Ward Farnsworth on Socratic method

Philosophy

Yesterday, I explored what irony is. I roughly characterized it as experiencing multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. It is the capacity of a mind to subdivide itself into interlocutors.

Today I’m looking at a book on Socratic method, and seeing better why Nietzsche called Socrates “the great ironist”.

On a Socratic view, denying what someone says is the act of a friend; you should want friends who deny what you say.

Such denials produce good things. If someone has a talent for denying your claims (hopefully with some indirection and tact), you might change your mind for the better. If not, you’re at least likely to end up with a better sense of why you think what you do. You will more clearly see the details and qualifications that go with it. You might become less sure what you think altogether. That will feel like a loss, but you will be closer to the truth, even if it’s a truth that, in some cases, you may never finally reach. In that event you still hold beliefs, but you hold them a little differently. You’re more humble, more aware of your ignorance, less likely to be sure when you shouldn’t be, and more understanding of others. Socrates regarded these as great gains in wisdom.

All this is what Socratic partners try to do for each other. They are good-natured and subtle contrarians. In practice this might nevertheless sound like a set of instructions for becoming unpopular or getting yourself killed. That’s what it was for Socrates. Take heart, though: describing the method as something practiced by one person on another is mostly a convenience to illustrate how it works. In real life and when reading Plato, too — Socratic questioning is better viewed mostly as a way to think about hard questions on your own.

You challenge yourself and harass yourself and test what you think and deny what you say, all as a Socrates would. That might sound easier than doing it to others. In fact it’s considerably harder. But it’s also more rewarding and less dangerous.

The ability and inclination to “challenge and harass oneself” in order to become less complacently cocksure of one’s own convictions, and consequently wiser, is to be an ironist. One of the more refined and effective ways to be an ironist is to adopt the Socratic method for your own autointerrogation practice.

By the way I like the author of this book, Ward Farnsworth. He teaches law at UT, and writes books on all sorts of topics. The book I quoted is The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook. He also wrote a companion volume, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual. I’ve read bits of both books, and they are simple and entertaining, but not dumbed-down in the least. He’s also written on argumentation, rhetoric and chess. I think I’m a fan.

Irony deficiency

Chord, Philosophy, Politics

Today I wandered through several books touching on irony.

It began with Geertz.

Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery. The common forms of it are familiar enough. In dramatic irony, deflation results from the contrast between what the character perceives the situation to be and what the audience knows it to be; in historical irony, from the inconsistency between the intentions of sovereign personages and the natural outcomes of actions proceeding from those intentions. Literary irony rests on a momentary conspiracy of author and reader against the stupidities and self-deceptions of the everyday world; Socratic, or pedagogical, irony rests on intellectual dissembling in order to parody intellectual pretension.

But the sort of irony which appears in anthropological fieldwork, though no less effective in puncturing illusion, is not quite like any of these. It is not dramatic, because it is double-edged: the actor sees through the audience as clearly as the audience through the actor. It is not historical, because it is acausal: it is not that one’s actions produce, through the internal logic of events, results the reverse of what was intended by them (though this sometimes happens too), but that one’s predictions of what other people will do, one’s social expectations, are constantly surprised by what, independently of one’s own behavior, they actually do. It is not literary, because not only are the parties not in league, but they are in different moral universes. And it is not Socratic, because it is not intellectual pretension which is parodied, but the mere communication of thought — and not by intellectual dissembling, but by an all-too-earnest, almost grim, effort at understanding.

Geertz and Rorty live side-by-side in my mind because I learned of both of them from the same wonderful, life-transforming book, Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Irony is central to Rorty’s work, so I dipped into what some consider his magnum opus, to refresh my memory of how he spoke of irony.

The attempt to fuse the public and the private lies behind both Plato’s attempt to answer the question “Why is it in one’s interest to be just?” and Christianity’s claim that perfect self-realization can be attained through service to others. Such metaphysical or theological attempts to unite a striving for perfection with a sense of community require us to acknowledge a common human nature. They ask us to believe that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others — that the springs of private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the same. Skeptics like Nietzsche have urged that metaphysics and theology are transparent attempts to make altruism look more reasonable than it is. Yet such skeptics typically have their own theories of human nature. They, too, claim that there is something common to all human beings – for example, the will to power, or libidinal impulses. Their point is that at the “deepest” level of the self there is no sense of human solidarity, that this sense is a “mere” artifact of human socialization. So such skeptics become antisocial. They turn their backs on the very idea of a community larger than a tiny circle of initiates.

Ever since Hegel, however, historicist thinkers have tried to get beyond this familiar standoff. They have denied that there is such a thing as “human nature” or the “deepest level of the self.” Their strategy has been to insist that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down — that there is nothing “beneath” socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human. . . . This historicist turn has helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics — from the temptation to look for an escape from time and chance. It has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress. But even after this substitution takes place, the old tension between the private and the public remains. Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates (e.g., Heidegger and Foucault) still tend to see socialization as Nietzsche did — as antithetical to something deep within us. Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates (e.g., Dewey and Habermas) are still inclined to see the desire for private perfection as infected with “irrationalism” and “aestheticism.” . . . I urge that we not try to choose between them but, rather, give them equal weight and then use them for different purposes. Authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov are useful as exemplars, as illustrations of what private perfection — a self-created, autonomous, human life — can be like. Authors such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls are fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort — the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel. We shall only think of these two kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision.

. . .

If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools — as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.

This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches a figure whom I call the “liberal ironist.” I borrow my definition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.

For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” — no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. . . . Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question — algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort — is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.

The ironist intellectuals who do not believe that there is such an order are far outnumbered (even in the lucky, rich, literate democracies) by people who believe that there must be one. Most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism. So ironism has often seemed intrinsically hostile not only to democracy but to human solidarity — to solidarity with the mass of mankind, all those people who are convinced that such an order must exist. But it is not. . . .

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?” This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. . . .

Then I began to dig into a book on the Socratic method by Ward Farnsworth. I did this not only because Geertz spoke of Socratic irony but because Nietzsche characterized Socrates as “the great ironist”, in multiple senses.

In Birth of Tragedy:

…that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man — how now? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks — merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans resolve against pessimism — a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science — indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what — worse yet, whence — all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against–truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your–irony? — —

In Beyond Good and Evil:

The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” — or, more clearly, of instinct and reason — that is to say, the question whether in regard to the evaluation of things instinct deserves to have more authority than rationality, which wants to evaluate and act according to reasons, according to a “Why?,” that is to say according to utility and fitness for a purpose — this is still that old moral problem which first appeared in the person of Socrates and was already dividing the minds of men long before Christianity.

There it is: “dividing minds”, not necessarily between persons but within a single soul. This dividing seems essential to irony. He continues:

Socrates himself, to be sure, had, with the taste appropriate to his talent — that of a superior dialectician — initially taken the side of reason; and what indeed did he do all his life long but laugh at the clumsy incapacity of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and were never able to supply adequate information about the reasons for their actions? Ultimately, however, in silence and secrecy, he laughed at himself too: he found in himself, before his more refined conscience and self-interrogation, the same difficulty and incapacity. But why, he exhorted himself, should one therefore abandon the instincts! One must help both them and reason to receive their due — one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments. This was the actual falsity of that great ironist, who had so many secrets; he induced his conscience to acquiesce in a sort of self-outwitting: fundamentally he had seen through the irrational aspect of moral judgment.

So now I want to understand better Nietzsche’s attitude toward irony.

I’m seeing some general patterns. He associates it with decadence and non-nobility. By these terms, I mean something specific that is not purely vicious, just as in Nietzsche’s thought nobility is not purely virtuous. Nobility is simply a matter of psychic unicity. A noble soul is undivided, uni-perspectival, inert and impervious. It does not question its instincts but trusts them and acts instinctively. It is rarely curious, open to change or reflective toward its own existence. A noble soul is unironic. Socrates was ironic because he lacked nobility.

But he also seems to see an interpersonal dimension to irony. Consider this:

The clearest sign that two people hold alienated views is that each says ironic things to the other, but neither of the two feels the other’s irony.

Of course, the division is not just between the alienated friends. Each friend is speaking ironically, and has the inward division irony requires. But the irony is not registering, which raises the question: what is each friend missing in what the other is saying? Is the second meaning in the ironic utterances what each friend mistakes for the other’s belief, so the irony does not land? Or has each friend lost all sense of the other’s complexity and hears psychic polytonality as monotony?

For a while I was associating irony with pluralism, and I don’t think I was wrong to do so. Irony might be a necessary (or at least extremely helpful) condition of pluralism. But I want to understand their similarities, differences and relationship more clearly. I think irony is multiplicity of view in a single moment of experience (like a chord), where pluralism is more experienced sequentially (like a scale).

In irony we experience multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. If we are pluralists, we can mute all but one of the truths in order to experience another as a purer and cohesive perspective.

I have become this way politically. I have become almost unable to straightforwardly speak about any single political position without simultaneously feeling the legitimate objections of two or more others — and more importantly the sheer magnitude of social complexity of the “hyperobject” each attempts to know and respond to.

But we can only do this if we have learned more than just the factual What content of other political positions. Even more we must know how to dance the How of its logic and feel the Why of its driving concerns.

More and more I find this kind of irony is what is most lacking in contemporary political and social discourse.

Geertz’s three lessons

Philosophy

I’m reading Geertz this morning. He and Rorty remind me of one another, not only in their style of thinking, but in their humor. Recalling his first fieldwork, and the 800 page dissertation he wrote on it, and the 500 page book he distilled from his dissertation, Geertz summarized what he gained from the years of effort in three offhand lessons:

1. Anthropology, at least of the sort I profess and practice, involves a seriously divided life. The skills needed in the classroom or at the desk and those needed in the field are quite different. Success in the one setting does not insure success in the other. And vice versa.

2. The study of other peoples’ cultures (and of one’s own as well, but that brings up other issues) involves discovering who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, something a good deal less straightforward than the ordinary canons of Notes and Queries ethnography, or for that matter the glossy impressionism of pop art “cultural studies,” would suggest.

3. To discover who people think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, it is necessary to gain a working familiarity with the frames of meaning within which they enact their lives. This does not involve feeling anyone else’s feelings, or thinking anyone else’s thoughts, simple impossibilities. Nor does it involve going native, an impractical idea, inevitably bogus. It involves learning how, as a being from elsewhere with a world of one’s own, to live with them.

Reading Geertz, I’m realizing how much I’ve imitated his tone, and that of Rorty and Howie Becker, specifically when I speak about design. It is the tone of those whose abstraction span stretches from deep space to the dirt under one’s feet because the ideas they discuss are ideas they have used for many years.

I am in a phase right now where I need absolutely everything I handle to have a traceable concrete lineage. I cannot tolerate the level of alienated abstraction I’ve been enduring.

Closest and most demonstrable

Biography, Philosophy

One of my favorite deep cut Nietzsche passages:

The two principles of the new life. —

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

Someday I should make a “Jefferson’s Bible” of Nietzsche quotes that freed me from the dismal faith of my youth and initiated me into a far better one.

The Nietzsche I revere and love is not the macho Nietzsche who emerges when you start with his most popular and most tattooed quotations. “God is dead.” “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” “When you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” And, of course, there is the new antisemite favorite “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Midwits love a paradox.

My favorite Nietzsche is the early-middle Nietzsche who wrote Human All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science. I love precisely the books that were excluded from the two Walter Kaufmann collections, Portable Nietzsche and Basic Writings, which is a little puzzling because I prefer Kaufmann’s translations to all others.

These were the books Nietzsche wrote mid-metamorphosis as he transformed himself from brilliant academic philologist to mystical firebrand. In them, he reflected on his war with his own received faith. The battlefront was questioning the sacred morality of his own culture — a morality so sacred that even asking is an unforgivable blasphemy.

Central to this drama is an intellectual conscience, sensitive, exacting, demanding, thorough and sometimes brutal. This is what Nietzsche awakened in me. He taught me to ask “Do I really believe this?” and to not confuse this question with “Can I argue this?” Because just as we must never confuse truth with reality, we must never confuse belief with faith.

Reconceiving KPIs

Design

(This is me working out some thoughts for work.)

My company hosts an event each year that we call Practice Week. It is a week set aside for reflection and learning, focused on the strange discipline known as service design. This year our team is dividing into “pods”, each focusing on some area of interest or importance to service design.

My pod’s subject is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Service Design.

According to Wikipedia, “KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”

It is indisputable that KPIs are terribly important in business, and this is why we are learning about them, not because any of us are compelled by this subject. We confessed to one another that, for a variety reasons, we were suffering a lack of intrinsic interest. For us KPIs have been a necessary evil — a combination of 1) boring, 2) abstract and 3) morally suspect.

After sharing our reservations about KPIs, it occurred to us that maybe challenging these reservations directly might breathe some inspiration into our session.

We asked:

  1. Are KPIs essentially boring, abstract and suspect — or do they just seem this way to us because of how we’ve approached them?
  2. Might there be a way to approach them that makes them interesting, tangibly real and a valuable part of our service design practice?

In other words, is there a philosophical opportunity to reconceive KPIs in a way that helps service designers organically integrate KPIs into our praxis?

(Honestly, this reunderstanding of uninteresting and trivial matters as fascinating and worthy problems is a core skill for designers — or at least designers like me. If we choose to rely on work ethic and willpower to slog through work we find boring , we will inevitably produce uninspired, uninspiring designs that are good for little more than setting the stage for implementation. We will become what engineers think we are: a preliminary planning step on the way toward the real work of building. If we endure the boredom, we can certainly bullshit ourselves and others and playact enthusiasm, but our “positivity” performances will be even more boring and unconvincing than our work. We’ll contribute to transforming the world into meaningless, joyless bullshit. As someone with a feeble work ethic and poor acting skills, I’ve never had any choice but to resort to philosophy in order to find genuine interest in problems that initially strike me as irredeemably dull and pointless. I suppose I shouldn’t say things like this out loud, but imprudent candidness is a key spice in my flavorful practice.) …

…So moving toward framing this problem as a design brief, some questions emerge, pertaining to the three repellent characteristics of KPIs.

  1. Can we change our understanding of KPIs interesting in a way that reveals KPIs as an interesting aspect of design work — an aspect we are intrinsically motivated to use?
  2. Can we ground our understanding of KPIs in realities we intuit directly and concretely, and make an abstract “experience-distant” knowing more “experience-near“?
  3. If we are able to intuitively understand KPIs and able to incorporate them into our practices, what possibilities of influence does this open to us? Might KPIs empower us to find more profound and demonstrable win-wins benefitting both an organization’s bottom line and the wider world?

But should they (and measurements in general) be as all-important as they currently are? And how reliable are they? Do KPIs produce unintended consequences, both in outcome and in the experience of work?

Ethos, ethic, game and rule

Ethics

Borrowing from Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, I want to experiment with a rhetorical approach of speaking of ethics in terms of games and rules.

Every ethic belongs to an ethos and serves that ethos.

Apart from the ethos it serves, though, an ethic is meaningless.

Following an ethical rule outside the context of its ethos is absurd, just as following the rules of a game outside of game-play is absurd.

Imagine, for instance, a tennis player so fanatically dedicated to the game of tennis that, even off-court, they continue following the rules of tennis, and expect others to follow the rules of tennis at all times, too.

Or imagine the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, and suddenly, without warning, the Steelers begin brawling. They are joined by their fans, who swarm out of the stands onto the field and overwhelm the Cowboys with numbers. Would the valiant Cowboys continue playing by the rules of football, avoiding holding and unnecessary roughness penalties, while the Pittsburgh hooligans subject them to atomic super-wedgies and hang them from the goalposts by their blown-out waistbands?

Now imagine, following their 821-0 victory over the Cowboys, the Steelers hooligans move up the street to the basketball arena and storm the court where the Dallas Mavericks are playing. The Steelers and their hooligans crowd onto the court and score touchdown after touchdown against the confused and defenseless Mavericks. The Mavericks take the high road and stick to the rules of basketball, but they score neither baskets nor touchdowns. They score only moral points, and these do not count toward victory. Eventually, using their new formula for victory, the Steelers become the champions not only of the NFL, but also the NBA, the WNBA, the MLB, NHL and every Olympic event.

When the game changes, the rules change with it.

The problem is, a great many of us mistake our own ethos for reality itself. And we mistake the rules of our own ethos, our ethic, for absolute universally-binding laws of human conduct, which all decent people must follow. We continue following the rules of the game off-court, and expect others to do as well, even if they’ve never agreed to participate in our ethos — or even reject our ethos.

In the future, when someone invokes an ethical principle, my first question will be: To what game does this rule belong? Am I obligated to play this game? Did I explicitly or implicitly consent to it?

If I am obligated, I will ask for clarification on the rules that bind both parties, and on who referees these rules?

If I am not obligated, I will recognize that I am in a far more interesting game: the game of determining the game, the rules of the game, and the referee of the rules.

Technicracy (sic)

Philosophy

It never occurred to me before today to understand a technocracy as rule by (or under) technic (or technik or technicity, depending on translation) as conceived by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology.

I prefer the term technicity. Technicity is the enworldment within which all things are understood, first and foremost, as means to ends. “What is it for?” is the compulsive next question, following “What is it?” It is the root of the industrial faith, and the true source of our misery under capitalism, and even more under various anti-capitalisms.

Trapped within the hollow, arid, robotically hostile strain we call corporate life, the technicity-bound rebel can dream nothing better than socialism. But socialism is a dream of technicity itself, guaranteeing the same miseries of capitalism, but in even purer form, without the vestigial consolations of pre-industrial life that have been smuggled into capitalism through liberal protections of the private sphere.

To sloganize:

  • The enemy is neither capitalism nor socialism, but their common faith, technicity.
  • Fundamentalism is what happens when the objects of religion are uprooted from their proper soil and planted in the sand of technicity.
  • Those trapped in technicity can only perceive, conceive, intuit and imagine inside the narrow limits of technicity. When the technicity-possessed say religion, they can mean only fundamentalism. When they dream escape from their misery, they dream leaps out of technicic pans into technicic fires.
  • It is trivially easy to swap out belief content within the same technic faith. Fundamentalist Christians can dump out their religious beliefs and replace them with Progressivist ones without much deep adjustment or change in life experience. But religious conversion is not essentially about beliefs. It is about the substratum that makes beliefs intelligible and persuasive (or sheer nonsense), the substratum of faith. You cannot stay in technicity and understand religious existence.
  • “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.” — Wittgenstein

The book we need

Philosophy

Fuck yes. Technic and Magic is exactly the book this time needs:

This book is not a political manifesto, or a general call to arms. More modestly, it is a reminder that reality-­systems are contingent conglomerates of metaphysical axioms, and that their modiication is always possible. Indeed, we are always able to modify our own reality­-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck. This volume is intended for those who lie defeated by history and the present, in the most general and most tragic sense. Regardless of the historical circumstances in which we ind ourselves to live, and even if we are completely hopeless about our power to modify the balance of forces on a macroscopic scale, we are always capable of modifying our own reality-­settings  – thus giving to ourselves a different reality, a different world and a different existential experience within it. Is it pure illusion? Not any more, or any less, than any other reality or any other world that is hegemonic enough to impose its own social institutions over a speciic historical period.

It was the book I wanted to write.

I’m disappointed and thrilled.

Ideologies of hate

Politics

Ideologies of hate often present themselves as ideologies of justice. The justice is invariably justice for some group or set of groups.

But the ideology’s concern for these groups can seem inconsistent and illogical.

The groups may suffer all kinds of tragic events. But only some of the events are noticed and inspire energetic response. The groups may suffer a variety of chronic problems. But which problems become issues of concern seems to have nothing to do with severity. It is almost arbitrary. Serious problems are ignored, while relatively trivial problems provoke extreme outrage. Even attitudes toward public figures seems inconsistent. A politician or celebrity who is adored one day is despised or loathed the next. Or the reverse.

To find the consistency, ignore the positive rhetoric  — the care for the harmed or love of the admired. Instead, focus on the villains of the stories. The villains are the real protagonists, not the victims and heroes. Hate, not love or compassion, drives the plot.

Ideologies of hate look for opportunities to make their hate look like virtuousness. Where the opportunity to hate is lacking, interest dissipates, and virtues do not appear.

If you’re seeing this pattern in your own political tribe, it can be helpful to remember that most movements are made up of a variety of ideologies, some driven by positive goals, and some driven by pure hate. Hate can be very powerful, and it is tempting to harness that power.

Susan said “this makes so much sense of Progressivism. It is for women, but only when it can be against men. It is for POCs, but only when it can be against white people. It is for Palestinians, but only when it can be against Israelis. It is for Kamala, but only when it can be against Trump.”

That’s the formula: A hate ideology is for X only when it can be against Y.

Campagna

Biography, Enworldment, Metaphysics

I think I’ve found my next book, Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.

My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is supericially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-­system of our age. A reality-­system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world – if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world­making activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’.

His reason for writing this book is addressing today’s nihilism epidemic.

…the unfolding events and the apparent impossibility to put a stop both to the disintegration of those institutions that had prevented the return of recent atrocities and to the blatantly suicidal path of environmental wreckage, started to instil a doubt in me. Somehow, it appeared as if the range of the possible had dramatically been shrunk, and that our ability to act differently, or even to imagine otherwise than in a way already inscribed in the present, had been curbed once and for all. Like many others of my generation and of our time, I myself experience this paralysis. Whether by taking the form of political impotence or of individual psychopathology, the oppressive weather of our age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present had little in store for anybody interested in fostering what used to be called ’emancipation’, perhaps the future still hosted the possibility of a change as-yet to come. As anybody with children, I too didn’t want to let go of a however implausible hope for a future, planetary turn in a different direction. And indeed, I too didn’t want to renounce the dubious belief that even an individual can always contribute, however marginally, to social transformations on a large scale. Yet, such stubborn hopes didn’t silence my doubts. For one, I wondered, what am I to do with myself, while we journey through these gloomy, penultimate times? And secondly, is it really true that a sociopolitical revolution would be sufficient to change the course of the events? Or is it perhaps the case that something else, at a different level, would have to change?

This double questioning — a pressing anxiety for my own well-being, and a more theoretical curiosity over the general mechanisms of change — led me to consider the problem through another angle.

And now here’s the good part:

Might it not be the case that change seems impossible, because technically it is impossible? And might it not be the case that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality-settings? At their core, both questions pointed towards an element within our reality that stood as the ground of the specific cultural/ social/political/economic settings of our age. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we implicitly define what is possible and what is impossible within our world. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we decide what is our world. In traditional philosophical parlance, that is the level of metaphysics: the place where it is discussed what it means to exist, what kind of things legitimately exist, how they exist, in what relation they stand to each other and to their attributes and so on. By deciding on metaphysics, that is by deciding on the most fundamental composition of our world, it is implicitly decided what kind of things can or cannot take place in that world. In less specialist parlance, we could say that it is at that level, that ‘reality’ itself is defined. As the parameters of existence, particularly of legitimate existence, in the world change, so the composition of our world changes — and consequently, the range of the possible takes one or another shape, and with it the field of the ‘good’, that is ethics, and politics, etc.

As with most books I’m drawn to these days, the joy is mixed with terror of being scooped. His diagnosis is identical to mine.

The ingrained hopelessness of so many contemporary intellectuals is not in the contents of what they believe, which was summarized charmingly by Woody Allen in Annie Hall:

There’s an old joke.

Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

The litany of complaints changes generationally, and what will bring an end to the misery changes with it.

It is forever “life sucks [for x reasons] and then life as we know it will end prematurely [from y catastrophe], and this time it is different and worse than ever before [due to z criteria].” The sense that this time it is different is an element of what makes this time perpetually like all other times.

I, like Campagna, agree with Heidegger that this recurring, shifty nihilism is a metaphysical malady that goes by the name technic, technik, technicity.

I, like Campagna, see our relationship with language as central to our problem.

Only a range of the existent can be conveyed through linguistic means, much like only a range of the colour spectrum can be perceived by the human eye. No matter what the evolution of our technological prosthetics will be, there will always be shades and things that will remain immune from language and from colour detection. Yet, this last statement is, in itself, a metaphysical axiom: it is a criterion which I suggest to place at the foundation of our understanding of what exists. Also the opposite criterion, that of the limitless ability of language and of its technology to grasp the truth of the existence, is an equally legitimate axiom.

Wow. And shit.

Back to this terror of being scooped.

I must get real about the metaphysical emergency we face. I need to care more about the success of the rescue mission than whether my role in the mission is ever acknowledged. I’m corrupted by the need for recognized originality.

Once again, like dozens of times before, I’m pretty sure I’ve been scooped.

Or.

Or maybe I am a truth-seeker who got so accustomed to swimming in boundless waters that I stopped hoping for land. Forty days and forty nights, forty years of swimming through watery wilderness toward something promised but ever unfulfilled, I gave up on landfall, or even a ship. I dreamed of some ideal ark we could build together, some firmness beneath our feet.

Could it be that I can’t even recognize the feeling of terra firma when I’m finally standing on it? That I imagine others built the boat I dreamt of building, when really, we have all just wandered ashore on the beaches of the same promised land?

If that land turns out to be the Pavilion at Brighton I am going to be pissed.

Disalienation gathering

NOTA

A few things I love to do that make me feel connected with the world beyond my skullspace.

I’ve also gotten this from cycling, especially mountain biking.

Alienation is a loss of intuitive contact and participation in some aspect of reality. Total alienation is rare, but partial alienation is nearly universal. Wherever alienation occurs, things begin to feel unreal and we, ourselves, feel less real. It requires effort to overcome alienation, especially in conditions of mass societal alienation.

I am designing a half-day disalienation event. I would want a mix of generations and worldviews in the room.

A rough agenda.

  • 20 minute meditation or prayer session to quiet ourselves down and prime ourselves to pay attention.
  • 30-45 minutes of gongfu tea. We will focus on noticing the sights, sounds, smell and taste of the tea, speaking only to point out subtler features of the experience so others can notice them with us.
  • 90 minutes of salon, on some experience-resonant topic. “Acquired tastes” might be a good one.
  • 60 minutes of blind contour drawing. We’ll refrain from commenting on or even looking at one another’s drawings. The purpose of the activity is the activity itself, not the output.
  • 90 minutes of salon, over some simple lunch, on some topic connected with awareness shifts. “Noticing” or “absorption” or “craft” are possibilities.
  • 30 minutes of scotch tasting. We’ll each slow sip one dram of scotch. We will share what we smell, taste and see, and try to notice what others are noticing.

That would be an amazing day.

I might want to experiment with doing gatherings in multiple cities. A friend in Chicago expressed interest in hosting one. We were thinking we could do in-person gatherings on Saturday, then have a Zoom call the next day for participants in different cities to connect and reflect.

My fantasy debate questions

Politics

The question I really want to see asked at the next debate:

“Each of you represents a party with extremist elements. How would you each address the extremists of your own party (as you understand extremism)?”

And as a follow up:

“What do you each believe the other should have said but did not?”

And as a follow up to that:

“Based on what you just heard from your opponent, what additional things would you want to say to your own party’s extremists?”

 

Sapient IA Bible

Design

For many of us, Sapient’s “Information Architecture: Practice Definition and Process Framework” (universally known simply as “the IA Bible”) was the first time we had ever seen an exhaustive documentation of UX design methodology (except nobody was calling it “UX” quite yet). It was released in March 2000, and copies of it were coveted. I still have my copy.

Up until it came out I was swimming in techniques, and did not understand how any of it came together. I think the IA Directors understood it better, but according to this document, it was only after they gathered and combined their knowledge that anyone felt they had anything like a complete picture. I think this is a historic document, and I collect design books. If you know of a book that laid out the human-centered design process like this earlier than March 2000, please let me know.

Battling design triads

Design

Designers love diagrams. We tend to be visual thinkers. Where verbal thinkers feel they understand things when they find the right words to express a thought, designers feel they understand when they find the right shape. And so it is not surprising that designers understand their own work in diagrams.

If you ask a designer what they do, there’s a strong chance they’ll draw a Venn diagram. There is an equally strong chance one of the three overlapping circles will be labeled “Desirable”.

Perhaps the most popular one is the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad. My first exposure to it was the late 90s, but expressed in different language. A User Experience Architect used it to explain to me that our role was responsible for finding the overlap between 1) “User” (what users want and need), 2) “Technology” (what is technologically possible), 3) “Business” (what serves business goals), and 3) . At least according to one source, it was IDEO who developed and popularized the now ubiquitous Desirability-Viability-Feasibility model. What is Desirable, Viable and Feasible satisfies the needs of people, is good for the business, and can be developed and delivered easily enough that it is worthwhile to do.

Another version, which I believe predates the other by almost a decade is the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad. When designers focus on the benefits they provide to people — and this is our primary focus — we often speak of these benefits in terms of good experience. This triad clarifies what is meant by “good experience”.

A good experience has three qualities: It is 1) “Usefulness” (the design satisfies functional needs), 2) “Usability” (the design minimizes functional obstacles), and 3) “Desirability” (the design is valuable beyond its function).

Years ago, I became curious where this triad originated. It turns out it was conceived in 1992 by Liz Sanders, who is now known primarily for her work in participatory design. To the degree a design affords usefulness, usability and desirability, it will be valued by people and adopted.

So which of these two Venn diagrams is preferable? They seem to do similar things with a similar shape and with one overlapping word. Do we just choose the one we like better? Do we just choose the one that we think will resonate more with our audience?

I propose that these two triads complement each other. This becomes easier to see if we avoid using the word “Desirability” in two different ways. In the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad, Desirability is about people’s response to what is being designed. It asks if the design will actually be adopted. Let’s call it “Adoptability”.

And adoptability is the goal of good experience. Looking at the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad, they define what is adoptable. So the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad fits inside the Adoptability region of our new Adoptability-Viability-Feasibility triad.

Not one to stop while I’m ahead, I’ve decided to add yet more elements. I’ve been warned by trusted colleagues that I’m pushing it too far. I’m going to try anyway.

Years ago I heard someone, and I suspect it was Jared Spool, talk about design having two modes. 1) “Design the right thing.” 2) “Design the thing right.”

I see the first triad Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability as representing “Design the right thing.”

I see the second triad Usefulness-Usability-Desirability as representing “Design the thing right.”

So far so good?

Ok. But here’s where I got in trouble with my colleagues. While I was digging around the internet to confirm that Jared Spool was in fact the inventor of “Design the right thing.” / “Design the thing right.” I came upon an article that mapped these two statements to the famous Double Diamond of design thinking. And I got all excited about mapping the two triads to the diamonds to produce a  Grand Unified “What Designers Do” Diagram.

I received two objections. The first objection points out that we are not only thinking about adoptability-feasibility-viability while defining our problem. We also think about usefulness, usability and desirability. And once we think about designing a thing right in the second diamond, we don’t stop worrying about feasibility and viability.

Honestly, none of this bothers me. In design, when we describe what we do, we exaggerate and sharpen definitions and separate things that are blurrier and messier and more intermingled in real practice. We’re just trying to help people conceptualize, and this makes it easier. It is roughly true. Good enough.

The second objection, however, might be fatal. But if it fails, it seems to be an interesting failure, so I’ll expose the idea with the objections and see what happens. If I can’t rescue it, maybe somebody else can.

The objection is this: While it is true that the first diamond is where we determine what the right thing is to design — and while it is also true that the right thing to design is adoptable, feasible,  and viable — it is not necessarily true that the first diamond helps us determine what the right thing to design is by defining what is adoptable, feasible,  and viable. Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability is more commonly used as a framework for evaluating concepts, and that is something that belongs in the second diamond.

But then, I’m thinking… Maybe designers should be thinking more about how we can bring feasibility and viability into that first diamond.

Perhaps we are overemphasizing Adoptability when framing our opportunities and design problems.

I don’t know the answer. But I do know from years of design practice that sometimes clearly framing a question is the key to better answers. So I’ll leave it open.

Thoughts?

 

“Swiftvoting”

Philosophy, Politics

When news came down that DNC convention would be held in Chicago (based on my book purchases, it must have been in mid-January 2024, when I started reading Playing With Fire, followed by The Controversialist and King: A Life) I had a sudden epiphany that we are reliving 1968.

The October 7 Pogrom had happened three months before, followed by orgies of pro-Palestine / anti-Israel / anti-West demonstration, which invited comparison with pro-Viet Cong / anti-American activism of radical youth. I’d been thinking about Nixon’s seething “silent majority” and wondering how big today’s silent majority is. It is hard to know in times when dissent against the dominant ideology is discouraged, or even punished. I was also thinking also about how the Paris riots of May 68 disgusted a generation of ex-Trotskyite Jewish neoconservatives into existence, and how the pro-Hamas left is likely inspiring a neoneocon movement.

Then I heard that through some cosmic perversity, the DNC Convention would be held in Chicago and it all crystalized, and I hit the books and immersed myself in the era. Around that time (February 12) I posted to Facebook:

We are re-living 1968. Just keep watching.

To which I got comments like, “more like 1932”. Because Godwin’s Law.

And then I commented:

I just poked around to see if this idea is trending right now. It seems that is sort of isn’t — or isn’t much more than it always does every single election year.

Because at that point I hadn’t seen anyone make the comparison, or develop it.

Then I elaborated:

Keep an eye on the Chicago DNC convention, infantile activists, the silent majority, creepy right-wingers, deranged left-radicals, Democrat candidates bowing out, the spawning of a new generation of disillusioned ex-lefties disgusted by fellow travelers / useful idiots who support obvious psychopaths who reinforce their fanatical ideological commitments… Hopefully no political assassinations or bombings on US soil!

I’m not claiming to have prophetic foresight here.

I am claiming that I have something much, much better. I have 1) a modest knowledge of history and 2) even better, an energetically-cultivated independence of thought.

I read histories from political moments before this particular funhouse era. Do you really not understand that any history of totalitarianism is just as much about its own time as it is about the 1930s? For this reason, you’ve got to read histories written in a variety of times. You’ve got to read what totalitarians said about themselves. If you read contemporary ideologues like Timothy Snyder, Jill Lepore, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the like, you aren’t reading history — you are reading partisan editorial. This should be obvious to any critical thinker, but it is far from obvious to readers of NYT history bestsellers who read these books and are just shocked by their relevance to what is happening today!

And I read philosophy, so I can understand events from a plurality of logics. This enables me to try them on in turn, compare what each reveals, and find one that provides intuitive, cognitive and moral clarity on whatever I’m concerned or perplexed about. This hard work enables me to think things outside the narrow circular rut of Progressivist thought, and to see stark truths of which rank-and-file Progressivists are utterly oblivious.

If you are not reading philosophy, I promise you that you are running a philosophy you passively adopted through casual socialization. I have yet to meet an “original thinker” who thinks even slightly originally. Progressivists are ideologically automated to rethink the independent truths of the likeminded, and automatically dismiss thoughts from outside their logic as propaganda delusions.

But I am burying the living shit out of my lede under an avalanche of flex.

What I really want to do is make a new observation, and to mint a brand-new coinage. This morning I was expressing my belief that Kamala Harris can win this election. Here is what I said:

We live in a Taylor Swift Age where a stuffed sequined leotard can become an object of extreme adoration for no reason at all but a psycho-social need to adore.

I believe the autonomous mass-mind known as Progressivism can pull a “swiftvoting” propaganda operation to make Harris into a shining idol of hope for a Trumpless future.

I believe Harris can win.

Swiftvoting. That’s pretty good. An astroturf campaign to implement an engineered vibe-shift. Swiftboating for femme Gen-Zers and olds trying to mimic them.

And I bet you think you know why I think she’s a phony, terrible candidate. According to your omniscience, I can’t abide a woman candidate of color. If you had any capacity for self-reflection, which you do not, you’d see that the swelling backlash against progressivism has everything to do with this reflexive compulsion to condescend and progsplain people’s own motivations to themselves. You think you know better than I do what motivates my thinking? You? You’re an ideological automaton whose programming diverts self-reflection to harmless subroutines that simulate self-awareness.