we gain these only with some real and painful tradeoffs. We lose some virtues as we gain others. A religious community needs the full range of virtues, not only intellectual ones. I do not believe esoterists ever arrive at a full understanding of God.

With respect to knowledge, God’s infinite being is best understood as a hyperobject (to use Tim Morton’s term), an object of knowledge of a scale and topology ungraspable by any individual mind, and therefore best “known” through distributed understanding. But this is just the belief part of religious faith. Religious faith is a whole-being affair, something done with the entirety of one’s heart, soul and strength.

If this blog were an online publication, I’d set this post aside for further editing. But this blog is a public diary, so I’m hitting “publish”.

A failed attempt at theological clarity

Enworldment, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Religion

When I profess belief in God, people are often either baffled or they misconstrue what I mean.

Things get weirder when it turns out that my beliefs and attitudes can diverge from or even clash with those of some religious believers, while harmonizing with those of some atheists. I will frequently tell atheists “I share your disbeliefs.” But then I will seem to agree with with theists. Because of my esoteric orientation which accepts the necessity and relative validity of approximate understandings, I avoid contradicting good-faith simplistic understandings. I do this not only because such conflicts are nearly impossible to resolve, but even mere because I believe creating this kind of conflict is wrong. Despite our theoretical differences, at an infra-theoretical intuitive level, I believe they are as right as possible, and that their beliefs inspire good action. This is what I choose to emphasize.

So depending on context, it can look like I agree with everyone, or it can look like I agree with nobody at all. Everything is fuzzy or endlessly qualified. My yesses do not mean yes and my noes do not mean no.

I’ve mentioned before that the pragmatic maxim is useful in theological discussions.

C. S. Peirce formulated the maxim several different ways. My favorite is:

To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception—and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

(I love these words so much I plan to enshrine them in a letterpress piece.)

When someone states belief or disbelief in God, this tells us nearly nothing. But when we ask what follows from one’s belief or disbelief in God, an entire world begins to unfold. Let us make an attempt to unfold my world.

Pragmatic consequences of an essentially divine reality:

  1. Reality transcends the grasp of reason. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Reality is inexhaustibly surprising.
  2. Each and every person is a minutely bit divine reality, and each transcends the understanding of every other person. Every person is a source of surprise, both in who they are and what they can show us about reality.
  3. Morality is one aspect of reality that transcends truth. Reason cannot and must not veto conscience; it can only make appeals to conscience and pursue positive judgment. Reason is a lawyer before the judge, conscience.
  4. Morality obligates us to live in accordance with transcendence. We must invite, welcome and extend hospitality to surprise and the judgment of conscience, not only intellectually, but in our being: emotionally, intuitively and practically in our being — heart, soul and strength.
  5. The consequence of immorality is alienation. We have the freedom to wall ourselves up inside our reason, acknowledging only realities that reason reasons is reasonable, but this cannot be accomplished without a felt loss of reality. It only feels like punishment.

Above I linked to an earlier post, and I prefer my earlier, simpler expression:

I believe in God, and therefore we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. We must live as a part of a reality that includes and exceeds us, and requires us to do so.

But honestly, the sequence is backwards. For the last year, my friend and colleague Darwin Muljono has been preaching the gospel of critical realism, which I vulgarly interpret as pragmatism-in-reverse. It encourages us to ask: “if things are such and such a way, what conditions are necessary for this to be so?”

I believe — and cannot sincerely disbelieve — that we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. I believe in the reality of this obligation more immediately and deeply than I believe in evolutionary psychology theories that treat this conviction as a by-product of instinct. A reality that can morally obligate us in such a way is divine. That is the condition of a morally-obligatory reality. Therefore, I cannot sincerely disbelieve in God. My intellectual conscience forbids suppressing this fact, so I will not suppress it.

I will close this mess with another favorite C. S. Peirce quote:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Achieving Our Country

Philosophy, Politics

Over the last several years my alienation from progressivism has grown so complete, I’ve wondered if I’m still a left liberal at all.

I decided that a good way to gauge my drift would be to return to the book I have considered my political Bible and see how I respond to it now. That book is Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country.

The answer is, of course, that I have not drifted at all. I agree with it as much now as I ever did before. It is progressivism that has changed — and it has changed in a way Rorty tried in vain to warn us about.

It is a huge irony that this book became famous for a shockingly prescient passage that predicted the election of a Trump-like demagogue, and not for the insightful critique of cultural leftism that laid out the causes of the foreseen event. Most — but not all! — leftists were content to just boggle at the prophetic accuracy.

Had they taken the rest of the book to heart, they might have sobered up and avoided Trump’s reelection. But instead they pushed things even further in the wrong direction.

There is a consensus that there has been a vibe shift and that the left is “done with woke.” I see what they see, but I think the diagnosis is superficial. I have only seen changes in mood and emotional intensity. The root cause — the ideology and its habits of interpretation — is unchanged, and I feel sure it will reactivate and cause more damage when events jolt it back from dormancy.

Very few people think about how they think — only what they think. Education trains them to think like all educated people think. After this training, they process information almost automatically, like a program.

Because they think exactly like others think about the same information fed from the same sources, they reach the same conclusions, and this creates an illusion of objectivity. “Everyone has independently come to the same conclusion as me because I’m thinking logically with valid information, and arrived at the truth.”

There is nothing wrong with this. We cannot change the fact that people think uncritically. The only variable is the ideology they are programmed to run.

In a healthy society the population is programmed with ideologies that support society. In an unhealthy society the population is programmed with ideologies that undermine, weaken or even intentionally harm society. It’s still passive, uncritical conformism, just a passive, uncritical conformism that believes itself assertive, critical and independent.

What this bad programming is essentially is a cultural autoimmune condition that causes the body politic to attack itself.

Again — the cure to this cultural autoimmune condition is not teaching true critical thought, but accepting the fact that 95% of folks are never going to think critically about anything, and that this is good. If you feed them critical thoughts they’ll be as thoughtless as ever but do thoughtlessly destructive things instead of thoughtlessly constructive things. Better to provide them a solid ideological foundation to serve as a platform for their achievements. We have never found better programming than liberalism.

(If this sounds cynical, it is because you overvalue philosophical thought. There are many other virtues, and those are more worthy of admiration than philosophical virtue. There is moral integrity, courage, honesty, industry, ingenuity, thoroughness, athleticism, artistic talent, beauty, charisma, tenacity… so many others.

Unknowable unknowns

Philosophy

I think I’m about to repeat an old thought. It’s yet another play on Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” formulation. But this adds to the unknown unknowns a third and more difficult dimension of mystery: knowable and unknowable.

Rumsfeld’s original quote:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

I want to expand the “unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know” in to account for two very different reasons we may not know that we do not know something.

Here is my expansion:

  • Knowable unknown unknowns — we don’t know that we don’t know because we neglected to consider some relevant thing that, had we considered it, would have made sense to us and enabled us to respond effectively.
  • Unknowable unknown unknowns — we don’t know that we don’t know because we are philosophically unprepared or unequipped to notice some relevant thing, so even if we had considered it we would have been unable to make sense of it, and it could not have informed an effective response.

Letterpress sefirot

Biography, Design, Judaism

An old friend of mine introduced me to a master letterpress printer who lives in the Atlanta metro area. The printer connected me with one of the nation’s best die makers. I immediately ordered a plate for my first project, which will be a letterpress sefirot.

I am doing this project because nobody else has. I have been unable to find a beautiful letterpress printed sefirot, so in order to have one I will have to print it myself. This is something that should exist. I’m excited to have a supply to give away to friends.

The final printed artifact will look like this:

Metaethics

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

When contemplating moral action, we seek ethical principles. We do this almost by cognitive reflex. We ask: “By what principle is this action justified?” We expect to find an answer. Is this because we believe that the essence of morality is rules — rules we must follow in order to be good?

In his Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig situates rational ethics within a broader nonrational context, which he calls metaethics. Metaethics still obligates us to act, but not on the basis of something we can codify. We act on the basis of relationship, on intuition of the living reality of another person.

It is tempting for anyone from a Christian conditioning (which emphatically includes progressivists) to assume the metaethical ground of ethics must necessarily be merciful. But doesn’t this just establish another rule to obey — a rule to abolish enforcement of rules? A rule of unconditional kindness, of self-sacrifice for the good of the other, of imitation of the crucified redeemer — of automatic altruism?

My Jewish instincts are inclined to view that as an evasion of moral responsibility. Face to face with being who transcends our own, we are addressed and called to respond with one’s own extra-logical conscience. Hineini.

Perhaps Kabbalists are right, that the balance tilts toward Chesed (mercy and love) and away from Gevurah (severity and law). As a holdover from my old math-mystic days, I like to imagine the balance at approximately 61.8% Chesed to 38.2% Gevurah. This tilt implies that we should err toward mercy or charity, while still exercising our judgment as fully and faithfully as we can. But unless I am deeply mistaken, Kabbalists understand the necessity of Gevurah’s discipline, and that the desire to annihilate Gevurah and leave Chesed entirely unrestrained is a form of evil-enabling evil.

I am urgently interested to see if Rosenzweig develops his concept of metaethics in a direction that holds each person metaethically responsible for his own choice and application of ethical systems.

Of course, but maybe

Ethics, Politics

“I’m against violence…” “I do not condone murder…” “Killing is unacceptable…”

…But maybe…

“…he started a much-needed public conversation.” “…he expressed an anger we all share.” “…he has put sociopath executives on notice.”

In other words, he did a bad thing, but maybe he also did some good.

How much good?

So much good that maybe we won’t regret the murder? So much good that maybe the murder was justified? So much good that maybe the murderer was, in fact, a hero?

And how bad was the murder, really?

Is it really so bad to murder an alleged murderer? How many death did this man cause? Is the world a worse place with one less sociopathic zillionaire?

I met a group of friends for dinner last night. The question of Brian Thompson’s murder came up.

I listened to everyone washed their hands with “of course…” before bloodying them with “but maybe…”

I protested the but-maybes. I insisted that we decouple the condemnation of murder from the obvious need for healthcare reform.

It was assumed that my protest was a protest against murder, and, being both tired and outnumbered, I lacked the clarity at that moment to respond.

Driving home I realized that my problem is not with murder or with violence.

If Brian Thompson had been charged, tried and found guilty of 40,000 deaths and sent to the electric chair, I would not have the reaction I’m having. I’d be saying something like “of course we should never celebrate an execution, but maybe….” And the same will go for whatever punishment Brian Thompson’s murderer receives.

My problem is that one man — an elite among elites, posturing as a victimized marginal figure — extralegally appointed himself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. And my even bigger problem is that a great many fellow-elites, who share his outlook, vaguely approve of his vigilanteism, because he is dispensing justice as they see it.

The outlook goes like this: “This system is hopelessly corrupt. The powerful are beyond the reach of justice. Maybe we are past the point of getting justice any other way.”…

…”So maybe… it would be a good thing if CEOs feared for their lives when they do ?harmful things to the public.”

A few points:

1) This is literally advocating terrorism. Terrorism is use fear as a political instrument.

2) What the public perceives as harmful is very easily manipulated through propaganda. The public has believed a great many incorrect things, even in the recent past.

3) Half of this country — albeit a less elite and privileged half — holds completely different theories of corruption. They believe that woke radicals dominate our institutions, including education, media, finance and technology, and that the system is hopelessly rigged to give woke radicals more and more power to do horrible things like persecuting white people, destroying religion and public decency and transing all the kids, and so on. The conspiracy theorist fringe of the right believes even wilder stuff. There’s this universal principle of morality known as the Golden Rule. How do we feel about them sitting around a table saying “Of course, thou shalt not kill, but maybe…”

The problem as I see it is that we have all become so goddamn sure that we are so goddamn smart and well-informed and well-intentioned and self-aware that while of course I believe in liberal democracy, maybe… just maybe, the country would be better off if people like me had dictatorial power.

That is my problem.

Our liberal-democratic institutions are designed to make indulgence in our false omniscience impossible. When they work correctly, they force us to take one another seriously as persons. We must win public support for our preferred leaders and their policies through persuasion. We must win customers by offering them better value. We must make our case before a jury of our peers.

These experiences sometimes show us the limits of our omniscience. We come away less omniscient, but much wiser.

That wisdom advises reforming our institutions when they stop working correctly. It advises against giving up on institutions and going radical, illiberal and antidemocratic. This is especially true when we convince ourselves that only antidemocratic illiberal action can save “our” liberal democracy.

I had a friend who was a full-on QAnon conspiracy theorist. I found his worldview horrifying. The horror had less to do with the falseness of the beliefs than it did the pragmatic consequences of those beliefs: if he truly believed what he professed, he was obligated to respond violently.

My QAnon theorist had no evil intentions. He had no selfish ambitions. He just wanted to protect us from others with evil intentions.

When leftists talk about conservatives, are they really that much different? They have fancier resumes, more reputable authorities underwriting their convictions and more respectable coercive tools backing their wills, but the logic is the same. Conservatives don’t really mean what they say. They are trying to trick you. If you listen to their arguments and find some of them persuasive, you are a sucker. They are motivated solely by greed, but we are motivated only by the public good. Which is why we must fight the greedy, lying people with ruthlessness. We must fight them with every economic and social tool at our disposal. Maybe violence, if it comes down to it.

We learn more about a person by listening to what they have to say about their enemies than from what they say about themselves.

Taste of infinity

Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.

We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.

But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.

But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.

And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.

Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.

I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.

Actant systems

ANT, Design, Etymology

Design develops actant systems. Polycentric design disciplines (including service design) are optimized to integrate multiple interacting human actants into the actant systems they develop. In contrast, monocentric design disciplines were optimized for a single human actant.

One exciting aspect of seeing design this way is purely etymological. Human actants in a design system are designated defined roles in the system. They are, as such designees. In design we designate roles both to people and to engineered sub-systems as actants within our systems. Cool!