Monk

This is what happened, as Aristotle always used to tell the story, to most of the audience at Plato’s lecture “On the Good.” They all arrived, you see, supposing that they would get out of it some of the things which men have considered good: wealth, for example, or health, or power - in short, some remarkable source of happiness. But when the account proved to be about mathematics, numbers, geometry, astronomy, and - finally - about oneness as the good, it seemed to them, I guess, to be something completely unfathomable. The upshot was that some expressed contempt for the whole business, others severe criticism.

-- Aristoxenus (quoted in J. Miller’s “Examined Lives”)

Plato’s mother [upon receiving some indication of his divinity] took her newborn son “to Mount Hymettus where she wanted to sacrifice him to Apollo god of herds and to the Nymphs. In the meantime she laid him down there, to find, on her return, that he had his mouth full of honey: bees had come and done this, as an omen that the words flowing from his mouth would be, as the poet has it, ‘sweeter than honey.’”

-- James Miller, “Examined Lives”

"The world is all that is the case."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

(Source: Sully's Dish)

For sleep is rather extraordinary. If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way.

-- Raymond Tallis at Philosophy Now Magazine

Our animal natures are indeed dark and mysterious. Just think of sex! Talk about a strange condition. You feel compelled to run your hands all over another person's body and to lick and suck, and your dick becomes larger and completely solid, and you want to ram it into her openings until this charged-up dick discharges its milky load. Or for something less provocative, consider our constant need to stuff our mouths with food, rather like sharks on two legs. Being pregnant and giving birth is also something to wonder at. Getting old and dying is no light matter either. Of course, it could be said that what truly makes us stange is the fact that we should be so intelligent and conscious about all of this.

“I think so badly of philosophy that I don’t like to talk about it. … I do not want to say anything bad about my dear colleagues, but the profession of teacher of philosophy is a ridiculous one. We don’t need a thousand of trained, and badly trained, philosophers — it is very silly. Actually most of them have nothing to say.”

-- Karl Popper

Does he think philosophy should be a strictly amateur affair, done for love and driven by inspiration?

The wondrous things one will come across on the Internet! I had not heard of George Scialabba before, but I came across this interesting interview. Mr. Scialabba is a book critic and apparently a bit of a radical - of the intellectual sort rather than the bomb-throwing type. I thought we'd catch a snippet or two. He is being interviewed by Puya Gerami, and the subject is on the historical move from the generalist to the specialist in public intellectualism, and how it's really just not quite as fun as it used to be. I guess there has to be some loss in going from the literary to social science.


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GS: As the US evolved from a yeoman republic in the mid-nineteenth century to a mass society, as industrial production in particular became the dominant form of economic relations, the new society needed a workforce that was trained up in new skills. So mass education was inaugurated. Now, one of the dangers of mass education, or education of any kind, is that it empowers the educated. It suggests potentially subversive questions about their relation to authority. From the point of view of the owners of society, inquiry of that sort had to be cut off at the knees, or at least, had to be carefully managed. And so new ideologies and techniques of social control, popular management, and the manufacture of consent were developed in the form of the advertising industry, the science of marketing, and public relations as a new aspect of politics and public management.

[Monk: I would take issue with the note of dark conspiracy, and argue that greater knowledge and more mature scientific methods naturally took the most serious and relevant discussions of politics and policy beyond the common and general mind. Hey, math is hard, as is detailed historical analysis.]

One of the tools of the manufacture of consent was expertise. Public relations involved finding engineers, scientists, and social scientists who could make the ruling class's case persuasively. Formerly, all you needed to criticize American foreign policy and corporate policy effectively was a good ear for bullshit. Because government and business propagandists were basically amateurs, their critics could be amateurs. But the new techniques of social control called into being a whole new cohort of intellectuals - one might call them anti-public intellectuals: intellectuals in the service of power rather than in the service of the public. They deployed expertise, which in turn required that they be countered with expertise. But expertise takes time and effort to acquire; and it proved difficult to combine this time and effort with what had formerly been the chief activity of public intellectuals, that is, the cultivation of the humanities. Literary intellectuals like Randolph Bourne or Mark Twain, or philosophers like William James, could muster perfectly adequate critiques of American foreign policy in the early industrial age. But when the ruling class got smarter and better at hiring its apologists, the public needed experts of its own. And these tended to be investigative journalists--I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald--or maverick scholars, like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, John Kenneth Galbraith, Christopher Lasch, or William Appleman Williams.

[...]

PG: You write that these new public intellectuals, in effect, sacrificed literary timelessness for the exigencies of real politics.

GS: Well, yes, putting it like that was a little bit of a literary flourish on my part. But it's true in this sense: people will read Orwell and Camus forever because their political rhetoric is itself a kind of art, a form of literature. People won't read Chomsky or even I.F. Stone forever. I hope they'll read them for a good long time, for as long as this is a class society. But even after this is no longer a class society, people will read Orwell for the beauties of his prose and the windings of his sensibility; while they'll be able to put aside I.F. Stone, gratefully, and say: "All right, God bless him for his beautiful life, but now we've learned what he had to teach; may he rest in peace."

-- George Scialabba

Jordan Michael Smith takes on one of the icons of American conservatism, Thomas Sowell, one of the very few black intellectuals who will carry the right-wing political banner, if not the only black intellectual of any renown. Mr. Smith discusses Sowell's book "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles":

According to Sowell, American political debates follow two parallel lines tracking distinct visions of human nature. Those on the left have an unconstrained view of man, and those on the right have a constrained view. The unconstrained view holds that humans are perfectible creatures sullied only by their flawed social environments. With the proper education and social support, man can become an altruistic, even Christ-like being. Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the unconstrained thinker par excellence, holding that “men are not naturally enemies” and that the individual “is born free but everywhere is in chains.” Man is inherently rational in this perspective. With proper organization and education, universal peace is attainable, as is the eradication of poverty, violence, and disunion. John Kenneth Galbraith was a recent example of a thinker with an unconstrained view of human nature, according to Sowell.

In contrast, the constrained vision sees man as a beast, held in check by customs, traditions, and coercion. Adam Smith, the Federalist, and, especially, Edmund Burke epitomized the beliefs of the constrained view. Moral and intellectual limitations define the perspective of this outlook, which believes above all in the “general infirmities of human nature,” as Burke put it. War is ineradicable, as are class conflicts, hatred, and evil. The ideas of Friedrich Hayek represent the humility of the constrained view, writes Sowell.

For Sowell, these taxonomies go far in explaining political debates. “Conflicts of visions affect not only such large and enduring issues as economic planning versus laissez-faire, or judicial activism versus judicial restraint, but also such new issues as the most effective modes of Third World development, ‘affirmative action,’ or ‘comparable worth,’” he writes. “In each of these controversies, the assumptions of one vision lead logically to opposite conclusions from those of the other.”

Such is the principled case that Mr. Sowell proudly espouses. Mr. Smith argues that the reality is murkier, and that if you follow the actual positions that Sowell has taken over the years, you would have to look to other factors to account for his politics. For instance, when it came to the recent Iraq war, Mr. Sowell was among the hawks suppoting President George W. Bush's call for a regional democratic transformation, which hardly suggest a constrained vision of man. Interestingly, when our efforts turned into a debacle, Mr. Sowell was willing to change course and started speaking again of the limits of nation-building and the limits of human nature, but this suggests pragmatism more than principle, or as Smith writes, "Sowell does not so much subscribe to a political philosophy as adopt and abandon ideas whenever convenient to do so from a partisan standpoint."

Mr. Smith also raises gay politics to make his point. He brings out Sowell's statement from 2005: “What the activists really want is the stamp of acceptance on homosexuality, as a means of spreading that lifestyle, which has become a death style in the era of AIDS.” As Smith counters, “The notion that homosexuality can be spread to those who don’t want it reveals a tremendously malleable view of human nature.”

The point is that the difference between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats is not that liberals are dreamy and Republican conservatives are hardnosed in reality. If you look at the issue of climate change, for instance, who is in hard denial? My own view is perhaps crass, which is thus: if you want to predict where Republicans will be on an issue, you only have to ask what do the millionaires and billionaires want, and that is where they will be. When it comes to social issues, such as gay rights and abortion and race, where it is not clear where the monied interests naturally lie, then we see a more cagey politcs in which Republicans try to secure popular support by providing a politcal home for popular prejudice (so long as it does not impinge on money interests). Perhaps this is a bit reductionist, but, yeah, I think that money goes far in explaining Republican politics, the politics of plutocracy. This is not to say that Democrats do not value wealth, but at least Democrats see other interests as being important too.

An interesting, arguably pessimistic, statement on the possible limitation of human intellect. I am not sure that our mathematical power is not nimble enough to be able to ultimately take anything in nature into our comprehension. There may be limits in our responses to what we learn, but we may be able to understand what is happening. For example, we are arguably developing some strong ideas about climate change and the hazards this presents for us, even though we probably will not be able to secure the political will to act accordingly. More personally, I know I should probably give up sodas and sugary food, but I would not bet on that ever happening.

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Einstein averred that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He was right to be astonished. It seems sur­prising that our minds, which evolved to cope with life on the African savannah and haven’t changed much in 10,000 years, can make sense of phenomena far from our everyday intuitions: the microworld of atoms and the vastness of the cosmos. But our comprehension could one day “hit the buffers”. A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality. The bedrock nature of space and time, and the structure of our entire universe, may remain “open frontiers” beyond human grasp. Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, or tropical forests – is made up of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. That, at least, is what most scientists believe, and there is no reason to doubt it. Yet there are inherent limits to science’s predictive power. Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that’s atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained compu­tation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become. And even if we could build a computer with hugely superhuman processing power, which could offer an accurate simulation, that doesn’t mean that we will have the insight to understand it. Some of the “aha” insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.

-- Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, at Newstateman.com

The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is — absurd.”

-- Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist

It would probably be more sensible to say that it is we, with our common sense, that are truly absurd, we and our little happy dreams and our deep and self-important expectations of meaningfulness, as though the world and universe revolves around us, when, in fact, we are really more like self-moving rocks or replicating bags of gas that can 'think'.

Adam Smith once noted that we are less troubled by the prospect of a hundred million people dying as a result of an earthquake in some distant location than of losing our little finger, but would nevertheless be horrified by the idea we might allow them to die in order to save it. Climate change effectively transforms the former scenario into the latter, and so places unprecedented demands on our moral imagination. Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities... climate change does not tempt us to be less moral than we might otherwise be; it invites us to be more moral than we could ever have imagined.

-- Malcolm Bull

I am afraid that that invitation will have to be declined.