All posts by anomalogue

A thought experiment for Christians

Philosophy

Are you an especially righteous Christian? 

Try this thought experiment: Read your own scripture and ask yourself “What if I’m on the wrong side of these stories…?” 

Have you ever done this?

Some wooly minds instantly seize and balk at making this move. They cannot even ask the question hypothetically. They are flooded with dread, and dread is proof that some serpent is whispering in their ear. No, God fills them with certainty that they know good from evil. 

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Here is the problem with unprincipled people: Inevitably, they muster principles to justify whatever they want to do as Righteous Acts, but these principles shift incessantly to support the impulse of the moment.

So, when unprincipled folk need to be a flock, they bleat meekness, decency, forgiveness and love. But when the weather changes their wooly coats fall away, and now they’re howling the opposite values — greatness, lustiness, vengeance, rage — and they’re far too blood-drunk to worry about hypocrisy.

Then the hangover comes. They crawl back under their sheep’s clothing, pull the wool back over their own eyes, and spend the rest of their lives spinning lies about who they were in history. 

But the disguise is only for themselves. Sheep don’t growl. 

Reenlightened or Snuffed

Ideas

Here is our choice: 

a) Update how we as a species think, act and feel so we can finally reach some fundamental agreements that permit us to continue to enjoy the fruits of our blessed artificiality…

or

b) Refuse to update — making agreement and coordination impossible and a new profound Dark Age inevitable, starting with a violent thinning of the herd by the most brutish, backward and “natural” half of the species, and concluding with the snuffing of the survivors by Earth herself.  

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Humankind is not the species it was 50,000 years ago, and if the last 200 years of progress is amputated from our history, it would be better described as decapitation. 

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Fundamentalists are slaves of symbols they cannot understand. 

America is philosophically diseased

Chord, Ideas, Philosophy, Politics

America is philosophically diseased.

Most Americans perceive, believe and intuit using 19th and 20th century modes of understanding which are 1) are incompatible and irreconcilable with the others, 2) mutually hostile, and 3) inadequate for making theoretical, practical and moral sense of the realities we face.

And every one of these obsolete and broken-down philosophies assures the mind it binds that there is no need for philosophizing. Doing, not thinking, is what is needed now! Thinking is useless enough, but thinking about thinking? — That is the most pointlessly abstract, idle and meaningless thing any person could do.

The only way out of the crisis we face — (a crisis much worse than an unphilosophical mind can know how to know!) — is to learn to conceive truth very differently than we do today. We are desperate for a new popular philosophical platform, not to make us all come to the same conclusions, but to support our differences and to help us navigate them peacefully and productively.

We need, at minimum, an upgrade in a) our epistemology (and ontology), b) our ethics (and metaphysics) and c) our political practices. My own prescription is a) Bruno Latour, b) Emmanuel Levinas, c) Chantal Mouffe. But before we can build we need demolition (Friedrich Nietzsche) and ground clearing (Richard J. Bernstein).

I look at this list of thinkers, and I love seeing them together like vertebrae in a backbone.

Here is a suggested core curriculum for regeneration of philosophy for our times:

 

The truth about fundamentalism

Philosophy

We need to stop indulging the Fundamentalist Christianist conceit that their “religion” is a branch of Christianity. They are a denomination of Fundamentalism, which is not even a religion but a philosophical autoimmune disease.

As a religious person, I am very tired of seeing Fundamentalism mistaken for a religion. Religion is about transcendence. Fundamentalism is about preventing transcendence at all costs, including murder if necessary. As long as we cooperate with the confusion that Fundamentalism is religion “gone too far” rather than religion aborted, we will help spread the infection.

It is pure geographical accident that American Fundamentalists use symbols stolen from Christianity. If their mothers had extruded them onto a different patch of dirt they’d have seized different symbols but they would have handed those symbols over to that same master all Fundamentalists of all denominations* worship.

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  • Yes. Islamists, Christianists, Bolsheviks and Nazis all belong to the same worldwide anti-religion, Fundamentalism. They are denominations of one and the same spasmodically violent worship of graven mental images. For these ideo-idolators, religion is belief, faith is beliefs, and killing and dying for opinions makes blessed.

Fall in

Philosophy

The gathered sheep fall into formation, and behold: the flock is now a pack. And the pack snarls “Let us prey!” Whoever keeps their wool is devoured with the others.  

There is no shock of Revelation, no disturbance of conscience, no lost sleep. 

Today is today. Yesterday is a wooly memory. 

Tomorrow will be tomorrow. If forgiveness is needed it will be taken. 

All will be forgotten in the retellings of the tale.

We were the good guys.

We are diplomats

Ideas

Whether we like it or not, when we act as the individual Who we know we are, we represent a What others believe we are. 
Each of us is a diplomat of the categories we are to others. 

Hannah Arendt said “No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is — as distinct from the question of who he is — which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.”

Liberal tension

Philosophy

The left-liberal soul is torn between left and liberal. To the left stands sensitivity to every power imbalance, from the grossest violence to the gentlest manipulation — all inequalities threaten the freedom of the individual to be who she or he is meant to be. All inequality must be eliminated before individuals are truly free. Comprehensive freedom-from is the feeling of freedom for the left gone illiberal!

The right-liberal soul is torn between right and liberal. To the right stands the longing for human accomplishment, from success in business to building great empires — all limits to what we can accomplish together threaten the freedom of the individual to participate in something greater than the self. Limits to accomplishment must be removed before a people is truly free. Unlimited freedom-to is the feeling of freedom for the right gone illiberal!

In the painful tension between individual freedom-from (which requires collective effort to protect all) and collective freedom-to (which requires individual sacrifice and participation) writhes liberalism, essentially middle, essential tense, essentially compromised. 

The privileged SJW

Politics

From my own experience, privilege manifests primarily in two ways, which apply equally to all people of every demographic:

  1. Incuriosity: Not feeling obligated to understand what your fellow citizens are trying to tell you. “I see clearly that I see things the right way, and that your view is distorted.”
  2. Imperiousness: Not feeling obligated to win the assent of your fellow citizens before doing things that affect their lives. “I don’t have to convince you.”

Privilege is not something that automatically deludes certain categories of people, nor does disprivilege enlighten other categories.

The epistemological and ethical self-privileging of our own inexhautibly irritable illiberal left fringe was in fact an effect of privilege (or perceived privilege). A set of folks thought they possessed sufficient political power (due to numbers and the thrust of history, not to mention the overwhelming privilege of the social status one gains from a degree from an elite university) to steamroll anyone who disagreed with them. They “checked their privilege” when “dialoguing” with token representatives of their favored categories, but when talking to examples of “privileged” categories, took the most privileged position possible and condescendently lectured them on how great they actually had it compared to other unfortunate categories. Or they just discharged their resentment on any demographically qualified human lightning rod that happened to be handy when it was time for lightning to strike.

Our illiberal Left did not care how people felt about “finally having the tables turned on them.”  They didn’t bother listening to opposing views because their vulgar marxoid false consciousness theories explained away the objections of dissenters to their own personal satisfaction.

The sole difference between this gang of ideologues and any other gang of conspiracy theorists is that this gang sort of favored the same people and policies we left-liberals did. Their passion was useful, so we accepted them as allies. We ought to feel ashamed that fewer of us called out their “calling out” — until it cost us what might be the most important election in this nation’s history. Now we are full of remorse and desire to self-reflect on what we were doing wrong. A year ago this self-scrutiny would have gone much further.

So we can complain all day about the Right not being vocal enough about denouncing their fringe, but how did the Left do when we felt secure in our power?

If the Right stands up to marginalize the KKK, they will have demonstrated true moral superiority to the Left, who did far too little to marginalize our SJW.

 

When a thing is new

Philosophy

You may have seen this well-known quote attributed to William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

This quote is probably a distillation from a passage in James’s classic lecture “Pragmatism”:

 I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

There is no pursuit more subject to retroactive obviousness than philosophy.

Philosophy is the design of the very conceptual apparatus used to understand all experience, and this includes the experience of our own memories. Once we start thinking with a new philosophy our old thoughts are subsumed by the new philosophy and re-understood in its terms. We unconsciously dissociate from our old self, treating that old self like someone else.

It is extremely difficult even to return to old philosophies we once used but abandoned, and it is even harder yet to return to older and more primitive philosophies that were blind to experiences which, to us, are impossible to miss.

We tend to either find these older philosophies obsolete, and fail to appreciate the role they played — and continue to play! — in our present philosophies. Or we thoughtlessly do our best to believe what the older philosophies say in the terms of our new philosophies and do severe violence to both the old and the new.

Here is how I understand it: We develop philosophies we need but do not yet have with the philosophies we do have but need to leave, which in turn were developed with philosophies we used to have but left.

It is like making new tools with worn-out tools which were made from old, now broken tools. No — actually, it is not like this. It literally is this.

The big difference is that when we think of tools, we tend to view them as objects we use. Philosophies are subjects we use, and in an unnerving sense those subjects are our subjectivity.

By many, possibly most, popular philosophies, there no distinction is made between one’s own soul and our deepest subjective tools, which are not only the contents of our beliefs, but our very believing of those beliefs: our faith.

When our subjective tools begin to malfunction, we feel that we ourselves — our very souls — are breaking down. We lose our faith, and we want it back.

To be continued.

 

Alternative wisdoms

Ideas

The wisdom of the romantics: “Close your ears to distracting and deceptive voices and obey your heart’s commands.”

The wisdom of the liberals: “Listen to the voices of the others around you and educate your heart before you trust its commands.”

The wisdom of fundamentalists:  “Listen only to us who know and love the Truth, train your heart for obedience, then with ears closed to distracting and deceptive voices, execute righteousness.”

Us here

Philosophy

Most of the world sees things in terms of us-here and them-there. We who live here are good, and they who live there are wicked. We are blessed to have been born here among the good and to have been taught the absolute truth.

The other part of the world — much smaller — sees things in terms of us-cosmopolitan and them-insular. We who are cosmopolitan understand that where someone was born and what they were taught is the absolute truth does not matter. What matters is whether a person has understood that the unexamined, uncritical belief that one is good and knows the truth is not a sign of knowing but of ignorance and will lead not to good, but to evil. We must stay alert to the fact that we ourselves are vulnerable to playing the evil role unless we stay aware of how evil actually works, and that evil works precisely through our own certainty that we are right.

This certainty — this moralistic pridefulness — will lead the wives and children and grandchildren of American soldiers who bravely fought and defeated totalitarian movements in Europe and in the Pacific to enthusiastically support totalitarians in their own land — totalitarians who promise the same returns to national greatness, the same disgust toward liberals and intellectuals, the same rise of the common folk to take back their government, the same mass conspiracy thinking. Because their families believe with all their hearts that it was Japanese or Germans or Italians that their husbands, fathers or grandfathers fought — missing entirely the fact that it was an eternal evil they fought — an eternal evil ready to seduce any person in any land professing any faith — just as long as they are prideful enough to believe they possess the knowledge of good and therefore impossible to seduce. They give themselves to the strong man who says the words they love to hear and never allow themselves to suspect who has entered their bed. They betray the principles they claim as the basis of their virtue — but it feels so right, it can’t be wrong. 

Contained and comprehended

Ideas


If Levinas is right — and I believe he is — it is no accident that the person I know whose formula for intellectual victory was to “contain and comprehend” the other was also among the most amoral people I’ve known. Whether he behaved admirably or despicably, the only judgment that weighed on him was how his soul experienced his own soul as he acted before it.

Neither argument nor morality are about self-satisfaction of reason, and when this basic fact is misunderstood all other highfalutin “spiritual” concepts and practices become solipsistic puppet play. 

You cannot vault over the ordinary transcendence of other people’s minds and arrive at some communion with superhuman Transcendence. The failure to make the leap, and the fall into the abyss of immanent dreaming of transcendence is “experienced” by oneself as spiritual success.

The desire to reduce all phenomena to the terms of self and to protect these terms from whatever attempts to impinge by effecting repentence (metanoia) is, if not the origin of all evil, at least one key tributary. 

Two kinds of othering

Ideas

According to Wikipedia “when the term the Other is used as the verb Othering, it labels (distinguishes and identifies) someone as belonging to a category defined as the Other. The practice of Othering is the exclusion of persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self.”

It is interesting that of all words, we use this word to designate reduction of other individuals to mere instances of categories, which are mental extensions of one’s own self. It is precisely otherness — that of their being that transcends our minds — that we deny others. Seen this way, it would make more sense to call it Selfing.

It is also interesting that many so-called “religious people” are the quickest to reduce everything to the terms of their doctrine, which, contrary to their doctrines, is precisely denial of transcendence, not its affirmation. The greatest reduction of all is the ultimate Other, God, who becomes a personal possession — a mental idol worshiped as God in place of God.

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I see two categories of othering. The usual negative othering (or anti-othering), such as racism, sexism or xenophobia is contemptuous disregard of those categorized as instances of despised groups. The disregard will be underpinned by different styles of justification, usually essentialist on the illiberal right and sociological on the illiberal left.

Positive othering (or philo-othering) is the same reduction of individuals to instances of categories (and in the process, depriving the other of otherness), but the value assigned to the other is affirmative. This process still denies the transcendent reality of the affirmed other, but awards the dehumanized other favorable status. By this way of thinking, reverse-racism should not be used to designate hatred of white people by black people (that’s simply racism), but rather that strong inclination of white leftists to view all people classifiable as “people of color” in a favorable light, instead of approaching individuals as the individuals they are.

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Liberalism seeks conditions to allow each individual to self-classify — to choose they groups they represent — and to adopt whatever intersectional identity they wish to have, not those imposed by others. As long as these classifications are imposed, liberalism still has work to do. It is unclear to me that philo-othering or affirming equal-but-opposite anti-othering is helpful to this cause.

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Fundamentalist philo-othering of God denies God’s reality at least as much as atheist anti-othering of God. When I hear debates between fundamentalists and atheists see anti-otherers and philo-otherers collaborating on a worldview where religion has no place.

Dying of disrespect

Ideas

Americans generally believe it is good not not care what other people think.

Saying “I don’t care what you think” is often seen as a sign of independence, toughness and spirit. We say it with a tone of pride, as if we have demonstrated a virtue. When we are bothered that someone thinks poorly of us, we scold ourselves for caring so much what others think. We shouldn’t care about that.

But not caring what others think is a formula of disrespect — almost its definition. Look at the etymology of re-spect: back + look. If I look at you and I see someone who looks back and sees me, I respect you. If I look at you and see something whose seeing is irrelevant, I disrespect you.

When we say someone has disrespected us, what we mean is that they have *demonstrated* disrespect. But the disrespect was there prior to the act, and the suspicion that we are not respected is profoundly alienating. The sin of disrespect is committed in the heart before it is committed with word or action.

I find this exaltation of disrespect alarming. I am alarmed not only because disrespect is painful to the disrespected and degrading to the disrespectful, but because the institutions most vital and essential to our way of life are all ones that depend on respect to function and flourish. How is it that a nation so utterly dependent on respect has embraced disrespect as admirable? Can we really adhere to an ethic of disrespect and hope to thrive as a nation?

If you doubt that our national institutions all assume and require respect, here is a list of some key examples:

  • Our market, at least when it functions properly, is a place where companies work to develop products and services that customers prefer over other possibilities. When competition gets fierce enough, companies will go to extreme lengths to figure out exactly how their customers see the world in order to do a better job of appealing to them. This is an extreme kind of respect.
  • Our democracy, when it functions properly, forces candidates to figure out what their constituents want from them and to explain to them how they intend to deliver results. The incumbents must demonstrate how they have delivered or explain persuasively why they did not deliver or risk being voted out of office. The candidates must care how their constituents think and what they think of them. In a healthy democracy, disrespect costs a politician their job.
  • Our judiciary system also requires persuasion. A lawyer attempting to persuade a jury of peers is by proxy attempting to persuade the public of the truth of her case. Again: respect.
  • Our legislative process, despite what so many Americans have come to think is a collaborative design process performed legislators of differing opinions. All design processes require extreme respect among collaborators, each of whom looks for novel resolutions to apparent obstacles which permit miraculous possibilities of alignment where before there was only mutual objection and frustration. But our public — who believe a good politician is one who already knows what is best, who grandstands on Uncompromising Principles, and obliterates opposition through sheer force of will, and who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of it — elects leaders who exemplify the disrespect ethic, effectively hurling human monkey-wrenches into our delicate political mechanisms. Is it any wonder things have stopped working in Washington? And it seems that many of us think the solution to this problem is to find new, even more potent forms of disrespect so overpowering that they can just sweep aside what remains and get things done autocratically in the manner of a sole proprietor of a private business, who calls all the shots, makes hard calls and… doesn’t have to care what anyone thinks about it. “My way or the highway.” (Where is the highway in a nation? Deportation? Jail?)

These are some of our key liberal-democratic institutions, but it is not even a complete list.

Can we  afford to continue to exalt disrespect? Is it possible America’s worst troubles are symptoms of disrespect? Are we perhaps even dying of disrespect?

And can an individual citizen do anything about this?

I think much of the damage is done individual-to-individual. Like it or not, when we converse with other people, we represent our political positions. When we show someone disrespect, we do so on behalf of who they think we represent. When you converse as a member of a political party, a religion, a race, a profession, a generation, a philosophy, a stance on some issue, or whatever — you represent a group. You become a concrete experience — a touch-point, as we call it in the design business — of something otherwise abstract and intangible. To represent your group is an enormous responsibility if you think about it.

If you are persuaded at all by what I am saying, you might want to meditate on three questions:

  1. How often do you catch yourself admiring disrespect?
  2. Have you reflected on whether disrespect is a good thing to admire?
  3. How many times a day do you feel or show disrespect, versus feel and show respect — especially to those who disagree with you?

I think this is the most important thing I have to say right now. Struggling with disrespect and overcoming it is more complex and difficult than it seems on its face — it is, in fact, a discipline on the order of religion — but simply questioning the ethic of disrespect is a crucial first step.