Category Archives: Politics

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 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.

 

Pluralistic insight

Politics, Pragmatism

We use whatever concepts we have available to us to understand our experiences. When facing an unfamiliar situation, we intuitively choose a conceptualization that seems to fit in an attempt to make sense of it. And if the first pick fails to give us a handle on the situation, we might “try on” another — if one is available to us.

Having a larger conceptual repertoire gives us more options for understanding. It also raises our expectations with regard to conceptual fit. Perhaps most importantly, the practice of trying out different ways of conceiving subjects us to first-hand experience of contasting experiences of understanding, which produces the insight we conceptualize as pluralism: multiple approaches to understanding always exist, even though it seems only one truth is possible.

Inducing the pluralistic insight, and equipping citizens with a large repertoire of concepts for reaching understandings satisfactory to the greatest possible number of people is the most important function of education in a liberal-democratic society.

Those who make use of a limited set of concepts for understanding the world will be accustomed to making do with semi-adequate understandings. They lack all experience of pluralism: the world they experience is a mysterious and arbitrary world where thinking is barely relevant because it rarely does much good.

One strong argument for public education is ensuring children are taught by teachers who have a reasonably large conceptual repertoire to teach. You cannot give what you do not have. Or to put it differently “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch” — usually the ditch of fundamentalism.

 

 

 

 

Life is unfair

Ethics, Politics, Symbols and diagrams

fairness

This scale is an attempt to diagram a framework I posted to Facebook.

Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more people declaring that “Life is unfair.” I actually grew up hearing that.

I’m starting to believe this statement is the essence of right-wing politics. Degree of renunciation of fairness is what defines the right-wing spectrum:

Centrism views fairness as one legitimate political goal, but acknowledges practical limits to the degree of achievable fairness. Centrism sees over-reaching attempts at fairness to be artifacts of naive partiality with distorted self-serving conceptions of fairness. To the degree a centrist leans right, he sees increasing levels of unfairness as inevitable and acceptable.

Middle right believes that fairness should not enter the discussion. Fairness is an inappropriate goal for politics, and an inadequate framework for thinking about it. Politics should be thought about in terms of other dynamics (such as economics). These dynamics naturally produce a healthy equilibrium which are in fact the best possible political outcomes. The distorting lens of “fairness” demands that we “fix” precisely that which is not broken (and conversely, that we preserve the hacks intended to produce fairness, but which destroy natural equilibrium).

Hard right believes that inequality is necessary — that establishing proper rank is required for the health of a society. The strongest, or wisest, or smartest or the most righteous should have more power than the weak, foolish, unintelligent, vicious masses.

I can see the self-consistent logic and validity of these positions. But as a left-leaning person, I believe the elimination of fairness from political discourse is a disaster. To say “life is unfair” is to misrepresent a moral intention as a natural fact. It pretends to say “perfect fairness is not an achievable goal” but really means: “I have no intention of treating you fairly.” I do not believe I can credibly ask a person to trust me if I do not intend to treat them fairly.

But, with all that being said, here is a troubling question: can right-wingers actually trust the left to treat them fairly? Because being fair means making the question “what is fair?” an open question for discussion, and I am not at all sure this is the case with many Clinton and Sanders supporters, who seem to have already decided unilaterally for themselves what is fair.

When asked for the left half of the scale, I added:

Hard left wants to maximize fairness by ensuring that everyone has exactly the same resources. Middle left believes politics is essentially about achieving maximum fairness. Centrism, as it leans leftward, sees fairness as one key condition of freedom for all. Fairness and freedom will never be perfect, but we are obligated to pursue it.

I do not care what you think

Philosophy, Politics

It is easy to disregard what someone thinks if that person lacks the resources to make you feel the consequences of your disrespect and disregard. We only say “I don’t give a shit how you feel” to people who are powerless either to help us or to harm us.

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A person or a group we treat as a powerless nobody will seek opportunities to return and confront us as a powerful somebody — as somebody who can command our attention, or our respect, or — and God help us if it comes to this — to make us feel what it is like to be a powerless nobody.

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Perhaps the biggest difference between left and right comes down to the question: Which segment of the poor and powerless mass deserves to be courted and which deserves to be despised?

Political orientations

Philosophy, Politics

Does the world need another political categorization scheme? Nope — so here’s one I just thought up:

Political orientations can be categorized according to two original social experiences:

  • A) early feelings of membership in one’s society;
  • B) early feelings of alienation from one’s society.

From the original feeling, political views can develop a variety of ways.

With respect to one’s own pursuit of membership/alienation:

  • C) pursue increased degree of membership in one’s society;
  • D) pursue increased degree of alienation from one’s society;
  • E) maintain current degree of membership/alienation.

With respect to cultivation of membership/alienation feelings:

  • F) toward intensifying feelings of membership for those who feel membership;
  • G) toward intensifying feelings of alienation for those who feel alienated;
  • H) toward deintensifying feelings of membership and alienation.

With respect to enlistment of actors into belonging/alienated camps:

  • I) toward increasing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging, while reducing the number of people who feel alienated;
  • J) toward increasing the number of people who feel alienated, and reducing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging;
  • K) toward maintaining the numbers of those who feel belonging and alienation.

And finally, with respect to attitudes toward change:

  • L) hope – optimistic belief that one’s life can be changed for the better;
  • M) fear – pessimistic belief that one’s life will be changed for the worse;
  • N) resignation – belief that things will happen however they happen and that one has little or no control over it;
  • O) skepticism – things can be changed, but the consequences are radically unpredictable.

My own classification would be B.C.H.I.O.

I might need to make a political quiz.

 

Moral types

Ethics, Politics

Some people listen carefully to others, learning from them how they perceive, think and act, and try to hear beneath it who this person is, what kind of life they live, what kind of world they inhabit, what might interest and benefit them.

Some live by the rules of reason. They look for compelling logical arguments and if they see that they have been overpowered, they proudly yield.

Others live by the rules of their ethos. They do what they ought to according to prevailing norms, in loyalty to that which gives their reality structure, substance and meaning.

Yet others follow rules for practical reasons. They avoid breaking rules in order to avoid the consequences of breaking them. They answer primarily to coercive social forces.

Finally, there are those who know only physical force. Everything that seems coercively social is only a few degrees away from physical force. They are barely removed from a state of war.

Each of these types represents a different relationship with transcendence.

Principle of compromise

Politics

When I hear grandstanding imitation Martin Luthers or Martin Luther Kings — and there are so many of them — proclaiming unwillingness to compromise on their favorite principle, it makes me worry about America’s future. Whatever truth there is in these principles, it is all undone by disdain for compromise.

Since when is compromise despicable? Compromise is the core principle of liberal-democracy. If there is one place where Americans must be uncompromising, it is in our commitment to compromise.

No principle that exalts itself above the requirement to compromise has any place in a liberal democracy like the United States of America. If your favorite political principle prohibits faithful adherence to the higher principle of compromise, you are a shitty American. You do not understand the profound demands American patriotism makes on its citizens. You belong in some other more backwards country with a more primitive forms of loyalty, not here.

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If we seriously want to get back to what makes this country great, let’s imitate the Constitutional Convention. Let’s proudly make a point of respectfully disagreeing with those who view things very differently, then work hard and patiently at designing peaceful agreements, persevering as long as it takes to succeed.

And if you are one of those many people who think there is no greatness to get back to — that this country was corrupt from the very beginning and will remain corrupt to the end — please be as loudly outspoken on this point as possible so the rest of us know to what to do with your political views.

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I’ve been working on a bibliography of political writings to help those who have a taste for cultivating respect find the best specimens of various political stances. I’m collecting the very best specimens of liberal, neoliberal, democratic socialist and conservative thought. Let me know if you’re interested, and I might post it.

Pluritarian Pluriversalism

Anthropology, Biography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

To someone born into an autistic universe controlled by a single set of strictly logical natural laws, the experience of empathy and the subsequent revelation of an empathic pluriverse redefines the meaning of miracle, and of transcendence, and of religion.

Before, miracles were exceptions to the laws of nature. After, miracles are the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness: other minds, each with a world of its own — each with the power to change the meaning of one’s own world.

Before, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond the finite objective world.  After, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond myriad finite objective worlds, each rooted in the elastic mind of a subject.

Before, religion was the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers. After, religion was still the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers, but the change in conceptions of transcendence and miracle means that it is the individual and the individual’s world that is transcended, and this means the route to transcendence is not around the world and one’s neighbors, but through them and their worlds. The activity of loving, respecting and learning from one’s neighbors is intrinsic to loving, respecting and learning from the infinite God who cannot be confined to any one world, however vast.

Myriad worship practices are needed to worship myriad aspects of an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly meaningful God. By this understanding, empathy is worship.

Souls

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Every soul is the size of the entire known universe, containing every known thing within it, endures for all time from the earliest known pre-history to the most distant imaginable future, and encompasses every conceivable possibility. Therefore, no two souls are alike. 

Souls vary in size, density, variety and complexity. Souls overlap in reality, but weave through realities differently, touching, entangling, moving and being moved by different beings. 

Some souls have space in them for your soul, and are happy to extend you hospitality. Some souls seek your hospitality. Other souls need your soul locked up inside your silent body.

Postenlightenment harmony

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

Tillich (from The Courage to Be):

The whole [Enlightenment] period believed in the principle of “harmony” — harmony being the law of the universe according to which the activities of the individual, however individualistically conceived and performed, lead “behind the back” of the single actor to a harmonious whole, to a truth in which at least a large majority can agree, to a good in which more and more people can participate, to a conformity which is based on the free activity of every individual. The individual can be free without destroying the group. The functioning of economic liberalism seemed to confirm this view: the laws of the market produce, behind the backs of the competitors in the market, the greatest possible amount of goods for everybody. The functioning of liberal democracy showed that the freedom of the individual to decide politically does not necessarily destroy political conformity. Scientific progress showed that individual research and the freedom for individual scientific convictions do not prevent a large measure of scientific agreement. Education showed that emphasis on the free development of the individual child does not reduce the chances of his becoming an active member of a conformist society. And the history of Protestantism confirmed the belief of the Reformers that the free encounter of everybody with the Bible can create an ecclesiastical conformity in spite of individual and even denominational differences. Therefore it was by no means absurd when Leibnitz formulated the law of preestablished harmony by teaching that the monads of which all things consist, although they have no doors and windows that open toward each other, participate in the same world which is present in each of them, whether it be dimly or clearly perceived. The problem of individualization and participation seemed to be solved philosophically as well as practically.

It is the belief in a preexisting harmony that separates the classical Enlightenment view from a Postenlightenment view. I believe in disharmonious reasons, which is another way of saying that I believe in Pluralism. To extend the music analogy, reason does not produce chords, it produces a chromatic scale, from which harmonies can be made, but only if sour reasonable notes are muted, at least until the melody progresses and the key changes, making the formerly sour note sweet. A harmonious truth must be designed, and design always means making good tradeoffs.

Pop ideology how-to guide

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Here is how to build a popular ideology:

Do rock-solid factual investigation. Satisfy the requirements of the critical mind.

Present the facts of the investigation in compelling stories that win over the heart, too. Adhere to the facts.

Encourage the heart and the mind to believe together for once. And what a relief wholehearted belief is in these fragmentary contradictory times. This rare peace is reason enough to believe.

Build fact and feeling together, higher and higher, to moral heights where gravity weakens and earth loosens its grip. Up here ideas are lighter and can be piled one upon the other with only sporadic logical spot welding.

The heart has the mind’s endorsement now, the newly unified soul hangs on your verdict.

Now is poetry’s moment. Passionate declarations, inspired insinuations, elegant analogies, and flights of spirit move mountains arguments cannot even touch.

Set your conclusion at the tip of the crescendo.

Then drop to earth again. Plant your feet where all can see where they are rooted. Return to facts. Build a second edifice like the first and crown it with the same conclusion. Then drop.

Repeat a third time, then a fourth.

Spread your conclusive points over the breadth of the sky. Now it is a worldview, supported on columns of excellent journalism. Readers will rise with you to hold it up, united in heart and mind, with themselves, with each other, as a community, as a collective mind, as a political body ready to act on behalf of your faith.

Nobody will notice the heavenly roof is suspended by nothing but  a desire for sheltering unity. Nobody can believe the sky is not attached to the ground.

The columns of fact and argument bear no load.  They are decorative stumps. They are monuments to the idea of reason.

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If you teach your poetry ventriloquism, when you let the facts speak for themselves they say what your heart wants to hear. This is doubly true if you think a complete knowledge of facts points to a single moral conclusion.

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The formula: Journalism; poetic ethical interlude; journalism; poetic ethical interlude…

miracle occurs

Respect > passion

Politics

I don’t know what makes me put stuff like this on Facebook.

Passion is overrated. It is cheap and common. Any jackass can get worked up about what is obviously true and good and want to fight for what they know is right.

Respect is more difficult and admirable. To negotiate for what you believe in while recognizing that your opponent is doing the same, committing whole-heartedly to your position while reserving your deepest loyalty for the mysteries of diplomacy — that constant possibility of breakthrough insight that pierces horizons, transfigures questions, sublates either-ors, and creates new intellectual space ex nihilo — this demands a kind of faith entirely unknown to “religious” fanatics who always manage to be on the wrong side of the stories they misappropriate.

If you see religion as opposed to liberal democracy and science, you might want to consider rethinking your most basic schemas. Religion, liberalism and science do not tolerate each other: they require and entail one another. In fact, they are inseparable — more like facets or dimensions than discrete entities.

(And of course, I had to mention Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Metaphysical Club.)

A newish political framework

Ethics, Politics, Pragmatism

(Updated November 25, 2015, and edited slightly on January 19, 2020.)

No word is more loaded and distorted than the word “liberal”.

No word is more crucial, especially right now. Deprived of language, the very concept of liberalism is slipping away. Liberalism is losing its place in polical discourse, precisely when it is most needed. Each ideology sees liberals as unwitting dupes of its enemy, and happily shoots through liberals to fire on its foes, and tallies fallen liberals into its kill count.

But liberalism differs more from illiberal ideology than strains of illiberalism differ from from one another. Far from being the midpoint, average or muddling of purer ideologies, liberalism represents the cleanest and most radical departure from all ideological extremes, and our best hope for transcending them.

For this reason the word “liberal” needs clarification and revitalization.

For the last several decades the word “liberal” has been casually associated with “left”. And among the right, liberal has also been connected with Political Correctness.

The PC-liberal association, especially, makes it impossible to discuss what liberalism really is, because what makes PC objectionable to those who reject it is not liberalism, but illiberalism: an aggressive prioritization of the interests of particular collectives over individual freedom of speech, with the goal of manually re-balancing the scales of justice to compensate for generations-old collective imbalance.

Of course, this sort of collective oppression is exactly what liberals accuse conservatives of attempting. Some conservatives cheerfully admit to this, because they believe their institutions are backed by some absolute super-human authority. But the libertarian faction of conservatism balks at this. Libertarians want to maximize all liberty — social and economic — and will not tolerate any authoritarian interference in the private sphere, even if the authority claims to be underwritten by God Himself. This commitment to liberty is what makes libertarians true liberals (and why they have been correctly called “classical liberals”).

In theory, left-leaning liberals are sympathetic to the libertarian goal of maximizing social and economic liberty — but they are deeply skeptical of the libertarian favored means of achieving it, deregulation. They suspect that those who favor deregulation (and reduction or elimination of the welfare state) are invested primarily in the interests of those Americans who benefit directly from deregulation and shrinking of the state, and that all talk of the Invisible Hand of the market and Trickle Down is justificatory myth.

I am not interested at this point in the merits of the left and right forms of liberalism. Instead I want to point out the important fact that liberals agree on the end — liberty — and disagree primarily on means of achieving it. My belief is that alliances founded on ends, where the means are contested, make far more sense than alliances founded on means used to pursue divergent ends.

When liberalism is secure, the disagreement between left or right liberal strategies can seem enormous — even the key difference between friend and an adversary. At times when liberalism itself is threatened (and it seems we are approaching that point), liberals of all kinds must close ranks and redraw battle-lines. To join ranks with lesser-of-evil illiberal forces allows liberalism to be divided and conquered.

For this purpose, I am proposing a framework to help liberals of all kinds understand our shared political ideals and to frame discussion of our disagreements.

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The strategy hinges on separating the idea of left versus right from liberal versus illiberal.

The left-right continuum is one of equality. The further left you go, the more importance you assign to actual, achieved equality. The further right you go, the more you believe that some people (for whatever reason) ought to have more power or wealth than others, and that this achievement of inequality is good. In the middle region (where I think most liberals stand) is belief in equality of potential, with the left-middle emphasizing mobility of status and the right-middle emphasizing stability of status.

The liberal-illiberal continuum is one of individual versus collective purpose. At the far end of liberalism is complete disregard for collective purposes. For a pure liberal, collectivities exist solely for the sake of individual purposes. At the far end of illiberalism is the belief that the collectivity is the only thing that gives an individual life purpose. Toward the middle is the belief that individual and collective purposes are at least potentially mutually reinforcing. Those who lean liberal will emphasize the value of individual experience of participation in collective purpose, while those who lean illiberal will emphasize the enduring greatness of institutions while acknowledging the importance of winning the loyalty and faith of those who contribute to its preservation and flourishing.

Having worked far too long in consulting, I’ve made a nice 2×2, so we can link up our understanding to the awesome power of the human mind’s hypertrophied visual intelligence.

ambiliberal-pluralism

Here’s the catch — there is a theory embedded in this diagram, and it is what distinguishes this model from similar frameworks.

In the middle of the diagram is a gray triangle, a region I call the “political gamut“. What falls inside the political gamut is a coherent and practical position. What falls outside of it is impracticable, or requires inconsistency in practice.

According to this model it is impossible to be extreme left or extreme right and also liberal. I think a great many hard-left liberals and hard-right libertarians look at each other and see the impracticability of the other’s position without seeing the impracticability of their own. But this model claims that liberalism is required to be centrist with regard to the left-right spectrum. Or, to put it differently, extreme liberalism requires extreme left-right centrism. I call this position “ambiliberalism“.

Have at it. I’m trying to be a good designer and user testing this conceptual model. Please respond here or on Facebook.

Universal Design Praxis

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I find the term Design Thinking inadequate.

First, the term Design Thinking belongs to IDEO. As far as I know, they made the term up, they use it for marketing and it remains closely associated with them. It is uncomfortably too many things at once:  a semi-grassroots movement, a (vague) methodology, a bag of tricks, a style, an approach to problem-solving and a trademark.

But second, thinking is only one part of what goes on with Design Thinking. And in fact in Design Thinking thinking is demoted from its usual exalted position. In most situations in most organizations, making and doing activities are preceded by lengthy talking, making of cases, adducing of evidence, modeling, deciding, planning, and other activities of the head. But with Design Thinking, making and doing become more equal partners  with thinking in determining what will be thought and done and made. Hands and feet enter the picture and work alongside the head (and heart) to shape what transpires.

For this reason, I am inclined to characterize this way of working more as a practice than a way of thinking.

Even practice fails to go far enough, though, because a practice can still position a practitioner outside of what is being worked on. With design problems one struggles inside them, rather than working on them or puzzling over them. Anyone who has gone through the wringer of a deep design problem can tell you: design immerses, involves, challenges and changes people at an unnervingly fundamental level. This is why talk around design, design thinking and related movements like UX and service design can get a little breathless and zealous and quasi-religious: because it does stimulate — even forces — unexpected and profound self-transformations. Because of this — because the practice of doing/making/thinking iteratively feeds back into and self-modifies the doing/making/thinking and perceiving process, and the practitioners involved in it, it should be called a design praxis.

And since the active domain of design praxis is all systems involving both subjective free-willed, choice-making entities (a.k.a. people) and objective entities — and such systems are ubiquitous —  it might even be called Universal Design Praxis. According to this perspective, most problems are actually design problems. When we limit design to traditionally define design areas (graphic, product, digital, architectural, interior, fashion, and so on) we misdiagnose problems as engineering, marketing, management, economic, etc. problems — and usually end up factoring out the crucial element of free-will, and wind up treating people as beings to manipulate, control or coerce.

There is a moral/political dimension to design praxis: it works to engage human beings as free and appeals to free choice, and this also contributes to the whole movement’s quasi-religiosity

So here are the core principles of Universal Design Praxis:

  • Any development of systems comprising both objective and subjective (free-willed) components is best approached as a design problem. (This encompasses the vast bulk of human activity.)
  • Design problems are resolved through iterative cycles of first-hand immersion, collaborative reflection, collaborative making, testing, revision, etc. Whatever the specific techniques used, they are used with this thrust in this basic framework: go to reality to learn, to make, to relearn, to remake…
  • Design praxis changes the practitioner as the problem moves toward resolution — the practioner self-transforms into someone capable of seeing a solution that initially was invisible.
  • Design praxis involves reflective collaboration — multiple people working directly with realities (as opposed to speculating or recalling or applying expertise). Abstractions are derived afresh from direct exposure to reality (the reality of people, things, actions, institutions, places — whatever contributes to making a situation what it is).
  • Design praxis assumes, affirms,  appeals to, and amplifies free-will.

 

Human [second] nature

Ethics, Politics

If someday we finally persuade ourselves that free will, souls and individual purposes were inventions, that they are sustained only by our linguistic and pedagogical habits, that they can easily be dis-instituted and explained into non-existence — I hope the insight doesn’t come before an even deeper insight: That the most important elements of humanity are our second-natural ones: what we have made of ourselves in the act of making things for ourselves.

Cultural activity is working to form the second-natural essence of future generations. I want us to have free-will, souls and individual purposes because I like having them, not because I think they have an existence apart from “mere” human ways of being.

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Do not argue with me about what is natural with the expectation that naturalness compels acceptance.

Show me that a thing is good and for whom it is good and which good things must be sacrificed to have it.

Faith in philosophy

Politics

My faith in philosophy still stands in that I believe philosophy does something important — and in fact, essential, in the life of human beings.

However, this faith has been beaten back severely over the last decade: I believe philosophy is suppressed by every society, even the freest, out of necessity — and further, that most of the time when it is suppressed that it ought to be suppressed.

Ambiliberalism

Philosophy, Politics

Here is a second version of my revised “Ambidextrous Liberal Manifesto” diagram, which I will eventually make into a new presentation to replace the old one posted on Slideshare.

ambiliberal-v2

The core ideas:

  • The term “liberal” needs to be restored to its original meaning: “favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.”
  • The proper opposite of liberal is “illiberal” not conservative. In the American liberal-democratic tradition, a conservative is necessarily, to some degree, also a liberal, which is why right-liberals are also called “neoliberals” or “classical liberals” or “libertarians”. The tradition conserved in America is liberalism. This is not as true in some European countries where liberalism has emerged from monarchy, aristocracy, or other illiberal orders.
  • The habit of conflating left with liberty or right with liberty is counterproductive. Left and right must be considered separately from questions of liberalism.
  • Left and right are attitudes toward equality and inequality — NOT liberty or unfreedom. Regulation and deregulation can serve liberal purposes or illiberal ones.
  • Left-leaning Democrats (analogous to European Social Democrats) and Right-leaning Republicans are both moderately liberal, sacrificing liberty for other values (equality and just rewards, respectively). Even within the American liberal-democratic tradition this is actually legitimate and deserves respect. Any position falling inside the triad of Liberalism, Social Democracy and Conservative Republicanism should be considered legitimate within the American political order.
  • Attributing secret or unconscious motives to our political adversaries is not only inaccurate and unjust — it makes enemies of fellow-citizens. Republicans are not all crypto-plutocrats and Democrats are not all crypto-Marxists, and to make these kinds of accusations is childish and violent.
  • Liberal-democracies depend on development of skillfully civilized fighting: what Chantal Mouffe calls “agonism“. Heated disagreements within a civilized range are not only acceptable to liberalism, they are the consequence of pluralism and the very substance of liberalism.
  • True liberalism cannot exist in a state of economic anarchy (the “libertarian absurdities”), nor in a state of exact equality (the “left-liberal absurdities”), but only where equal access to opportunity exists, which requires moderate pro-competitive regulation — a balance of equality and inequality. (Even proto-libertarian Friedrich Hayek advocated regulation, provided it was not anti-competitive regulation.)
  • Liberalism cannot be taken for granted as a natural state which emerges when illiberal obstructions are removed. It must be created and maintained. To do so, liberals must free themselves from doctrines of left vs right and instead form alliances which treat the policies of the left and right as mere means to the end of liberty, to be used together, ambidextrously, to maximize liberty.