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Okay, so I just found these and I couldn’t wait till Monday. So sue me 
. These (serious) quotes are from the comments section of this (otherwise non-serious) post on 3QD:
“Philosophy cannot bake bread–but it can bring us God, freedom, and immortality.”
“Philosophy is actually homesickness–the urge to be everywhere at home.”
“The philosopher lives on problems as the human being does on food. An insoluble problem is an indigestible food.”
-Novalis
“Being deep and appearing deep – Whoever knows he is deep strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going in to the water.”
- Nietzsche
The second one is something I feel strongly about. I’ve frequently been seen as stupid by groups of pretentious ‘intellectuals’, as I work on removing obscurity from my speech and writing, and not on maximizing it. To cultural elitists and pretentious people in general, obscurity is proportionate to profundity, or perhaps even identical to it; and of course vocabulary the measure of all knowledge. This might be part of a general tendency among ‘normal people’ (a group I have never identified with, and probably never will… this is an advanced warning in case you see me homeless some day because I was too abnormal to get a job. What, it could happen.) to value style too much, which itself might be part of a general tendency to fix one’s vision on the temporal rather than the eternal.
Since I’m criticizing cultural elitism, I should mention that besides its fundamental anti-intellectualism, it is also exclusionary and destructive of people’s self-esteem. It creates this grotesque competitive space where existential insecurity is fed, if not created. The atmosphere in such settings is so contrived, it’s nauseating.
- If something is evil (X) only because it had a role to play in the creation of something else that is evil (Y), then it cannot be more evil than the second thing. Though this is not logically necessary, it is commonsensical and intuitive. The only way X can be more or even equally evil as Y is if one makes the assumption that Y cannot be held equally accountable as X. I do believe that this assumption has been made by Pakistani talking heads who detract from the issue at hand (defeating the Taliban) by blaming the army instead of the truly evil people.
- Moral responsibility falls on everyone equally. When a person is coerced — for example, when a gun is put to her head — she cannot be held responsible at that time. But anything short of coercion, and you can hold her responsible. Now, notwithstanding the various problems with the idea of free will (only one problem, really, and that is how to reconcile causation with free will), people still have choice and should still be held responsible for their actions. Choice can exist without free will, and there are good practical reasons for holding people responsible in proportion to how much agency or freedom-to-choose they have. As such, given that neither the Taliban nor the army are being coerced, they both ought to be held responsible for their actions equally. And the Taliban are more culpable than the army for the crimes they themselves have committed, regardless of what role the army had to play in their creation.
- The army can be reformed, and let’s not forget there are people within the army who are secular-minded. The army should be kept under tighter control, certainly, if we are to live in a democracy. But at least the army can be kept under civilian control, in principle. The Taliban is not a state institution amenable to reform, with a mixture of good and bad elements. It is a criminal group not amenable to reform, with only bad elements.
- The army has a large number of good and decent individuals. I have relatives in the army who are fine, upstanding human beings. Some members of the army are corrupt, but that only makes the army partially evil, not wholly. The Taliban, on the other hand, is wholly evil.
- Pakistanis need to unite against the Taliban.
- We need to utilize proper propaganda. The Americans, Germans and Soviets have/had excellent propaganda machines. I don’t see why Pakistan can’t start using some cartoons, pamphlets, films etc. to generate anti-Taliban sentiment. The fact that we haven’t done that yet shows how unclever we are.
- For an idea of how to (psychologically) approach a just or holy war, I would recommend reading the Bhagavad Gita.
- To raise your spirits, I would recommend listening to this. Our soldiers should be made to listen to this before going to the field .
Note: I edited out one of the points I put in here regarding the creation of internment camps for the Taliban. I’ll have to think about it more clearly before I take a position.
This is part of a series of posts I’ll be doing on the possibility of a Leftism that is free of ressentiment, envy, wrath, spite, hatred (yes, even of the oppressor), animistic collectivism and nihilism.
Good:
1. Creating jobs for people for their sake, perhaps in part through the Government.
2. Investing in infrastructure, definitely through the Government.
3. Being willing to help someone who has gone astray, or to redirect them to someone else who can help them where possible. This with the patient, persistent and gentle care seen in A Walk to Beautiful.
4. Inclusiveness, as the actual solution to elitism.
Bad:
1. Handing people cash indefinitely or unconditionally, thus encouraging laziness and dependence.
2. Expecting that infrastructure will just build/maintain/clean itself through private investment, which it will not. In fact you’d have to pretty deluded to think it will. Third world countries rely on private infrastructure development, and this means that there are great roads and bridges in front of giant mansions, but no roads and bridges where the poor people are (only garbage and toilet water, since there are no sewage or trash collection services either. Such services are normally provided by the state, but with a minimalist state you have to take care of such matters yourself, which of course you can’t. Yes, not even you, invincible White male who descended from the heavens).
Even the U.S., an extremely wealthy society in terms of GDP, has extremely poor places where there is terrible infrastructure, comparable to third world countries (certain parts of Brooklyn and the deep South, for example). Canada, by comparison, does not have so many extremely poor places, even in far out rural and forested areas, and this despite being a poorer country overall. This is in part because of equilization payments.
3. Patronizing people and forcing them to take treatments that are degrading or against their will. Institutionalizing them against their will, or treating them like a problem that needs to be fixed. The mental hospital and its treatment of the mentally ill is the most barbaric and disgusting stain on Western civilization.
There is a certain vicious intolerance that runs through the West, that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s this tendency to see certain people as not being human, a cutting off of one’s empathy with them. To deal with this mass psychopathy, I think an extremely reactionary ‘anarchist’ Left has come into being, one that is itself pathological and walks around carrying the burden of its spite, guilt and ressentiment. I can’t decide who is worse, the reactionary who reverts to paganism (I consider this ‘anarchist’ Left to be essentially pagan) and starts idolatizing The Community™ out of desperate self-medication and as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, or the psychopathic White male doctor who straps you to a bed because you’re too crazy and worthless to be considered human anymore. I honestly can’t decide .
This same vicious strain is visible in the way families interact over here. White families tend to be alienated, i.e. the members alienated from each other. I see young people moving out at aged 20 (too young an age to move out, IMO), and parents not being willing to take care of their own children beyond the minimum necessary. I suspect this is not the case with Jewish and Black families, and I know it isn’t with South Asian families. This isn’t merely a lack of family values, however, as it appears to be something deeper and more essential to the West, with the family indifference being perhaps a symptom of some other underlying problem.
Maybe this comes with class privilege. Something similar exists in Pakistan as well, among the upper and middle classes (even in me when I was not ‘democratized’), a similar tendency to dehumanization. The West has overall class privilege because it is the upper class of the Earth, and then the upper class of the West has even more privilege added to that original baseline. Add being White and male to that and you can imagine how twisted your psyche must become.
4. Nihilism, as the perceived solution to elitism. It’s one thing to believe in social equality, but another thing to believe in value equality. Value equality is a contradiction in terms, as when you have values you automatically see some things as better than others. Some things are better than others. Kindness is better than indifference, humility better than pride. Happiness is better than suffering, and making yourself happy is good even when others are suffering (if you call that selfish, then it is the grandest and most virtuous selfishness I can think of). Celibacy is better than sexual activity, monogamy better than promiscuity, drug-abstinence better than intoxication, vegetarianism better than omnivority, and faith better than atheism. Etc.
These values should be upheld without the exclusionariness of Country Clubs and other elitist hellholes. This is not cultural elitism, nor is it Pharisee-ism. It is Christianity at its truest: simultaneous inclusiveness of people and intolerance of bad things. I guess you have to see it in action to really appreciate it.
(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)
‘And how do things stand in this case?– These negating and aloof ones of today, these who are unconditional on one point — the claim to intellectual cleanliness — these hard, strict, abstinent, heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics, ephectics, hectics of the spirit (all of them are the latter in some sense or other), these last idealists of knowledge in whom alone the intellectual conscience of today dwells and has become flesh — in fact they believe themselves to be as detached as possible from the ascetic ideal, these “free, very free spirits”: and yet, to divulge to them what they themselves cannot see — for they stand too close to themselves — this ideal is precisely their ideal as well, they themselves represent it today, and perhaps they alone…’
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‘… that wanting to halt before the factual, the factum brutum… that renunciation of all interpretation…’
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‘There is, strictly speaking, absolutely no science “without presuppositions,” the thought of such a science is unthinkable, paralogical: a philosophy, a “belief” must always be there first so that science can derive a direction from it, a meaning, a boundary, a method, a right to existence. (Whoever understands it the other way around — for example, whoever sets out to place philosophy “on a strictly scientific foundation” — first needs to turn not only philosophy but also truth itself on its head: the grossest violation of propriety there can be with regard to two such venerable ladies!)’
– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Written by Mike Palecek
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
With thanks: International Marxist Website
Cross Posted at : Sherryx’s Weblog
We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and scientific advancement. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no exception.
We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and scientific advancement. We are told that competition, combined with the profit motive, pushes science to new frontiers and gives big corporations incentive to invent new medicines, drugs, and treatments. The free market, we are told, is the greatest motivator for human advance. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Patents, profits, and private ownership of the means of production are actually the greatest fetters science has known in recent history. Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no exception.
Main slab of the Darwinius masillae holotype fossil. Photo by Jens L. Franzen, Philip D. Gingerich, Jörg Habersetzer1, Jørn H. Hurum, Wighart von Koenigswald, B. Holly Smith.The most recent and blatant example of private ownership serving as a barrier to advancement can be found in the Ida fossil. Darwinius masillae is a 47 million year old lemur that was recently “discovered”. Anyone and everyone interested in evolution cheered at the unveiling of a transitional species, linking upper primates and lower mammals. Ida has forward-facing eyes, short limbs, and even opposable thumbs. What is even more remarkable is the stunning condition she was preserved in. This fossil is 95% complete. The outline of her fur is clearly visible and scientists have even been able to examine the contents of her stomach, determining that her last meal consisted of fruits, seeds, and leaves. Enthusiasts are flocking to New York’s Museum of Natural History to get a glimpse of the landmark fossil.
So what does Ida have to do with capitalism? Well, she was actually unearthed in 1983 and has been held by a private collector ever since. The collector didn’t realize the significance of the fossil (not surprising since he is not a paleontologist) and so it just collected dust for 25 years.
There is a large international market for fossils. Capitalism has reduced these treasures, which rightly belong to all of humanity, to mere commodities. Privately held fossils are regularly leased to museums so that they may be studied or displayed. Private fossil collections tour the world, where they can make money for their owners, instead of undergoing serious study. And countless rare specimens sit in the warehouses of investment companies, or the living rooms of collectors serving as nothing more than a conversation piece. It is impossible to know how many important fossils are sitting, waiting to be discovered in some millionaire’s office.
Medical Research
The pharmaceutical industry is well known for price gouging and refusing to distribute medicines to those who can’t afford it. The lack of drugs to combat the AIDS pandemic, particularly in Africa, is enough to prove capitalism’s inability to distribute medicine to those in need. But what role does the profit motive play in developing new drugs? The big pharmaceuticals have an equally damning record in the research and development side of their industry.
AIDS patients can pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for the medication they need to keep them alive. In 2003, when a new drug called Fuzeon was introduced, there was an outcry over the cost, which would hit patients with a bill of over $20,000 per year. Roche’s chairman and chief executive, Franz Humer tried to justify the price tag, “We need to make a decent rate of return on our innovations. This is a major breakthrough therapy… I can’t imagine a society that doesn’t want that innovation to continue.”
But the innovation that Mr. Humer speaks of is only half-hearted. Drug companies are not motivated by compassion; they are motivated by cash. To a drug company, a person with AIDS is not a patient, but a customer. The pharmaceutical industry has a financial incentive to make sure that these people are repeat-customers, consequently there is very little research being done to find a cure. Most research done by the private sector is centered on finding new anti-retroviral drugs – drugs that patients will have to continue taking for a lifetime.
There has been a push to fund research for an AIDS vaccine and, more recently, an effective microbicide. However, the vast majority of this funding comes from government and non-profit groups. The pharmaceutical industry simply isn’t funding the research to tackle this pandemic. And why would they? No company on earth would fund research that is specifically designed to put them out of business.
“Has creation a final goal? And if so, why was it not reached at once? Why was the consummation not realized from the beginning? To these questions there is but one answer: Because God is Life, and not merely Being.”
– F.W.J. Schelling
There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness.
And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap–bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.
To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little sprites flit about—that moveth Zarathustra to tears and songs.
I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.
And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall.
Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
The term ‘Judeo-Christian morality’ is incredibly useful in my writing, but I’m made uncomfortable by it. This is because there is a lot of good in Judaism and Christianity, and I do not want to malign that kind of morality by reducing it to its most anti-human and hateful elements. However, I must use it, for lack of a better word. Having said this, I move on…
Judeo-Christian morality refers to two things, generally: one is ressentiment, and the internalization of it (i.e. of the ressentiment of others). Ressentiment is hatred of another due to their greater happiness, greater wealth, greater beauty and so on, if you cannot share in it, and especially if you see it as the source of your own misery. It is hatred of good things because they cannot be enjoyed by you, and of good (i.e. healthy, happy etc.) people because they ‘made you suffer’. The internalization of this is guilt for having those good things, ‘rich guilt’ as it is sometimes called; a pathology in the minds of many among the Pakistani bourgeoisie. Ressentiment and guilt (the internalized ressentiment of others) manifest in such behaviour as beating oneself, for example in religious rituals, and hating the rich, intelligent or talented.
The other element of Judeo-Christian morality is the perception of human beings as sinful and in need of redemption. This is a Christian sentiment, no doubt, and I say this as somebody with a very favourable view of Christianity. The idea is that we deserve to be punished for some innate tendency of ours – greed, consumption, sexuality, sinfulness -, and harmful events in the natural world are often interpreted as such punishment.
It should be clear already, to the astute reader, how the environmentalist movement exhibits these characteristics. There is a lot of guilt, and attempt to induce guilt in others, for our impact on the environment. At its most extreme is the idea that human life itself is parasitic, destructive, sinful. Good things – houses, electricity, mechanized farms – are really evil things, and we all ought to spin khadar for the rest of our lives like idiots or machines, living in villages and dying at 45.
I have seen an environmentalist video where human beings were depicted as viruses, and where the animation of the human being was as a black rectangular figure with sharp teeth, making inarticulate gutteral noises and ready to consume whatever came in his path. Anybody who sees humanity in this way is sad and unspiritual, hateful and pathological. There are less extreme anti-human statements made on a regular basis by population-control people (those who advocate for a reduction in the human population) and environmentalists, such as the following:
“We so had this coming, us stupid humans. There is some satisfaction in knowing we won’t get away with it, that we will be punished for our obstinate obtuseness and will suffer for our refusal to rein in our incredibly wasteful and polluting lifestyles. Serves us right.”
This is classic Judeo-Christian morality, with the words God, Original Sin and Satan just barely absent*.
Human beings are miraculous, as is life itself. Humanity is good, technology is good, and progress is good. Our impact on the environment is sometimes due to greed, but it is largely due to the legitimate desire of people to live a high quality of life. Their happiness is not evil, and does not ‘deserve’ to be ‘punished’. Whatever changes we make to reduce our impact on the environment and to positively improve the environment, they need to be done with an understanding of humanity’s special role and importance on Earth, in a gentle and non-violent manner (violence includes the moral violence of Gandhi [guilt-tripping, brow-beating, moralizing, engaging in moral exhibitionism and moral competition], and verbal and emotional violence), and while valuing the quality of human life.
“The human race always progresses most when most it asserts its importance to Nature, its freedom & its universality.”
“O son of Immortality, live not thou according to Nature, but according to God; and compel her also to live according to the deity within thee.” — Sri Aurobindo
* In the first draft I apologized to the Apostate for using her post as an example, but then she banned me for disagreeing with her, because of which I no longer feel the need to be so polite.
(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)
Click here for the video.
Most atheists frame the God-question in terms of the presence or absence of evidence to prove a proposition. This has gotten so tiring for me that I usually just nod along and smile, or say something broad like ‘I’m coming at this from a different point of view’, which is the shortest means of conveying my views on epistemology and how they lead me to ‘believe’ in God. There are a number of other frames within which one can look at the relevant issues, and one of them is to discuss the issue of supervenience.
I thought of this while reading the SE entry on panentheism.
Supervenience
One reality arises out of another reality. For example, mental activity arises out of physical reality. While reductionistic understandings agree that supervenience occurs, reductionistic supervenience maintains that there are consistent principles that function in the same way at both levels. Panentheists generally understand supervenience to give rise to new principles that are effective at one level but not present at the simpler level.
The faith vs. evidence narrative doesn’t really apply to the difference between reductionist supervenience and non-reductionist supervenience. Though atheists implicitly take a position on the issue of supervenience, namely the reductionist one, they still insist that theirs is a position based on evidence and ours on blind faith. But there is no evidence for either position on the supervenience issue: there is simply an intuitive attraction to one position or another based on how well it fits into existing, useful models of reality.
This brings me to my views on epistemology. The story goes something like this:
Intuition is the basis of all knowledge. Knowledge is subjective experience, which is organized into models of varying levels of permanence in the individual mind. With some frames, one can shift from one to another within a matter of seconds, as in the case of perceptual shifts with images such as these:
In the above image, when you’re looking through the ‘face frame’ you see two faces looking at each other. In a sense, it is ‘true’ that there are two faces, but does this mean that one is looking through a ‘face frame’, or is it that it is an ‘objective fact’ that two faces ‘exist’? Both are sets of metaphors (ironically, models themselves) that one can use to describe the experience of seeing those two faces. But I prefer to use the language of frames, models and narratives as it is less presumptuous and does not suffer from the risk of dogmatism.
From an Enlightenment-based perspective, something either is a face or a vase, but not both (I mean an organic face on a living person, so a face-shaped vase isn’t applicable here). In this case it’s a pictorial representation, but my point still stands if one chooses to describe the picture as ‘a picture of a vase surrounded by white’. In that case, not having access to the original picture, a person who hears such a description and believes it, will object that the statement ‘the picture is of two faces with black in between’ is patently false, as it conflicts with the first one. If the person who heard the first description forms a vase school of thought, and the person who heard the second one forms a face school of thought, they will most certainly argue over who is right. This approach to knowledge is based on a kind of ‘ontologizing’ of experience, which makes concrete, final and oppressive what was fluid, flexible and individualistic. This is the true meaning of the story about the blind men and the elephant.
However, I am not a relativist. Some models are certainly more satisfactory than others, and that which is experienced is real. One who holds that he is conscious is correct, whereas one who holds that the he is not conscious is incorrect. One who holds that animals are conscious is correct, but one who holds that they are mere inconscient machines is incorrect. The difference in this case is not a difference in quality of experience, but a difference in the presence or absence of relevant experience, with the advantage going to the one with the experience/with more experience.
Next time, dear atheists, do not ask me if God exists. The discourse of ‘existing’ is unsatisfactory to me, and has been replaced with the discourse of ‘perceiving’.
(Cross-posted to Yes and No)
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