Conservative tendency

The market for truth

2012-01-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

John Cleese was asked in a recent interview why so many people profess a desire to be famous.

"I think it's to have a sense of significance," he said. "Now most people don't want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that it's absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough."

"One of the things I've discovered ... as I've got older," he continued, "is that almost nobody knows what they're talking about. Of course, we're still talking and we're having fun but you have to realize that, in terms of truth or reality, most of it is completely valueless."

It's easy to make fun of this sort of celebrity wisdom, but I think Cleese may have a point. Three points, really.

Firstly, the point about people not being satisfied with an ordinary life. This has a lot to do with the decline of a rich culture (customs, religion, etc.) which provided the sense of significance which is now lacking.

The second point is, if not literally and simply true, then only a slight exaggeration: "... almost nobody knows what they're talking about."

And the final point Cleese makes I would put another way, and say that the market for truth and reality is vanishingly small.

Faltering democracies

2012-01-20T00:22:00.000-08:00

Buttonwood has a piece about the tendency of the "rationally irrational" majority (which does not take an interest in the details of politics) to have systematic biases - including an anti-market bias, and a view that favors short term make-work schemes over the improvements in productivity which underlie long-term prosperity. Democracy, it seems, is fatally flawed; it remains to be seen whether the established democracies of the West can survive.

Technocrats have taken over in Greece (too late!) and Italy. In the United Kingdom, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has made some progress in trying to undo the disastrous legacy of previous Labour governments. And in Spain a conservative government was voted in late last year to replace the socialists.

The mildly entertaining democratic processes of the United States lumber on, and (who knows?) they might result in an administration which begins the Sisyphean process of turning the country around. The next question would be whether the electorate would continue to support a President and a Congress committed to making hard, and (if the research Buttonwood alludes to is correct) unpopular, decisions in the interests of productivity and long-term prosperity.

Stupid intelligent versus intelligent stupid

2012-01-15T00:16:00.000-08:00

The topic of intelligence is one is I intend to look at from time to time and from various angles. There are scientific and factual issues, many quite controversial, which can be addressed, but also conceptual issues and questions of attitudes to the importance of (various types of) intelligence.

Let me begin by referring back to a piece I wrote over a year ago, drawing on something Jason Streitfeld (a follower of the 20th-century philosopher Gilbert Ryle) wrote on the topic. The basic point I was making was that intelligent behavior is what matters, not some hypothetical quality residing inside the head. The tests for cognitive ablility conducted by psychologists are very important tools, and in my opinion they should be more widely used and applied (for example, in helping individuals make choices about careers). What they do not and cannot do, however, is to deal with the sort of complex processing involved in making the sequences of real life decisions which to a large extent determine our individual fates. (The notion of emotional intelligence, which is supposed to address some of these issues, is still in the process of being defined and there is no consensus on the value of existing tests.)

Imagine two individuals, two scenarios. One person has a very high I.Q. and is able to cope easily with advanced mathematics but is socially awkward, and doesn't bother to organize mundane aspects of his life like personal finances. The other person has a lowish I.Q., did poorly at school but is socially adept, a hard worker and a good listener. Let's say he recognizes his limitations and devotes his limited intellectual powers to seeking out intelligent and trustworthy advisers. He invests his savings wisely and lives a long, happy and prosperous life within a trusted circle of friends and family. Who would you prefer to be?

A certain level of raw cognitive ability is necessary to achieve success in life. But when people use the epithet 'intelligent', they are often indicating high levels of cognitive ability - call it cleverness or 'braininess'. My point is simply that this kind of (high level) intelligence is overrated and less important than most people think. More important - especially in respect of the wellbeing of the individual concerned - is that other sort of intelligence which incorporates a gift for friendship, which allows one to recognize one's limitations, to make astute social judgements, to put a high value on the future and financial independence, and to act accordingly.

Jumping to conclusions

2012-01-13T01:46:00.000-08:00

There is a lesson to be taken from my previous post about jumping to conclusions and about hidden biases. Though neither I nor the news source I was relying on made any actual claims about who was responsible, there was an implicit suggestion that the claims made by Zahara Rahimzadegan's husband and by an evangelical Christian pastor that Islamic extremists were responsible for the woman's disappearance were plausible. As it turns out, the case seems to have nothing to do with Islamic extremists. (After the discovery of a body at the family home, the woman's husband has been arrested and charged with her murder.)

I am no fan of religion and certainly no fan of Islam, which is the source of many evils and much violence.

However, Islam is not going to disappear any time soon, and so one can only hope it will evolve - as Christianity did - and gradually adapt to modernity. And this process will not be assisted by bloggers or anyone else giving credence to unjustified accusations.

Mea culpa.

Missing person

2012-01-11T00:26:00.000-08:00

The Age, a left-leaning Australian broadsheet, has a report today on the disappearance of an Iranian woman living in suburban Melbourne. Mandy Ahmadi*, who arrived in Australia with her husband in 1999, disappeared on December 16 last year without taking her handbag, money or credit cards. Her husband and two sons fear she has been abducted by Islamic extremists. She and her husband converted to Christianity five and four years ago respectively.

A Christian pastor who has known the Ahmadis for eight years said that Mrs Ahmadi "really stuck her neck out" trying to convert Muslims and he feared that her zeal had come to the attention of Iran-based militants.

I quote directly from the newspaper's carefully phrased report:

Islam, strictly interpreted, mandates death for adults who leave the religion**, and there are many cases of Iranian converts being killed, both in Iran and Europe.

The same penalty may be applied to those who seek to persuade Muslims to leave their religion. While there are accounts of Muslims who converted being beaten in Australia, The Age is not aware of any claims of killings.

* Her husband's surname is Ahmadi and she was called Mandy Ahmadi in the original report. Her legal name appears to be Zahara Rahimzadegan. It is not the custom in Iran for a woman to take her husband's surname.

** It is not quite as simple as this. I am no expert, but this is the situation as I see it. The Quran says that the apostate will receive punishment in hell after judgement day, but does not mandate an earthly penalty. However, basing their views on some hadith (acts or sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad), most traditional Muslim scholars argue that apostasy is indeed punishable by death.

Update (Jan. 13): Police are conducting a search of the missing woman's house and surrounding areas. A police spokesman has indicated that the disappearance is unrelated to Zahara Rahimzadegan's religious activities. I'll post again when more has been made public.

What's worth doing?

2012-01-09T00:23:00.000-08:00

I think we must have evolved for crisis living, not reflection. Reflection bogs us down and causes us to question everything, whereas, in our normal state (lives more or less out of control), we act to deal with this crisis or solve that urgent problem, and often manage to remain cheerful and show courage and all sorts of virtues. Life-in-action brings out the best in us. Leisure and bounty often bring out the worst.

For example, we might start to ask questions like, "What should I do?" or, worse, "What human activities are intrinsically worthwhile?"

This last question in particular is problematic as each of us is situated in a specific social context. Simply asking what human activities are worthwhile is perhaps too abstract an approach. But so long as one is aware that one is dealing with abstractions and provisional generalizations the exercise may not be entirely useless.

And it can streamline discussion and simplify things. For example, I might be at a point in my life where I have to make a choice of direction but don't want to be distracted by a lot of boring details. (My specific situational details are very boring, as it happens.)

So - what sorts of activities are worthwhile, intrinsically or not?

1. Having fun - partying and that sort of thing - will be high on many people's lists. However, not really being dans le vent (to use a dated but expressive French locution), I have little to say about this.

2. Having children and raising them is considered life's purpose by many. Certainly it appears to be the fulfilment of a basic biological function, but what is significant about it has more to do with passing on values of various kinds in a particular cultural context.

3. Charitable and humanitarian work is often worthwhile, but its value is entirely extrinsic, i.e. in terms of the good it does. This is an area where well-intentioned people can do great harm. Good intentions and warm feelings are no substitute for thinking through the (possible) consequences.

4. Political activism. As for 3. Except that the intentions are not always good and the feelings are often far from warm.

5. Art and self-expression are often put forward as intrinsically valuable activities. Though it all depends on the quality of what is being made or said.

6. Enjoying good art or literature is a worthy thing to do, I suppose, but I wouldn't make too much of it. One important thing good taste does indirectly - and on a very modest scale - is to reward good quality art and writing and to limit the audience for (and so discourage) poor quality work.

7. Playing sports and competitive games is great for some. H.G. Wells used to invite friends to his country house for the weekend and he always organized lots of games. But he was inclined to tire quickly of one game after another. "Let's play something I can win," he would say.

8. Hobbies are worthwhile too, blurring the distinction between work and play. They can be a sort of compensation for the unsatisfactory nature of the greater part of one's life.

9. Ordinary social interaction? Well, this is an essential part of being human. (So is sitting alone under a shady tree.)

10. Learning is intrinsically valuable, especially (I am speaking personally here) the sort of learning that helps one understand important things - and things in general. I think the privileged person is the one sitting in the auditorium, not the lecturer. Likewise, scientific researchers (even successful ones) are less privileged than non-researchers who have more time and leisure to understand and appreciate what researchers discover.

After all, lecturers must be paid or they will not lecture (the ones who don't insist on payment you don't want to hear!); and researchers have to be paid and lured on by prizes and awards. But curious people don't have to be motivated by material rewards to learn, to read, to expand their understanding.

Of course, I am being slightly disingenuous here. Though I mentioned (artistic) self-expression, I am underplaying that basic human motivation, the desire for the spotlight, the desire for status, the desire to be taken seriously, to be listened to. And I am also ignoring the fact that most of us have to earn a living and that paid work not only fills a disproportionate amount of the typical day and so determines to a large extent the nature and quality of our lives, but also forms the basis of our identity, of how other people define or categorize us and of how we define and categorize ourselves.

I'll deal with the topic of remuneration in another post, but let me just say here that I don't see any necessary connection between the worthwhileness of an activity and whether or not someone should be paid for doing it.

Ten reasons to be chaste

2012-01-02T00:23:00.000-08:00

1. You will have more time for sleeping.

2. Chastity provides excellent protection against sexually transmitted diseases and - barring interventions by scheming deities - against unwanted pregnancies.

3. Chastity promotes trust and new friendships by easing some of the pressures and complications of social interaction.

4. Chastity protects existing friendships. Though sex can in many instances deepen friendships, it can also be a potent friendship-killer, not only in respect of the relationship between the lovers, but also in terms of collateral damage to other, third-party, relationships.

5. Chastity takes some of the urgency out of sexual orientation and gender identity issues. It allows one to apply a kind of dialethic logic to these matters. You can be this, that, both and neither all at once.

6. Chastity is a way of rebelling against the evolutionary mechanisms and imperatives which dominate most human behavior and which exert complete and utter control over the behavior of all other animals.

7. Chastity will free your mind for other things, like flirting or quantum physics or contributing trenchant comments to obscure conservative blogs.

8. Chastity requires no pledges, promises, vows or contracts.

9. It is invisible, imponderable and completely non-toxic.

10. Most importantly, chastity is not anti-sex: chastity and sex go hand-in-hand. Chastity adds value to sex. And sex gives chastity its meaning.

Privacy, time and fairy lights

2011-12-27T00:07:00.000-08:00

Just about everyone is communicating more - and in more ways - than ever and this naturally has an effect on our ideas of privacy.

More and more personal information is stored in data centers and much of that is potentially retrievable by anyone, but the very volume of data out there is perhaps our best protection. Most of the trivial stuff is lost and will never be retrieved - and, even if it was, what would it matter?

Breaches of privacy matter only when one's life is disrupted - for example when one's bank account has been tampered with, or one's friends alienated or offended, or one's house broken into.

As technologies change so do - and must - attitudes. Younger people are clearly less concerned about making information about (and images of) themselves public than previous generations were. There were always teenage exhibitionists, even if today's technologies allow exhibitionism on a much larger scale. The class clown has gone global, the school rebel is part of a worldwide protest movement.

But for every natural rebel or exhibitionist, then and now, there are sure to be many more individuals who have no difficulty maintaining their privacy and dignity and sense of balance.

Some changes are deeper, however. Technologies like the printed book and pen and paper encouraged silent, private reading and writing. And, significantly, the communication process is delayed in these instances and long periods of time elapse between the writing and the reading, months or years in the case of books, days or weeks in the case of letters or periodicals.

By contrast, digital technologies facilitate instant communication with peers in a context of high levels of sensory stimulation so that the private sphere of the silent reader is being crowded out.

This is the real problem for anyone who values minds attuned to slower-moving and important things, companions who sit quietly over a coffee, and who, when they talk, take you into a slower, deeper world where thoughts are more like grand orbiting planets than flickering fairy lights.

But then, fairy lights have their charm...

On the sunny side of the street

2011-12-24T00:27:00.000-08:00

A favorite recording of one of my favorite songs. The Benny Goodman Sextet with a young Peggy Lee.

Recorded exactly 70 years ago, on Christmas Eve, 1941.

Have a merry Christmas and a sunny new year.

The idea of Europe and France's idea of itself

2011-12-20T06:14:00.000-08:00

I'm impatient to know what is going to happen to Europe. It matters to all of us, insofar as Europe plays an important part in the global economy, and it matters particularly to those of us who live in Europe, or intend to live in Europe, or who simply cherish an idea of Europe (for ethnic, cultural, intellectual or other reasons).

The Economist's Charlemagne gives a good account of the background to and the prospects for a new treaty. In fact there are two treaties being negotiated: the new intergovernmental treaty associated with the recent Brussels summit; and the not-so-new but yet-to-be-completed treaty setting up a permanent bailout fund (the European Stability Mechanism). These documents appear to be crystallizing not only a two-tier E.U. but also a two-tier euro zone (with debtor countries lacking veto powers, for instance).

But will the markets wait for the bureaucrats and politicians to complete their ambitious agenda of drafting and ratification? Will the temporary rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, prove to be adequate (in conjunction with other funding sources like the IMF)? In the absence of massive bailouts (which can create their own problems), it's difficult to see how heavily indebted countries will be able to come out of this without devaluation (which would entail exiting the euro zone).

Particularly interesting, in the light of my recent reflections on dealing with decline, are comments by Johan Van Overtveldt who, in a new book (The End of the Euro) singles out France for special criticism. "France's inability to accept gracefully its political and economic decline has produced additional tension. La grandeur de la France, once an undeniable reality, is now a thing of the past."

Recent statements by French leaders attacking the creditworthiness of the U.K. were so far beyond the pale as to indicate a degree of panic.

And no wonder, with the ratings agency Fitch saying that "a comprehensive solution to the euro-zone crisis is technically and politically beyond reach," France's triple-A status on the brink of a downgrade - and a French presidential election just a few months away.

One last quote. On a Sky News Christmas special pre-recorded last week, Sir Philip Hampton (the Royal Bank of Scotland's chairman) said he thought the banking system could cope with Greece's exit from the euro zone, but he had broader concerns about social cohesion, even in France. "France has got an unmatched history of getting on to the streets and making a big noise. I'm amazed the French have been so subdued. I don't think it will continue."

If the French do take to the streets, let's hope the Islamists don't hijack the revolution. That would be an interesting twist.

Getting real

2011-12-17T16:45:00.000-08:00

I recently discussed Paul Krugman's views on the European crisis, and suggested that his ideological commitments may have distorted his analysis. Krugman argued that austerity programs would inevitably fail and lead to the destruction of democracy.

I note that Amity Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist, has also taken issue with Krugman's perspective. "There is evidence that austerity did lead to growth in the past," she writes, "and that it did not cause fascism."

Shlaes questions "the standard ... narrative of what happened" during the Great Depression which lies behind Krugman's views. She cites the example of Australian government cost-cutting in the early 1930s. "Australia recovered far faster than the U.S. ... [Prime Minister Joseph] Lyons may have praised Mussolini but Australia didn't go fascist."

I am not really in a position to argue on the basis of historical economic data or economic theory, but I can see that Franklin Delano Roosevelt has become a mythic hero for many liberals, and the New Deal an inspirational tale.

But inspiring narratives are just that - stories designed inspire (manipulate?), not to encapsulate historical (or any other kind of) truth.

History is complicated, there are no heroes, and the world does not owe us a living.

Paul Krugman on Europe

2011-12-15T19:10:00.000-08:00

It's always salutary to read or listen to - at least occasionally - those whose ideological perspectives are different from one's own.

Sometimes it's simply a matter of being confirmed in one's current views. Like the time I read a political book by Noam Chomsky (whom I respected as a linguist). I was staggered at the degree of anger and irrationality and extremism evident in Chomsky's prose. I had begun the book with an open mind, ready to be convinced: I was wavering ideologically at the time and had no vested interest in any particular system (beyond some investments in equities which could easily have been put into something else if I came to the view that capitalism was bad). But I found there was a huge gulf between where Chomsky was and where I was. I have no idea how he got there, and I was damned sure that I wasn't going to go there.

Paul Krugman is another kettle of fish, a distinguished economist who is also a liberal polemicist. I recently read an opinion piece by Krugman on political and economic trends in Europe, suggesting that we should call "the current situation what it is: a depression." Even putting aside the (unresolved) euro crisis, lack of growth and high levels of unemployment is leading to immense anger and resentment (against Germany, for instance), risks to social cohesion and a clear move in the direction of authoritarian governments.

Last month, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development "documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the 'new E.U.' countries." Hungary, for instance, a country with a turbulent and tragic history, is in dire economic straits. According to Krugman, it has "suffered severely because of large-scale borrowing in foreign currencies and also, to be frank [Krugman acknowledging his ideological position!], thanks to the mismanagement and corruption on the part of the then-governing left-liberal parties."

This led to Fidesz, a center-right party, winning an overwhelming parliamentary majority last year. But now Fidesz, by a series of constitutional and legal measures and media control, seems to be moving towards authoritarian rule "under a paper-thin veneer of democracy." Krugman sees what is happening in Hungary, "in the heart of Europe," as a sign of things to come on the troubled continent. As he puts it, the breakup of the euro may be the least of Europe's worries.

My concern is that Krugman's ideological preoccupations may be distorting his analysis. He is hostile to German-inspired attempts to encourage austerity, suggesting that such an approach is leading to the death of democracy and to authoritarian forms of government. But the crisis was caused, at least in part, by profligate government spending (exacerbated in some countries by their participation in an ill-conceived experiment in monetary union). And something like the pragmatic German model may be the only alternative to fascism or whatever forms of nationalistic collectivism are currently garnering support.

Dealing with decline

2011-12-12T00:31:00.000-08:00

Niall Ferguson and many others have made the point that the United States, like other once-dominant nations before it, is in for a very difficult period of adjustment. That is, if the combination of its massive public debt and shifts in the global economic center of gravity play out as expected, and America's international preeminence is relentlessly eroded.

The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is around 100%, and it's well known that public debt levels above 85% of GDP are a drag on growth and also carry other, more dire, risks - as recent credit downgrades portend and as recent events in Europe have illustrated.

Of course America never had an actual empire like many of the preeminent nations of the past, and so will be spared the dramatic indignity of surrendering territories and dealing with mass immigration and other such phenomena that are associated with the end of an empire. Though long-held perceptions and expectations are not easy to put aside, the lack of an empire will make the process far easier, not only in practical terms but also in terms of saving face. The decline in power and influence could be seen as a voluntary return to policies of relative isolationism and non-interventionism.

The French writer Henry de Montherlant - an aristocratic conservative - faced head-on and accepted the patent reality of the decline of France in the inter-war years, though he felt the pain of it keenly. Others, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, continued to believe in France's greatness, even after the debacle of 1940, even after the disastrous Algerian war, even now ...

The style and antics of the present French president, Nicolas Sarkozy is explicable only in the light of France's glorious past, and the mismatch between his pretensions and the reality of France's current position in the world is a source of amusement to many.

Britain's decline has been, if anything, even more painful and traumatic than that of France. In the post-World War 2 period, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann reflected the attachments and preoccupations and regrets of the English middle class. Behind the mock xenophobia and comic aggression of this little piece (from a performance in New York) lies ... Well, you be the judge.

A final thought: it strikes me that unsympathetic observers of David Cameron's actions at last week's Brussels summit will see him and his eurosceptic supporters - quite unjustly, of course, at least in respect of Cameron himself - as having been motivated by something like the sentiments being satirized here by Flanders and Swann.

Genetics and political orientation: some further thoughts

2011-12-07T00:08:00.000-08:00

Let us assume that - as the research (which I discussed briefly in a previous post) seems to indicate - our political and other values are heavily influenced by genetic and genetic/environmental factors and even reflected in brain structures. What consequences flow from this?

First of all, it will make one skeptical about one's own political beliefs and values. As with someone 'born into' a particular religion, skepticism is definitely called for. But, just as my being born into a particular religion does not mean that the doctrines of that particular religion are necessarily false, so my having a genetic predisposition to believe or value certain things does not mean that these things are not true or valuable.

Even if our political beliefs were completely determined, this would not necessarily reflect on their truth, rightness, viability, plausibility - on their value and worth in other words. But are value and worth matters which can be objectively assessed?

I would suggest that the policy prescriptions of the right or the left or any other political perspective or orientation can be assessed in various ways. Whether particular methods or policies work in practice can be tested (and history can be seen as a record of such experiments). Science can be brought to bear on factual matters, from biology to economics. But basic values - such as whether to value equality over prosperity and individual freedom, etc. - seem not to be amenable to objective assessment.

Another lesson one might draw from the research is that people are different - every brain is unique, of course, but there are also differences which reflect general patterns of thought; and consequently changing someone's mind about a deep ideological issue will not be achieved simply by setting out a logical argument. Of course conversions occur, and people change their own minds (though often, as one of the commenters on the linked post said, as a result of much reading and reflection).

But presumably conversions occur when the new ideology is compatible with underlying brain structures, in other words when elements of that ideology are already present in a latent form. Given the research results, unconscious constraints and unconscious proclivities and tendencies clearly shape the possibilities for individual belief and orientation.

Knowing this, one would not try to convert everybody to one's own way of thinking, but rather accept that many would not be able (without major mental re-engineering) to value the things one values and so think the way one thinks about social issues. One would concentrate on those whose basic values were compatible with whatever social philosophy one was seeking to promote.

Unfortunately, much argument and debate is entered into with the assumption that we all have a more or less identical faculty which we call 'reason' - a kind of logic machine in our heads which determines our views. But - leaving aside areas like mathematics and formal logic - this is not the case. Our thinking is bound up with feeling and with (often unconscious) values. The research results undermine the view that debate and adversarial discussion are truth-seeking activities. There could be a more limited role for discussion, however, in helping those who have certain predispositions to develop a conscious and coherent social philosophy which accords with those predispositions.

It would be nice if we could have a workable dual or multi-choice social, political and economic system, so that we could all just gravitate towards the option we prefer; but unfortunately capitalism needs to be a universal system if it is to work properly. A dual capitalist/socialist (or free market/collectivist) system will fail because the wealth-producing (capitalist) part will always face increasing demands to subsidize the collectivist component.

In fact this is arguably what is happening today. Most Western countries, though nominally capitalist, have large public sectors which are major employers and providers of welfare. A dual (private/public) system operates in many areas of society: there are private schools and public schools, private hospitals and public hospitals, private health insurance and public health insurance, self-funded retirees and retirees on state pensions, and so on.

And - surprise, surprise - public debt is jeopardizing the future of many Western economies and threatening global prosperity.

Meaning and information

2011-12-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

I don't remember meeting him, but, when I was a child, we often used to drive past a house belonging to my father's old colleague, 'Sticky' Glew. (My mother had been introduced to him, and had trouble deciding how to address him. She wisely opted for 'Mr Glew'.) It amused my father that his friend had written a dissertation on 'the meaning of meaning'.

"For thousands of years," writes Seth Lloyd (in his book, Programming the universe (Vintage, 2007)), "philosophers have tried to determine what 'meaning' means, with mixed success." (p. 24)

Lloyd's work (in quantum computing and quantum communication systems) is based around the technical concept of information. But strings of bits and so on mean nothing in themselves: they are meaningful only if they can be interpreted. "Meaning is defined only relative to a scheme of interpretation ..." (p. 25)

"Consider the string of bits ... : 1001001 1101110 0100000 1110100 1101000 1100101 0100000 1100010 1100101 1100111 1101001 1101110 1101110 1101001 1101110 1100111. Interpreted as a message encoded in ASCII, this string means 'In the beginning'. But taken on its own, with no specification of how it is to be interpreted, it means nothing other than itself." (p. 25) And, of course, 'In the beginning ...' is interpreted according to the conventions of the English language. As Lloyd points out, natural languages are rich in ambiguity, which is "a key aspect of poetry, fiction, flirting, and plain everyday conversation." (p. 27)

But sometimes, in order to understand basic concepts - like meaning - it is useful to strip away complexities and ambiguities and look at simple models, as Wittgenstein did in his account of language games. Imagine a simple language game in which a builder says "Block" and the assistant hands him a block, or "Slab" and the assistant hands him a slab. The meaning of each expression is to be found in the action the expression provokes.

Lloyd relates Wittgenstein's idea to computers and computing. "The meaning of a computer program written in a particular computer language," he writes, "is to be found in the actions the computer performs as it interprets that program. All the computer is doing is performing sequences of elementary logic operations, such as AND, NOT and COPY ... The computer program unambiguously instructs the computer to perform a particular sequence of those operations. The 'meaning' of a computer program is thus universal, in the sense that two computers following the same set of instructions will perform the same set of information-processing operations and obtain the same result." (p. 26-27)

Meaning, then, is interpreted information. We don't need a theory of meaning such as philosophers have attempted to build. Philosophy (most notably the philosophy of language and metaphysics) has drifted into unproductive areas reminiscent of scholasticism in which intellectual work is done without first ensuring that there is an important intellectual task to address.

Of course, the word 'meaning', like many English words, can be used in different ways, and a careful analysis of the context of use will reveal subtle - and not so subtle - differences. One sense of the word - rather different from most of the others is 'general significance' or 'point' or 'purpose', as in the sentence, 'My life seems to lack meaning.' I have not been talking here of this generalized kind of meaning, but of the ordinary - and primary - uses of the word in relation to information and communication. And, understood as interpreted information, it seems to me a perfectly clear and unmysterious concept. Trying - as some philosophers do - to make a big issue of what they call 'aboutness' or 'intentionality' (which doesn't mean what non-philosophers think it means) constitutes unnecessary mystification.*

The remarkable advances in computing and information and communication technologies during the last 70 years have thrown up many real problems of a fundamental nature, but they require scientific knowledge (not just knowledge of formal logic and philosophy) to address. In particular, the parallels between thermodynamics and information theory are clearly rich in new problems which would benefit from informed reflection. For example, all matter and energy is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but all matter and energy - everything there is - is also subject to the laws of information. Information theory appears to be a more fundamental and all-encompassing theory than thermodynamics (which can now be seen as just a special case of information theory).

Though I doubt the value of much recent philosophical work in the areas of language and meaning, some very important foundational work has certainly been done by philosophers, philosophically-inclined mathematicians and logicians. The key advances were made during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The work of George Boole, Giuseppe Peano, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead and many others provided the conceptual tools which made the development of the electronic computer and sophisticated communication technologies possible. Claude Shannon's development of what he called a 'mathematical theory of communication' and which has come to be known as information theory was based largely on the work of George Boole.

Information has come to be seen as physical - it is no longer seen as abstract, disembodied and unquantifiable. It is always tied to a physical representation: a mark on paper, a charge, a spin, a sequence of bases in DNA. Information processing occurs not just in computers and brains but throughout the physical world.

In 1961 Rolf Landauer came up with a principle with (it is said) startling implications: that one essential information processing operation (erasure) cannot occur without causing heat to dissipate into the environment (thus increasing the entropy of the universe). The processing of information is a thermodynamic process (just as thermodynamic processes are informational) and erasure is an irreversible operation. Negation can be reversed by a second negation. Addition can be reversed by subtraction. But erasure cannot be undone.

I will resist the temptation to discuss the implications of Landauer's principle (which I believe are not good!). I am a layman in these matters, but the role that information processing seems to play in every aspect of nature intrigues me. I am trying at least to understand the fundamental principles, and to relate the sort of thing one learns within the context of philosophical logic - e.g. that there are any number of alternative systems of logic - to the apparently more constrained context of real-world information processing.

* Much philosophical work in recent decades in areas such as ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and even logic has been done by people with a commitment to a religious view of the world (or at least with an anti-physicalist orientation), and has been motivated (I believe) by an attempt to undermine physicalism and to save a space for the spiritual (broadly interpreted). Such a motivation does not invalidate the work, but I personally don't think a convincing case against physicalism has been made.

Old guys in bow ties

2011-11-25T23:01:00.000-08:00

The internet has taken the donkey-work out of academic research, and devalued personal memory and expertise. Much of my research time in the past was taken up leafing through neglected volumes in 'research collections' (i.e. the stuff nobody reads anymore if they ever did) of academic libraries, scanning back-of-the-book indexes, and very occasionally turning up unexpected links between thinkers and bringing to light forgotten comments and analyses and predictions which often seemed to give the lie to commonly accepted views on intellectual history (where the focus tended and perhaps still tends to be on a few intellectual 'stars' who are credited with more originality and prescience than they had in reality).

Now, thanks to search engines etc., one can do in a few minutes what previously took months of searching. The dusty research collections have been or are being digitized - but what of the experts, the old guys with bow ties whom one valued highly for their lifetime's worth of knowledge? One of the pleasures of researching a topic was interacting with these often-eccentric people, chatting with them, making hurried notes as they gave one important clues and names to follow up on. Such mentors are fading out of the picture as so much of what they had to tell can be found now online.

But still there are questions of a type which Google doesn't really seem equipped to answer. Specific questions that an individual might have come up with in the course of reading or research require interlocutors who can put themselves in the position of the questioner - who can empathize intellectually. Or sometimes one is interested in the relationship between this and that - and a Google search will give one all there is to know on this and all there is to know on that, but never the twain shall meet (or at least not in the way one wants).

And then there are fundamental questions about the worthwhileness (for me or in general) of this or that subject area, this or that profession. This type of question is often the most important of all - and a human mentor (preferably old and learned) is definitely called for.

No tears for Massimo

2011-11-17T00:07:00.000-08:00

Massimo Pigliucci is a self-styled public intellectual who runs a blog misleadingly called Rationally speaking. It is in fact highly politicized, a vehicle for Professor Pigliucci to promote his left-liberal views - and himself. Which (apart from the misleading blog name) would be fine, if it wasn't for the site's (and Massimo's) loyal followers, and the feeling that one is dealing here not with a group of freely thinking individuals but with a sort of cult.

So I had a sense of schadenfreude (unworthy, I know) when I read this post by Pigliucci on an imminent restructuring of the curricula at the City University of New York where he is employed as a philosophy professor.

The proposal incorporates a reduction of the compulsory general education requirements from more than 50 to 30 credits (out of a total of 120 credits necessary for graduation). And within that 30 there is a 'required core' of 7 credits in English composition and 8 in mathematics and science. Professor Pigliucci alleges that this is part of a national trend towards "dismantling liberal arts education" and that these efforts are motivated by an attempt to produce not "intelligent and critically thinking citizens" but "workers who are trained to do whatever the market and the reigning plutocracy bids them to do." Unfortunately, the phrase "reigning plutocracy" gives him away.

It's my view that many - too many - academics in the humanities have betrayed their calling by allowing the content of what they teach to become politicized to an extreme degree. Too often divergent views on controversial issues are not welcomed and students are required to echo the politically correct clichés of their teachers in order to succeed. Feminism, multiculturalism, standard liberal views on social issues, geo-politics and capitalism dominate teaching and writing in many areas within the humanities and social sciences. And so the process continues, as indoctrinated college graduates become teachers themselves or journalists or public employees of one kind or another or occupiers of Wall Street.

So I'll not be shedding any tears for Massimo and his like if they lose their battle to maintain their power and influence. All in all, I think some good may come from the withdrawal of funding from the humanities as certain particularly noxious forms of indoctrination will be curtailed.

And whatever there is of abiding value in the areas affected by funding cuts will more than likely be incorporated - under other names perhaps - into new curricula, or find other modes of survival.

The meaning of life

2011-11-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

Having a cause to stand for or to fight for can give meaning to life. As well as meaning and purpose, a cause can also confer on its upholders a sense of psychological security, a sense that one knows things that others are unaware of, that one is committed to something important which the mass of humanity does not recognize as such (or at least does not actively support). There is a danger of smugness, arrogance and complacency here, but such pitfalls can be avoided.

A cause also gives one allies and adversaries - even, in some cases, a sense of excitement and adventure. Think of Communists (and fellow travelers) in Western countries during the Cold War. Just the right amount of secrecy and excitement, and no real danger to life and limb. (Professional agents on both sides did, of course, face great dangers. But then they were paid for it.)

The former British agent David Cornwell (writing as John le Carré) depicted that world as one in which the moral and political issues were dark, complex and ambiguous, but his great creation, George Smiley, managed nonetheless to retain a simple sincerity and goodness.

In The spy who came in from the cold (1963), Smiley makes only a brief appearance as a colleague of the main character, Eric Leamas. Leamas also stands for certain moral values. There is an interesting passage in which Leamas, waiting for an important and fateful meeting on the Dutch coast, thinks about a girl called Liz (a member of the Communist Party in Britain and so technically opposed to Leamas's cause) who had recently looked after him when he became ill in a rented room in London.

... At about eleven o'clock the next morning he decided to go out for a walk along the front, bought some cigarettes and stared dully at the sea.

There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung towards the sea. He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love, whatever it was he would go back and find it ...

Le Carré seems to be suggesting that the real meaning of life is not to be found in causes and grand designs but in the mundane, apparently pointless details of ordinary life. It might be tempting to go along with this line of thinking, but, of course, it is just a bit too facile.

The dichotomy between activism and quietism, between cause- or ideology-driven behavior and the still passivity of just being, does not in fact demand an evaluative choice - activism bad, quietism good, or whatever. It is not a question of either/or but of both/and.

As we shuttle between conviction and doubt, activity and stillness, sickness and health, a sense of meaning and well-being just bubbles up from time to time.

Cats are people too

2011-10-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

F.H. Bradley, the idealist philosopher, used to shoot cats (at night, in the grounds of Merton College, Oxford). Bradley was a dog man.

In a footnote in chapter XXVI of his magnum opus, Appearance and reality, in a section dealing with the human desire for life after death and the inconsistencies of the standard (Christian) view, he writes:

No one can have been so fortunate as never to have felt the grief of parting, or so inhuman as not to have longed for another meeting after death... One feels that a personal immortality would not be very personal, if it implied a mutilation of our affections. There are those too who would not sit down among the angels, till they had recovered their dog.

The only pet I've ever owned (apart from animals that were family responsibilities) was a cat, and I know the strange chemistry which sometimes links humans and animals of other species. I wouldn't want to make too much of it, but there was a kind of recognition there, a kind of bond, albeit tenuous and uncertain. Intimate may not be too strong a word.

A while ago, I saw on a lamppost a small, monochrome poster. Just a stylized cat's face and the sentence: Cats are people too. I have some sympathy with the people who bothered to design and print and paste up these posters, with their quirky and lighthearted campaign in defense of a currently very unpopular animal.

But I don't believe that animals have rights, or that we humans should be seen as more or less on a par with chimpanzees. The attempt by intellectuals and activists to raise the status and moral profile of animals has succeeded only in distorting reality and weakening moral thinking in general. By virtue of language and our relatively advanced brains we inhabit a vast new world from which all other animals are excluded.

The burdens of this world of human consciousness are such, however, that the pre-human world of our distant ancestors - of which we remain obscurely aware - can be seen as a kind of paradise from which we have been cast out. This may explain in part the mystique that animals have for many.

What animals see in us is an altogether more difficult question.

Do genetic and environmental factors determine political orientation?

2011-10-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

So often we see the truth of something, even talk or write about it, but don't fully realize the implications. And for me the implications of an idea which I have accepted for quite some time are finally, I think, sinking in. I'm talking about the idea that our - for want of a better word - ideological propensities (and perhaps values in general) are in large part determined by genetic and environmental factors.

Late last year and earlier this year there was a lot of publicity about a particular study (associated with the actor Colin Firth) concerning correlations between brain structure and political orientation. A paper detailing the results was published in April 2011 in Current Biology, and I had been meaning to have a close look at it, and perhaps to trace reactions and interpretations with a view to forming my own opinion on what it all might mean.

The study found that the gray matter volume of the anterior cingulate cortex was generally greater amongst university students identifying as liberal or left wing, while the right amygdala was larger in those who identified as conservative or right wing.

Predictably, a lot of nonsense was written by journalists and bloggers on the significance and implications of this piece of research - much of it along the lines that conservatives are less evolved!

It goes without saying that our knowledge of how brain structure and brain activity relate to thought and behavior is very limited. Research into these areas is at a very early stage and this study is a small piece of a very large and largely incomplete jigsaw puzzle. What the study does do, however, is to provide evidence that our political propensities are correlated to brain structures, which in itself is a profoundly important result. What it does not do is to validate value judgements about specific political propensities.

As the authors of the study point out, their research extends previous findings which related certain kinds of brain activity to political attitudes. Reference is also made to a study of twins which indicates that genetics plays a significant role in determining political views, and to other studies which have focused on the interaction between genetics and the social environment. "For example," the authors write, "political orientation in early adulthood is influenced by an interaction between a variant of a dopamine receptor gene linked with novelty seeking and an environmental factor of friendship."

Though not mentioned by the authors, research on birth order has thrown significant light on these issues. As I noted in a post last year, first-borns have been found to score higher on conservatism, conscientiousness and achievement orientation; later-borns on rebelliousness, openness and agreeableness. But, apparently, this pattern holds only within (rather than across) families because genetic effects are stronger than birth-order effects.

All in all, it is becoming increasingly clear that genetic and environmental factors play a big role in determining an individual's political orientation - and this is a hugely significant fact. When we engage in political (or similar kinds of) discussion and debate, we can no longer assume that we are dealing with people who - at least potentially - think like us. We all know from experience that such debate is usually (always?) futile, and at last, perhaps, we are beginning to understand why.

It is all very depressing for anyone who has been committed to the value of discussion and debate about values and politics. I want to face the implications of these findings head on. What consequences flow from them? Is ideological discussion a waste of time?

I'm still thinking about it.

Hayek and Hobbes

2011-10-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

I recently expressed an affinity for the social views of F.A. Hayek, noting that this position might appear to be difficult to reconcile with my fondness for the writings of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).

Hobbes is most famous for his contention that without a strong central authority societies disintegrate into conflict:

[D]uring the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war, as is of every man against everyman ... In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [Leviathan (Basil Blackwell, 1960), p. 82.]

The common power of which Hobbes speaks is conceived as a sovereign individual or group of individuals which is granted supreme power to act 'in those things which concern the common peace and safety.' The sovereign - so conceived - is the source of all law, and rights are a matter of legal definition.

There are obviously conflicts here with the views of Hayek. Hobbes had a major influence on the 19th and 20th-century tradition of legal positivism and the command theory of law, a tradition of thought to which Hayek was steadfastly opposed. Hayek accepted that the idea of law as a command is appropriate in systems of regulation applied to administrators and government officials, but if it is applied to the population at large then everyone is reduced to the status of unpaid servant of the state.

Hayek felt that healthy ideas of the rule of law were undermined in the later 19th century by proponents of legal positivism. The dangerous idea that whatever the government does is right and legal led to the perversion of the Rechtsstaat into the Kulturstaat and to various forms of totalitarianism. It also led to the acceptance of ideas of 'social justice' (involving, amongst other things, the redistribution of private wealth). Hayek believed that laws should not involve arbitrary elements and should be process-based and not directed at particular individuals or towards particular ends. His purpose was to delineate a private sphere where individuals are free to act without fear of coercion by government.

Fundamental to Hayek's position is his rejection of the view that order needs to be created by a sovereign authority. For order arises spontaneously, and any imposed order will - because no central orderer can ever have or process the required information - necessarily be inefficient and oppressive. But I think it's fair to say that Hayek also had a strong belief in individual freedom as a value in itself.

The major threats to individual freedom in Hayek's day were secular totalitarian ideologies (and social democracy which had - as he saw it - a tendency to drift in a totalitarian direction). For Hobbes, however, the main threat was social chaos, but also religious ideologies. Hobbes' sovereign (unlike religious authorities) was not concerned with the private lives of its subjects. Secular totalitarian threats were just not there in 17th-century England, and it is a mistake to see Hobbes as some kind of proto-fascist. Arguably he was just as concerned to protect human freedom as Hayek - and he was certainly opposed to totalitarianism.

Strangely, the tenor of Hobbes' thinking seems quite close to that which led to the development of game theory, one of the most significant new tools of 20th-century economics (and pioneered by Hayek's friend Oskar Morgenstern). Hobbes' suggestion that the individual should first seek peace, but, if betrayed and attacked, is justified in availing himself of 'all helps and advantages of war' to defend himself, approximates to the famous 'tit-for-tat' strategy which generally outperforms other strategies in the 'prisoner's dilemma' game. In one-off versions of the game, the outcome Hobbes predicted occurs and everybody loses (though tit-for-tatters lose less badly than others). But in iterated versions of the game, where artificial agents interact (in what could be seen as a model of society), pockets of spontaneous order and cooperation develop and thrive (providing evidence to support a Hayekian view).

I recognize the reality of spontaneous social order, though I suspect it is not quite so robust as Hayek assumes. As Hobbes (and Hayek in fact) knew from first-hand experience, civil disorder and war are real dangers, and something like Hobbes' sovereign, with strong and undisputed power, may be a necessary condition for peace in many contexts. Certain societies, especially highly cohesive ones with strong systems of morality in place, may be able to exist for long periods without the need for such an authority but history shows that civil conflict can erupt unexpectedly.

Both Hobbes and Hayek saw themselves as men of science, but appreciated also the other dimensions of human culture and the contingency of history. Both men were responding in their work to what they saw as the key social problems of their times in a rational, unsentimental and entirely secular manner. Hobbes' outlook is less colored by religious or metaphysical ideas than that of most of his contemporaries; and, of all the European neo-liberals, Hayek was probably the closest in spirit to logical empiricism, the anti-metaphysical and rigorously secular movement - exemplified in the Vienna Circle - which sought to replace obscurantist philosophies and religions with a view of the world based on science and a new understanding of logic and language.

Who cares about the compatibility or incompatibility of the thought of these two men? Why is the issue even worth raising? Because, I suggest, their differences bring to the fore very important questions about might and right, pragmatism and morality, ends and means.

I have the sense that - for better or for worse - Hayek's thinking retained traces of philosophical idealism, and this may have been what drove him to attempt to justify (certain types of) law on non-legal grounds and to place such an emphasis on human freedom. But the important questions are not what Hayek (or Hobbes) thought about this or that, but rather about what is, and what is not, the case.

Facts and values are intertwined in all discussions of social philosophy, and, if any progress is to be made, they must - no easy task! - be disentangled. The factual questions may be resolved through empirical research and reason, but questions of value will, I suspect, always remain contentious.

Little yellow men

2011-10-02T23:06:00.001-07:00

Parking spaces are at a premium in my part of town. The old 'no parking' sign has been replaced by complex permit zones and new technologies to detect and fine cheaters. Every afternoon the clearways are cleared and giant trucks carrying delinquent vehicles speed off to some outer-suburban destination. It's like a long, drawn out and slowly escalating war between motorists on the one side and the authorities and property owners on the other.

These little yellow men are survivors from a different age, an earlier and gentler stage of the war. One has the sense that they were designed with a sense of pride and a sense of humor.

Rejecting religion

2011-09-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

There is more to religion than doctrines, and much more to understanding religion than just understanding doctrines; but if the doctrines of a given religion are false, or if there is no good reason to believe they are true, then such a religion is not a live option for me.

Admittedly, some religions are less doctrinal than others, but I have found no religion which did not incorporate - as central elements - ideas which I find utterly implausible. Even Buddhism - often presented in the West as being open to a scientific understanding of the world - is committed, like other religions, to the idea of an objective moral realm, and also (at least in its Tibetan form as articulated by the Dalai Lama) to the notion of the soul as spirit, not entirely reducible to the self as understood by science.

Many people, reluctant to give up on religion entirely, admit that the doctrines they may have once believed are indeed false, but argue that there is a central core which the major religions share, a kind of essence of religious truth. When pressed to say what this core consists in, what exactly they do believe, such people reply in various ways, some more plausible than others. But I have never heard or read an account that attracts me or that I could personally endorse or adopt. For example, it's all very well to say that our minds have inbuilt limits. Of course they do, but does this fact suggest that something like what religions envisage lies beyond those limits? Often it's asserted that there is a benign force underlying reality: the evidence, I would suggest, is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Or that all is one, all is interconnected. I agree, and there is some evidence for this in physics (e.g. quantum entanglement) but how is this idea a religious one?

Religion, of course, is a very personal thing, and we all have our own deep reasons or motives for accepting or rejecting religious claims. I was a Christian until my early twenties when, one night, I suddenly realized that the burden of proof was on those who sought to affirm the claims of Christian doctrine rather than on those who sought to deny them. I say 'suddenly', but this shift in perspective happened at a time when I had been reading a lot of historical material on the Jewish background of the New Testament, and realizing that so much that seemed so special in the figure of Jesus was explicable historically. For a few weeks, I toyed with the idea of adopting the Jewish faith (as Christianity minus Jesus seemed to equal Judaism), but I found the notion of a 'chosen people' a little hard to swallow. And the notion of a personal God seemed more and more unreal. I had accepted it as part of a package of beliefs. But without those other beliefs (about God acting in history or through particular individuals or institutions), what reason was there to believe in such a being?

Neither fascist nor socialist

2011-09-17T00:44:00.000-07:00

I have been modifying and expanding the summary of my social views which currently appears as a stand-alone page under the title 'Sketch of a social philosophy'. I refer there to a particular European tradition of thought upon which I am consciously drawing and which may be characterized as both conservative and classically liberal.

"During the 1930s, a time of great political instability and polarization, a small group of European and American thinkers set out to revive and revise the classical liberal tradition. The group first came together in 1938 at a conference in Paris organized by the philosopher Louis Rougier, and was re-formed after the World War II as the Mont Pelerin Society. Its members were generally conservative, steeped in the cultural traditions of Europe, but forward-looking and seeking to apply new developments in economic theory and new political thinking to the economic and social problems of the time. Since then, of course, much has changed - new technologies have radically altered the way we communicate, and traditional and homogeneous cultures have been replaced by mixed and fragmented societies severed from their historical roots - but these scholars, largely because of the breadth and depth of their cultural understanding and their acute awareness of the contingencies of history, retain their fascination and relevance.

The European neo-liberals remained independent thinkers and did not really constitute a single school of thought. Some, like Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, favored relatively unregulated markets; others, like Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Louis Rougier, argued for a more active role in the economy for governments. Ultimately, the test of social and economic principles is whether they work in a given context - though, admittedly, there will always be an ideological element in such judgements.

Instinctively I favor the less interventionist approaches of Mises and Hayek. It's clear that command economies, such as those of the old Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe, do not work. But Hayek saw as fatally flawed not just socialism but also social democracy. Both systems may be utopian in inspiration but are oppressive and inefficient in practice. And, indeed, most European experiments in social democracy have failed miserably.

Hayek's attitude to social democracy was linked to his view that justice is not a matter of outcomes but of process, so the legal system should provide a framework for free human action that does not seek to direct it to predetermined outcomes. He was especially wary of the idea of 'social justice' which he saw as incoherent (because it is concerned with outcomes rather than process). I have some sympathy with this view, and, though I believe the unlucky and those not able to cope should be helped, I don't think it's a matter of rights or justice, but rather of benevolence or common decency. (See my short piece on rethinking rights.)

Socialist and social democratic programs may have failed, but there is a crisis also in economies more closely associated with free market approaches such as the United States, and so Hayek's optimism about spontaneous order may seem to have been unjustified. But, arguably, the financial crisis of recent years was caused (at least in large part) by inappropriate government interventions (for example, the politically motivated programs which encouraged people without means to buy homes).

Nevertheless, it can't be denied that there were failures in the financial markets also, and the expected self-regulatory mechanisms did not deliver. My explanation is that the spontaneous economic order which Hayek championed cannot be divorced from more general social values and norms, and these common values have been seriously eroded in the West in recent years. A lightly regulated system will only flourish in a moral and cohesive society. On the other hand, a proliferation of laws and regulations is no substitute for basic moral values, and may only succeed in stifling entrepreneurial and general business activity. In fact, whatever one's views on the nature of law and justice, it's undeniable that laws and regulations tend to proliferate beyond what is required to secure human freedoms or enhance other aspects of well-being."

[Since I wrote this I have been reflecting on my attachment to the writings of Thomas Hobbes which seems on the face of it difficult to reconcile with the views outlined above. More on this matter later.]

A very conservative person

2011-09-11T03:33:00.000-07:00

Having read some novels by Patricia Highsmith - and in particular The tremor of forgery in which she portrays rather patronizingly an American living abroad who makes anti-communist radio broadcasts to then communist Eastern Europe - I assumed that her own political views were liberal in the American sense. So it puzzled me a bit that I liked her as a writer. Usually writers with a liberal or progressive agenda really bother me - and so I don't bother with them.

This puzzlement was resolved when I read these words of Highsmith's friend, American playwright Phyllis Nagy (cited by Andrew Wilson in Beautiful shadow, his biography of Highsmith):

"The fact that Pat was from Texas is incredibly important for an accurate appreciation of her character. When you say things like this to people who aren't American they think it's terribly facile but Southern conservatism was deeply ingrained in her. People forget that she was a very conservative person ..."

She did, however, "... hold some very weird and contradictory views."

Patricia Highsmith was a complex character, flawed but very human. Her writing style is plain and spare and utterly non-experimental. She explores the themes of identity and morality in her fiction in very confronting ways.

Tom Ripley is her greatest creation, a likable psychopath. He only murders people (very few really) when he has to - and feels no guilt. He can kill someone in the afternoon and have a pleasant dinner, or dispose of the body during the night and really enjoy his morning coffee.

But Highsmith is acutely aware of the moral landscape that Ripley's behavior seems to challenge. In particular she is sensitive to the nuances of human communication which constitute in large measure the texture of our lives. In Ripley under ground, a suicidal artist character reads from the journal of another suicidal artist:

"Where has kindness, forgiveness gone in the world? I find more in the faces of children who sit for me, gazing at me, watching me with innocent wide eyes that make no judgment. And friends? In the moment of grappling with the enemy Death, the potential suicide calls upon them. One by one, they are not at home, the telephone doesn't answer, or if it does they are busy tonight - something quite important that they can't get away from - and one is too proud to break down and say, 'I've got to see you tonight or else!' This is the last effort to make contact. How pitiable, how human, how noble - for what is more godlike than communication? The suicide knows that it has magical powers."

Fascism and radical egoism

2011-09-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

Max Stirner (1806-1856) advocated absolute egoism: my ego is for me the only reality and the only value, and in affirming it I am simply myself. All general values and ideals (God, progress, humanity, etc.) are foreign to myself and do not concern me.

But Stirner believed that our minds are forever besieged and manipulated by such ideas and ideals which he saw as alien values, toxic abstractions:

"Man, your head is haunted ... You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons you." The Ego and its own (Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 43).

In the manner of memes (as described in recent years by Susan Blackmore and others), such ideas subject the individual to themselves: they call the tune.

On the face of it such a philosophy would encourage individualism and perhaps anarchism, and indeed Stirner's writings inspired anarchists in the 1890s and beyond. But, curiously, Stirner's ideas also inspired various German proto-fascist groups.

Leszek Kołakowski tried to make sense of this apparent paradox at a time when the chief threat to liberal democracy seemed to be from the left. Today, when the far right has regained a prominent place in the political landscape, his reflections are of even greater interest than they were when they were first published (in Polish) in 1976.

"At first sight, Nazi totalitarianism may seem the opposite of Stirner's radical individualism. But fascism was above all an attempt to dissolve the social ties created by history and replace them by artificial bonds among individuals who were expected to render explicit obedience to the state on grounds of absolute egoism. Fascist education combined the tenets of asocial egoism and unquestioning conformism, the latter being the means by which the individual secured his own niche in the system. Stirner's philosophy has nothing to say against conformism, it only objects to the Ego being subordinated to any higher principle: the egoist is free to adjust to the world if it is clear he will better himself by doing so. His 'rebellion' may take the form of utter servility if it will further his interest; what he must not do is to be bound by 'general' values or myths of humanity. The totalitarian ideal of a barrack-like society from which all real, historical ties have been eliminated is perfectly consistent with Stirner's principles: the egoist, by his very nature, must be prepared to fight under any flag that suits his convenience." (Main currents of Marxism (W.W. Norton, 2005, pp.137-138))

It seems clear to me that many of the 'historical ties' that once anchored Europeans and Americans have indeed been stripped away by various cultural and technological forces, so that large segments of the population in Western countries may now be vulnerable to something like a new form of fascism.

Jews with force

2011-08-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

Roger Cohen used the following fragments of dialogue from Philip Roth's novel Deception to bookend his recent New York Times opinion piece on anti-Semitism and Jewish identity.

The novel's protagonist, a middle-aged American writer, is speaking to his English lover.

"In England, whenever I'm in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word 'Jew', I notice that the voice always drops just a little... [That's how] you all say 'Jew'. Jews included."

When he returns to New York, he tells her that he has realized he had been missing something. What? she asks.

"Jews."

"We've got some of them in England, you know."

"Jews with force, I'm talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame."

Nicely observed. (Sits uneasily, by the way, with Cohen's worthy but rather contorted reflections.)

Anyone for chess?

2011-08-22T00:37:00.001-07:00

This picture tells a sad story about priorities and cultural decline. In a corner of the mezzanine floor of the local library (or is it a community center now?), pushed up against an air-conditioning vent and adjacent to a fire extinguisher, sits a chess table and chairs. The pieces are set up - albeit that the kings and queens are on the wrong squares (white queen should be on white, black queen on black); and albeit that one pawn and one knight have gone missing! A tradesman has left a small paint brush on the table which nobody has bothered to remove.

When the chess table first appeared a few years ago it occupied a prime site within the library, but I have it on good authority that it was virtually never used.

In itself a trivial matter, but symbolic - and indicative not only of cultural trends but also of the pitfalls of public sector decision-making.

The boat sails on

2011-08-13T00:28:00.000-07:00

The stand-alone pages (click under the Conservative tendency banner) are designed to sketch out in a concise way the political and ethical framework within which I am operating. But, since what I have written only imperfectly reflects my ideas, and also because my ideas are slowly evolving, there is a constant need to revise my notes.

I am reminded of Otto Neurath's famous image which compares our body of knowledge to a boat that must be repaired at sea: "We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry dock and reconstruct it from the best materials."

Today I put up a revised version of 'Conservatism without religion' under the new title, 'Modern conservatism'.

Sometimes I am tempted to go in a more scholarly direction. For example, I have been reading up on the philosophy of law. But, in some ways, such areas (the philosophy of mathematics is another that comes to mind) can be problematic. They appear rigorous and scholarly, but they lack a mechanism to create the convergence of views which characterizes scientific disciplines.

Debates between, say, legal positivists and supporters of natural law-based approaches - or indeed between legal positivists and legal positivists! - roll on for decades without any real resolution. Such debates produce divergence rather than convergence of opinion - growing lists of elaborate and more or less incompatible theories.

I have tried to avoid getting entangled in this sort of thing, stating my views as clearly and as plainly as I can. Not everyone will agree with what I say. There are facts and there are values, and values are necessarily subjective to some degree.

That's just how things are, and I am inclined to think that life would be a lot simpler and a lot more pleasant if that subjective element were more universally recognized and accepted.

The future of conservatism

2011-08-06T00:34:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time - not so long ago really - the older generation knew things that the younger generation wanted or needed to know. There was a sense that certain customs, certain literary or artistic or cultural standards persisted through time and might be expected to persist into the future. Objective standards, if you like.

That Western cultural tradition, that thing which we felt as our tradition, is dead. There is no 'us' any more other than fragmentary groups with little prospect of self-perpetuation.

Nothing highlights the disconnect between today's culture and the past more clearly than the slow but relentless closing off of the channels of intergenerational communication. Young people are largely self-sufficient, communicating with and seeking information from one another rather than from older mentors. And, of course, digital technologies facilitate such intragenerational information flow, freeing it from restrictions of time and distance.

Declining fertility rates in many Western countries and in Japan seem to be linked to the failure of cultural traditions. Is it not possible that a loss of confidence in those traditions might be a contributing factor to low birth rates? Look at it from the point of view of the individual who identifies with and takes his values from a culture he sees as dying. Why go to the bother and expense of having a family when there is little chance one's children would carry forward one's values?

We have learned that genes play tricks on us (as it were) in order to encourage us to reproduce - them! But what do I care about my genes? What I do care about are people, certain values, certain cultural and intellectual traditions. I feel much closer to people who share my basic values (I am not thinking politics here) than to those to whom I might have a close genetic relationship but who do not share my values.

Let us assume, then, that traditional conservatism, predicated on the assumption that key values are embodied in certain institutions (the traditional family, churches, etc.), is in terminal decline. Is there any future for conservatism? Perhaps a new form of conservatism?

I am of the view that there is a set of values which might justifiably be called conservative which will always survive the demise of particular cultural traditions: values such as independence of thought, self-reliance, self-discipline and the generous spirit which expresses itself in good manners.

Such values are timeless and not dependent on particular traditions and so are resilient to social and cultural upheaval. They stand a better chance of being passed on than culture-specific values.

But the upholders of such values will be geographically scattered, constituting - if this is not too Romantic an idea - a kind of diaspora. Their promised land is not and never will be a geopolitical entity, but simply the prospect of meaningful contact and communication, a meeting of minds in the here and now, maybe hearing echoes from the past and radiating out into an indefinite future.

Summoned by bells

2011-07-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

Schools run by, or under the auspices of, mainstream churches were once the mainstay of conservative values in many Western countries. The schoolmasters and schoolmistresses of times past were natural conservatives, valuing hierarchies of authority, almost military (or monastic?) routine, and a relatively stable body of cultural lore to be passed on - Christian texts, Greek and Roman texts, and various literary works in English and European languages.

In many ways this traditional amalgam of Greek, Roman and Christian ideas became a liability for the West because of the high prestige accorded to classical learning and literature, and the low status attached to science and technology. Nietzsche, steeped in the classical tradition, saw science as democratic and levelling. At the school I attended from the age of nine to the age of seventeen - an institution which carried the Middle Ages well into the second half of the 20th century - Latin and French were high-prestige subjects and, before some long-overdue renovations, our chemistry laboratory would have made any time-travelling alchemists feel right at home.

But there is no doubt that the West's shared cultural traditions helped to create a sense of social harmony at home and the sense of belonging to a wider world; that the widespread teaching and learning of Latin and Greek helped to create self-discipline and a sense of history; and that the tedium of regular services in the school chapel taught the invaluable but dying art of sitting still.

Back to the apes

2011-07-16T03:46:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins has been having a little trouble lately with feminists. He may think back with nostalgia to earlier decades when the world was marginally saner and marginally more intelligent and he was an evolutionary biologist who wrote popular books on evolutionary biology.

I was browsing through one of these older books recently, an elegant little tract entitled River out of Eden: a Darwinian view of life. The book is full of fascinating material, but let me focus here on a section showing that we are all more closely related than most people think.

"You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on. With every generation, the number of ancestors doubles. Go back g generations and the number of ancestors is 2 multiplied by itself g times: 2 to the power g. Except that, without leaving our armchair, we can quickly see that it cannot be so. To convince ourselves of this, we have only to go back a little way - say, to the time of Jesus, almost exactly two thousand years ago. If we assume, conservatively, four generations per century ... two thousand years amounts to a mere eighty generations... Two multiplied by itself 80 times is a formidable number, a 1 followed by 24 noughts, a trillion American trillion. You had a million million million million ancestors who were contemporaries of Jesus, and so did I! But the total population of the world at that time was a fraction of a negligible fraction of the number of ancestors we have just calculated.

Obviously we have gone wrong somewhere, but where? We did the calculation right. The only thing we got wrong was our assumption about doubling up in every generation. In effect, we forgot that cousins marry. I assumed that we each have eight great-grandparents. But any child of a first-cousin marriage has only six great-grandparents, because the cousins' shared grandparents are in two separate ways great-grandparents to the children. 'So what?' you may ask. People occasionally marry their cousins ... but it surely doesn't happen often enough to make a difference? Yes it does, because 'cousin' for our purposes includes second cousins, fifth cousins, sixteenth cousins and so forth. When you count cousins as distant as that, every marriage is a marriage between cousins. You sometimes hear people boasting about being a distant cousin of the Queen, but it is rather pompous of them, because we are all distant cousins of the Queen, and of everybody else, in more ways than can ever be traced."

Seeking to get one of his students to reason along these lines, Dawkins asked her "to make an educated guess as to how long ago her most recent common ancestor with me might have lived. Looking hard at my face, she unhesitatingly replied, in a slow, rural accent, 'Back to the apes.' An excusable intuitive leap, but it is approximately 10,000 percent wrong. It would suggest a separation measured in millions of years. The truth is that the most recent ancestor she and I shared would possibly have lived no more than a couple of centuries ago, probably well after William the Conqueror. Moreover, we were certainly cousins in many different ways simultaneously."

Classic Dawkins.

The ground of being

2011-07-11T00:42:00.000-07:00

For almost the whole of human history - until, say, the 19th century - the intellectually curious could expect their culture's deepest and most universal explanatory systems to be not only intellectually but also emotionally satisfying. Mythic, religious or metaphysical systems provided explanations (albeit inadequate as we now see) of both the natural and the social/moral world.

Our best theories of physics, by contrast, omit - as they must - all the things our complex brains seem primarily designed to deal with. And the men (and very few women) at the forefront of research in physics and related sciences often come across as lacking in social awareness.

Writing style (in non-technical contexts) gives a lot away about a person, and so often, when reading autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books by leading scientists, I find myself making allowances for what seems to be a certain childish quality, a lack of critical or social or psychological awareness or sophistication - even sometimes a certain moral immaturity and recklessness. It seems almost as though - as with autistic savants - these people's brains are not 'wasting' any time or energy on the immensely complex processing involved in being socially (and morally?) aware.

There are exceptions, of course. Seth Lloyd's book Programming the universe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is not only beautifully written in a spare and restrained style, but it is also saying something of profound importance. Lloyd takes the tradition of digital physics associated with such names as Edward Fredkin and John Wheeler and updates it to encompass the concept - and the reality - of quantum computing.

Wheeler suggested that the bit (i.e. information) was the fundamental building block of reality rather than the physical particle; Lloyd and his colleagues deal not in bits but in qubits (quantum bits). The cosmos is not a classical computer but rather a quantum computer - computing itself. A more recent work by Vlatko Vedral, Decoding reality (OUP, 2010), makes similar claims.

According to this way of thinking, in order to understand any complex system the most important thing is to understand how information is represented and processed within that system. But underlying all systems are just a handful of simple logical operations. There is something very beautiful about this, and I am sometimes tempted to devote myself in a serious way to learning more about these fundamental processes - and even writing about them. But I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it. Fascinating as these ideas are in general terms, I fear that the deeper one goes, the less interesting they become - except in a technical sense. The puzzles of quantum computing are fascinating - but no more so than any other complex joint problem-solving exercise. The fascination is not the emotionally satisfying fascination associated with a global understanding of one's place in nature.

My provisional conclusion is that ultimately our ordinary lives are more complex and interesting than these fundamental processes. To imagine otherwise is to exhibit traces of theological thinking, the old sense that there is something very wonderful at the heart of reality - God, the Ground of Being. But it's looking increasingly likely that there's just a whole lot of computing going on, willy-nilly, and without a master programmer.

Karma

2011-07-01T01:13:00.000-07:00

I walked past a disabled man the other day who was rattling along in his motorized wheelchair with the brand name emblazoned on the back in big letters: KARMA.

Since karma is the supposed moral law of cause and effect whereby the sum of a person's actions is carried forward from one life to the next, I wondered what the makers of the wheelchair had in mind. A little joke?

Or do they really believe that their clients - at least those of them who were born disabled - are paying for evil deeds committed in previous lives?

Conservative and libertarian

2011-06-24T00:24:00.000-07:00

Though much philosophical and ideological debate, polemic and argument can seem like a waste of time (and frankly much of it is), there will always be a place for it if only as an intellectual safety valve or as the mark of a free society. But can such debate be a truth-seeking activity?

Worldviews or ideologies are a mixture of facts (or purported facts) and (inevitably subjective) values. They can be partially assessed in terms of the facts (or falsehoods) they rely on, in terms of how well they reflect social and psychological realities, and also in terms of internal consistency or coherence.

Though internal consistency doesn't necessarily imply truth, testing coherence can serve a useful (if limited) purpose. Amongst those whose ideas are different but close, discussion can be productive. If I generally think like you but we disagree about this or that, I might be inclined to look again at those issues from your point of view, and you from mine. Two minds which are fairly close trying to reconcile areas of disagreement are not unlike one person finding incompatible elements in his own thinking and trying to bring them into some kind of harmony. There are certainly circumstances when explicitly setting out one's ideas in writing or in a discussion does make a difference.

Such clarifying discourse, however, is pretty rare, as most of the time - whether we mean to or not - we are just playing games, scoring points, defending long held points of view without really putting our beliefs on the line. And these problems are magnified when the setting is institutional and the participants are professional scholars.

The sciences are tethered to reality by strict conventions and procedures. Predictions are made and tested. Adverse results may often be explained away, but adverse results do make a dent in the credibility of those who support the theory in question. By contrast, in non-empirical areas (mathematics is a special case and can be seen as quasi-empirical in fact) the prizes go to those with the most persuasive manners, the most dogged commitment to scholarly tasks (and to writing grant applications), and the most influential friends and allies. Truth has little to do with it, and the proliferation of theories of human rights, justice, morality, equality, etc. is just about as far from science (which is marked over time by drastic pruning and convergence) as it is possible to get.

There is also the unfortunate fact that scholars with left-wing or (so-called) progressive views have, to a large extent, taken over the teaching of the humanities in universities as well as most of the important journals. One example: a preference for "creative" and "novel" approaches by the Journal of Social Philosophy is combined with a clear left-wing bias. The journal, edited by Carol C. Gould, "seeks to publish creative approaches to practical and normative issues ... such as those arising from economic and other forms of globalization, violent political conflict, and the multiplicity of cultural experiences worldwide." It "gives priority to the development of novel theoretical frameworks from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, human rights and global justice."

So is social philosophy just a cover for ideological posturing and empty talk? Not necessarily. But, clearly, the sort of thing promoted as social philosophy by the Journal of Social Philosophy is far too influenced by current ideological fashions. It is all too easy covertly or unwittingly to build values and biases into theories and models in the humanities, and the "novel theoretical frameworks" being sought are sure to be shot through with implicit values. A different style of social philosophy could, though, usefully identify hidden values and biases in social scientific research. Scientific disciplines must eschew values if they are to be truly scientific but reflection on such disciplines can legitimately incorporate substantive and explicit discussion of values as a central element.

System building in social philosophy and related areas is problematic. The countless systems and theories which have been elaborated are just so many incompatible and ultimately crude attempts to encapsulate the immense complexity of social reality into a linguistic construct - thin and static models of a dynamic world. (Computer simulations may, however, manage to capture important aspects of social reality.)

For me, then, social philosophy is mainly critical and analytical, but it can also involve the articulation of principles, directions, ideals and preferences.

The tradition of social thought which I favor draws on both conservatism and libertarianism because these currents of thought not only - as I see it - reflect the realities and the possibilities of human nature, but also because they do not appeal to grievances and resentments as leftist ideologies tend to do. Conservatives respect the cockeyed wisdom of tradition, libertarians the rationality of ordinary people (imperfect though it is and we are).

Both conservatives and libertarians embrace the present and, though they look to the future and hope, they do not, like radical leftists, look for salvation there... Life - when all is said and done - is good.

Consciousness in a brown paper bag

2011-06-20T00:13:00.001-07:00

Democracy, debt and delusion

2011-06-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

The Economist's 'Buttonwood' recently cited a BCA Research report which predicts - on the basis of some plausible assumptions concerning the continuation of current voting patterns relating to age, ethnicity and gender, and demographic trends - that the Republican Party will fade as a major force, and that even Texas will be a solidly Democratic state by 2030.

BCA believes that the deficit problems in the U.S. will not be tackled until 2013, and (this is based on new research from the Pew Research Center) that spending cuts - especially to Medicare and Social Security - will be resisted by voters. Taxes will rise substantially:

"[H]igher taxes will lead to lower labour supply and slower capital accumulation. Eventually, further tax hikes will become self-defeating. At this stage, the U.S. will likely experience a fiscal and political crisis on a scale that has few parallels in history."

The problems of American democracy are mirrored in many other Western democracies today, and they go beyond the fortunes of particular parties and indeed beyond politics.

The Western liberal democratic model seemed until relatively recently to have stood the test of time and to have achieved a degree of stability. But increased populism and the gradual erosion of traditional institutions within Western countries has led inexorably to chronic budget deficits and accumulating public debt.

In the dark days of the 1930s and 40s, a group of European and American thinkers tried to articulate a social philosophy which had at its core the key principles of economic liberalism. Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek played leading roles in the movement, but there were many others, now mostly forgotten.

They shared, by and large, a belief that human reason could help to define economic and social possibilities and impossibilities as a guide to policy-making. They developed a very sophisticated understanding of the way free markets operate and are able to process and assimilate complex information. But their thought also had a socio-political dimension.

These thinkers shared a distrust of majoritarian democracy which they saw as a potentially fatal flaw in Western political thought and practice.

It is only in recent decades that the complex, traditional structures and institutions of the West (structures which often embodied privilege and elitism, but also social complexity and autonomy) have been effectively dismantled - leaving what? Naked majoritarian democracy and its corollaries, political populism and an unsustainable welfare state.

The idea of freedom, that as far as possible people should determine their own lives, is a powerful one, and most Western countries have managed - until now - to deliver a high degree of freedom with social order and prosperity. But the relative freedom and prosperity enjoyed in the West over the past two centuries or so was not just the result of a particular political model. It was also dependent on deep social, cultural and historical factors or preconditions.

And, arguably, those preconditions for an effective and prosperous free society are no longer in place in the U.S. and many other Western countries.

Two kinds of people

2011-06-06T02:29:00.000-07:00

We all have a tendency to think in terms of simple dichotomies, and often these dichotomies are strongly value-based and involve taking sides (good and bad, friend and foe, right and left ...).

The English writer Alan Bennett recalled that, as a child, he often saw inanimate objects as either good or bad, friendly or not friendly: one shoe brush (maybe the one for putting on the polish) was bad, the other (for polishing) good; one spoon was good, its fellow was bad, and so on.

Needless to say, these tendencies are stronger in some people than in others. They often manifest themselves in sporting or political contexts. Some people can watch a sporting contest or listen to a political debate without taking sides. Others - perhaps more naturally competitive - just can't be impartial.

A particularly amusing case relates to an old controversy between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz whose respective claims to have invented the calculus led to much dispute at the time. The mathematician Gregory Chaitin couldn't resist joining the fray - more than 300 years later! - and, what's more, highlighting the personal and moral qualities of the two long-dead antagonists:

"Newton was a great physicist, but he was definitely inferior to Leibniz both as a mathematician and as a philosopher. And Newton was a rotten human being ... Leibniz invented the calculus, published it ... and then was astonished to learn that Newton, who had never published a word on the subject, claimed that Leibniz had stolen it all from him. Leibniz could hardly take Newton seriously!

But it was Newton who won, not Leibniz.

Newton bragged that he had destroyed Leibniz and rejoiced in Leibniz's death ...

Morally, what a contrast! Leibniz was such an elevated soul that he found good in all philosophies ... It pains me to say [really?] that Newton enjoyed witnessing the executions of counterfeiters he pursued as Master of the Mint." [Meta math! The quest for omega (Vintage Books, 2005), p. 57]

Later, Chaitin pities Voltaire, who satirized Leibniz and praised Newton:

"Poor Voltaire - if he had read Newton's private papers, he would have realized that he had backed the wrong man!" [p. 59]

Midgets on my shoulders

2011-05-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

I have previously mentioned my failed search for a 'thinking master', a reliable guide to approaching and assessing the most important intellectual and moral questions. Perhaps it was a good thing that I never found one; perhaps even seeking such a guide is a sign of intellectual indolence. Certainly, George Steiner's study of maîtres à penser and their disciples which I cited in that previous post suggests that the vast majority of such relationships end in disillusionment. This is not to say, however, that we are not utterly dependent on what others have discovered and thought and said.

Isaac Newton wrote that he had seen further than other men only because he had stood on the shoulders of giants. Steven E. Landsburg cites an anonymous variation on this saying: "If I have not seen as far as other men, it is because midgets are standing on my shoulders."

Landsburg may or may not be an intellectual giant but - to his great credit - he is not afraid of addressing the big questions, and often brings to bear upon them a refreshing candor and directness coupled with ruthlessly rigorous logic (usually).* I have a few reservations about some of his positions, but I believe his general approach is well grounded.

One of his most interesting ideas relates to what people really believe. Wisely, he is very skeptical about what people say in response to survey questions, and he thinks that much of today's anti-religious literature (including Richard Dawkins' efforts) is based on the false premise that people really believe what they say (and perhaps think!) they believe.

According to Landsburg, "Dawkins undercuts his own position when he points to statistics showing that ... there is no correlation between religiosity and crime. His point is that religion does not make people better, but he misses the larger point that if religion doesn't make people better, then most people must not be terribly religious."

Different parts of our brain can in effect 'believe' different, incompatible things, and it's often only when circumstances require or force a single choice that the inconsistency is noted and resolved - one way or the other. So most purportedly religious people only believe in the tenets of their religion when there is no real cost to them. They believe that they believe, but it doesn't matter all that much so their beliefs are what Landsburg calls "disposable".

"Suppose you could take a devoutly religious person," he writes, "ask him, 'Are the tenets of your religion true?' and somehow convince him that the life of his child depends on getting the answer right. I'm guessing that nine times out of ten, you'd find yourself confronting a born-again infidel. The only reason that rarely happens is that there's rarely an occasion when getting the right answer actually matters."

*See The big questions: tackling the problems of philosophy with ideas from mathematics, economics and physics (Pocket Books, 2010). See also http://www.the-big-questions.com/

Dollar bears

2011-05-25T01:43:00.000-07:00

The U.S. dollar seems to be losing its status as a store of secure value and it's difficult not to see this both as a contributing factor to, and as symbolic of, a world-wide loss of confidence in the United States itself.

A Bloomberg report published today makes it clear that most of the top-performing global fund managers are sticking to their "long-term bets against the U.S. dollar even as the currency has rallied more than 4 percent since the end of last month." Despite the recent rally, the dollar is still down 12 percent in the past year against a trade-weighted basket of six currencies.

Alessio de Longis, a New York-based currency strategist, was quoted as saying that "the long-term fundamentals still look terrible for the dollar... The U.S. has worse monetary policy and worse fiscal policy than other countries, and that is a bad combination..."

Bill Gross of Pimco said that investors should "revolt" against Federal Reserve-engineered low interest rates and seek alternatives to U.S. bonds. Michael Gomez, also with Pimco, said that Asian currencies were only part way through a multiyear appreciation against the dollar. "We think this is a powerful trend," he said.

The rising Chinese currency (the yuan) is not yet convertible but many believe that Asian countries such as South Korea and Malaysia will let their currencies climb along with the yuan. Other currencies to get a favorable mention in the Bloomberg report were the Australian and New Zealand dollars, the Norwegian krone and the Swedish krona.

Anthony Norris of Wells Fargo thinks the U.S. dollar will rally later in the year but still believes the dollar has to decline in the longer term.

There are, of course, dissenting views, but the fate of the dollar rests with interest rates and government finances, and U.S. monetary and fiscal policies do not inspire confidence.

The smelly pony

2011-05-20T01:32:00.000-07:00

Modern psychology has confirmed the deep psychological insights of a few 19th century thinkers (most notably, perhaps, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche) about the extent to which we are strangers to ourselves. We often do not see ourselves as clearly as others - even chance acquaintances - see us, or know our own minds.

I once read an account of a young woman who realized with great surprise that she had really hated the pony she thought she had loved as a girl. All girls love their ponies, don't they? And her younger self had duly conformed. But, looking back, she suddenly realized that that girl did not love her pony at all. It was evil-tempered and evil-smelling. A burden was lifted, an unnecessary self-deception revealed.

I can think of similar examples from my own adolescence. My 'love' of playing cricket lasted into young manhood, and it took a mere acquaintance (an older man, the captain of a team for which I was playing) to ask the obvious question - and to dispel the illusion. Again, a burden was lifted. At my father's initiative, I had had extensive training in the game, and, until that slightly embarrassing (but liberating) conversation, I continued to play it out of habit or duty or a delusion, not that I was good at it (I clearly wasn't), but that I enjoyed it.

Now, this may be drawing a long bow, but I recently wondered whether my love for the English language might not be another case of 'the smelly pony'. English is a brute of a language to use well. I don't know about you, but, even as a native speaker, I find it a struggle sometimes. I don't really feel at home in my own language!

English is classed as Germanic, but is really a mixture of Germanic and Romance. The double vocabulary (Anglo-Saxon/Norman), reflected in legal phrases like 'last will and testament' and 'storm and tempest', is well known and results in an unnecessarily large and unwieldy lexicon. But English sentence structure - not just the lexicon - seems also to have been influenced by the French-speaking Normans, to the extent that German sentence structures sound strange to us. (For English and the Romance languages the basic word order for transitive sentences is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), whereas German has verb-final order in subordinate clauses.) I wonder if native speakers of, on the one hand, Germanic languages like German or Swedish, or, on the other, of French or the other Romance languages, ever feel daunted by - not at home in - their own tongue. I doubt it.

Filthy lucre

2011-05-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

My thoughts have been more than usually concerned with financial matters of late as I attempt to rejig my modest investments in the light of the changing economic and financial environment, and bring them into line with my assessment of the current risks and opportunities out there. It's difficult to know where to put one's savings these days, with currency turmoil and sovereign debt problems adding to the usual uncertainties. I may in the future have a go at talking in detail about these matters though I still have a residual sense (derived from a rather old-fashioned upbringing) that money is not a proper subject for polite discourse!

The most unlikely people have spoken in praise of money - and in the most unlikely circumstances. The English television and screen writer Dennis Potter was interviewed on Channel 4 by Melvyn Bragg a short time before his death from cancer. He was in pain, and occasionally sipped a morphine-based concoction from a flask. He spoke of his early life, his work (he was trying to complete a final television drama), politics, English culture, and of his desire to murder Rupert Murdoch. Despite his left-wing views, Potter admitted to a strong preference for traveling first class. A disarming aside stuck in my memory. "Money - I like it," he said.

If lefties and the dying normally refrain from speaking in praise of cash, so do other categories of people, including Romantics and romantics. And, of course, the traditionally religious. The notion of holy poverty ("Blessed are the poor ...") is a major New Testament theme and a strong element in most Christian traditions, including Roman Catholicism.

So this couplet by Hilaire Belloc, a writer who strongly identified with the Roman Catholic church, has rather more punch than it would had it come from the pen of a worldly cynic:

I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Islamists and Nazis

2011-05-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

If ever one is tempted to doubt, as I sometimes am, that ideas matter - I am speaking of ideas without technological applications - one has only to consider the havoc wreaked in recent years by violent Islamists. The pattern and manner of their actions could in no way be explained by economic or narrowly political factors. Recruiting young men and women (even children sometimes) as suicide bombers could only happen in an environment where all notions of decency and love of life had been replaced by poisonous myths, resentment, hatred, a cult of death and whatever else constitutes the ideology of violent Islamism.

I have in recent weeks been posting on this general topic as I educate myself on some of the main figures and groups involved. Paul Berman's book The flight of the intellectuals (Melville House, 2010) has been my main source. Berman has a sharp turn of phrase - for example, he refers to Yusuf al-Qaradawi as "the theologian of the human bomb" - but, more importantly, he has been scrupulous - as far as I can tell - in his presentation of (mainly) other people's research.

Two things struck me particularly: one was the influence of Romanticism on the Islamist cult of death; the second was the closeness of Islamism to extreme Western political ideologies, left and right.

The writings of Hassan al-Banna - founder of the Muslim Brotherhood - seem to have been as much concerned with overturning the Western cultural and political establishment as with religious preoccupations. Though his focus remained on early Islamic ideas and history, he was keen to incorporate modern notions into his ideology and was particularly impressed by the extreme right-wing movements which were flourishing in Europe in the 1920s. The Muslim Brotherhood started in Egypt as a very small, seemingly insignificant group. Al-Banna had great plans for it, however.

A few years later, he wrote of the potential power of small groups with charismatic leaders, citing the example of the Prophet Mohammed. He cited other examples also, though just two from the modern era. One was Ibn Saud, founder of modern Saudi Arabia; the other was Adolf Hitler!

"... And who would have believed that that German workingman, Hitler, would ever obtain such immense influence and as successful a realization of his aims as he has?" (Cited Berman, p. 31)

In 1936, in Palestine, the 'Arab Revolt' against the British and the Zionists broke out. "The most violent and intransigent of the Palestinian leaders was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Al-Banna revered the mufti. He pledged support. He launched a solidarity campaign..." (Berman p. 31)

Membership of the Muslim Brotherhood increased rapidly during this period and reached about two hundred thousand by 1938. Berman's description brings out elements which are suggestive of fascism:

"It was a religious movement, pious and observant. It was intellectually vigorous. It was educationally active. The Brotherhood was athletics-oriented (the Boy Scouts were a direct influence). And welfare-oriented. The Brotherhood was also paramilitary, if only covertly, with an exterior appearance of law-abiding cautiousness. The Brotherhood cultivated the principles of discipline, obedience and adulation of its own Supreme Guide, who turned out to be Hassan al-Banna himself. Each new member swore an oath of loyalty to al-Banna. And the Brotherhood was a revolutionary movement on the grandest of scales." (Berman, pp. 31-32) It sought to subsume local nationalisms into a broader idea of Islamic unity.

One of the most fascinating - and shocking - features of Berman's book is the elaboration of the intimate links between the Nazis and key figures in the Islamic world, most notably Amin al-Husseini, al-Banna's "hero and inspiration" and his greatest ally outside of Egypt.

"Haj Amin al-Husseini, [...] when his time of desperate troubles came, would look to al-Banna, the most powerful of his own comrades for help, and would receive it too. And so began a three-way dance - between the Grand Mufti and the Nazi leaders, on one hand, and between the Grand Mufti and al-Banna, on the other." (Berman p. 67)

Rather than attempting to detail the dealings the Grand Mufti (who saw the Nazis as natural allies) had with Hitler and Himmler, I will quote a passage from a book by Matthias Küntzel whose "angry tone" seemed to Berman "well struck":

"The Mufti only ever criticized the Nazi policy when he feared that Jews might escape the Holocaust. He was on friendly terms with Heinrich Himmler, whom he admired. Their friendship was, however, strained when in 1943 Himmler wanted (as a propaganda stunt and in return for the release of twenty thousand German prisoners) to permit five thousand Jewish children to emigrate - and therefore to survive. The Mufti, who, according to a German government official, 'would prefer all of them (the Jews) to be killed,' fought tirelessly against this plan. With success! The children were dispatched to the gas chambers. The mufti showed special interest in reacting to decisions by the governments of Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to allow some thousands of Jewish children accompanied by responsible adults to leave for Palestine. It would be 'appropriate and more expedient,' he wrote promptly to the Bulgarian Foreign Minister, 'to prevent the Jews from emigrating from your country and send them somewhere they will be under strict control, for example to Poland.' Another success! Already issued emigration permits were withdrawn and the salvation of the Jewish children prevented." (Cited Berman, pp. 94-95.)

This was the man Hassan al-Banna welcomed as a hero into Egypt after the war: " ... this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle." (From a 1946 address by al-Banna to the Arab League, cited Berman, p. 106.)

Such attitudes are still alive and well within the Islamist movement as anyone who follows current affairs will know well. What is surprising to me is that such notions are held, not just by the uneducated, but also by supposedly learned figures within the Muslim world.

In the 1980s, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi wrote a book expounding al-Banna's ideas (including the notion of a massive jihad and world domination). Al-Qaradawi has been portrayed by Tariq Ramadan as the greatest of scholarly authorities on al-Banna's thought. But these three sentences, from a transcript of one of al-Qaradawi's television sermons (broadcast by Al Jazeera in 2009), suggest that something is profoundly wrong, not just with the scholarly judgement and moral perspective of the speaker, but with the politico-religious thought-world which the speaker and many of his listeners inhabit:

"Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated the issue - he managed to put them in their place." (Cited Berman, p. 78)

The Islamist ideology is simply crass and credulous, morally bankrupt, intellectually null and void. It represents a tragic betrayal of all that is beautiful, all that is subtle and all that is fine in the cultural and intellectual traditions of the Islamic world.

Islamic death cult

2011-04-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

"The Children are the Holy Martyrs of Tomorrow."

[Hamas kindergarten motto]

Paul Berman's account of the Islamist movement and of the failure of Western intellectuals to come to terms with it [The flight of the intellectuals (Melville House, 2010)] makes depressing reading. The movement, which began as an attempt to rejuvenate Islam by returning to its early sources, developed mainly in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th century and crystallized in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and related groups in other countries.

Hassan al-Banna, founder (in 1928) of the Muslim Brotherhood, created "the original institutional model for what has come to be known as 'Islamism' - with the suffix 'ism' trailing after Islam to distinguish al-Banna's political and more-than-political twentieth century renewal movement from the ancient religion itself." (Berman, p. 33) Tariq Ramadan, al-Banna's Swiss-born grandson, has often defended the reform movement and Hassan al-Banna from accusations of indulging in or promoting violence. He has claimed that his grandfather was philosophically opposed to violence, and any violence perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood or its offshoots represented aberrations.

For example, Ramadan has admitted that al-Qaeda's history does trace back to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he has insisted that the violent elements within the Brotherhood from which al-Qaeda and other such groups derived were rogue elements associated with Sayyid Qubt rather than Hassan al-Banna.

It turns out, however, that Qubt was mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, and had close links with Tariq Ramadan's father, Said Ramadan, who - like Tariq - was a devoted follower of Hassan al-Banna.

Qubt was profoundly influenced in his youth by the Romantic movement, and wrote, in Berman's words, "strikingly original" commentaries on the Koran which were "drawn from the heart." The commentaries were published in a magazine edited by Said Ramadan, and formed the core of Qubt's "gigantic ... masterwork, In the Shade of the Qur'an - this mega-exegesis which, having emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, has gone on to influence Islamist movements around the world, not just organizations like the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood but the Iranian revolution (in a Persian translation by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic) and the Afghani Islamists (in a Dari translation by Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president of Afghanistan), even apart from al Qaeda." (Berman, p. 141)

What is particularly ironic is that this tradition of Islamic thought and action draws not just on Islamic, Arab and Middle Eastern roots, but also on Western notions such as fascism and socialism (Qubt in his youth had been a secular socialist) - and Romanticism.

The Romantic cult of death found a receptive audience in these 'reformers' of Islam. Qubt "pictured the entire world hurtling toward a catastrophic crisis, which he interpreted along paranoid and apocalyptic lines... [H]is vision of an Islamic vanguard establishing a revolutionary Islamic state somewhere on earth and using that one lonely outpost to export Islamic revolution to the rest of the Muslim world and then to everywhere else, his vision of the Koranic utopia to come, the resurrected Caliphate, and his dedication, meanwhile, to martyrdom - all of this was visibly extreme. His whole instinct was to take al-Banna's already pop-eyed Mussolinian idea about resurrecting the Islamic Empire and give it a desperado extra twist." (Berman, p.147)

Even without that extra twist, al-Banna's original ideas are quite bad enough. "Degradation and dishonor," wrote the revered founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, "are the results of the love of this world and the fear of death. Therefore prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death." (Cited Berman, p. 33)

Nobody should hesitate to speak out against these pernicious and perverted ideas.

Islamism and the extreme left

2011-04-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

When Jules Monnerot was writing his Sociologie du communisme in the late 1940s (see 'Possessed by the truth'), and for some decades thereafter, the greatest threat to Western democracy and economic liberalism seemed to many to be Marxism-Leninism and the communist states which exemplified this ideology. Western radicals were generally committed to Marxism in one form or another, and many had links of a sentimental or more substantial nature with the Soviet Union or other communist states.

Monnerot, seeking to explain the appeal of this ideology, made historical comparisons with Islam. His polemical purpose was not to attack Islam, however, which seemed at the time to be a tradition in decline and primarily of historical interest, but rather to attack Marxism-Leninism.

It is something of an irony that, only a few decades after Monnerot wrote, the tables have turned and it is Marxism-Leninism which is now of historical interest, whereas political Islam - or Islamism - is ascendant once more. In geopolitical terms, the Cold War threat does seem to have been replaced by the Islamist threat, but ideologically the situation is not so simple. Leftist and anarchist groups - which still find inspiration in the writings of 19th and 20th-century radical thinkers - are flourishing, and occasionally join forces with the Islamists in seeking to undermine the status quo.

One thing that particularly interests me in Monnerot's analysis is the concept of subversion. The liberal elites in the West in the second half of the 20th century generally did not take the notion seriously, and made fun of (or demonized) those whose love of their country and/or their way of life led them to be deeply suspicious of those who sought to promote communist ideas or to engage in (or to protect those engaged in) the process of supplying sensitive information to foreign powers.

In Patricia Highsmith's novel, The tremor of forgery, set amongst American and European expatriates and tourists in Tunisia at the height of the Cold War, there is a character I quite warmed to who secretly recorded weekly talks promoting American values which were broadcast to the countries of Eastern Europe. He was a good-hearted and serious soul who was (predictably) patronized by the sophisticated American writer whom he befriended. The writer-character called him (but not to his face) OWL (for Our Way of Life).

OWL acts as a counterweight to the relativizing and amoral forces which dominate in this novel and typically dominate in Highsmith's fictional world. He represents a much-maligned tradition of boring and reassuring decency that I find very attractive - but such an attitude is usually tethered to an actual social order which supports it.

Socially, so much has changed, of course, since those times. America and other Western countries are scarcely recognizable. We don't seem to have the option of that simple patriotism any more. The new patriots are all too often loud and xenophobic, seeking to regain something that has been lost rather than - as in the past - simply being quietly proud of their country, its customs and its history.

Some might say, then, that there is nothing left to subvert. I disagree. Despite all the ugliness and dysfunctionality of Western societies at present, they still embody notions of decency and political and economic freedom. And those violent groups which join in street protests against austerity measures or who organize their own violent protests and attacks on property at various economic forums are clearly bent on attacking and undermining this system which still delivers - in varying degrees - freedom, prosperity and order.

Islamists of various kinds - from the openly violent to the ambiguously intellectual - have been and will remain in an uneasy relationship with the extreme left. Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan has expressed support for anti-globalization protests and many anarchists and leftists have seen in him and others like him useful allies.

As Paul Berman writes: "On the activist far left, some of the anti-globalist radicals and the die-hard enemies of McDonalds saw in Ramadan, because of his denunciations of American imperialism and Zionism and his plebian agitations, a tribune of progressive Islam, even if his religious severities grated on left-wing sensibilities." [The flight of the intellectuals (Melville House, 2010, p. 17)]

The recent killing of the Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni is a tragic illustration of the paradoxes inherent in the de facto alliance between Islamist groups and the far left.

Gremlins of the blood

2011-04-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

My father suffered a massive stroke, but made a remarkable recovery. Almost as remarkable was his dramatic dietary reformation, a sudden switch to a radically healthy diet: great bags of apples, raw carrots, yogurt ...

Over a period of time he regained his ability to speak and write, but his speech was slurred and error-prone in the early stages of recovery. Once, he referred to the oxygen-carrying blood protein as "hemagoblin". This term was subsequently pluralized by his children into a facetious explanation for any mysterious illness.

On another occasion, we were discussing a politician who, he said, "had a ball in both courts."

Possessed by the truth

2011-04-04T21:35:00.000-07:00

During those decades of the 20th century when communist regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere seemed to be thriving, constituting sources of inspiration for Western leftists and prompting fear and loathing on the part of conservatives, communism was frequently compared with Islam.

For example, the French thinker Jules Monnerot made such a comparison in his Sociologie du communisme (1949).

A case can certainly be made that ideologies like Marxism-Leninism operate like religions, albeit without the supernatural dimension. In particular, there is a strong in-group/out-group dynamic and a sense that there is an essential truth at the heart of the ideology, the total acceptance of which is a prerequisite for being counted amongst the faithful.

But why single out Islam as a point of comparison - why not any religion? Basically because, like Marxism-Leninism, Islam has a detailed plan for a universal and supposedly egalitarian social order. Islam, writes Monnerot, "draws on resentments, and organizes and streamlines the impulses that set men against the societies in which they are born."

Just as, claims Monnerot, communists deployed an "historical myth" which was "apt to fanaticize men", so too did the Fatimids of Egypt and the Safavids of Persia.

For Monnerot, Stalin was like the Muslim "commander of the faithful". In communism, as in Islam, "the believer does not think of himself as a 'believer': he is in possession of the truth - or, better put, he takes the thing that possesses him for the truth. This truth inspires in him an active attachment that truth, in a scientific sense, doesn't inspire and never asks for."

Modernity is characterized by relatively autonomous spheres of activity and relatively autonomous institutions coexisting and creating a complex society in which there is space for individual privacy and freedom.

Communism, by contrast, is a "total social phenomenon" that breaks with the "autonomy of spheres of action" characteristic of modernity. And radical political Islam or Islamism may be characterized in a similar way.

Monnerot's mention of the "resentments" that Islam putatively draws on to feed subversive impulses recalls another (related) tradition of European social thought which associates populist radicalism with Jewish and Christian traditions. But that is another story ...

The trouble with religion

2011-03-28T22:47:00.000-07:00

The trouble with religion is that it is many things, that it can be understood in many different ways, so it is very difficult to say anything unequivocal about it. This applies to religion in general, and to specific religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Recently I quoted some unequivocal remarks of a negative nature which Ernest Renan made about Islam (see 'Europe and Islam'). This 19th-century historian of religion and Semitic languages had an unfortunate penchant for rhetorical excess and did not restrict his negative remarks to Islam. He referred to the Pentateuch (the early books of the Old Testament) as "the first code of religious terrorism in history." Though he did praise certain later books of the Hebrew Bible, in which he saw the beginnings of a new, purified religion, I doubt that he had many Jewish friends. (Or any Muslim ones!)

One reason why it is difficult to talk in a sensible way about religion relates to semantics. Any common noun is defined by use - it does not necessarily have a meaning which it is possible to define precisely. I won't go into the intricacies of this idea, which Wittgenstein elaborated in his later writings, because I think it is relatively uncontroversial and really quite simple. We tend to think sometimes that, if there is a word, there should be a precise concept 'behind' that word. But this is not so. Think of the word 'game', and the numerous activities that may be described as games, from football to solitaire. What essential features do they have in common?

Likewise with religion: the traditions we call religions or denominations can be very different from one another and don't necessarily share an essential element. For example, there is a world of difference between someone who identifies as a liberal Protestant and who doesn't commit to any specific doctrines, and an evangelical Christian who believes in the literal truth of the book of Genesis, etc.

Another problem is that religion is intensely personal and bound up with self-image and identity. So an attack on a particular religion or set of beliefs can be (felt as) an attack on a person or people, though it is not meant as such.

The situation here is not dissimilar to that involving strongly held political views, and indeed some ideologies operate in a similar way to religions.

I have a broadly scientific view of the world in that I think the only justified beliefs are those for which there is empirical evidence of some kind. I recognize, however, that we have a propensity - maybe even a need - to believe things which go beyond reason and evidence.

Renan, for instance, valued science and renounced the idea of a personal God and all religious dogmas, but he retained a strong belief in something very like what Christians call providence. In a striking image, he compares us to operators at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, weaving the reverse side of a tapestry we do not see. This belief in the benevolent 'Machiavellianism' of nature leads to a sense of acceptance, a Stoic commitment to conform to nature's purpose. Like Hegel and other idealists, he believed that humanity is moving forward towards perfection through a succession of imperfect forms. Renan was astute enough, however, to see that human progress is no simple, straightforward matter, and spoke of 'oscillations', each advance being followed by a temporary setback.

In my view, Renan was right to reject dogmatic and institutional religion and to value science. But his metaphysical beliefs about nature's purpose, etc., while not incompatible with science and reason, strike me as wishful thinking, a comforting fantasy.

They still hunt lions

2011-03-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Returning from my nightly walk, I passed a man walking his dog in the local park. The dog loomed up out of the darkness and, as it nuzzled my trousers, I noticed that it was not in the first flush of youth.

The man was smallish, neat, middle aged, with a military-style moustache.

"Are they still called Rhodesian ridgebacks?" I asked him.

"Indeed they are!" he replied, obviously pleased at my interest. "And they st- still hunt lions."

Europe and Islam

2011-03-19T21:55:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell's account of post-World War 2 immigration and the resurgence of 'political Islam'. Caldwell makes the point that, until the latter part of the 20th century, Europeans had little praise for either Islam or Islamic civilization. The views of Ernest Renan, a philologist and historian of religion, were typical.

On March 29, 1883, Renan gave a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled 'L'Islam et la science'. "Those liberals," he said, "who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror.... But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong."

Of course, Islam has no monopoly on religious terror and hypocrisy, and arguably the Christian churches followed a similar pattern. The difference is that the Christian churches came to a fruitful and abiding accommodation with the rising secular culture in which they were embedded, preventing any "seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal", and allowing a space for notions of privacy and individual freedom.

By contrast, Islam - as it is all too often understood and practised - attempts to control every aspect of life and to bring not only individual and social behavior but also laws and government institutions into line with Koranic precepts.

For various reasons, Western populations generally took a benign view of Islam in the post-World War 2 era. One reason for this was post-imperial and post-fascist guilt; another was what Caldwell refers to as "an accident of history":

" ... In the 1950s, Arab nationalism, of the sort practised by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the Ba'athist leaders of Syria and Iraq, was the main political force coming out of the Muslim world. It was driven largely by people who wanted to break theology's stranglehold on Muslim societies. Even if Arab nationalism was a threat, a young man ready to leave his nation to work in a mill in Belgium was unlikely to embody it. Europe's Arab and other Muslim newcomers could be assumed the most secular and modern of their countrymen, with a vocation to act as Europeans. Indeed, photos of groups of Moroccans and Turks newly arrived on Rotterdam's docks or in Rhineland train stations show clean-shaven men in conservative jackets and ties.

But right around the time immigrants began arriving in Europe en masse, a global resurgence of political Islam was beginning. It is now in full swing."

Those "clean-shaven men in conservative jackets and ties" no doubt felt great respect for European traditions and values. They were not to know that those very traditions and values would soon be under threat, from external forces, certainly, but also - and more importantly - because the Europeans themselves were losing faith in those values. In effect, Europeans had ceased to love and cherish their own civilization.

The disposable academic

2011-03-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

I tend to avoid Special Christmas Double Issues, just as I tend to avoid Exclusive news reports. If it's exclusive it's probably a beat-up that no one else is interested in; and if it's part of a Special Christmas Double Issue then it's likely to be - well - like what you might find in a Giant Xmas Stocking: space-filling, bland, untargeted, not indispensable.

Leafing through - rather belatedly - just such a double edition (The Economist, Dec. 18, 2010), I came across an article on a topic of rather limited interest which nonetheless impinges on a topic of greater interest.

The article itself was a dreary tract about the way PhD students and postdocs are exploited as teachers and researchers, and then not offered real jobs. But the broader, more interesting question relates to the status and role of university teachers and researchers generally, tenured or not - to the future of university-based academics.

The article seemed to be somewhat at odds with The Economist's traditional approach in its (at times) complaining tone and in its feminist subtext.

"One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband." The anonymous - as is the custom at The Economist - author then refers to her own experience of having "slogged [clearly a favorite word] through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology." One would have thought that prospective PhD students would be better placed than most to take responsibility for their own decisions, and quite capable of assessing possible outcomes, relating to employment or anything else.

The author notes that the sorts of activities PhD students spend their time on (like writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and preparing regular literature reviews) do not produce the sorts of skills (like the ability to communicate with non-experts) which the job market demands.

She does ultimately, however, put the onus of responsibility where it should be put - on the individual student. Prospective PhD students "might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic."

But new PhDs and postdocs are disposable only because many classes of tenured academic are dispensable. Academics - especially in the humanities - have lost status. In a climate of economic stress and fiscal retrenchment, the future looks very bleak indeed for a category of professional whose prestige was inextricably linked to scholarly and intellectual values which are no longer current.

New values prevail in a harder and very uncertain world.

The odour of joss-sticks

2011-03-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

In the light of recent discussion on this site about literary style and the relative unimportance of plot in fictional works (see the posts 'Rue de la Paix', 'Chilly, ain't it?' and comments), it is worth quoting the rather beautiful and deeply conservative epigraph which Dorothy Sayers chose for her Clouds of witness (1926):

The inimitable stories of Tong-king never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.

-- The Wallet of Kai-Lung

Chilly, ain't it?

2011-03-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

In a recent post ('Rue de la Paix') and accompanying comments, aspersions were cast on Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). I highlighted what I saw as an anti-Semitic aside in one of her novels, and a scathing review by Edmund Wilson of a later novel was quoted in a comment.

I do not warm to Dorothy Sayers. She interests me only to the extent that any intellectually active figure of the time does. It is the period which fascinates me more than the individual. Sayers seems to have been an intelligent person with much energy and independence who (sadly to my way of thinking) was ensnared by religion, becoming in her later years an apologist for Christianity.

As a young women, however, she was (pace Wilson) a gifted writer with a quirky and interesting mind. Here are some extracts from one of the wittier passages of the novel Clouds of witness which Sayers wrote when she was in her early thirties. The book features Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayer's amateur sleuth, who manages to be at once extremely aggravating and - if you can look past the outmoded class perspective and linguistic mannerisms - rather funny. (Even likable at times.)

Wimsey makes his way to a farmhouse in the wilds of Yorkshire, past ...

... a stretch of rough, reedy tussocks, with slobbering black bog between them, in which anything heavier than a water-wagtail would speedily suffer change into a succession of little bubbles. Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck the surface with a noise like a wet kiss, and vanished instantly. With that instinct which prompts one, when depressed, to wallow in every circumstance of gloom, Peter leaned sadly upon the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great War; (6) Birth control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will. This was his nadir, however ...

Continuing on his way, Wimsey reaches a farm gate:

A man was leaning over it, sucking a straw. He made no attempt to move at Wimsey's approach. 'Good evening,' said that nobleman in a sprightly manner, laying his hand upon the catch. 'Chilly, ain't it?'

The man made no reply, but leaned more heavily, and breathed. He wore a rough coat and breeches, and his leggings were covered with manure.

'Seasonable, of course, what?' said Peter. 'Good for the sheep, I daresay. Makes their wool curl, and so on.'

The man removed his straw and spat in the direction of Peter's right boot.

Wimsey finally gets the man to tell him the name of the man who lives in the house:

'Mester Grimethorpe.'

'No, does he now?' said Lord Peter. 'To think of that. Just the fellow I want to see. Model farmer, what? Where ever I go throughout the length and breadth of the North Riding I hear of Mr. Grimethorpe. "Grimethorpe's butter is the best"; "Grimethorpe's fleeces Never go to pieces"; "Grimethorpe's pork Melts on the fork"; "For Irish stews Take Grimethorpe's ewes"; "A tummy lined with Grimethorpe's beef, Never, never comes to grief". It has been my life's ambition to see Mr. Grimethorpe in the flesh. And you no doubt are his sturdy henchman and right-hand man. You leap from bed before the breaking day, To milk the kine amid the scented hay. You, when the shades of evening gather deep, Home from the mountain lead the mild-eyed sheep. You, by the ingle's red and welcoming blaze, Tell your sweet infants tales of olden days. A wonderful life, though a trifle monotonous p'raps in the winter ...

A certain anarchic energy, no?

Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank - once again

2011-03-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Britain's largest bank, HSBC, has signalled* its intention to move its headquarters back to Hong Kong where it was founded in 1895.

The bank's UK and European operations have been hindered by new taxes and regulations which have proliferated in the wake of the global financial crisis, and, of course, the European financial environment is fraught with unresolved sovereign debt and currency problems.

The move would be a major blow to London's standing as a financial center - and could be seen as symbolic of profound shifts in global wealth and prosperity away from Western Europe and the US and towards the Asian region.

HSBC's prospective move also reminds us that the time is rapidly approaching when Asian time zones will dominate global markets. Europe is particularly disadvantaged in this respect, as Asia goes to work when Europe is sound asleep. (Hong Kong - and the rest of China - is 8 hours ahead of London.)

* [added later] The signals, I must admit, are mixed. The original story - sourced to unnamed investors and carried by London's Sunday Telegraph - claimed that a move to Hong Kong was more than likely. Apparently, domicile is reviewed every three years, and the investors had noted a change of tone in favor of a move to Hong Kong. The bank has subsequently denied that any decision to move has been taken.

Rue de la Paix

2011-03-04T20:33:00.000-08:00

Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by the University of Oxford. She is most famous as a writer of detective fiction, much of it both stylish and funny.

I quote here, however, a rather unfortunate passage from Clouds of witness (1926). The offending clause, so casual and gratuitous, may have passed in the 1920s, but strikes us today as totally unacceptable.

A detective is making inquiries at a jeweller's shop in the Rue de la Paix:

The majority of the staff failed to recognize the photograph, and Parker was at the point of putting it back in his pocket-book when a young lady, who had just finished selling an engagement ring to an obese and elderly Jew, arrived, and said, without any hesitation:

'Mais oui, je l'ai vu, ce monsieur-là. It is the Englishman who bought a diamond cat for the jolie blonde.'

No theory of rights

2011-02-26T19:45:00.000-08:00

The other day I had a discussion over a cup of coffee which helped me clarify my ideas on human rights (and perhaps on philosophy also). I am coming to the view that rights are a way of speaking rather than something one can have a theory about. [I am not talking of legal rights* here, but rather about what might be called moral or natural rights (sometimes seen as the basis or justification for legal rights).]

My interlocutor was particularly interested in whether or not children have rights. We agreed that animals do not, because they could never comprehend the reciprocal notion of obligation. But nor can very young children. I suggested that maybe children could be granted rights on the basis that they would grow in the future to understand reciprocal obligations.

My friend noted that respect for children was built into the moral convention that (women and) children are given priority in the sinking ship scenario, but I suggested that it was not useful to talk about this in terms of rights. He said that adults giving themselves priority over (weaker) children in life-or-death situations - pushing children aside in the rush for the lifeboats - was considered morally despicable. True. But I don't think 'rights' are necessarily involved here - certainly the situation can be fully described without using the word.

When I imagined a pregnant woman with a terminal brain tumor on the sinking ship (to highlight the question of the status of the unborn child in this situation), I began to recognize the absurdity into which these sorts of discussion all too often descend.

All this strengthened my conviction that rights (and similar concepts) cannot be treated scientifically, as it were. They cannot be quantified or dealt with in a scientifically precise way. As with many other issues of semantics and communication, there are prototypical cases, where a concept is fairly clear, and more marginal cases, where there is scope for disagreement.

To take a trivial but instructive case, if I am queueing in a supermarket and somebody tries to push in ahead of me, I can justly tell him that he has no right to do so. (Either he has failed to understand the queueing convention or he is flouting it.)

Too often, though, the concept of rights is used in contexts far removed from these semantically clear cases, and far removed also from any spontaneous and plausible natural language usage. Such tendentious and problematic use of the term only serves to sow confusion.

'Right' and 'rights' are just words, but words which, used sparingly and appropriately, evoke an aspect of the multifaceted moral environment in which we all move.

*Explicit laws (or rules or regulations) can of course unambiguously assign legal (or other formal) rights to individuals or groups.

Lost world

2011-02-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

Early-to-mid 20th century Europe and America (to the extent that America reflected aspects of European culture) is my spiritual home. The world of the new physics and the Vienna Circle. A world of artistic and literary ferment. Even much of the popular culture was not ephemeral (the Gershwin brothers for example).

And yet I know this world only by the traces it has left - books, paintings, films, songs; but, more importantly, by overlapping generations and manners of thought, speech and action that survived long enough for me to learn to love and respect them.

I don't know that book-learning is ever really enough to know a culture. One has to grow up in it - or at least to mix with those who did or, more doubtfully, to mix with those who mixed with those who did! That song comes to mind: I've danced with a man, who's danced with a girl, who's danced with the Prince of Wales...

When I was an undergraduate, many of the older academics spoke English with German or Hungarian accents and epitomized for me the archetypal European scholar. There were stories of encounters with famous names. An old colleague (and friend) was taught logic at Harvard by Willard Van Orman Quine and this mattered to me.

I recognize of course that much of this is idealized and even illusory and based on the same rather childish tendencies which drive teenagers to emulate pop-culture icons, or hang around hotel exits.

The difference is that my idols all checked out some time ago.

The social self and the severely mentally disabled

2011-02-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

In a comment on my post 'The social self and human rights', it was suggested that seeing selfhood and rights as deriving from social interactions left certain kinds of severely disabled people potentially vulnerable. Commenting on the comment, I agreed that some severely disabled people would on my account not have rights, but nonetheless they should be treated humanely and with due respect.

The reference to 'due respect' was a classic instance of begging the question, I must admit. If they are owed respect then they have a right to that respect - but my account of the social self seems to fail to explain that right.

Could one find within my framework a basis for respecting a child who was incapable of all higher cognitive functions and incapable also of learning even basic skills like self-feeding? I think one needs to take account of the social and emotional context - i.e. the mother, father, other carers, etc. Perhaps one could assign respect to the child on the basis of respect for these people.

What of the advanced Alzheimer's sufferer? His or her social connections with the world have been effectively erased. However, such people can be respected for what they were and for the traces which remain.

In general I think it would be appropriate if procedures for terminating such hopeless lives were available for those families who felt that the dignity of the sufferer would be better enhanced by death than by a continuation of life.

The topic of euthanasia is one which cannot be avoided in any proper discussion of the social self. I have given a preliminary view, and I would welcome comments.

Physics, metaphysics, religion and social thought

2011-02-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

Are sciences like physics relevant to social and political thinking? Arguably they are, not directly, but as they influence one's general view of the world - one's metaphysics, if you like.

Consider relatively recent developments in physics - particularly those relating to our clearer understanding of the notion of quantum entanglement, and the realization that information is physical and a more basic physical concept than matter or energy.

These discoveries and new ways of thinking allow us to reassess various older traditions of thought. Personally, I am led to look again with increased respect at philosophers like F.H. Bradley (a 19th century philosophical idealist) who, entirely innocent of mathematics and formal logic, articulated a view of the world in which everything was related to everything else, everything was ultimately inseparable from the whole. Schopenhauer (drawing on Indian philosophy) had a similar view. Spinoza was an important source for Bradley's thought - indeed there is a rich tradition of thinkers in this vein. Some were religious, others less so or not at all. The wholesale rejection of idealism by philosophers in the early 20th century occurred just when physics was beginning a revolution which would vindicate important elements of philosophical idealism.

I am not suggesting a return to philosophical idealism, however. Any metaphysics of the future needs, in my opinion, to be firmly based in physics and quantum information theory.

Issues of politics and society can of course be dealt with without reference to physics or information theory; but they cannot be dealt with in any comprehensive way without reference to religion. This is because so many Western institutions and ideas and modes of thinking are influenced so profoundly by Christian and classical (especially Platonic and Stoic) thought. Even people who don't think of themselves as religious continue to hold beliefs which derive directly from religious traditions. This applies to value systems (humanism could be seen to be a Christian value system) and also to more general ways of thinking about oneself. Religious ways of thinking (e.g. the mind as something different from the body) come naturally to us, whereas scientific truths are often counter-intuitive.

My views on science and my (very limited) scientific knowledge form the basis of my secular view of the world; and this secular view clearly affects my political and social views. Physics and information theory may not have direct applications to social philosophy, but indirectly - by helping to form a secular view of reality - they influence profoundly my social thinking.

Even the most unpleasant

2011-02-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

Some authors of crime fiction have a plausibly bleak view of the world. A few of them are also gifted writers capable of achieving high levels of stylistic elegance. Here is the one-sentence, almost conventional Author's Note from Death of an expert witness by P.D. James, a mystery based around a murder in an East Anglian forensic science laboratory:

"There is no official forensic science laboratory in East Anglia and, even if there were, it is in the highest degree improbable that it would have anything in common with Hoggatt's Laboratory, whose staff, like all other characters in this story - even the most unpleasant - are purely imaginary and bear no resemblance to any person living or dead."

The social self and human rights

2011-02-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

All is one. Everything is connected to everything else. For centuries philosophers and mystics have said so. And maybe they were right.

Their convictions were based on feeling (oneness with Nature, etc.) but also on thinking about reality. Recent scientific and social thought based on some seminal 20th century ideas is very much in line with these basic insights.

Mutual information is the formal term used to describe the situation when two or more things or events share information with one another. Two things have mutual information if by looking at just one of them you can infer something about the properties of the other. This notion has applications in physics (quantum entanglement is a super-correlation of particles which may be separated by great distances, and a dramatic illustration of mutual information), but it also has applications in the social sciences. Mutual information has recently been used to help explain the origin of societal structures. (See, for example, Vlatko Vedral's Decoding reality (OUP 2010), pp. 93-108.)

In the middle years of the 20th century, structuralist thought developed in linguistics and other social sciences which encouraged this general line of thinking. In language, for example, it is not the actual speech sounds which matter so much as the relationship between the sounds. More radically, people could be seen not as atomistic individuals but as nodes in a network. In other words, we exist only to the extent to which we relate to others, and we are defined by the sum of those relations. Solitary confinement, then, could be seen as eating away at a person's very core.

But a prisoner in solitary confinement has already been formed by countless social interactions. Think of a new-born baby. What happens if the baby is isolated from all social contact (but continues to be fed and exercised etc.)? This is an experiment which would be unlikely to get ethics committee approval. The sad and fragmentary accounts of children raised by wolves or other wild animals suggest that they never adapt to human society. But at least these children raised in the wild had a society of sorts, albeit not human. A laboratory-raised child without social contact would arguably not be a person at all. Those who believe in the religious notion of the soul might beg to differ, but even religious people would accept that an infant raised without social and linguistic input could not function as a person.

This notion of personhood being essentially derived from the culture and community may be seen to pose problems for liberal (and classical liberal) ideals of human rights and individual freedom. If rights are seen to be somehow innate or objectively real (whether God-given or not), they may form the basis of a political or social philosophy.

But if the very existence of the person is not only dependent on, but in a profound sense derives from, the broader community, then any notion of individual rights will be contingent and circumscribed. What society gives, society can take away.

The view that I am putting seems to necessitate a drastic revision of the current notion of human rights. A strong case could be made that many supposed rights are mere fictions and others are inappropriately applied. Issues such as euthanasia may also have to be reconsidered.

Historically, liberal principles and notions of imprescriptible rights developed when virtually everyone believed in a spirit or soul which not only animated the body but encapsulated the individual's essence. How can they be reconciled with a purely secular view of the social self?

In addition to these problems of metaphysical baggage, the proliferation of human rights (or rights inflation) is further eroding the credibility of the concept. Behind this tendency to invent and assign new rights is the antagonism many on the left feel towards the idea of charity: if what the underprivileged receive is their 'right', they are (supposedly) not beholden to the generosity of others.

Despite these problems and confusions, I think it is still possible to be committed to classical liberal ideals (like individual freedom). What is valuable in this tradition of thought can still be defended - but on pragmatic rather than on religious or metaphysical grounds.

The rights which survive will not be static and innate but rather dynamic and, for the most part, contingent, arising out of a person's interactions and relations with others. Those who cannot - or who choose not to - embrace reciprocal responsibilities will not be accorded the freedoms enjoyed by those who can and do, but they too should be treated with justice and humanity.

For, arguably, not all rights are contingent. Justice (or due process) is fundamental to the view I am putting. Whereas most (all?) other rights are contingent on acceptable behavior, justice should apply equally to all.

Impartiality or 'equality before the law' is a centrally important idea, and it is only undermined by attempts by the left to implement other - more problematic - forms of equality.

Dreams of freedom

2011-01-31T20:42:00.000-08:00

I have no expert knowledge of Egypt or of other countries of North Africa and the Middle East and so am, and will remain, just another observer of events as they unfold. I do, however, express the hope that the protesters realize that the euphoria many of them are feeling as they topple or seek to topple repressive governments (a mixture of high expectations and the sense of power?) will fade, and the subsequent reality won't measure up to today's dreams of freedom. It never does. Even if these movements don't end in tears (like the Iranian revolution which ousted the Shah), they will end in compromise and relative dissatisfaction.

Ultimately, I suspect that what most of the non-Islamist protesters want approximates to a European-style welfare state. What is insufficiently appreciated is that European and American societies have for more than two centuries been sustained not only by a complex tradition of political and religious thought and custom, but also by wealth (derived largely from invention, manufacture and trade). The balance of wealth in the world is now shifting dramatically away from the US and Europe, but not towards North Africa and the Middle East; rather, towards East and South Asia.

In my view, the best the people of the non-oil-exporting countries of North Africa and the Middle East can hope for is peace, modest economic progress and gradual political reform. No cause for euphoria, but no cause either for despair and continued submission to secular or religious tyrannies.

Rhubarb to you

2011-01-27T21:17:00.000-08:00

As I have been immersed for a while now in deep and serious topics (to say nothing of a brief exchange on another site on the use of explosive rhetoric in the discussion and analysis of contentious issues of global politics), I feel the need to rebalance and recalibrate. And nothing assists the recalibration of one's reality sensors more effectively than the mundane and the superficial.

A friend recently baked what she called a 'cottage pie' (potato topped mince-meat pie); my family calls it a 'shepherd's pie'. What do you call it?

In my mother's family it was a Monday-night dish made with left-over meat from Sunday's roast lamb. My maternal grandmother - not a stickler for accurate nomenclature - rather unhelpfully called it 'potato pie'.

Which reminds me of something in Willard Van Orman Quine's account of his childhood. He referred to 'pie plant' growing in the garden - "rhubarb to you," he wrote.

Scope for dialogue between liberal conservatives and conservative liberals

2011-01-22T21:14:00.000-08:00

The word 'ideology' has negative connotations, associated as it is with the polarization of political opinion and consequent breakdown of social cohesion. But arguably we all have an ideology of sorts - a value-system related to social and political matters - implicit if not explicit.

Genetic and environmental influences all play a role in predisposing one towards the left, right or other putative dimensions on the political scale. And there is not much one can do about that, other than to be aware that such influences are potent. One should definitely not take one's social and political views to be self-evident.

Without denying the very real differences between them, intelligent liberals and conservatives can agree on a number of important things - for example, the desirability of good manners, the need for long-term fiscal planning and the need for some kind of system to assist those who have been afflicted by acute misfortune or who simply cannot cope.

Extreme views are problematic. It seems to me that those who hanker for some kind of revolutionary (or reactionary) apocalypse are beyond the pale, probably harmless dreamers and schemers, but just possibly dangerous. For there are dark depths in all our minds and sometimes one senses primal resentments (and psychological problems) behind the words and actions of extremists, whether they be loners or members of extremist groups.

So much of the trouble in today's world is based on ethnic grievances, and the kind of group-think encouraged by many supposedly oppressed groups feeds these resentments and easily erupts into violence.

I identify as a conservative, but, like many conservatives, I also draw on the classical liberal tradition. Unfortunately, the word 'liberal' has been effectively hijacked by those with 'progressive' opinions, many of which have little to do with the freedom of the individual (a commitment to which lies behind classical liberalism) and much to do with the machinations of advocates for 'oppressed' groups.

From my point of view, there is something very powerful and positive about the old liberal notion of blind justice - treating everyone simply as a person rather than as a representative of a group or class. I know all the arguments about unconscious bias and structural inequities, but identifying as oppressed, identifying with a particular oppressed group, is, I think, in most cases counterproductive to the well-being of the individual or family in question. I have the strong sense that those from disadvantaged backgrounds etc. who refuse to dwell on these matters and just get on with their lives are giving themselves a far better chance of success and happiness. Advocacy for women and various ethnic groups has become an industry in the West, and just who this industry serves is a moot point.

Despite inevitable differences between conservatives and liberals, the old-fashioned liberalism espoused by many conservatives creates the potential for productive dialogue between these liberal conservatives and old-fashioned - or conservative - liberals.

Deeper than language

2011-01-16T21:26:00.000-08:00

Polonius: ... What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

I suspect that the strings of words we use to explain and justify our behavior may be insignificant froth compared to the deep neural sources of our convictions and our actions. As split-brain and similar experiments have shown, we have a natural tendency to confabulate, to rationalize behavior after the event - and the stories we tell (and believe!) are often utter fictions.

Arguably, most of our decision-making occurs below the level of conscious awareness. As a schoolboy, I was taught to make important decisions by creating lists of fors and againsts, and weighing them up rationally. This never worked, and I thought the fault was with me. But the recommended technique was based on an utterly false view of the human brain, one that saw consciousness as all.

Intuition is an important element in certain types of complex, real-world decision-making, especially in relation to pattern-recognition and also in relation to judgements about other people. The trouble is that, though intuitions can usefully draw on sub-conscious processing of complex data, they also incorporate input from primitive, value-related systems of the brain which were appropriate to the sorts of quick, rough-and-ready judgements required by our ancestors, but are inappropriate to people living in technologically-advanced societies.

Of course, language affects cognitive processing (conscious and unconscious) in complex and subtle ways. But it is a mistake to think that the structure of language - its concepts and categories and so on - reflects the underlying nature of reality. The most one could claim in this regard is that it enhanced our ancestors' ability to deal with their environment in a practical way. And language itself is a key component in the social environment which makes human intelligence possible.

Natural language is good for many things - for sharing knowledge and enabling complex group operations, for inspiring and encouraging, for misleading and discouraging, for cementing social bonds, for fomenting rebellion, etc. But one thing it is not good for (except as an adjunct to scientific methods) is discovering new truths.

Metaphysics was the ultimate armchair discipline. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries metaphysicians in Europe and America created vast linguistic and conceptual structures which purported to explain the underlying nature of reality and much else besides. But they were blinded by the structure of language and their own rhetorical flights, and their prolix works now gather dust in library basements and warehouses.

Of course, there have always been those, of an empirical cast of mind, who saw little value in metaphysics, but perhaps the most formidable attack on this style of thinking was mounted in the 1920s and 1930s by the so-called logical positivists. They sought to discredit metaphysics entirely and had a huge impact in the middle decades of the 20th century.

In the latter part of the century, however, certain philosophers tried - with some success - not only to attack logical positivism but also to rehabilitate metaphysics. They claimed, for example, that the logical positivists' anti-metaphysics campaign was flawed and indeed ultimately metaphysical itself.

In general terms, though, I think the logical positivists were right - science (broadly understood so as to incorporate the historical disciplines) is the only way to push back the frontiers of knowledge. Not only do metaphysics and philosophy lack the empirical dimension of science, they are generally pursued via the medium of natural language, whereas the underlying structure of the world is amenable only to approaches which are heavily reliant on quantitative and mathematical methods.

But science has little or nothing to say about right and wrong, or about political and social ideals. By contrast, natural language might be seen to be ideally suited to deal with such issues. Perhaps, but caution should be exercised in this area. The trouble (as I see it) is that value-based political and ethical theories proliferate, not unlike the metaphysical theories of the 19th century, without any way to test them and weed out the rubbish.

I am inclined to think (like Wittgenstein) that value-related issues are real, and they can of course be discussed, but they are not the sorts of things one needs to have theories about.

Value systems are real and inescapable aspects of social relations, built into the manners and customs and expectations of any society. And, of course, individuals and groups may and do challenge certain conventions, but always within the context of a complex network incorporating many other conventions. (Such a view seems to me compatible with virtue-based approaches to ethics, by the way.)

This process of review and revision happens. Conservatives may prefer that it happen more slowly, liberals may prefer that it happen more quickly, but it is an inevitable part of the life of society.

And though language constitutes a key element in the social environment and so profoundly affects cognition, and though words may inspire, instruct, clarify, warn and all the rest, the ultimate driving forces of human existence will always be wider and deeper than language, in the still obscure dynamics of social and somatic processes.

John Bickle on Antonio Damasio on consciousness

2011-01-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

Late last year, John Bickle, a professor of philosophy and neuroscience at Mississippi State University, wrote a review* of Antonio Damasio's new book, Self comes to mind: constructing the conscious brain (Pantheon). Unfortunately (as with many such pieces) this review tells us more about the reviewer's beliefs and convictions than we need to know and consequently less about the book in question than it could do. Here is the first sentence:

"When combining neuroscience and philosophy, one popular strategy is to present many surprising neuroscientific results and then breathlessly assemble them into a grand speculative claim about 'what it all means'."

This bad strategy is contrasted with a second, and supposedly good, strategy (on which more in a moment), so that Bickle is setting up a simplistic dichotomy - as our brains are wont to do, but you would think a philosopher of neuroscience would resist the temptation. "Popular" obviously has a negative connotation for Bickle. (This in itself says a lot. I suspect his books don't sell as well as Damasio's.) Furthermore, breathlessly assembled facts and "grand speculative claims" are clearly out; and, whatever you do, don't ponder "what it all means"!

The second strategy, the one Professor Bickle follows, is "to roll up one's sleeves and dig into a specific area of neuroscience, presenting not only the eye-opening results but also the methods and rationales behind them to argue precise philosophical points."

Self comes to mind is, Bickle claims, an example of the first strategy. But is it?

Grudgingly admitting that Damasio's book is "an interesting read", the reviewer characterizes a central hypothesis (regarding homeostasis) as being "worthy of serious investigation." He also admits that Damasio "offers an intriguing link between the evolution of consciousness and the brain's propensity to create 'maps' - networks of neurons that represent body states... I was grateful to see Damasio apply real neuroscience to this often hand-waving notion of 'embodied cognition'."

Hang on. Isn't this book supposed to be of the hand-waving kind involving breathlessly assembled facts etc.? Not entirely, it seems.

The book provides "a nice continuation" of Damasio's previous writings on the role of emotions in consciousness, but has a new focus on memory: "the brain's evolved capacity to store vast records of motor skills, facts and events, combined with its ability to process memory records while continuing to perceive the present moment, result in the fully human 'autobiographical' self - the key ingredient, he argues, that allows for the mysterious leap from mind to conscious awareness."

But, unfortunately, "[w]hen the philosophical going gets tough (that is, interesting), Damasio often switches topics." What is interesting for a philosopher may not be interesting for a general audience. And note the "often".

Bickle concedes that, "when fleshing out a 'synoptic vision', it is not practically possible to explain all of the scientific processes that formed the basis of one's speculative reach. Still, there's something deeply worrisome about books like this. Expounding on scientific results and using them to engage in philosophical speculations without explaining or criticising the processes that generate the data can create a dangerous intellectual conformity paraded as 'scientific'." Books like this? Does he mean this book? As Bickle notes: "Damasio knows his science..." Nonetheless, "he and others would do well to remember that many readers don't." Really?

Bickle continues: "A little explanation of the scientific process lurking behind the philosophy would go a long way." Maybe, but then it would be Bickle's book and not Damasio's.

So, if ever you feel like rolling up your sleeves and digging into a specific area of neuroscience and making a minute examination of the methods and rationales that generate the data and using this as a basis to address precise philosophical points, you will know whose books to turn to.

*New Scientist (Nov. 27, 2010)

One-Trick Pony

2010-12-22T17:41:00.000-08:00

No politics, no polemics, no messiahs, no mangers, no magi, no stars or stables or kneeling oxen. Just a small performing horse...

When I heard it on the radio years ago, I liked this song. A hymn to minimalism.

I like it still.

Merry Christmas!

Taking stock

2010-12-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

So where have I/we been? And where are we going with Conservative tendency?

1. Interaction. I want the site to be more interactive, so, if you have an interest, please click on the followers gadget and/or comment or email me (engmar3 [at] gmail [dot] com). And thank you to those who have already shown their interest, and I hope you will continue to find the time to drop by.

2. The human condition. My interests are various but are centered around fundamental questions about the universe and our place in it. I see our situation in fairly bleak terms, actually - no religious comforts. Which is why social and intellectual comforts - a compliment, a probing question, a shared interest - are so very important.

3. Randomness. I'm interested in developing my knowledge of the philosophy of mathematics and logic, especially aspects of these subjects that may relate to fundamental questions. The various types and levels of randomness which appear to underlie physical processes is my current focus, as it has potential relevance to how we see ourselves and our lives.

4. Politics. My inclination is towards quietism, not activism; but I respect activists and those more politically engaged than I am at the moment. I think the long-term political trends we are witnessing are unfortunate - especially to the extent that they involve government-initiated solutions (or supposed solutions) to social problems. Generally it is a healthier situation if individuals and families work out their own solutions to their problems as far as possible.

5. The decline of the West. I am fascinated by the rise and fall of civilizations, and there is an awful lot of rising (in the East) and falling (in the West) going on at the moment. Cultures must be underpinned by political stability and economic prosperity and arguably we are witnessing the last throes of a two-and-a-half thousand year cultural and intellectual tradition. What can be salvaged from the wreckage?

6. Minimalism. My conservatism is a minimalist conservatism - or perhaps my minimalism is a conservative minimalism! I seek out simplicity and clarity in matters of the mind and in aesthetics. I may try to develop this idea explicitly in the new year, but it is implicit in everything I write.

Jesus the Greek

2010-12-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

Ernest Renan... Nassim Taleb (whom I have written about recently) is a fan of his. Friedrich Nietzsche was most decidedly not.

Renan was a seminarian who famously renounced his Roman Catholic faith to become a leading scholar of Semitic languages and a literary celebrity in 19th century France. Much of his fame was due to the spectacular success of his Life of Jesus which rejects the miraculous but which betrays a continuing religious sensibility built around philosophical idealism and a sentimental attachment to the figure of Jesus. For Renan (as one of his biographers put it) religion was expelled from the front door but came in again through the back. Nietzsche saw Renan's perspective as not only religious, but priestly.

Renan had a deep knowledge not only of the languages of the Holy Land but also of its geography and he traveled widely in the region with his beloved sister while researching the Life. What he has to say about the ethnic background of Jesus of Nazareth is interesting, though it probably says more about the (relatively mild?) anti-Semitism of Renan's cultural milieu than about historical reality. There was a great vogue at the time for all things Indo-European, and, though Renan saw the Indo-European and the Semitic peoples as "the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity [read: European civilization] what it is," he is not altogether even-handed in his treatment of these two traditions. Clearly, Renan is ever-so-slightly uncomfortable with a Jewish Jesus, and the infinite delicacy with which he expresses himself on this matter is nothing short of comical.

He points out that, at the time of Jesus' birth, the population of Galilee was racially diverse and "there were many who were not Jews (Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, and even Greeks)." Since many of these non-Jews converted to Judaism, it is impossible, asserts Renan, to "ascertain what blood flowed through the veins of him who has contributed most to efface the distinctions of blood amongst mankind."

Inciting hatred?

2010-12-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

This witty little piece is worth pondering for the light it throws on changes that have occurred in the social, cultural and legal environment over recent decades. The song (as the text on the video notes) ruffled a few feathers when it was released more than 30 years ago.

But would such a song have been written today? And, if it had, would it have been given a mainstream release? I doubt it.

Individual ethics and manners once bore a far greater load and played a more central role in the functioning of society. But now, as Western governments seek to modify behavior through 'education programs' and a progressive legislative agenda, the role of private judgement in morality, manners and professional life has been downgraded.

Legal systems, once perceived as staid but respected, have become pro-active players in an intra-societal struggle, as an ever-expanding inventory of groups and sub-groups and categories of individual seek to benefit from their minority or 'oppressed' status.

I have the strong sense that Western societies were not only considerably freer, but also considerably saner in previous decades.

Religious influences on political views

2010-12-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

Religious background - whether or not it has been renounced - clearly plays an important role in determining the shape and tenor of a person's political and social views. Even people who have not had a religious upbringing are often influenced by religious elements of the broader culture.

I am interested not so much in survey data etc. about links between particular religious traditions and particular political ideologies (interesting though this can be) as in the logic behind the links. For example, it seems to me that the left owes a huge debt to Judaic sources insofar as its basic project is an attempt to make real a religious vision of a new earth, a promised land of harmony and prosperity.

Protestant churches and sects are generally closer to Christianity's Judaic roots than churches in the Catholic tradition (e.g. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopalian and Anglican). These latter traditions are not so much Christian as Christian-Platonic, following Plato in seeing the soul as essentially spiritual rather than essentially embodied and earthy. Judaic notions of the resurrection of the body and a (mass) last judgement sit uneasily with the belief of most traditional Catholics and Episcopalians in a soul that leaves the body at death and makes its individual way to heaven. (The Pythagoreans and Platonists believed something like this.)

But, ultimately, all traditional Christians and religious Jews believe in a spiritual - or at least in a supernaturally transfigured - realm, and such a belief is very compatible with political conservatism (and with political quietism which could be seen as a non-activist form of conservatism). Clearly, for religious people the main game is to get things right for the long haul - for the spiritual or transfigured realm - and secular institutions, political or otherwise, are of secondary importance.

Those who have lost their faith in a supernatural solution may or may not retain the moral priorities and ideals of the renounced religion. They may, like Nietzsche, find inspiration in the aristocratic values of classical Greek and Roman culture, so different, as well-known passages from the New Testament and related works make clear, from Jewish and early Christian social and moral teaching. Though non-religious conservatives will have various views on these matters and may retain many elements of Judaic or Christian ethics, they will not, as a rule, attempt (like the non-religious, left-leaning liberal) to implement a secularized version of Judaic or Christian moral and spiritual ideals.

In this the conservative - non-religious though he/she may be - shows more realism than his/her 'progressive' equivalent, and, in fact, a more profound understanding of the holistic nature of religious thinking.

Of course, the dramatic rise of Islam and, in particular, of militant Islamic fundamentalism, has changed the whole dynamic of the interplay between religion and politics in the West. But that is another story. For now I merely observe that these developments have highlighted the close links between Western religious traditions and our more general notions of freedom. The exploitation and abuse by Islamic extremists of Western conventions of religious freedom not only put those conventions at risk, but, with them, other freedoms which we have taken for granted but which are in fact the delicate fruit of a long historical process.

Sense and self-indulgent nonsense

2010-11-24T19:19:00.000-08:00

I recently referred - perhaps unfairly - to the propensity of many mathematicians and scientists to be naive and uncritical when thinking outside their areas of expertise. Of course, we are all inclined to be naive and uncritical at times, but the phenomenon is more striking in a person who exhibits high levels of critical thinking in a specialist area. My original observation was based in part on having read a lot of autobiographical and other material written by very gifted scientists and mathematicians and wondering why I found myself having to 'make allowances' for them.

The distinguished mathematician Gregory Chaitin is a case in point. Here are a few instances of the strange mix of sense and nonsense that flows from Chaitin's pen when he moves beyond the work which has made him famous. [All the quotations are from his book Meta Math! The quest for omega*.]

On medical care. "[I]n my grandmother's generation in the old country, women would have a dozen children, most of whom would die before puberty. So you were trying a dozen mixes of DNA subroutines from both parents. (In the Middle Ages, babies weren't even named til they were a year old, since so many of them would die the first year.) Now instead of trying to keep women pregnant all the time, we depend on massive amounts of medical care to keep alive one or two children, no matter how unhealthy they are. While such medical care is wonderful for the individual, the quality of the human gene pool inevitably deteriorates to match the amount of medical care that is available. The more medical care there is, the sicker people become! The massive amounts of medical care become part of the ecology, and people come to depend on it to survive ... "

On mathematical prehistory. "[F]undamental questions go back millennia and are never resolved. For example, the tension between the continuous and the discrete, or the tension between the world of ideas (math!) and the real world (physics, biology). You can find all this discussed in ancient Greece. And I suspect we could even trace it back to ancient Sumer, if more remained of Sumerian math than the scrap paper jottings on clay tablets that are all we have, jottings that give hints of surprisingly sophisticated methods and a love for calculation that seems to far outstrip any practical application."

Chaitin cannot resist a footnote: "Did Sumer inherit its mathematics from an even older civilization - one more advanced than the ancient Greeks - that was destroyed by the glaciers, or when the glaciers suddenly melted, or by some other natural catastrophe? There is no way for such sophisticated computational techniques to appear out of nowhere, without antecedents."

On ideas and creativity. "Let me describe what it feels like right now while I'm writing this book ... [T]he ideas I'm discussing seem very concrete, real and tangible to me. Sometimes they even feel more real than the people around me. They certainly feel more real than newspapers, shopping malls and TV programs ... In fact, I only really feel alive when I'm working on a new idea, when I'm making love to a woman (which is also working on a new idea, the child we might conceive), or when I'm going up a mountain! It's intense, very intense."

Chaitin elaborates and reiterates with references to beautiful women, art and food (" ... like an amazing ethnic cuisine I've never tasted before."). He continues:

"And I'm a great believer in the subconscious, in sleeping on it, in going to bed at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. after working all night, and then getting up the next morning full of new ideas, ideas that come to you in waves while you're taking a bath, or having coffee. Or swimming laps. So mornings are very important to me, and I prefer to spend them at home. Routine typing and e-mail, I do in my office, not at home. And when I get too tired to stay in the office, then I print out the final version of the chapter I'm working on, bring it home - where there is no computer - and lie in bed for hours reading it, thinking about it, making corrections, adding stuff.

"Sometimes the best time is lying in bed in the dark with my eyes closed, in a half dreamy, half awake state that seems to make it easier for new ideas, or new combinations of ideas, to emerge. I think of the subconscious as a chemical soup that's constantly making new combinations, and interesting combinations of ideas stick together, and eventually percolate up into full consciousness. That's not too different from a biological population in which individuals ... combine to produce new individuals. My guess is that all this activity takes place at the molecular level - like DNA and information storage in the immune system - not at the cellular level. That's why the brain is so powerful, because that's where the real information processing is, at the molecular level. The cellular level, that's just the front end ...

"Yes, I believe in ideas, in the power of imagination and new ideas. And I don't believe in money or in majority views or the consensus. Even if all you are interested in is money, I think that new ideas are vital in the long run, which is why a commercial enterprise like IBM has a Research Division and has supported my work for so long. Thank you, IBM!"

It takes your breath away, does it not?

* Vintage Books, 2005

Through a crystal darkly

2010-11-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

In previous remarks on randomness and computation, I mentioned the work of Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician and theorist who has written and spoken (he is a brilliant speaker) extensively for both specialist and general audiences. Chaitin's technical work is highly regarded, but his interpretations and extrapolations are sometimes a little idiosyncratic and he is inclined to sound a bit New Agey at times. (He is rumored to receive help in his thinking from a giant crystal!)

Paul Davies (a physicist and writer) is, by contrast, sober and restrained - even a little pedestrian by comparison - but he is a reliable guide within his areas of expertise. I recently came across a foreword by Davies to a book of Chaitin's essays* in which Davies gives his perspective on the significance of Chaitin's work and its implications for physics and our view of the world generally.

Chaitin (who had been obsessed from his childhood years with Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem) "greatly extended the scope of Gödel's basic insight," writes Davies, "and recast the notion of incompleteness in a way that brings it much closer to the real world of computers and physical processes. A key step in his work is the recognition of a basic link between mathematical undecidability and randomness. Something is random if it has no pattern, no abbreviated description, in which case there is no algorithm shorter than the thing itself which captures its content. And a random fact is true for no reason at all; it is true 'by accident' so to speak ... Chaitin was able to demonstrate that mathematics is shot-through with randomness ... Mathematics, supposedly the epitome of logical orderliness is exposed as harboring irreducible arbitrariness." (p. vi)

"[M]athematics contains randomness - or accidental, reasonless truths," Davies explains, "because a ... universal Turing machine [an idealized computer], may or may not halt in executing its program, and there is no systematic way to know in advance if a function is computable (i.e. the Turing machine will halt) or not." (p. viii)

But this limitation on what we can know or predict (known as Turing uncomputability) applies not just to mathematics and computers but also to scientific theories. On Chaitin's view, a scientific theory is like a computer program that predicts our observations (the experimental data).

Indeed, in the words of Paul Davies, " ... we may regard nature as an information processing system, and a law of physics as an algorithm that maps the input data (initial conditions) into output data (final state). Thus in some sense the universe is a gigantic computer, with the laws playing the role of universal software." (p. viii)

And if the laws of physics are computer algorithms, there will be randomness in the laws of physics stemming from Turing uncomputability. But, according to Davies, the randomness will, in reality, be "even more pronounced than that which flows from Turing uncomputability." (p. viii)

He points out that the real universe differs in a crucial respect from the concept of a Turing machine. "The latter is supposed to have infinite time at its disposal: there is no upper bound on the number of steps it may perform to execute its program. The only relevant issue is whether the program eventually halts or not, however long it takes. The machine is also permitted unlimited memory ... If these limitless resources are replaced by finite resources, however, an additional, fundamental, source of unknowability emerges. So if, following Chaitin, we treat the laws of physics as software running on the resource-limited hardware known as the observable universe, then these laws will embed a form of randomness, or uncertainty, or ambiguity, or fuzziness - call it what you will - arising from the finite informational processing capacity of the cosmos." (pp. viii-ix)

There are, it seems, different forms or levels or randomness. The 'mild' form which - as chaos theory shows - is implicit even in classical, deterministic physics; the pseudo-randomness which can be generated by simple computer algorithms; the well-known randomness inherent in quantum mechanics; and perhaps the deepest levels of all stemming from proven features of idealized computers (Turing machines) and from seeing the universe itself as a giant computer - one with specific limitations on its processing capacities.

These are difficult (and to some extent speculative) ideas. But I think they are worth pursuing and may even have profound implications for how we see ourselves and our world.

It is, of course, impossible to draw definitive political or metaphysical conclusions from them, but, if the ideas are sound, there will be such conclusions to draw.

Let me just mention two thoughts which come immediately to mind: Chaitin's and Davies' notions are utterly incompatible with any political ideology which attempts to predict, plan and control human affairs; and they also appear to undermine perspectives which incorporate notions of a providential force operating behind the scenes and impinging on natural processes, historical events and/or individual destinies.

* Thinking about Gödel and Turing: essays on complexity, 1970-2007 (World Scientific, 2007).

Lessons of the masters

2010-11-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

The French expression, maître à penser, has no English equivalent. A 'thinking master' is what I have always wanted and never found. Perhaps wisdom is unstable and only exists fleetingly in an action here or a thought there. A strange thing, the desire for discipleship (to be a disciple - not to have them). It may reveal deep psychological flaws, but I think not. In my case it reflects simply a combination of a desire to know and a certain laziness. (Why should I do all the work?)

Some years ago, George Steiner gave a series of lectures (which became a book*) on the topic of masters and disciples. Most of the relationships he describes end badly, by the way, not unlike love affairs.

The lessons I have learned from my hoped-for masters have pretty well all been negative, and the thinkers I have flirted with have all been seriously flawed in one way or another. Arts and humanities-oriented writers and scholars are too often ignorant or (worse) scornful of scientific knowledge. Scientists and mathematicians, on the other hand, are often amazingly uncritical in non-scientific areas, and especially in social and political contexts.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that politics works as it does, catering to the lowest common denominator, that legislators lack vision or that government debt is spiraling out of control in so many jurisdictions.

But I continue to be amazed when intellectuals - as happens all too often - align themselves with religions or discredited ideologies - the desire for discipleship trumping the desire for truth.

* Lessons of the masters (Harvard University Press, 2003).

No sense of place

2010-11-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

I have recently been reading some Patricia Highsmith novels* from the 1950s and 60s. Three communication media - the old-fashioned letter, the (usually local) newspaper and the telephone - all play very significant roles in these stories. (There is also the occasional telegram - or cable - and books also appear.)

Highsmith's characters spend a large proportion of their allotted pages planning and writing letters, posting letters, organizing the material for writing more letters, waiting for letters and speculating as to why no letter has come or, more rarely, receiving a letter and analysing the contents. The local newspaper is good for keeping track of whether the body has been found or what stage the police have reached in their investigation. And the telephone looms as large as in the movies of the period.

In their way, each of these media enhances the sense of place and/or the sense of distance from other places. Even the telephone signals the sense of distance by the involvement of an operator.

Patricia Highsmith's world may not be the real world of the 1950s and 1960s - it is a slightly claustrophobic and chilling distillation of reality - but it reflects important truths about the crucial role communication technologies play in weaving a cultural milieu and defining a locality.

As traditional letters disappear from the communication landscape, as print is replaced by digital devices, and the telephone operator is remembered only in the "Operator! Operator!" of old films and TV, we are inexorably losing our sense of place.

*The blunderer, This sweet sickness, Those who walk away and The tremor of forgery.

Normative shmormative

2010-10-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

In the light of some recent discussions on this site (here and here), I thought it might be appropriate for me to make a short statement about my general attitude to science and philosophy. I am not as convinced as some of my interlocutors are about the coherence and value of philosophy as a discipline, but I know this is a personal thing, and I certainly don't presume to tell others what they should do or be interested in!

I tend to think historically, and I see a grand tradition of thinkers who were called philosophers, but many (most?) of the great names (e.g. Descartes, Leibniz) were also scientists and/or mathematicians. What is left of philosophy after all the sciences have been peeled off from it does not attract me - unless it can be reconnected in some way with the sciences. I am not unsympathetic to the Quinean view that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. But there are very different ways of seeing the philosophy of science.

As I have the view that philosophy is not an independent discipline, I tend to see any authority to set epistemic norms and make definite judgements on factual matters as residing within specific scientific traditions, and the role of philosophical thinking as essentially clarificatory; but also speculative in the sense that it may suggest new conjectures to be considered or new ways of conceptualizing or interpreting data.

From what I have said it may seem that my worldview is rather impoverished, but let me hasten to say that my view of the world embraces lots of non-scientific things (e.g. pleasure in language and literature). I see morality and manners as being of central importance, but I am reluctant to accept the need for experts in ethics and similar areas (except in limited pedagogical contexts).

The unity of science

2010-10-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

I have always disliked the idea that there is some kind of dividing line between the human sciences and the so-called 'hard sciences' like physics and chemistry. In the 1920s and 1930s the thinkers of the Vienna Circle pursued the 'unity of science' ideal, sensing in the division between the human and other sciences traces of a dualism of mind and matter.

But the unity of science project was strenuously resisted, and attempts (often rather crude) to apply the methods of quantitative science to human questions were - and still are - attacked as 'scientism'. Even the scientifically-minded thinker and economist Friedrich von Hayek used the term 'scientism' to describe what he saw as misguided attempts to turn economics into a science like classical physics.

But (and I take my cue here from Nassim Nicholas Taleb) Hayek and others who maintain "a hard and qualitative distinction between the social sciences and physics" * are working with an outmoded notion of physics.

The 'hard sciences', we now know, go well beyond the traditional engineering-oriented mentality and the approaches of classical physics - they are far more complicated and shot through with predictive uncertainties (randomness) than was appreciated in the past.

So the idea of the unity of science is given a new lease of life as the nature of science (and reality) is better understood.

Furthermore, socialistic notions of central planning - once claimed to be 'scientific' - are clearly exposed as being based on an inadequate view of science; while the conservative's traditional skepticism about government action and awareness of the dangers of unintended consequences is given (rather belated) scientific support and vindication.

* The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable (Penguin, 2008), p. 181.

Head-hijacking Martians

2010-10-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

A reviewer wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Nassim Nicholas Taleb "is an eclectic scholar and a rude man." Yes and yes. He is also provocative, intelligent and informed. (Some other adjectives and epithets appear in the comments section of my previous post.)

Here is Taleb's description of a (typical?) philosophy colloquium [The black swan (Penguin, 2008), p.289]:

"HOW MANY WITTGENSTEINS CAN DANCE ON THE HEAD OF A PIN?

A number of semishabbily dressed (but thoughtful-looking) people gather in a room, silently looking at a guest speaker. They are all professional philosophers attending the prestigious weekly colloquium at a New York-area university. The speaker sits with his nose drowned in a set of typewritten pages, from which he reads in a monotone voice. He is hard to follow, so I daydream a bit and lose his thread. I can vaguely tell that the discussion revolves around some "philosophical" debate about Martians invading your head and controlling your will, all the while preventing you from knowing it. There seem to be several theories concerning this idea, but the speaker's opinion differs from those of other writers on the subject. He spends some time showing where his research on these head-hijacking Martians is unique. After his monologue (fifty-five minutes of relentless reading of the typewritten material) there is a short break, then another fifty-five minutes of discussion about Martians planting chips and other outlandish conjectures. Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant)."

Taleb proceeds then to be very rude to those philosophers "whose curiosity is focused on regimented on-the-shelf topics" and whose critical faculties are "domain dependent." In other words they fail to apply their skeptical methods beyond their philosophical work. For instance, they might blindly believe in the abilities of their pension plan managers.

"Beyond this, they may believe without question that we can predict societal events ... that politicians know more about what is going on than their drivers, that the chairman of the Federal Reserve saved the economy, and so many such things. They may also believe that nationality matters (they always stick "French," "German," or "American" in front of a philosopher's name, as if this has something to do with anything he has to say)."

If Taleb is hard on philosophers, it is not because he doubts the importance of philosophy but precisely because he believes in its importance. "Philosophers," he writes, are "the watchdogs of critical thinking" and "have duties beyond those of other professions."

Of mice and men

2010-10-14T21:28:00.000-07:00

Last night, as I was walking on a footpath by the river, I felt something softish roll under my left heel. It was a juvenile mouse (or some such rodent) which had fatally mistimed its dash across the path. It was still breathing, its body apparently split, with yellow stuff coming out. I didn't have the stomach to put it out of its misery and gingerly pushed it aside with the toe of my shoe and walked on.

Later in the evening, I chanced upon this passage, this cri de coeur, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, with the section heading, "The world is unfair":

"Is the world that unfair? I have spent my entire life studying randomness, practicing randomness, hating randomness. The more that time passes, the worse things seem to me, the more scared I get, the more disgusted I am with Mother Nature. The more I think about my subject, the more I see evidence that the world we have in our minds is different from the one playing outside. Every morning the world appears to me more random than it did the day before, and humans seem to be even more fooled by it than they were the previous day. It is becoming unbearable. I find writing these lines painful; I find the world revolting." *

*The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable (Penguin, 2008), p.215.

[Something lighter next time. I promise!]

Fake wisdom

2010-10-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

"Half the time," writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The black swan*, " I am hyperconservative in the conduct of my own affairs; the other half I am hyperaggressive. This may not seem exceptional, except that my conservatism applies to what others call risk taking, and my aggressivenes to areas where others recommend caution."

For example, on the stock market, 'safe' blue chip stocks present invisible (and potentially terminal) risks, whereas speculative stocks "offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts."

There might be some wisdom in this - it is the theme of the book. But this, which follows on the next page, is, I think, more dubious.

"I once received [a] piece of life-changing advice, which ... I find applicable, wise, and empirically valid. My classmate in Paris, the novelist-to-be Jean-Olivier Tedesco, pronounced, as he prevented me from running to catch a subway, "I don't run for trains."

Taleb continues: "I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking."

The last sentence is good. It makes sense. But my advice on the other matter (for what it's worth) is to run fast and catch the train. (And, more generally, to be wary of anyone who speaks in parables.)

*The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable. (Penguin 2008). Quotations from pages 295, 296 and 297.

The randomness at the heart of reality

2010-10-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

Is reality ultimately based on randomness? How one answers this question ultimately colors one's outlook (I suggest) in deep and subtle ways. Of course, there are many ways one could approach the issue and there are ambiguities in the question itself. But I am drawn to such questions as this (as a moth to a flame?) and, since I read and think about them, I might as well write about them here from time to time.

Here, then, are a few notes about Vlatko Vedral's view of the issue ...

Vedral draws a distinction between "classical superficial randomness" (e.g. coin tosses) and "quantum fundamental randomness" (see Decoding reality (OUP, 2010), p.163). Randomness approximates to unpredictability and much in our world appears random because it is impossible to predict in practice even if in theory one could do so using the methods of classical physics (if one had all the relevant data etc.). But the quantum world is different. No prediction can be made (even in theory) of certain quantum events. Quantum theory embraces randomness, and sees some quantum phenomena as random in a fundamental sense.*

We can think of scientific theories, Vedral writes (p. 166), as computer programs "with the output being the result of whatever experiment we are trying to model. We say that our theory is powerful, if we can compress all sorts of observations into very few equations."

But any theory will be finite and will (as Gregory Chaitin first fully realized within information theory) only produce a finite set of results. "In other words, there will be many experimental outcomes that could not be compressed within the theory. And this effectively implies that they are random." (p. 167)

Is the randomness in quantum theory due to the theory's incompleteness - our lack of knowledge of a more detailed deterministic underlying theory - as some people think? Or is "randomness inherent in the Universe, and therefore ... [an essential] part of any physical description of reality? Randomness could simply be there because our description of reality is always .... finite and anything requiring more information than that would appear to be random (since our description could not predict it)." (p. 167-168)

Vedral states what he sees as a "very profound conclusion" that this view implies: "that randomness in quantum physics is far from unexpected - in fact according to this logic it is actually essential. Furthermore, it would mean that whatever theory - if any - superseded quantum physics, it would still have to contain some random features." (p. 168)

To me it matters (or seems to matter) whether or not randomness is at the heart of things. Does it matter to you?

* I have revised this passage slightly in response to a comment.

A model of restraint

2010-10-01T00:17:00.000-07:00

Moralizing is a perilous business. It's all too easy to convey not just a moral point, but a sense of moral superiority or self-righteousness also. Perhaps I'm oversensitive to these things and see smugness where there is none, but I do react negatively to most moralizers, especially (for some reason) when they happen to be philosophy professors. (Peter Singer comes to mind.)

I was reminded of these issues when I read a recent article by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Any response that I might make would tend to sarcasm. By contrast, Norman Geras remains dispassionate. His critique of Appiah's article is a model of conciseness, clarity and restraint.

Don't rock the boat

2010-09-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

The chapter on 'social informatics' in Vlatko Vedral's Decoding reality (OUP, 2010) is an odd mixture of jargon and platitude. The attempt to apply basic principles of physics and information theory to the social world is not very convincing (and in fact doesn't do justice to important work, by economists especially).

Here is part of his lame conclusion: "Some sociologists are optimistic that the information age will lead to a fairer society that will improve everyone's living conditions, as well as narrowing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Others are rather pessimistic, claiming that the new age will bring an abrupt end, a kind of phase transition, to present society (through all sorts of mechanisms such as increased crime due to the breakdown of families, global terrorism, global warming, and so on)." (p.108)

The notion of phase transition is nonetheless of some interest. In physics, phase transitions - radical changes in the way elements of the system in question interact - occur only in certain circumstances. In one dimensional systems (where there is limited scope for interaction) phase transitions are impossible. There are no general phase transitions in two dimensional systems either, though there is a particular arrangement which does allow a phase transition to occur. Generally, however, phase transitions only occur in three dimensional systems which allow more complex interactions. The classic example involves interacting H2O molecules: ice becomes water, water becomes vapor.

In the distant past, human societies were very local in nature. "One tribe exists here, another over there, but with very little communication between them. Even towards the end of the nineteenth century, transfer of ideas and communication in general were still very slow. So for a long time humans have lived in societies where communication was very short range. And, in physics, this would mean that abrupt changes are impossible. Societies have other complexities, so I would say that 'fundamental change is unlikely' rather than 'impossible'." (p. 104)

New technologies have changed all this. Now " ... we can learn from and communicate with virtually anyone in the world ... Increasingly ... we are approaching the stage where everyone can and does interact with everyone else. And this is exactly when phase transitions become increasingly likely."

But, of course, the nature of any phase transition is unpredictable, So Vedral ends the chapter with the vague comments on optimistic and pessimistic scenarios quoted above, and the observation that "[i]n a more interconnected society we are more susceptible to sudden changes" and so "we had better improve the speed of our decision making." And maybe the quality?

I can't resist quoting the final lines of this chapter in which he previews the next section of the book. " ... In order to understand the ultimate origins of information we need to take an exciting voyage of discovery. And this will take us into the realms of quantum mechanics, the true nature of randomness, whether teleportation is possible, and the question of free will and determinism. It's going to be a rocky boat, so hold on tight!"

Rocky boat?

Rewriting history

2010-09-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

Back in May I wrote a little piece called 'Out of my comfort zone' in which I touched on some ideas on the nature of the universe put forward by Seth Lloyd and - more recently - by Vlatko Vedral. Vedral's book, Decoding reality: the universe as a quantum computer (Oxford University Press) came out earlier this year.

In his review in New Scientist (there is a pay wall, so I can't give the link) Lloyd praises the book but also shows irritation that Vedral did not even mention Lloyd's book of several years ago on the same theme (Programming the universe). Lloyd also points out a mathematical howler which, as he saw it, was surprising in a leading researcher.

What jumped out at me in Vedral's book was an amazingly slipshod paragraph about Nietzsche which reflects badly both on the author and on Oxford University Press. It helps confirm my suspicion that books have become commodities - objects for sale - and the quality of the content is secondary. Scholarly values are out the window. (Vedral boasts of his 'streetwise' style; more worrying is the sense that he feels that historical truth doesn't matter.)

According to Vedral, Nietzsche " ... based the whole of his philosophy on the premise that physics implies that life is ultimately pointless, as eventually it must become extinct. The idea of absolute progress (the idea of progress to the point of perfection) must therefore ultimately be an illusion, in direct contrast to the ideas underpinning the evolution of life. Nietzsche thought that this conclusion is so difficult to live with that he needed to introduce the concept of a 'superhuman' - an improved version of the human, able to come to terms with the fact that life cannot achieve absolute progress. Nietzsche, sadly, did not himself have the key attributes of his superhuman - he spent the last 11 years of his life in a lunatic asylum unable to deal with life, disillusioned and alone." (p.60)

Readers who know more about Nietzsche than I do can draw their own conclusions. I simply point out that the German thinker believed in an 'eternal return' - that life would ultimately repeat itself (in fact a scarier idea than extinction!). Also, he had an organic brain disease - he wasn't made insane by his philosophy; and he was looked after by his family after his breakdown, so did not spend the time in an asylum, and nor was he alone. He was so far gone after his breakdown that he could hardly be called 'disillusioned'.

These may be deemed unimportant errors, but they are symptomatic of an unfortunate attitude. It's a pity, because the book is worth reading. It is serving to crystallize some of my ideas, and I'll have more to say about it later.

In praise of the conservative consumer

2010-09-17T01:45:00.000-07:00

Much social science is pseudo-science and the proportion of dodgy research is particularly high in business-related areas. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see the concept of conservatism featuring in a recent model of consumer behavior devised by researcher Ross Honeywill. According to a profile by Lucinda Schmidt, Honeywill sees the recent global financial crisis (or 'the great recession') as less significant a turning point than something that occurred about 20 years ago: the advent of a new economic order, and the rise of a new kind of consumer (the 'NEO').

"NEOs are constant consumers: confident, individualistic, creative, free-thinking and socially progressive. Many are under 40, university-educated, self-employed and buy for quality not price.

The other type, 'traditionals', are more comfortable in a structured environment, often have conservative social values and are driven by price and getting the best deal.

Consumers come from these two planets ... The distinction is not between those who have money and those who don't; there are wealthy traditionals and poor NEOs."

The key difference is in the attitude to spending: 'traditionals' are unnerved by uncertainty and have disappeared from the consumer landscape in the US.

Honeywill makes the point that a recovery will only occur when the 'traditionals' start spending again. This may well be, but I can't help feeling that the behavior of the so-called 'traditionals' seems both more rational and more sustainable than that of the NEOs.

In fact this 'socially progressive' new style of consumer who buys for quality might be seen to be behind the massive build-up of debt which caused our current economic troubles. Moreover, the 'constant consumer' will inevitably define life in terms of consumption, and quality of life in terms of product quality.

Traditional modes of operation - based on setting one's own goals and living within one's means - are not only more sustainable but more conducive to a larger - and ultimately freer - view of life.

English Jewish surnames

2010-09-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

[Revised July 2011]

My late father had a special interest in Jewish history and a very positive attitude towards Jews - unlike his brother who was in this regard something of an 'evil twin' whose belief in an international Jewish conspiracy was unshakable.

My paternal grandparents and great-grandparents were either Roman Catholics or members of the Church of England and there was no suggestion of any awareness of Jewish ancestry. But, oddly, virtually all my father's friends were either Jewish (surnames: Pittman, Babel, Mossenson ...) or had surnames which are often indicative of Jewish ancestry (Miller, Bloomfield, Rees ...).

Even his barber was Jewish (of German origin) and, when Dad retired due to ill health, the hairdresser (whose shop was near his office) gave him a card with a touching note in which he referred to himself as my father's "devoted Freund."

I never talked to my father about these matters as I only began to take an interest in them after his death. Was he aware of the possibility of Jewish ancestry? I doubt it. Did his Jewish friends suspect that his family was Jewish or part Jewish? This is possible. In an early photograph my rather anti-Semitic uncle bears an uncanny resemblance to Franz Kafka!

In fact there are some surnames in my family tree - mainly on my father's side - which could indicate Jewish origins. Beck, Fisher and Langman seem the most likely.

English names have been adopted by Jewish immigrants over the centuries. The migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries are well known. Earlier waves of Jewish immigration are less well documented. Many descendants of Sephardi Jews from the Iberian peninsula settled in the British Isles in the 16th and 17th centuries and gradually assimilated into the Christian mainstream.

Some names are more likely than others to be associated with the possibility of Sephardi or other Jewish origins. Amongst the names of my forebears I am looking at in this regard - apart from the names mentioned above - are Davis, Lester, Harris, Michell, and also English, Pember, Russell, Sturgeon and Ward.

Head-clutching epidemic?

2010-09-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

Yet another head-clutching philosopher !

Ten ways of being conservative

2010-09-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

Politically. The current system is a shambles but, if we mess with it too much, we are liable to end up with something even worse.
Fiscally. Though debt has a crucial role to play in modern economies, over-indebtedness - especially on the part of governments - is threatening future prosperity. Fiscal conservatism should be less contentious than other forms of conservatism, as it is based on simple rationality and prudence rather than on subjective feelings or convictions.
Socially. Traditional ways of relating and communicating have proved their effectiveness. They are also to be preferred on aesthetic grounds.
Religiously. Religious fashions (like happy clappy Christianity) are anathema. Like social conservatism but with a metaphysical dimension.
Scientifically. Mainstream scientific opinion is taken seriously as a provisional best guess.
Artistically. Varies of course with the art and the context. The conservative likes (some) old art not because it is old but because it is good. Anything showy or meretricious is rejected. A painter like Mondrian, I would say, is deeply conservative.
Sartorially. There are fashions and fashions. The sartorial conservative takes heed of the slow underlying fashions and ignores the fads.
Gustatorily. Adventurous eating is seen as not only unnecessary and potentially wasteful, but as suspect - perhaps indicative of an empty mind (or worse). Ludwig Wittgenstein, in this as in so many other aspects of his life, combined conservatism with its opposite. He didn't mind what he was given for dinner so long as it was always the same.
Alcoholically. The right drink at the right time.
Sexually. Let's face it, sex and conservatism have been and always will be in an awkward relationship. Uneasy bedfellows?

Were Wittgenstein's antics catching?

2010-08-29T23:39:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me this link which features a picture of the philosopher Karl Popper clutching his head. The description of the head-clutching (plus) Wittgenstein in my post of last month ('The showmanship of Ludwig Wittgenstein') was taken from the book Wittgenstein's poker which is about the notorious debate between LW and Karl Popper at which LW was supposed to have threatened Popper with a poker. Ah, those were the days...

The 'internal self' is a fiction. So what?

2010-08-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

What might be the practical implications of the view of the self put forward in some of my recent posts, notably "Nietzsche on the 'self'"? Here are a few thoughts.

If one realizes that one has been treating as something real the internal 'self' or 'I' which is in fact a fiction, then one's view of who one is will change in subtle - but possibly significant - ways.

It may provide a way of dealing with death. The body dies, but arguably it is the 'internal self' we are more concerned with. And if it is only an illusion, what is there to mourn (apart from the loss of the body)?

There will be implications also for the moral sense, as the old idea of the freely willing agent - the traditional notion of the conscience - might be called into question. This is too large an issue to address here, but, briefly, my view is that we certainly have a sense of being able to choose from a large array of imagined possible actions - and in a sense we do freely choose. The problem that philosophers have addressed is to define precisely how free choice is to be understood so that it does not depend on an 'internal', immaterial self. I suspect, however, that, as the notion of the internal self is superseded in everyday thinking, the philosophical problem of human freedom will no longer seem to be a problem.

One other implication of the new view of the self is that the atomistic individualism which lies behind much political thinking comes to seem quite unrealistic and false. For there is no spiritual core to define the individual. Rather the individual is a product of society. Language is social and is a key element in an individual's identity; likewise other cultural elements and social relations of all kinds. A new-born baby only gradually becomes a human individual as it interacts with and internalizes elements of its social, cultural and linguistic environment.

It is a truism that we are social beings - but the Christian-Platonic notion of the soul and then its secular equivalent led Europeans for hundreds of years to underplay the social dimension. And current notions of political freedom, human rights and equality could be seen to derive from this discredited tradition.

Believing in a social self does not entail a collectivist social ideal, however, and certainly not an egalitarian one. Collectivism is not incompatible with the view that the 'internal self' does not exist, but then nor is the traditional conservative ideal of an organic society based on multiple institutions and complex hierarchical relationships.

Intelligent behavior

2010-08-19T22:27:00.000-07:00

The mark of intelligence is active learning - changing behavior in response to circumstances and past successes and failures. In his remarkable and largely forgotten book The concept of mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle distinguishes between a passive approach of 'satisfying criteria' (or following rules blindly) and an active one of 'applying criteria' (which involves making choices about when to apply which criteria, that is, continually modifying the rules one lives by).

Ryle writes: "To be intelligent is not merely to satisfy criteria, but to apply them; to regulate one's actions and not merely to be well-regulated. A person's performance is described as careful or skillful, if in his operations he is ready to detect and correct lapses, to repeat and improve upon successes, to profit from the examples of others and so forth. He applies criteria in performing critically, that is, in trying to get things right."

Ryle's work is difficult to categorize. It is not scientific psychology, but nor is it anti-scientific. It is concerned with the basic logic of psychological explanations. He called the area in which he worked 'philosophical psychology'.

As Jason Streitfeld points out, Ryle challenges "what he calls 'the dogma of the ghost in the machine,' the tradition of Cartesian dualism which says that minds and bodies are distinct entities, each with their own causal properties. Ryle says this is a category error. When we speak of minds, we are not speaking of states, entities, or events. The language we use to talk about minds employs a logic of dispositions, and not simply of occurrences. Rather than think of the mind as a particular place or thing, Ryle asks us to imagine it as a complex set of abilities, capacities, skills, and so on ...

... Ryle's argument is not that we do not have private thoughts, or that we do not imagine, think, or feel. He does not ignore the richness and potency of experience. Rather, he says that the marks of the mental are not intrinsically private. Sometimes they are public, such as when we speak or write, or otherwise perform publicly. Thoughts are only sometimes private, and then only by convention or circumstance. Furthermore, such private acts do not confer intelligence to outward, public acts. Ryle's insight is this:- Intelligent behavior is not the product of intelligence - it is intelligence itself."

Nietzsche on the 'self'

2010-08-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

Martin and Barresi (see my post 'The ghost in the machine') draw attention to Nietzsche's brilliance in seeing so clearly and so early (his final mental breakdown occurred in January 1889) the questionable nature of the self. (The quotes are from pages 194 and 195.)

'Nietzsche is famous for having proclaimed that the rise of Enlightenment secularism meant that "God is dead." He is virtually unknown for having uncovered, in his personal reflections, the perhaps deeper truth that the self is dead ...

"Everything that enters consciousness as 'unity'," he said, "is already tremendously complex." Rather than unity of consciousness, we have "only a semblance of Unity." To explain this semblance, rather than a single subject [or 'I'], we could do as well by postulating "a multiplicity of subjects [or 'I's], whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and consciousness in general." We do not have any reason to believe that there is a dominant subject overseeing this multiplicity. "The subject [or 'I'] is multiplicity." '

(This view, by the way, is in accord with my understanding of the best recent neuroscientific theories.)

'Nietzsche concluded,' write Martin and Barresi, 'that we have been victimized by our language, that is, by "our bad habit ... of taking a mnemonic, and abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning "it flashes." Or the little word "I." To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the "subject," the "I"!" '

In other words, Nietzsche is saying that we have bought into the fiction of thinking that if there is a flashing, then there is a 'something' - an 'it' - that flashes; and if there is seeing, there is a 'something' - an 'I' - that sees. But this 'thing' that does the flashing does not exist - lightning is an electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere; and likewise the thing that does the seeing is not an internal agent, the 'I', but the physical organism (comprising eyes and brain, etc.).

So the "I" - or self - is neither a single thing, nor an agent (it does not do anything). Is it a fiction?

Man on a mission

2010-08-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

I was walking the other night along a riverside promenade in the middle of the city of Melbourne, Australia, where street artists, on hands and knees, draw large chalk or crayon versions of Renaissance masterpieces on the pavement. I saw ahead of me a group of drunken young men who were waylaying passers-by and forcing them to admire and contribute to the retirement plan of an embarrassed artist. So I walked a bit faster and studiously avoided eye contact.

As I slipped past I heard one of the men say to one of the others who was going after me: "Leave him. He's on a mission."

The ghost in the machine

2010-08-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

I have been reading The rise and fall of the soul and self: an intellectual history of personal identity by Raymond Martin and John Barresi (Columbia UP, 2006). The basic theme is that just as the idea of the soul has disappeared from scientific explanations of behavior (and from most people's thinking) so the idea of the self (which replaced the soul) is now being questioned if not rejected.

Much of the book, especially the later chapters, focuses on scientific research but philosophical approaches are also covered extensively. One thing that strikes me is the extent to which 20th century psychology was unscientific insofar as many theories and approaches clearly serve as vehicles for individual (value-laden) points of view rather than contributing to a gradual increase in understanding (as truly scientific work tends to do). I was impressed at how well the Anglo-American analytic philosophical tradition seemed to stand up when compared with certain branches of psychology, and with much continental philosophy.

The gulf between the Anglo-American and continental styles of philosophy is brought out in an anecdote featuring the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle:

'...Ryle attacked not only the Cartesian idea of a self distinct from the body - "the ghost in the machine" - but the very idea of an inner life. In The Concept of Mind (1949), he argued that all meaningful talk of mental episodes - "twitches, itches, and twangs," even a person's being angry - was not about anything private to a person's interior life but about bodily "dispositions to behave."

In the 1950s and 1960s, in England, ordinary-language philosophy, whose hallmark was to deny the inner life, came into full bloom. Meanwhile, on the continent, phenomenology, whose focus was the examination of inner life, was gathering steam. There was little love lost between the proponents of the two approaches. At a conference, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in a conciliatory gesture, remarked to Ryle, "But are we not doing the same thing?" Ryle responded, "I hope not!" ' (p.244)

The showmanship of Ludwig Wittgenstein

2010-07-31T22:21:00.000-07:00

Here is a description of some of Wittgenstein's typical antics (the description is based on an account given by Peter Munz of a famous 1946 seminar and was published in the book Wittgenstein's poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow):

'[Wittgenstein] wrestles visibly with his ideas, holding his head in his hands, occasionally throwing out staccato remarks, as though each word were as painful as plucking thorns, and muttering, "God I am stupid today" or shouting "Damn my bloody soul!...Help me someone!" '

Now here is a scene from the story 'The secret garden' by G.K. Chesterton (published as the second story in The innocence of Father Brown in 1911, three years after Wittgenstein's first arrival in England):

'...Father Brown, who had sprung swiftly to his feet, ...was holding his temples tight like a man in sudden and violent pain.

"Stop, stop, stop!" he cried; "stop talking a minute, for I see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking... Will my head split - or will it see? I see half - I only see half."

He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture of thought or prayer...'

In 1936 Wittgenstein tried to distance himself from the Father Brown stories (which had been recommended to him): '...Wittgenstein turned up his nose. "Oh no, I couldn't stand the idea of a Roman Catholic priest playing the part of a detective. I don't want that." '

And yet it seems that Wittgenstein, in playing the part of a philosopher, had himself been mimicking that fictional Roman Catholic priest playing the part of a detective!

Early influences

2010-07-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

I would like to highlight a point I made in a comment attached to my previous post - namely that if an individual's political (or for that matter religious or philosophical) views are affected by basic character and personality traits, and if such traits are in part determined by genetic factors and/or by very early experiences, then an individual's views will be less a product of mature reason and analysis than is generally assumed. Consequently, we should be more skeptical of our own convictions.

Recent work in developmental psychology has showed convincingly that - and to some extent how - the sense of self arises from social interaction, but basic personality traits seem to have a strong genetic foundation. This is brought out by the controversy about the influence of birth order. Some (very cursory) reading has led me to the provisional conclusion that the 'first-borns tend to be more conservative' idea is indeed true, but only within (not between) families. Within families first-borns score higher on conservatism, conscientiousness and achievement orientation, later-borns on rebelliousness, openness and agreeableness. The results only work within families because genetic effects are stronger than birth-order effects. The birth-order effect is real but weak.

It is of course intuitively plausible that first-borns might favor the status quo insofar as they often bask in the undivided attention of their parents until the dreaded sibling comes along to drive them out of this childhood paradise.

Little Hitler

2010-07-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

Two young women - sisters - chatting in the kitchen of a suburban house. One sister - the visitor - unscrews the lid of a jar of boiled candies and helps herself to one or two.

A little boy, about three years old, wanders into the kitchen, his eyes fixed on the open jar. The candies were his and he had a strict, self-imposed regime of two per day.

"No more lids are to be taken off in this house!" he thunders.

The sisters laugh.

"And there is to be no more laughing in this house!" he orders.

The sisters laugh uncontrollably.

__________

The child was me, and the incident raises the issue of the early formation of psychological characteristics, and also the link with an eventual social philosophy.

It is generally accepted that a person's basic character traits are determined within the first couple of years of life. And clearly one's personality and character affect one's views of social arrangements and ultimately one's (implicit or explicit) social philosophy.

A conservative tendency? The incident suggests - let's be honest - a leaning towards something a little closer to fascism!

Work and play

2010-07-13T00:10:00.000-07:00

I'm interested in what people would continue to do if they were no longer paid for doing it. Obviously, there is a large class of not particularly enjoyable jobs which are necessary for the effective functioning of society. And there is a class of activities - like games - which are not necessary in a practical sense but which people engage in just for fun. The interesting areas are between these extremes.

Of course, a lot of people enjoy their paid work, but part of that enjoyment usually derives from the status and the money that it brings, and I suspect that, even if they could afford it, few professionals would continue to work if all the work was pro bono!

My brother is a professional actor, and he will occasionally help out with a student film, or do something he considers worthwhile on the stage for a pittance. But his identity as an actor is dependent on properly paid work.

Journalism is an interesting case. Bloggers generally blog for no financial reward and a fair percentage of the material is professional standard. Obviously, the intrinsic rewards of writing and research (if it is being read and/or utilized) are sufficient to keep these sorts of activities going.

Another interesting area is academic research in the humanities. I know a university professor who spent years (on and off) as part of a team translating Proclus (a 5th-century neo-Platonist with some pretty crazy ideas) into English, which was good for his career - but would he have done it if it did not enhance (albeit indirectly) his pay packet? I doubt it - but I may be wrong. I know of other, older scholars who will happily take their labors of love into retirement.

Despite the exceptional cases, funding matters - in the arts, in social areas and in science. Many - most? - areas of the arts and the humanities would wither away without financial support. Individual initiatives could never replace social spending by government and large private organizations*. And most areas of science depend on a combination of government and commercial support to maintain critical mass.

The hard truth is that much of the support that these activities depended on in the past can no longer be relied on.

There are humanitarian issues at stake here (I would place them above the arts and pure science in importance), and many will suffer.

However, in areas in which human suffering is not at issue, the process may be bracing to watch. A giant social experiment is in train which will determine which (intrinsically valuable) human activities will remain live options into the future.

*Spending by government on social welfare and similar programs can, of course, have adverse consequences. However, I am making the (relatively uncontroversial) assumption here that governments do have a legitimate role in providing a safety net for those in need.

Left, left, left right left

2010-07-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

It has recently been pointed out to me that my conversation is full of references to "the left" and "the right" (and this blog tends to reflect my conversational habits). I think the observation carried an implicit criticism (about my tendency to think in terms of simple, adversarial dichotomies?), and I might just give a few initial reflections here on the matter.

First of all, I realize that an individual's political and social views are very complex and cannot be reduced to a position on a one-dimensional (or even multi-dimensional) scale. I have used the word "conservative" to label my general position, but it is a word which is sufficiently flexible to cover a range of perspectives in a range of areas (not just politics).

I had a friend who was raised in China in the 1970s (the daughter of a general, in fact), and she was in a deep sense a conservative, though she was not interested in Western politics. She was educated in Confucian values and classical Chinese literature by her maternal grandmother, who had been a concubine, and yet she was also deeply affected by Maoist Communist ideas.

The point I'm making is that I know there is no simple left/right dichotomy. I am interested in how people think and form their values, and, if I tend to identify with "one side" of politics, I am not totally sure of my position and I remain respectful towards and sometimes fascinated by those with views very different from my own.

Racism and the right

2010-07-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

Talk about 'ethnic differences' and attitudes thereto is usually conducted, in educated circles at least, in a very constrained and politically correct manner. No wonder. A word out of place - or the wrong word - can destroy a career.

This situation is unfortunate because there will always be those who - feeling that they have nothing to lose - are only too ready to fill the vacuum with ugly words and ugly deeds.

On the basis of evident racism in elements of the far right, the left tends (incorrectly) to see anyone right of centre as suspect in this regard. I think I am correct in saying that the left particularly prides itself on not being racist (whatever that means exactly [see below]) and sees this as a key point of differentiation and self-definition. So if racist ideas can be imputed to conservatives, this serves to sharpen the left's self-identity.

Racism becomes politicized - which means it is ever more difficult to deal with the deep and complex problems associated with ethnic tensions, and ever more difficult to discuss these issues sensibly.

In fact the words 'racism' and 'racist' have become rhetorical hand grenades without any clear meaning. Sure, racially-motivated violence, racially derogatory language and certain forms of discrimination can be seen clearly to be racist. But even those who merely interpret data garnered from cognitive and other testing of various populations as indicating significant statistical differences between those populations with respect to specific abilities may be accused of racism.

These implicit constraints on free inquiry and free speech only serve to create resentment and cynicism.