All posts by anomalogue

The pain of non-response

Ethics

When I attempt to communicate with people and get no response, I find it intensely painful.

Maybe I’ve just gotten sensitive about it and notice it more, but until a few years ago I do not recall speaking to people and being ignored, as if I hadn’t spoken. Now it happens frequently. By my understanding of manners this is appallingly rude, not only according to rules of etiquette but by universal human standards.

I have also noticed an increase in leaving electronic communications unacknowledged and unanswered. I don’t mean ignoring group emails or forwards or links. I mean ignoring personal messages.

I have been told many times by multiple people that this should not be taken personally and that in today’s world this is not an offensive behavior. Cultural norms change and hand-wringing only makes you bitter and keeps you stuck in the past. While I understand this argument, I find it unpersuasive and even depressing. Common behaviors that begin to feel familiar, then acceptable, then normal, then expected do not automatically become good. The belief that what has become common also becomes good encourages us to abdicate our moral judgment. And really, aren’t we selective in our passivity? There is judgment smuggled in when we accept former rudenesses as benign or as progress. We don’t accept all change this way.

I feel an urgent need to explain this pain, not only because pain by its nature seems to demand investigation into its causes, but, it appears to me that I find non-response more painful than most other people do, and I probably need to be able to explain why this is the case to others as well as myself. And maybe my explanation will inspire others to change their behaviors and their expectations of how others behave toward them.

This is my attempt at an explanation:

I think the pain of on-response is rooted in its deep moral ambiguity: it can mean many things, across a broad range of significance.

It can be purely accidental and insignificant. The attempt to communicate was not perceived. Or it can be a mostly innocent postponement or forgetting to respond, due to other more pressing things are going on. It can be an incapacity to respond, for reasons having nothing to do with the communication.

But crossing into the personal side of the spectrum of meanings, it can mean that the communication just isn’t seen as important enough to warrant a response. Or it can be an inability or unwillingness to respond for personal reasons, for instance feelings about the anticipated exchange. Or the silence might signal anger.

Or, worse, the non-response could be a sign of contempt. The contempt might be minor, for instance, a disregard for subjects or themes deemed unimportant. Or the contempt might be more serious: the speaker deserves no response. Or the contempt might be profoundly personal: the speaker is not worth the effort of a response.

The more the non-response is a pattern, the more likely the meaning of the silence falls somewhere on the contempt end of the spectrum. This is why non-response is offensive.

One of the key functions of manners is to keep alienating questions of these kinds from arising. Manners have us 1) signal our respect, and 2) offer explanations for behaviors that could be misinterpreted as disrespectful.

I do not believe the behavioral changes in response to the social media and rampant addiction to mobile devices are creating new norms of etiquette. I believe they are destroying manners and weakening human relationships. I believe general decay of manners (and in general of honoring social obligation) contributes to what some are calling a loneliness epidemic.

Respect is a fundamental human need, rooted in the affirmation that our existence is acknowledged and valued by the people around us. Social norms that allow us to disrespect others (even when that disrespect is not intended or felt as an emotion by the disrespectful) is creating a world that denies these fundamental human needs.

Gatecrasher maxim

Philosophy

When I have a  metanoetic transformation that throws me into a new world of insight, I’ve learned to tell myself: “I am late to this party.”

A person who undergoes metanoetic transformation is truly “born again” in the sense that it is necessary to learn how to speak and act all over again, to flourish in this freshly newly-revealed world. We can still speak about the more primitive facts of our lives, but the things that matter are imprisoned in privacy. It takes humble and painstaking work to re-mature  after conversion. Most of all, this means re-overcoming the egoism of infancy. Inexperienced converts think they’ve become godlike seers of the re-creation of all that is, when in fact, they’re just babies who don’t understand how populous the world already is.

Growing up again after being born again, re-socializing ourselves, learning new language for new experiences and learning to communicate and build on our new communities allows us to repeat the process. Eventually, we get better at maturing a little quicker. That starts with assuming that surely someone got here earlier and starting a search for the others who already know instead of assuming the apparent ignorance we see around is real.

There is always a party if you want to find it. And wanting to find that party is morality itself.

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(Yes, “gate” is a Janus reference.)

Rude tools

Design, Ethics, Extended Self, Philosophy

In my last post I promised that my next post would be “a theoretical tantrum on the ethics around that miserable love triangle between developer, tool and user.” and that I thought the issue of “‘ownership’ of software is an unrecognized moral crisis of our times.”

This is that post.

My belief in the importance of resolving the issue of tool ownership hinges on a theory which I experience as true: Extended Cognition. According to wikipedia “Extended cognition is the view that mental processes and mind extend beyond the body to include aspects of the environment in which an organism is embedded and the organism’s interaction with that environment. Cognition goes beyond the manipulation of symbols to include the emergence of order and structure evolving from active engagement with the world.” The example offered to me by my friend Zach, who introduced this concept to me, was of doing addition with your fingers. Viewed through the lens of Extended Cognition the movement of the hand is part of the thinking that produces the result.

Where I experience this as most true is when I use tools that I’ve learned to use skillfully. That is, I’ve mastered them so fully that they more or less disappear as I use them. If we know how to use a pen, we no more need to think about using that pen while we are using it than we need to think about our hand. It becomes part of us, and it allows us to focus our attention on the thing we are doing, and to become absorbed in our activity.

This is true also of software tools — or at least well-designed ones. If a tool is well-designed, I am able to just concentrate on the content of my activity, without the need to split my attention thinking about use of the tool. Often, I can’t even explain how I use a tool. My hands know what to do, and my verbal mind isn’t in the loop. What I know can only be demonstrated.

How many times have you told someone you can’t really explain how to do something on their computer of phone, but if you can just get your hands on the device you can show them? Sometimes it’s not enough to see the screen. Only actual doing of the interaction releases the know-how.

This kind of knowing that seems to exist just in the body is known as tacit knowledge. I like to call the part of UI design that harnesses this tacit knowledge “the tacit layer.” Back when designers still liked to talk about “intuitive design” this awareness was much more prevalent. But I think this way of thinking about design is in precipitous decline. Now, intuitive means little more than figure-it-outability.

Tools used largely in a tacit mode to develop ideas become an extensions of the user’s own being. To change a tool so that it stops functioning this way changes a person’s being. It literally prevents a person from thinking — it robs them of a piece of their own mind.

When we look at software in that light, doesn’t it seem like a norm that a company owns software, and that users pay a licensing fee for the right to use it offers far too little protection to the user? Shouldn’t users have more control over what is done to them?

I’m not suggesting a change in IP law or anything like that. I do think the software industry needs some different licensing arrangements, though. I’d like to see something like a user-developer covenant: “If you, the user, invite this tool into your life, adopt it and invest the effort to master it, you can trust us, the developer, to safeguard your investment by minimizing design changes that break the tacit layer, create distractions and force unwanted relearning. We understand that your concern is with what you are doing, not with the tool we offer you.”

 

 

Taking away my tools

Biography, Design

Over the last decade and a half I’ve relied on four tools for making my thoughts.

Of these four, two have broken in the last couple of years: Adobe Illustrator and WordPress. These two tools have undergone frequent deep UI changes, which have obsoleted my skills. When I try to use them now, I’m too busy thinking about how to use the UIs to concentrate on the ideas I’m attempting to develop.

Yesterday, I found out my hosting service is upgrading their server and it is going to bring down my Wiki, my core tool for organizing what I learn in my reading. I chose to host my own Wiki so I could control this key tool and not be subject to the whims of developers, but now they’ve caught up with me and ruined this tool, too. Now I only have one thinking tool left intact, and that is my own philosophy.

It’s funny; this feeling of vulnerability is exactly what led me to philosophy in the first place. When I was a kid living at home, my father was fond of informing me that I owned nothing — that he could take any of my possessions away any time he wanted to. My parents were always threatening my sister with taking away her horse if she didn’t toe the line. I saw clearly that I could not tolerate that kind of exposure. I figured the only thing I had that could not be taken away were my ideas, so that was what I made my treasure.

Stupidly, I have relied on tools under other people’s control to help me shape and craft my ideas, and when those people decide to exercise their whims to disrupt my ability to use these tools, my most precious capabilities — the things that help me be who I am — are jeopardized.

I’m halfway considering throwing out all my software tools and re-training myself to use just pen and paper to work through my ideas. While I’m at it maybe I’ll get rid of all my books and kick my awful caffeine habit. I can’t trust other people to even understand what I need, much less to actually respect the legitimacy of those needs, much less to act in a way that doesn’t harm me. And supporting those needs is entirely out of the question. What I need seems unreasonable to other people. Nevertheless, I need what I need, and that means I must reduce by dependency as well as my exposure. I think this is the root reason so many thinkers are ascetic.

My next post is going to be a theoretical tantrum on the ethics around that miserable love triangle between developer, tool and user. I am convinced that the “ownership” of software is an unrecognized moral crisis of our times.

Process Theology

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pragmatism

I’ve been poking around in several books on Process Philosophy/Theology to see if my own homegrown theology isn’t in fact some version of Process Theology. So far I’m finding some closely matching concepts. (Two big ones: Panentheism and “the lure”.) That is not surprising: it turns out Whitehead was influenced by Pragmatism (which not long ago I considered my religion). Process Theology appears to me to be the religious implication of Pragmatism.

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For awhile I’ve speculated that Fundamentalism is actually a religion of its own: a distinctive way to interpret scripture and to practice religion. Fundamentalisms are more like one another than they are to other denominations within the same religion. I’ve come to see Mysticism and Humanism as similarly connected. (Note Oct. 3: and the book I’m reading reminded me, also Scholasticism.) There is considerable similarity across Mysticisms and Humanisms (that is, attempts to fit religion inside the Enlightenment framework).  I’ve been calling them “lateral traditions”. I’m sure this is not a new concept, and when I find the language others are using to talk about this idea I’ll adopt it.

I believe Process Theology represents another lateral tradition.

Yom Kippur dream

Biography, Fables, myths & parables, Judaism

Last night after we broke the Yom Kippur fast, I fell asleep and had a vivid dream. I was in a yard behind a suburban ranch house where two trees were growing. One tree was nearly barren. It had already flowered and given fruit and had shed most of its yellow leaves.  The other tree had strong limbs and was bursting with green leaves. But as I stood admiring it, I noticed the soil at its base was rippling. The tree began shaking violently and the ground heaved a boiling swarm of beetle-worms, which were devouring the tree’s  roots. A large section of the tree facing me calved off and crashed to the ground. Within two minutes the young tree was reduced to a flat pile of wet sawdust. Both trees were gone, and thick grass grew over where the trees had stood. There was no sign they had ever existed on the rectangular lawn. “Perfect space for a swimming pool,” observed a woman standing behind me.

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Was this dream a response to yesterday’s Torah portion?

God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.

This displeased Jonah greatly, and he was grieved.

He prayed to the LORD, saying, “O LORD! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment.

Please, LORD, take my life, for I would rather die than live.”

The LORD replied, “Are you that deeply grieved?”

Now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city. He made a booth there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city.

The LORD God provided a gourd plant, which grew up over Jonah, to provide shade for his head and save him from discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant.

But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered.

And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind; the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, “I would rather die than live. ”

Then God said to Jonah, “Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?” “Yes,” he replied, “so deeply that I want to die.”

Then the LORD said: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight.

And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!”

Critical reverence

History, Judaism, Politics

In Torah study my fellow students regard our heritage with a distinctive attitude that can be characterized as critical reverence. We are horrified by much of what the Israelites did in God’s name, but we know that this is where we, who now judge, learned our judgment. Without them, we would not be in a position to see how we would prefer them to have behaved. And we can only hope our children and all of posterity will regard us with the same attitude, gratefully accepting what we bequeath but — even better, refusing to repeat our mistakes.

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The Left and the Right seem to agree on at least one thing: they both think that criticism and reverence are incompatible. If you revere, you cannot criticize. If you can criticize, you can no longer revere. This is a side-effect of philosophical impoverishment. True reverence and criticism are mutually dependent. Criticism without reverence (or respect) is condemnation. Reverence without criticism is delusional fanaticism.

When the Left learns to revere as it criticizes, and the Right learns to criticize as it reveres we will be prepared to reconcile and recommence our national project.

Intuitive forces

Philosophy

I think I might not believe in intuitions as pre-thoughts. I think intuitions are creative impulses — the impulse to make a song, an image, a story or poem, a gesture or dance, an object, an organization — or a thought. Why must a pre-thought be placed between an intuition and its expression? I’m inclined to believe the same psychic forces befind intuitions can shape multiple media and can also shape a person’s responses to many kinds of experience. 

Convergent forces, not ideal forms, are what shape life. Plato has never rung true to me. 

Esoteric summary

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

The heart of morality is the call to transcendence: we are meant to exist as ourselves toward reality that is not us (alterity). These are the proper terms of transcendence: self transcending toward alterity within a shared ground of infinite reality. This is very different from that common conception of transcendence that opposes a mundane natural world and a divine supernatural one. The fact that I cannot deny the existence of this call to transcend is the primary basis for my belief in God. Such a call has no authority in an essentially meaningless universe.

Alterity (reality that is not us) is infinite, meaning that it is not only quantitatively limitless, but qualitatively limitless as well. This means it can only be thought-toward in an open-ended way, not comprehended. Thinking-toward qualitative infinity encourages existing-toward reality in a way that invites the kind of radical surprise intrinsic to qualitative infinity, a prerequisite of transcendence, and is therefore an ontological foundation of moral life. An aid for imagining the directions of this existing-toward is along the trajectories of time, physicality and mind. These can be seen as the basic “objects” of transcendence, but they are everted objects which enclose us, involve us, and exceed us. (Another word for an everted object is a subject, and this is another tributary to my belief in God.)

The heart of transcendence is metanoia: a tacit conceptual/moral/practical shift in being that changes why we exist, how we exist and what we perceive in the world. These three kinds of being can be imagined as the self who exists toward infinity, the subject of metanoia.

Metanoia is a process that can be encouraged and discouraged, which sometimes even ought to be resisted. To navigate the metanoetic cycle, it is important to be able to read the waters of experience and to recognize the significance of moods, feelings and other psychological states that indicate one’s situation and help orient action and moral interpretation.

(Above was a sketchy summary of the diagrams in Geometric Parables. The moral ideal is diagramed as a spiral, qualitative infinity is diagrammed as an asterisk, the subject of metanoia is diagrammed as a trefoil, and the metanoetic cycle is diagrammed as a wheel. I did another half of a sketch yesterday, where I tried to explain each of the parables from the perspective of the others. I am going to finish that and publish it on this blog ASAP.)

Autumn 2011, when the canary died

Design, Politics

The reason I have been so upset about the state of design is that in 2011 — autumn of 2011, to be exact — all the liberal progress I’d been seeing in my field suddenly reversed. Three things happened:

  1. Steve Jobs died, (October 5, 2011), and even worse, Isaacson’s biography of him was published (October  24, 2011).
  2. Lean Startup was published (September 13, 2011).
  3. Front-end frameworks, Bootstrap (August 19, 2011 and Foundation (September 2011), hit the development world, enabling developers to make visually passable UIs without assistance from UI designers.

All three of these factors marginalized design in crucial ways that have gradually brought the digital water we users swim in to a frog-killing rolling boil.

This helps explain why our digital lives are in pleasureless turmoil. Remember back when we would count the hours to the next Apple product release, and get excited when we saw that an upgrade was available to the software tools of choice? Now it all makes us uneasy, because it means yet more disruption where what we really want is stability. New features are more likely to make things harder for us than improve our lives.

This is not an inevitable effect of the world getting more complex. It is a direct effect of design’s marginalization. Engineering-minded people now run the show — folks obsessed with the Thing they make, as opposed to the experiences real-life people have interacting with things in real-life situations. The latter is what designers are all about, and it is why we use the language of “experience” when speaking about our practices, all of which are focused on improving experiences people have. For designers the Thing is only the means to an end, which is people’s experience of it.

But now the language of design has been appropriated and emptied. Engineers call their Things “Experiences”. When they hack together a front-end using a front-end framework, they call this “designing the User Experience”.

People who lack understanding of the radical paradigm shift (meant literally, in the Kuhnian sense) at the root of HCD — a root that could not be more at odds with the objectivist Industrial Age paradigm — are blind to the relapse to which we’ve succumbed. They never made the shift anyway, and these new retro-practices make more sense to the engineering mindset.

And sadly, this relapse has spread into politics, hitting both left and right extremes of the political spectrum, each feeding on conflict with the other, and is rapidly closing in on the center. We have the brainless sophistication of children trained by disillusioned Marxists to perceive the world in the terms of racist, sexist and other identitarian sociologies (ironically called “hermeneutics” of this and that) facing off against aggressively anti-intellectual thugs. Liberalism is now widely disparaged and declared vapid, naive and obsolete by the very people who are blind to what Liberalism is, how it is done and why it is so important.

Hopefully, soon everyone will have known all these things I’m saying all along, and I will retroactively have not been the only one freaking out about the loss of liberal democracy, the loss of design and seeing very vividly the connection between the two. Until then, stuck in this present, I am isolated in my own obsessive interests and worries.

 

Design augury

Philosophy

The assumptions about human life at the heart of our design practices which shape our products and our daily experience of the world are exactly the same assumptions that shape our political life. Design, however, moves faster, which means we can sense where our politics are headed by observing where design has arrived. 

When I become angry about giant corporations using their own cloud computing ecosystems to outmaneuver other rival cloud computing ecosystems and dominate the market and ignoring the impact their strategic jockying has on users who have to live and work in their platform battlefield, it is because I feel and smell the politics inside this phenomenon. 

The same is true when I become enraged at dealing with the consequences of startuppity hubris — with the consequences of individual microomniscient geniuses obsessing over their masterpieces, thinking about the contant improvement and perfection of a product they think of as their own personal property, and forgetting the users who have to deal with the constant tinkering, rethinking, pivoting, etc. not just with this one product but pretty much all products. 

…And the weird sameness of so many product innovations, all in lockstep inside a narrow product paradigm, treating minute tweaks as revolutionary breakthroughs. Witness the dozens of variations of Hi-Tec C pens spwarned by Pen Type A. 

…And also when I suspect that most product designs or updates are motivated less by how it will be to use them than how it will be to read about them (or watch videos about them) on tech blogs, unboxing videos, kickstarter profiles, etc. 

…And when I see mass embrace of Helvetica and Swiss Grid design systems. A longing for regularity, order, conformity to relentless logic inherent in that approach to design. 

…And then there’s the Industrial Age relapse known as Lean Startup. 

  Etc. 

These trends feel very much as though they belong to this political moment, and also to what I fear is gathering force behind the present wave of history. 

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Of course, another name for “assumptions about human life at the heart of our activities” is philosophy. Getting at those ethical, ontological, epistemological faiths that direct our attention and guide our actions — most of all when their effects are unconscious and indistinguishable from truth and of reality itself — and seeing what possibilities emerge when they are detected and questioned is philosophy’s central task. 

I am surrounded by folks who know that philosophy is a pointless intellectual exercise in opinionated speculation, an inferior and primitive approximation of science. The philosophy behind this attitude which produces this belief as well as the myriad other political and practical beliefs remains entirely unexamined because according to itself, this activity would be pointless. It is better to just develop one’s beliefs strictly through scientific method and practical hands-on doing — never mind that all this activity is guided by philosophy and what is noticed as significance is filtered by philosophy. 

I’ve said this for years, and I’ll say it again: what ails this nation is bad philosophy. Neglect of philosophy has made us too stupid to be good Liberals. This is why most of us are illiberal right or left, or just checked out. 

Renewal is rarer than revelation

Philosophy

When a new philosophical perspective alternative reveals itself, it takes philosophical clarity to recognize that what has been revealed is not the ultimate truth but just another philosophy.

And even with this clarity, it take significant philosophical discipline to resist the impulse to accept the new perspective as one’s own, simply because one has seen where one was formerly blind. 

And finally, it takes humility to realize that new philosophical perspectives are nearly never as new as they seem to one who has just conceived it. Almost always, the deepest impact a new philosophical perspective can have is exposing one’s own misunderstandings of misconceived old truths — truths incomprehensible apart from the perspective. But because each time a new philosophy is revealed, it is revealed in a new situation and expressed in a unique language, pride and laziness works against working to discover the redundancy of one’s own apparent genius.

By one of the most perverse ironies of the human condition, when philosophical clarity, discipline and humility fail, the failures are experienced by individuals and their adherents as success of the highest order — as divine revelation, as divine command, as the dawn a new age — and the feeling certainty that attends such errors as evidence of truth. 

Philosophy, properly practiced, is an exercise in perpetual humiliation. It is both an inoculation against prophetic hubris, and a recollection of Liberalism which will otherwise be forgotten.

Sadly, because so few American intellectuals take the practice of philosophizing seriously, treating study of philosophy as a systematic exposure to a history of opinions — (opinions mostly supplanted by more rigorous social scientific fact) — too many people have dismissed Liberalism, thinking themselves superior to something that is, in fact, too demanding for their minds and character.

Pamphleteerism

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Over the last year I’ve been equipping myself to make pamphlets. I’ve purchased several reams of beautiful French Paper in cover and heavy text weights, waxed linen bookbinder thread, needles, and awls and a bone folder. I’ve figured out how to use Adobe InDesign with my printer (which prints 2-sided) to create booklets in signature format ready for binding. I’ve practiced and refined my booklet sewing technique constructing and revising Shabbat prayer booklets.

I think I am going to force myself to work differently in the coming months. I think I’m going to steal from the product development industry (my greatest, most beloved, most intensely detested frenemy, who has nourished me with so many unavoidable crises, who has dragged me through so much dark despair into so many enlightenments). What I intend to steal comes directly from the single most painful trend of the last decade. I intend to force myself to work in “sprints”.

Working in pamphlet sprints, I will write with the intention of always creating a printed pamphlet by the end of the session. I am also going to get rid of this notion of getting everything I’ve learned into a single book. I’m going to get it all out in microcosmic bursts of various genre.

Here are the pamphlets I have planned so far:

  • Geometric Parables. This is a book of diagrams I’ve been drawing and redrawing, interpreting and reinterpreting over the last 15 years. These images guide my best thoughts. When I think, often I am just growing the consequences of particular problems onto these frameworks, as if they were trellises. This will be an obscure little book, consisting of diagrams and meditations in compact verse. Its purpose is not explanation, and it is unlikely to make sense by itself. Its purpose is prayer: recollecting what memory cannot grasp. I will be flirting with idolatry making this pamphlet the way I want it made.
  • The Ten-Thousand Everythings. This could end up being a book that explains Geometric Parables. I’ve accumulated a large number of aphoristic scraps that fit together into a cohesive philosophical perspective. I want to attempt to demonstrate my way of thinking by exploring some key domains, especially ethics, ontology and religion. This will be my idea dump. I’m going to try to force myself to be more relaxed and prosaic writing and rewriting it.
  • Syllabus Listicalis. This idea came to life yesterday, when I just started listing out the most consequential points where I disagree with conventional wisdom. Few people understand the extent to which my thinking has diverged from the norms of everyday thinking, especially at the most crucial life-shaping points. This has left me in a place where at best I agree with others on details, but not for the reasons people tend to assume, which cannot be explained within contemporary customs of polite conversation. I doubt I’ll try to explain anything in Syllabus Listicalis. It will be a bare list of instructive disagreements, maybe a negative image of The Ten-Thousand Everythings.
  • Interface: This will be a more or less explicit book about the myriad lessons I’ve learned oscillating between human-centered design and philosophical reflection, and how these insights have constellated around what I think is an important new way of thinking about reality. I believe many designers have intuited the importance of this new perspective as they have developed and applied its methods to an expanding sphere of problems. But so far, I have seen no attempt to articulate the perspective itself and  account for its importance.

In addition, I may start typesetting my better blog posts. Maybe I’ll make a series called Anomalogues. But first, I’m going to make some editions of the pamphlets I’ve listed above.

Syllabus Listicalis

Judaism, Philosophy

Today, I feel a need to make an arbitrary list of consequential reconceptions. These are some of the core ideas I want to put in one of the several pamphlets I have planned. I’ve named two of them: Geometric Parables and The Ten-Thousand Everythings. Maybe this is the start of a third pamphlet, Syllabus Listicalis.

  • Blindness is like rippling mercury that nullifies sight with glare and camouflage. The equation of blindness with darkness is profoundly misleading. Anyone who expects blindness to be highlighted with shadows is blind to blindness and consequently to sight. The disperception of blindness sees precisely where it doesn’t.
  • A soul is an everything among myriad everythings. It is natural to imagine a person’s soul as a body-shaped ghost, but this is an intellectually and morally corrupting confusion. Souls are better imagined as radiating into the world from a person’s physical being. The soul’s radiance continues to travel after it leaves its source and it illuminates those aspects of the world the soul finds important. Everywhere I look I see the souls of people I love: this is the root of my compulsion to give gifts. I could continue on to the subject of immortality, but let’s not.
  • Objectivity is a type of subjectivity. The idea that subjectivity is a distorted reflection of some all-encompassing objective world has catastrophic consequences. The best way to understand a person’s subjectivity is to examine its objectivity. When we speak of human “subjects” and school “subjects”, in both cases we ought to mean the word “subject” in the same sense.
  • Transcendence is entirely about the relationship between I and Other. This idea that transcendence refers to a supernatural reality behind or beyond the mundane world, is an elaborate failure to recognize otherness beyond one’s own I. Many, if not most — (and possibly all!) — notions of magic are the splatterings of souls on the walls of solipsism.
  • Tacit knowledge is not articulated, it articulates. Everything explicit, everything formed, emerges from implicit being. That which is least sayable is not passive silence, but an active capacity to say. Here speech is a metaphor for all making, all poiesis.
  • Love and dread together signal transcendence. Only dread reveals the reality of the beloved. These are not “choices”, they must be taken together, always.
  • Love is not only a matter of heart, but also of soul and of might — not separately, but always all at once. Love is done with the entirety of our being. To love God is to love the entirety of reality with the entirety of one’s being.
  • Pluralism means that even when we avoid being wrong, we are never as right as we hope.
  • Religion does not have to be conceived as it often is: the activity of an individual communing with God. Religion can, and in fact must be, broadened to comprise the continuous struggle of finite beings to relate vitally to infinite being without suppressing its infinitude. By this definition, sciences are religious activity and fundamentalisms are anti-religion.

Update on my “LEF” political model

Politics

Since my last update on my “newish political model” I have continued trying it out on different political positions and playing with new ways to conceive the various dimensions, and I’ve developed a slightly new (and, I think, improved) way of thinking about it. The difference is in the way I am thinking about the Fraternity dimension.

If you remember my descriptions of Liberty and Equality, you might want to skip to Fraternity.

Liberty (individual autonomy): freedom of individuals versus authority of collectivities. Who determines how individuals are to think, feel and act?

+) an individual alone determines individual being;

-) the collectivity determines individual being;

0) at the center an individual determines individual being within reasonable limits set by a collectivity.

What kinds of collectivity are we talking about? According to this model any group capable of imposing its will on an individual is considered a collectivity capable of curtailing individual liberty. This differs from Political Compass, which views liberty as curtailed primarily by the federal government.

And what are reasonable limits? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Equality (power distribution): desirability of equality versus desirability of rank. How much disparity of power among individuals is acceptable and ideal?

+) each individual is given the same power and resources as every other;

-) each individual is given different amounts of power and resources according to rank;

0) at the center every individual is guaranteed a fair opportunity to acquire power and resources.

What kinds of rank are we talking about? According to this model every value system ranks differently and imposes rank according to its own logic. Societies can rank-stratify by family, class, wealth, race, education, talent, temperament, party membership — anything to which the word “deserve” can be applied. This differs from Political Compass, which casts equality issues in terms of government regulation.

And what is fair? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Fraternity (membership in political order ): essentially universal membership versus essentially exclusive obligation.

+) membership in a universal political order is automatically extended to all of humanity;

-) membership in a particular political order is restricted to a group defined by involuntary essential characteristics ;

0) at the center potential membership in a particular political order is universal, and actual membership is entirely voluntary (and not defined by essential characteristics).

 

Illiberal delusions of depth

Politics

In general, the social sciences teach us more about societies of social scientists than it does society in general.

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Show me an example of political or sociological “realism” — a claim of inalterable facts — and I’ll show you an ideologue with an investment in society being some particular way. It might even be the key to an intellectual’s soul.

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Once the foundations of liberalism erode away, and public opinion starts asking hard questions of public truths grown complacent through luxuriation in universal acceptance, the truth of liberal values are anything but self-evident. They epitomize vapid conventionality, and all-too-conveniently, most of the people who continue to uphold them do so through inertia and timidity.

In times like these it almost requires a radical’s personality to excavate the layers of pious dust and quotidian debris that settle over generally accepted moral facts and to burrow into the ground where the wellsprings of liberal morality still flow clear. It turns out, these apparent self-evident (that is, long unexamined) moral principles, such as the ultimate value of the individual, the importance of free speech, thought and action, the exercise of reason, and above all, pluralism are not in the least self-evident once they are flooded in long-suppressed illiberal light and tag-team interrogated by left-wing and the right-wing inquisitors.

Fact is, liberalism was never the natural and inevitable state of society once tyrants are removed from the scene, but rather humankind’s hardest-won accomplishment. But the belief that liberalism exists with mere removal of impediments has led to the neglect of liberal education, and especially a self-aware philosophical explanation of morality.

Instead, the last several generation were rigorously trained to emote on demand: to sympathize as intensely as possible at sacred signifiers of its tribe (generally of categories of people) and to produce anger in equal amounts at the tribe’s categorical enemies, who are those who fail to produce the requisite emotions at key symbolic stimuli. Every tribe can produce its own elaborate supporting theories, including its own homegrown theories on why the other tribe’s theories are nonsensical and the result of nefarious influences.

And bystanders who decided to spare themselves all indoctrination and believe themselves independent observers fared no better. In fending off miseducation, they fend off necessary education as well, and fall into ideological traps they are ill-prepared to detect or to escape once they learn whatever “the truth” their habitual reading conceptually habituates them to understand.

At this point I am interested neither in expounding nor defending my views for people who are by nature or second-nature unsympathetic to liberalism. Instead, I plan to continue my private project of exposing the wellsprings of liberalism to those who have already learned to love them. And I do mean learn to love, because love of liberalism is either learned or latent, never accessible to naive or misled minds.

But it is true: as a liberal I do owe my fellow-citizens an account. But I do not owe it on their philosophical terms or their schedule. These are the things you learn when you work at education, which is another word for allowing learning to change you.

Mark Lilla on the trajectory of ideologies

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: “Successful ideologies follow a certain trajectory. They are first developed in narrow sects whose adherents share obsessions and principles, and see themselves as voices in the wilderness. To have any political effect, though, these groups must learn to work together. That’s difficult for obsessive, principled people, which is why at the political fringes one always finds little factions squabbling futilely with each other. But for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.”

Mark Lilla on political thought today

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind (2nd edition): “Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West seemed so shallow, so clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in Western societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts and even vocabulary for describing the world we now find ourselves in. More worrisome still, we lack awareness that we lack them. A cloud of willful unknowing seems to have settled on our intellectual life. This, it seems to me, is the most significant development since The Reckless Mind was published [on September 9, 2001], and the first thing we need to understand about the present.”

I cannot wait to read Lilla’s latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, due August 15, 2017.