All Conspiracy Theories Considered Absurd

For the philosopher, who’s not an “analytic” philosopher, but has analytic training, the set of causes which I’ll call “denialism” (but are usually known by the somewhat more negatively charged, lengthier and more general phrase “conspiracy theory”) present an interesting challenge. In this article I shall prove that no species of denialism can ever be true or meaningful, using a very basic form of the logic of statements.

I shall restrict my attention to denialism, which I’ll define as a conspiracy theory that negates a received truth or opinion. A pure conspiracy theory, such as “the world wide Jewish conspiracy” doesn’t do this. A denialist conspiracy theory often “piggybacks” on the received truth-opinion, gaining currency from the popularity of the truth-opinion. For example, if all the toffs and their women are talking about Shakespeare or Michelangelo

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

- TS Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The insecure Prufrock can say that Bramante sculpted the Pieta as a short cut to sounding deep.

Then a strategy to regain cultural capital (what Bourdieu calls Distinction) would be to put the boot in by saying that “Shakespeare” didn’t write Shakespeare, where “anti-Stratfordianism”, the belief that a miller’s and alderman’s son did not write the “Shakespeare” of the First Folio is an example of Denialism.

But first of all, what are some “denialisms”? Here are some of my “favorites”, arranged in an order that will be obvious.

Lo Thus Quoth Dighton, Lay those Tender Babes: The Ricardian Denial

The tyrannous and bloodie Act is done,
The most arch deed of pittious massacre
That euer yet this Land was guilty of:
Dighton and Forrest, who I did suborne
To do this peece of ruthfull Butchery,
Albeit they were flesht Villaines, bloody Dogges,
Melted with tendernesse, and milde compassion,
Wept like to Children, in their deaths sad Story.
O thus (quoth Dighton) lay the gentle Babes:
Thus, thus (quoth Forrest) girdling one another
Within their Alablaster innocent Armes:
Their lips were foure red Roses on a stalke,
And in their Summer Beauty kist each other.
A Booke of Prayers on their pillow lay,
Which one (quoth Forrest) almost chang’d my minde:
But oh the Diuell, there the Villaine stopt:
When Dighton thus told on, we smothered
The most replenished sweet worke of Nature,
That from the prime Creation ere she framed.
Hence both are gone with Conscience and Remorse,
They could not speake, and so I left them both,
To beare this tydings to the bloody King.

Shakespeare: Richard III

The “received” account of the deaths of Edward V and his brother is that they were slaughtered by hired thugs, Dighton and Forrest, in the pay of Sir James Tyrell and that Tyrell was furthermore in the pay of Richard III, who engaged Tyrell when Richard’s buddy Buckingham wimped out of the caper.

This account appears in Shakespeare’s Richard III but that play was sourced on Sir Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III:

For Sir Iames Tirel deuised that thei shold be murthered in their beddes. To the execucion wherof, he appointed Miles Forest one of the foure that kept them, a felowe fleshed in murther before time. To him he ioyned one Iohn Dighton his own horsekeper, a big brode square strong knaue. Then al the other beeing remoued from them, thys Miles Forest and Iohn Dighton, about midnight (the sely children lying in their beddes) came into the chamber, and sodainly lapped them vp among the clothes so be wrapped them and entangled them keping down by force the fetherbed and pillowes hard vnto their mouthes, that within a while smored and stifled, theyr breath failing, thei gaue vp to god their innocent soules into the ioyes of heauen, leauing to the tormentors their bodyes dead in the bed.

The denialist account originates in a work of detective fiction, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time and it purports to prove the denial or the dubiety of the received story, found in both Shakespeare (who wasn’t writing history) and his source Thomas More (who was, but in a primitive police state in which it was convenient to establish Richard’s illegitimacy, given that More’s sovereign was the son of Henry VII, who settled Richard’s hash at Bosworth).

But chances are More was telling the truth: chap certainly spoke truth to power later on in the matter of Anne Boleyn: would such a one be quite so willing to tell a lie in his History here?

More’s compassion for real victims shines through in his use of the unusual word “sely” to refer to the children; for “sely” derives from “saelig”, a Middle (or Old) English word that managed to mean three simultaneous things: “silly happy holy”, like the Christ Child or John Dunbar’s “baby full of benignity”, at his “mothers breast sowkand”, or sucking at her tits. The meaning has disappeared in a world where it is hard to be all three things together. It also came through in Sir or Saint Thomas More’s actions in the matter of Anne Boleyn.

But note how the conspiracy theorist has essentially to reduce people to a subcritical level. Sir, or Saint Thomas More has become a propagandist hack even and the Shakespeare denier cannot imagine anything higher than a hack. The Ricardian conspiracy theorist relies on ignorance of Sir or Saint Thomas More’s martyrdom.

And later in the book in which this poppycock is bruited, a male interlocutor (chosen, I think, to be male to give him a voice of authority) deflates claims that British soldiers killed striking British miners at Tonypandy in 1910 by introducing Tey’s readership to watered down Hume: for as to most callow reader of philosophy should know, empirical claims can be doubted, Tey’s male character “shows” by way of the fact that “the material record can be doubted” that “no miners died at Tonypandy” when in fact the oral record indicates that they did…and the slaughter nine years on of Indians peacefully assembled to air their grievances at Amritsar confirms that British soldiers could and would open fire on civilians.

Anonymous: Shakespeare Didn’t Write the Plays

The recent film Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich, hasn’t done well at the box office. It is based on the denial or the claim of dubiety of the “received” account of the authorship of the plays collected by Hemyngs and Condell in the First Folio and attributed to Shakespeare, a glover’s and alderman’s son from Stratford and actor-manager in addition (according to nearly all actual Shakespeare authorities) to being a playwright.

Many amateur and self-appointed sleuths cannot imagine that a mere middle class man with a grammar school education (that seems to have been remarkably thorough) could have written about kings, and queens, and stuff, possibly because the typical amateur or self-appointed sleuth cannot.

The American Civil War Was Not About the Slavery, Stupid

Reputable historians do emphasize that the South made broader claims on the North before our American Civil War than simply the right of Southerners to own slaves. Somewhat apart from the fact that Northern states emancipated their slaves in the early 19th century, the South was also reluctant to approve high tariffs on imports in order to finance infrastructure (notably, the Erie Canal linking Albany with the Great Lakes) that benefited only the North or projects the South did not want.

But mainstream historians do not deny that the South developed the theory that the states could individually and unilaterally “nullify” Federal laws not only to avoid tariffs but also to prevent the free states, which were gradually outnumbering slave states due to Western expansion, from eventually gaining a Congressional majority, banning slavery nationwide.

Perhaps shamed by the heritage and their peculiar institution, Southern apologists in recent years have been claiming, on the basis of Nullification’s economic purpose, that the Civil War was not about slavery, rather about states’ rights.

Thie is the denial or the claim of dubiety of a story accepted by mainstream historians of the left such as Howard Zinn, and of the right, including Charles Johnson and Winston Churchill.

Americans Never Landed On the Moon

I lost my virginity in Wisconsin as the astronauts landed on the Moon, so perhaps this denial, or the claim of dubiety, that the Moon landings occurred is especially offensive to me.

It is theorized that the entire adventure was filmed on a sound stage.

Death of a President

Next we have the denial or the claim of dubiety of the official story of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963.

The official story is that the assassination was performed using rather right wing methods (a bullet) by a malcontent loner with a checkered, expatriate past and a young, beautiful Russian wife, with left-wing sympathies but no real friends among the American left of the time. As is well known there are a vast number of alternate theories.

They were popularized by Oliver Stone’s film JFK. They are collected and rejected in a great whacking book by former Los Angeles District Attorney Vince Bugliosi, Reclaiming History.

I have read this book in its entirety. It is a monument to the legal insight and moral seriousness of Bugliosi, the Los Angeles district attorney who nailed Manson. It demonstrates not only that Oswald, acting alone, killed the President but also that historical “certainty” is possible where historical “certainty” is P(x)=1 “for all practical purposes”.

I was 14 at the time of the assasination and, just prior to the announcement that the President had been shot, I’d been disciplined for retaliating against a bully whose father had established the first McDonald’s outlet in Des Plaines, Illinois.

9-11

Comes now the denial or the claim of dubiety of the official story of 9-11. The official story is that it was the work of hired suicide killers engaged by Osama bin Laden, the scion of oil wealth who’d been enraged by the continuing presence of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War and the American abandonment of Afghanistan after its people had effectively won the Cold War. Some alternate stories claim it was staged by American spy agencies to mobilize the country against Israel’s enemies, etc.

Creationism

This is the denial or the claim of dubiety of Darwin’s theory of Evolution and its modern restatements. In recent years this has been on the face of it a claim of dubiety in the form of claims that people who believe scientific authority are being excessively credulous, and that in the interest of fairness, the Creationist and “Intelligent Design” “theories” deserve “equal time”.

Global Maybe Not Warmingism

This is the denial or the claim of dubiety that “global warming”, most conveniently former Vice President Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”: that the world is getting warmer, that this is due to the properties of additional carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, that the increase is due to human activity and finally, that this will have bad effects, some of them with positive feedback such that, caused by global warming, the effects (notably release of methane from melting sub-arctic permafrost) will be magnified.

The Nadir: Holocaust Denial

The denial or the claim of dubiety that Hitler killed the Jews is the most tragic form of Denialism. It often takes the form of denying the most extreme parts of the Holocaust; for example, some “respectable” Holocaust deniers concede that German Einsatzgruppen shot Jews in Russia during the Nazi offensive, but deny, for reasons known only to them, that Jews were gassed by design.

Truth or Consequences

All of the above Denialisms are issues of truth, but the first and most trivial (the “Ricardian” denial of Richard III’s guilt) has no “pragmatic”, no corresponding actions to be taken if either side is “proven”: since the United Kingdom is ruled by the descendants of an elector of Hanover and not by a Tudor monarch, the discovery of proof that Richard III did not kill Edward V and the Duke of York would have no effects, whatsoever, save on the Beefeaters’ morale, which I’m sure they’d restore by insisting upon retailing the old story and quaffing ale, or something like that.

The pragmatics of the Shakespeare authorship dispute are more serious, since quite a lot of Shakespeare analysis and interpretation, especially but not exclusively Marxist, accounts him to be a representative of a rising middle class empowered by technology (printing) and the Reformation (and the abandonment of the mediaeval Mystery play, leaving an initially unmet demand for idle entertainments) to make money and create works of art without being beholden to princes and magnates. Most of the Shakespeare Denialists prefer to say that an aristo (such as the Earl of Oxford, who inconveniently died in 1604) or at least a man with university training (such as Marlowe) wrote the plays, which denies the story of the self-made man of which the received biography of Shakespeare is an example.

The pragmatics of the American Civil War question are quite serious, since an official, Northern and “liberal” account powered the American Civil Rights movement: Dr Martin Luther King presented the need for equality as an “uncashed check” dating to the Civil War in which slaves were formally freed and enabled until 1876 (the end of “Reconstruction”) to use their formal freedoms practically. While latter day slavery Denialists deny they are racists, their cause is for this reason offensive to many African Americans. And as opposed, say, to Brazil, there remains at least a perception of racism in renarratives of the Civil War as being about “states’ rights”, and in cases like that of Trayvon Martin, whose shooting by a white-Hispanic security guard was not investigated by local authorities.

Moon landing Denialism has few pragmatic consequences because very few people believe it. The American moon landings were, according to some philosophers of science, the first real confirmation of Galileo’s heliocentric astronomy but very few disbelieve Galileo at any rate.

The JFK assassination Denialism has had mostly consequences in the form of a lot of wasted time, although it did trigger a separate investigation beyond the official investigation, in the House of Representatives.

The consequences of 9-11 denial have been equally small.

Evolution denialism and Global Warming denialism have had very, very serious consequences, in the USA as regards Evolution (where school systems have had to teach either the Biblical story of Creationism, or more commonly the “doubt”) and world-wide, especially in the USA, as regards Global Warming denialism: Republicans in Congress will not pass any laws that treat Global Warming as a possibility and as a result, no countermeasures were taken last winter against the possibility of high-strength EF4 and EF5 tornados recurring in 2012, where such large tornados had damaged large parts of the USA.

I believe that I can prove all conspiracy theories false, first by showing how they are logically false or meaningless (which I shall together call “absurd” to best express both ideas) and then showing how they cannot guide pragmatic action. To do so, I shall present the special case proof as regards Global Warming denialism.

Refutation of Not Warmingism

Here are Gore’s “inconvenient truths”, again: “the planet is warming, it is warming as a result of industrial activity by way of a known mechanism called the ‘greenhouse effect’, this will have bad effects, some of which will interact in positive feedbacks with warming, possibly creating a permanent change in our planet’s habitability”.

Mainstream climate scientists assert these Inconvenient Truths as a scientific statement: roughly, all of them taken together using “logical and” as a single Inconvenient Truth: mainstream scientists do so as scientists. Now this of course is to go out on the empirical limb, since this claim, as science, has a certain probability of being true, and a complementary probability of being false.

Let’s symbolize Gore’s Inconvenient Truth as IT.

If P(IT) is its probability, P(IT) is between 0 and 1 (0<P(IT)<1). It cannot be, as Hume discovered, exactly 0 (false with certainty) or exactly 1 (true, with certainty). The logical denial of the Inconvenient Truth, ~IT (not IT) has 1-P(IT) probability and it can’t be 0 or 1 in truth value, either: 0<P(~IT)<1 because 0<1-P(IT)<1.

But this is the logical denial of the Inconvenient Truth in English: “the planet is not warming (baby, it’s cold outside), or it is warming but owing primarily to sunspots or something, or the greenhouse effect isn’t real (CO2 is good for you), or all the foregoing is false but baby, Global Warming is good for you, or, anyhow, we could use a new planet. Might be cool. Or warm. Or something.” Logically, the sequence of individual claims connected by “and” is negated by a logically weak series of the negations connected by “or”: where IT is (A & B & C …), ~IT is (~A | ~B | ~C …).

Now this shows that Al Gore was making a remarkably strong claim, as is any claim that uses a lot of “ands”, and the denier is apparently more humble, since an “or” claim is logically weaker.

Logically strong claims are hard but brittle and easy to refute with one counterexample, whereas logically weaker claims are hard to refute, since they are refuted by the refutation of all their terms.

But, the logically weak or claim is not consistently asserted by the Denialists; their assertion is that they doubt the Inconvenient Truth. They do not claim “not IT” they say “IT is doubtful”…if we let ? be a doubt operator, the GW Denialists claim ?IT.

Now, this ordinarily seems both quite Enlightened and easy to prove.

To prove the or as opposed to the doubt, all the Denier has to do is disprove (but not to certainty, this cannot be done) any “link in the chain”. He needs to show that globally as opposed to local conditions (where it’s easy to show that global warming, in activating the movements of air, can create, chaotically, dramatic instances of local cooling), it’s not getting warmer, or that the greenhouse effect isn’t occurring, or another denial.

But: consistently, the Denialists do not do this. They speak as individuals (with an interesting pose of the vox clamant in deserto) or as members of foundations whose main goal is not to prove anything but to prove the doubt.

Now, as it happens, this is “nice work if you can get it”. We already know that when R is any empirical proposition whatsoever, its probability is 0<P(R)<1 but this is almost exactly the same thing as saying that the probability of ?R (“R is dubious as hell”) is unity: P(?R)=1.

Not only is no proof of the Denialist’s case needed (nice work if you can get it) it also allows the GW Denialist (who’s actually a Doubterist) to strike poses and quote Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” It makes him seem to himself and his pals as a brave, Enlightened skeptic like Galileo.

Or something.

But, Houston, we have a problem.

As scientists, who only as part of their professional remit assert empirical propositions with probability P between 0 (certainly false) and 1 (certainly true), the Inconvenient Truthers already know that they may be mistaken!

This has two serious problems. The first is that insofar as the dubiety of IT is used as a call for debate, it’s a strange debate. Rather than a debate over an assertion and its negation, it is a debate between a climate scientist who asserts, taking the risk that she may be wrong, a claim, and someone else who asserts, without taking the risk that he may be wrong, that the IT assertion is doubtful. The second party can never be wrong because all scientific statements are asserted with implicit probability between 0 and 1 but expressions of doubt are, per Hume, always true, assertions about language guaranteed to be so.

Now, this sounds pretty nifty to the Denialist. “I can never be wrong, wow”. Guys love that when that happens.

But by way of Sir Karl Popper’s well-known “unfalsifiability” critique of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the Inconvenient Truth Denialist is not as he usually claims doing science and does not belong in “open scientific debate”.

Worse than asserting that the sun goes ‘round the earth theory when that’s been finally confirmed false (probability close to 1, perhaps .9999999, but not 1), most recently in the Moon landings (oops, aren’t they bogus? NO), the Denialists “argue” for a proposition as necessarily true as 1+1=2…the tautology that the Inconvenient Truth is doubtful. Of course it is.

Worse than the Indiana legislature of the 19th century that asserted that pi, the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle, is exactly 3.14 as opposed to its unclosed continuing value (3.1487…), the Denialists want to “argue” that 1+1=2 in arguing that a scientific statement can be doubted.

It is noble and heroic to do so when arguing as does Winston Smith with O’Brien that five fingers remain five fingers, in 1984, and recreationally, the denialists like to pretend that world science is in cahoots with world government. But O’Brien asserts that four is five, an assertion of probability 0, whereas the climate scientists assert IT, equivalent to 0<P(IT)<1, and this is logically consistent with the claims of the Denialists.

Policy

Let’s now move to pragmatics. The Inconvenient Truth has serious policy implications, therefore the next step is analyzing the costs and benefits of acting as if it is true, or false.

Now, this analysis was made informally by the Bush administration at the time of the non-signature, by the USA, of the Kyoto accords in 2000. Basically, the administration said that Kyoto would retard economic growth in the developed countries.

However, their linkage is weak and uses a curious American axiom. This is that the profits of existing large firms and the incomes of their first set of benefactors (the wealthy majority stockholders and the bondholders of energy companies) will benefit ordinary Americans, indirectly but automatically, through job creation.

We Americans often believe (but I do not) that if the rich get richer, they will go crazy and start companies, creating jobs. But, of course, and as Keynes noted, sometimes if you’re rich, you prefer to just punch in your ID at an ATM and admire the numbers. Sometimes you like to take a girl along to help you admire them. Sometimes you flash your wad. Sometimes you light cigars with one hundred dollar bills and overtip snooty headwaiters.

We are encouraged to believe along with Milton Friedman that all the rich rise at the crack of dawn to run ten miles and, during their run, hatch schemes for spending their money on job creation. But Thorstein Veblen would ask about the idlers and wastrels who rise at noon, providing at best jobs for manicurists, barbers and bartenders.

Call the rich who create jobs the “productive rich”, it’s quite possible that deregulation and globalization increased their ranks in the 1980s by creating opportunities to spend money on investment as opposed to consumption.

It is unquestionable based on anecdotal, literary sources that in the 1930s and 1940s, there were fewer outlets for productive investment as a result of a global flight to autarky, which was why the rich of the 1930s were very different from the rich of the 1980s.

But, and this is a key point, this has nothing to do with today’s rich. The rich of 2013 may be job creators, or wastrels.

In terms of what we hear on the media…it’s as if Thorstein Veblen never lived.

To philosophy, which is well aware (probably more so than the actual players) of undecidability, there are two open questions. The first is, how much money handed over to the wealthy investors in existing energy companies, which rely in some measure on global warming inaction, flows into productive reinvestment. The second is whether Keynes was right, and if you redirected the money hose at the poor, whether they would create immediate sales numbers for existing companies by immediately spending their money on common household appliances…and stuff.

Philosophy, without having to decide, knows that in this case, a golden mean might be the way to go. And, global warming Affirmationists want as it happens policies that are Keynesian.

Rather than preserve the incomes of existing energy companies invested in doing things they will fund startup businesses in alternatives, and redirect through carbon taxing the profits of the energy firms.

The cute thing about philosophy is that it teaches you to keep on thinking when you do not know, at least with the certainty most people like, and what we’ve discovered is that in one minor way, the Denialists, who are mostly conservative in the rest of their politics, are Hayekian, and believers in the free market (especially as currently jury rigged in favor of the big shots…excuse me, that wasn’t philosophy, it was me channeling Tony Benn and Michael Foot, not germane, an aside) whereas the Affirmationists are Keynesian or socialist. Which means that as scientists making a pragmatic recommendation based on what they have discovered, the climate boys are well advised to argue for the Golden Mean.

If we do a cost and benefit analysis the cost of the truth of IT is probably high enough to the least well off to justify a pragmatic acting on its truth. The people most impacted by global warming, if it is occurring, are poor, they live on flood plains, they live on prairies, they live in forests, or they live in teeming cities where “austerity” has recently caused cutbacks in emergency services, or has prevented them from being instituted in the first place.

In the pragmatic cost-benefit calculation, the opponents of the Inconvenient Truth use as stakeholders the wealthy who benefit from existing corporations through bonds and equity. Its proponents worry more about the “99%”.

We can conclude that in the known absence of certainty, we should act on Global Warming.

The Proof Generalized

Now, let’s generalize the proof of the falsity or meaninglessness of IT denial to that of all conspiracy theories.

A scientific or legal conclusion is made about states of affairs, let it be C. The Denialist doesn’t assert ~C (not C) he asserts !C (C is doubtful pronounce it “bang, C”). But because any meaningful official or legal conclusion as to a state of affairs has probability P(C) where 0<P(C)<1, the probability of ~C is 1-P(C) and the probability of this is also between 0 and 1.

The received story of Kennedy’s assassination, while never having P=0, has a probability less than 1, and its denial has 1-P which is also between 0 and 1.

But the “probability” of !C is unity.

But this means that !C is not science. Jibber jabber can consist of false statements ("jibber jabber the earth is flat"), meaningless statements ("jibber jabber the current regnant King of France is bald") or even, as here, true statements ("jibber jabber Global Warming is doubtful"): Mr Jibber Jabber, funded as you may be by the Heartland Institute to raise doubts and impede, you are still talking nonsense.

The “Ricardian” who seeks to re-open debate about the disposition of the two Princes, the JFK assassination buff who seeks to re-open debate about Kennedy’s assassination, and the Holocaust denier do not strongly argue for their alternative claims, rather they argue for the dubiety of the mainstream story.

This is because as conspiracy theorists, they also argue for the corruption of the documentary record when it presents evidence confirming the mainstream story. Perhaps Sir James Tyrell was paid to confess (and endure the usual 15th century torture? Oh well): perhaps Thomas More wrote what Henry VIII told him to write (and later on stood up to the King in the matter of Boleyn? Oh well): perhaps an odd lot of men like Hemyngs, Condell, Ben Jonson, a variety of ink-stained printer’s devils and who knows who else were in on the First Folio caper.

This indeed is Josephine Tey’s main idea in The Daughter of Time: the gullibility of the sort of people who believe documentary records. It’s a popular form of what philosophy students learn, hopefully in their first course: the fourfold division of statements into analytic versus synthetic, and apriori versus aposteriori.

But it ignores the radically different logical status of “P is doubtful” and “P” or “not-P”. All meaningful scientific statements are doubtful, and as Popper knew, if they are not, if they are not in his view “falsifiable”, they are jibber-jabber mumbo-jumbo, like Marxism or Psychoanalysis. The question is pragmatic: without even knowing the specific numerical value of the probability of P we must decide what is to be done.

Implications

In the past, conspiracy theory and denialism were at the shadows and in the margins, a sort of B-level. However, the Internet has nearly destroyed the distinction between high Culture and low. It makes people feel that they are “just as good as anyone else” for today, they do not have to visit the Bodleian Library to find a copy of Thomas More’s History of King Richard III.

Reading science fiction has long been a way for people to feel as if they participate in the glamor of science without having to do math or think very hard. Likewise, being a Denialist makes you feel, I’d guess, that you’re an authority. If some twerp, poolside, has read every play by Shakespeare several times over, you can recapture the attention of the ladies by announcing in a weary, superior tone, “did you know, my dear boy, that Shakespeare did not write the plays”?

But there is something worse, that emerges in Holocaust denial most plainly but even occurs in trivial “Ricardianism”. In Tey’s book, a male protagonist (where Tey may have selected that gender to provide authority) is equally dismissive of the claim that British troops, in 1910, fired upon striking miners in Tonypandy.

I know the Holocaust occurred as a direct result of Hitler’s intentions mediated through a society without rule of law.

I do not know what happened at Tonypandy, in part because miners’ families in Britain then, and perhaps even now, have an oral and not a written culture. Any government support for a continuing written working class record is now ancient history for this is considered, in Britain and my own country, to be lunatic leftism. I spoke to a British man from mining families and he strongly believes that the shootings occurred. He does so because his great grandfather was there and told his son, and so forth. But this testimony is not to be found at the Bodleian, and as a Yank, I have no opinion.

But the common feature of Holocaust and Tonypandy Denialism (if there is such a thing as Tonypandy denialism) is the denial of suffering and the normalization of daily life as nonviolent and safe.

If Shakespeare in fact made a name for himself in a primitive police state where every word he wrote had to be approved by censors, in the teeth of opposition of envious men like Robert Greene who used Shakespeare’s own lines to mock him, while supporting a family long-distance, this is a tale of suffering and triumph. Its denial erases this.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the Moon at the risk of their lives. Moon landing denialism erases this.

People sat on roofs in Katrina begging for help for days. Global warming denialism makes the disaster just a case of “shit happens”, not something that may have been avoidable.

Holocaust denialism doesn’t in most cases deny that Jews and others were rounded up and ethnically cleansed, it merely seeks to deny that Jews were deliberately gassed; it is asserted that the Jews died of cholera. Some forms assert that while Jews were shot by Einsatzgruppen they were not gassed as if all the Denialist sought was to deny the apex of evil.

Now, this shows how Denialism is a Pop culture phenomenon if the purpose of media that at least in the past was labeled “B level”, “middlebrow” or “escapist” is essentially to reconcile the exhausted office worker with a daily pain of existence which cannot be squarely faced.

If Shakespeare didn’t struggle to write the plays and become a successful businessman, this excuses us from doing much of anything. If we can only deny climate change, we can return to daily existence and not worry so much. And if the Holocaust was in part not true, this is an anodyne of a sort.

Yeats said it best, in “The Stare’s Nest by My Window”, a poem about the way in which the Irish, to Yeats, habit of spinning stories can help us to avoid pain by selecting the most pleasant, or least unpleasant, story from the media…which now falls over itself, and not only in the USA, to retail pleasant stories.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Denying suffering is a form of hatred. Mass media entertainment techniques persuaded the people of my country to support a lie about WMD, so the denial in this case was not a denial of suffering in the direct sense, yet it was used to deny Iraqi suffering, for if Iraq had had WMDs the brutalizing ten year period of sanctions and the brutalizing war may even have been justified. If the Holocaust denier can “prove” that there was no “proof” than eight million died, he is content that one or two million died, for he’s shown how we can feed on fantasies.

We can deny suffering on order. Certainly, part of the reception of Shakespeare’s Richard III was pity and terror based on the belief, in the contemporaneous audience, that two kids were destroyed, accompanied by relief that Elizabeth had put an end to religious wars that had succeeded the dynastic wars of the 15th century and the reigns of Henry VII and VIII.

Deaths of children such as the nine day Queen Jane were known to have happened in the living memories of Shakespeare’s audience who it may be said was anxious, in a way we of course are not, that England return to the undecidability of religious conflict, an undecidability in which kids got killed. Denialism uses a strange, but comforting, logic: that because the Holocaust may not have happened (or did not happen) then our fears of being Holocausted in turn (say by our Serbian friends and neighbors) are silly.

But (as Fight Club seemed to imply) the office worker trades her autonomy for security which renders her relations superficial and insensitive to pain in a virtual reality of media in which violence is so ultra as not to be believed.

Philosophy’s job is here to open a door to some disturbing possibilities, and a disturbing way in which popular media can numb us to some real problems far more serious than the deaths of the Princes. Sometimes the fly has to be shown how to get back into the fly bottle.

It’s Prostate Cancer Stage 4

Nicholas Poussin, Blind Orion in Search of the Rising Sun

That’s the diagnosis by the Queen Mary team. It adds no tragedy to Dr Jamieson’s 25 May diagnosis of a “metastasizing adenocarcinoma” nor Dr Lau’s confirmation of that at QMH on 1 June. A Stage 4 prostate cancer is a metastasis. The only difference in my case is that so far we have not found the original prostate tumor, and prostate is inferred from my sky high PSA (Prostrate Specific Antigen) levels (80, should be 4).

The diagnosis is unconfirmed by any sort of “smoking gun” but we need an action plan and the sky high PSAs mean we need to assume that it’s a prostate and get started on minimizing malignancy based on that diagnosis (malignancy cannot be eliminated almost by definition).

Stage 4 is associated in an old fashioned Bette Davis Dark Victory way with remaining lifespan estimates but these are almost without meaning as probabilities. The reason they are without meaning is that today, more so than in the 1940s, patients are exceeding the number owing to rapid changes (all for the better) in medical science. And, there are statistical anomalies where a subset of patients does not respond well to treatment and their lifespan is shortened.

This, and because my spiritual plan is based on the one day at a time deal, means that I shall simply ignore the lifespan numbers. The doc did say, if you meant to do something do it, but as it happens what I meant to do was on my list before this debacle. I have as it happens been following my dream for many years and not living a phony life. The end of the rainbow, les foullis d’arcs en ciel pour l’ange qui announce la fin du temps, might be Queen Mary and there are far worse places to wind up.

The diagnosis presented so well by Dr Jamieson on 25 May is the fact, the weenie, the wall, wondrous high: from the old English poem the Wanderer:

weal wundrum heah,
(a wall, wondrous high,)
wyrmlicum fah.
(wound round with serpents.)

It is the same wall, and the good news (and there is good news) is that the initial therapy is hormonal and not chemo: basically my testosterone has to be lowered and my estrogen increased. This would be a big deal if I were some young stud but as it happens I have two children and (through “God’s Grace Abounding”) two grandchildren circulating in a womb in Chicago, eyes opening to the dim light of the maternal ocean. As far as I am concerned, I will turn into an old lady like Guan Yin if that is what is necessary to survive.

For I want to survive. The Me part of me could care less and only asks to drift away without pain in terminal dreamland. But the We part of me says two things.

First of all it says that this is very interesting and I want to see how it plays out for somewhat the same reason I watch the credits at the end of movies.

Second it says that I have been given so much and would like to return the favor through art that heals and eleemosynary actions, even if the latter are merely teaching jobs at a pay that’s so low it makes it somewhat eleemosynary.

More good news is that I am now free, as of a week, from my nicotine addiction that started in the Chicago and Northwestern Station in 1966 when, burning with shame and exhausted because I could not figure out how to hold a minimum wage job, I bought King Edward cigars. I’ve been on Nicorette for seven years but last week I just stopped. And I have had no withdrawal symptoms.

ne sceal næfre his torn to rycene
(a warrior must never speak)
beorn of his breostum acyþan,
(his grief of his breast too quickly)
nemþe he ær þa bote cunne,
(unless he already knows the remedy) -
eorl mid elne gefremman.
(a hero must act with courage.)

Source for the Wanderer is here. I read it the first time years before the Internet.

My father never liked my sang-froid. Perhaps he saw too much in the war, too much sang-froid that ended up with men falling from planes. Perhaps he thought my sang-froid was associated with my apparent fecklessness, a fecklessness that is exaggerated in a family like mine for in fact I took care of business.

In the 1990s, I was between jobs and was looking for one. After my cheerful status report to Dad, he grumped that I was “whistling in a graveyard”.

I mean, give me a break. Unemployment isn’t a graveyard, Pop.

But I have to hand it to my father. I’d just started running in 1981 and met him at a bar on the near north side. I was slim and had a killer suit and tie, grey flannel and rep. Children of the Depression, and my father was one, loved this look for to them it meant survival. In Shanghai of the time, it was the New Thought look.

My Father said, “you’re looking well, Edward. Quite well, in fact. In fact…you remind me of my older brother Edward.” Now, his older brother Edward (o anima cortese Mantoana) was a war hero and his accolade was undeserved. But I’ve never forgotten it.

Spinoza’s definition of sanity might be: I cannot hate God and God, if God exists, does not hate me. My spiritual program is about a Power greater than myself who restored me to sanity more or less in the course of going about that Power’s business. A loving God in fact raises all sorts of problems such as conditional love based on rule-following. But Yosemite was too silent to be real, and lofty, and there I was happy.

In his creaky deductive psychology, Spinoza’s gratitude was a zeal arising from love of him or It that has benefited us. But Spinoza doesn’t say what I would say in addition. Gratitude is itself a pleasurable emotion as we think happy thoughts about what has happened in our life that is blessed.

Foolish individuals mocked “philosophy majors” at fourth rate universities in the 1970s. As it happens I find it useful to have majored in philosophy.

A Fundamental Error in “Cancer, a Very Short Introduction”

In Hong Kong and on the public program you have to do the EZ-Klean procedure (about which the less said the better: Google it if you are curious) at home the night before the colonoscopy, and clean up after your Self.

Caution: this is not medical advice and should not be treated as such. I am a layperson uneducated in medicine and a cancer survivor of three weeks duration having been diagnosed May 25. But without pretension, I think, I can spot flaws in the philosophical implications of a medical choice. I believe that education in philosophy and logic is so missing from medical education as to moronize doctors speaking on issues that lie at the penumbra of their field, such that they can reason logically but only on a medical topic in a medical vocabulary. Whereas their pronouncements outside medicine are often moronic as here.

I generally like the Oxford Very Brief Introduction series because they are contemporary and very well-written.

Nicholas James’ Cancer: A Very Short Introduction is somewhat of an exception. Its information on medical options is first rate if opinionated.

But he’s dead wrong on holistic and alternative therapies.

He says they must be tested with the same rigor as new drugs and surgical procedures. Now, the problem here is that cancer, being incurable in most cases by way of verified drugs and procedures, is open ended.

Unless the holistic or alternative treatment “does harm” it may turn out, in a later state of medical science, to be confirmed scientifically as a cure. But hardly any such remedies do harm, for they are for the most part based on opposition to the most common form of scientific cure: tissue destruction through radiation and chemotherapy. They tend to be benign and natural, such as Linus Pauling’s overdoses of vitamin C or simply eating a rational diet as opposed to the crap I fed on up until, and not after, my diagnosis (crap that didn’t show up as obesity because of my thirty years exercise: crap that may have lain in wait.)

The alternative procedures necessarily lie outside of formal testing because most of their proponents do not want them to be subject to the cynical two-person game: private greed versus government regulation increasingly under assault. The testing is not only scientific it is a social process which changes the outcome, and has a disturbing error rate – although it doesn’t, admittedly, kill people (except in a way masked by the fact that cancer is, after all, incurable, and harm may have been done).

The penumbra of alternatives such as not going negative in interpersonal relations is like the criminal economy to the economist: the economist or medical scientist herself makes negative assertions about the criminal economy or alternative therapy that cannot, in themselves, be subject to the same rigorous checking that she demands of people who write about the criminal economy, or push alternative therapies for cancer.

The fundamental error is positivism in Adorno’s sense. When he used the word, he didn’t mean the more sophisticated forms of Positivism such as Logical Positivism with its verifiability, or Sir Karl Popper’s falsifiability. He meant a crude variant, the original variant: Comte’s assertion that the world operates to physical laws that we know (physics, apart from the ugly postulation of the ether, was considered finished in 1890 at the end of the Comtean century.).

But, since many philosophies generate folkish misinterpretations, Comtean positivism became Dickens’ Gradgrind’s folk positivism, in which the only true assertions are those that are verified. This makes the set of true assertions even more narrow than that of Logical Positivism, in which the only true assertions are those that are verifiable in principle.

James, the author of the Oxford Very Short book on cancer, is unreflectingly a folkish Comtean having no education, independent of medicine, the logic of whose vocabulary he’s a master, in philosophy and logic; indeed, an academic at Hong Kong poly recently warned me, in my academic job search, not to say I taught logic. Embed as James is in the system of careful verification of new drugs and surgical procedures, he won’t make room for benign procedures, often chosen by the patient, outside the scientific stockade.

Now the problem is that most cancers are still incurable: that what matters to the patients, We The Living, We The Cancer Survivors are (1) a shot at a cure, whether scientific or alternative and (2) life extension, grandchildren, and quality of life. We are a third type of scientist, for there are the theory boys such as theoretical physicists, and then there are the appliers of science such as software engineers and doctors and finally, there is the Object of medical science: the patient.

But it takes again an Adorno to remind us that in the sciences of “man”, of which medicine is an example with no pure theory at all (because apart from animal medicine, medicine is about the Object-patient, a person) the Object wishes to be a Subject as well as an Object, whence the activism of Aids victim and cancer patients…an activism in the latter case is diverted by elites into the American Tragedy of no health insurance (while it’s been talked about since Truman), or the British system and its strange Post Code lotteries which James describes, and which set patient against patient in the same waiting room…because one’s come from Amersham and the other from Tooting, and one or the other gets the better drug or procedure.

The patient who would be a subject, who takes responsibility with EZ-Klean and in my case thirty years of running which has pounded my L4 into my L5 spinal vertebra and given me painful sciatica, not caused by my cancer, but who thereby avoided sickness while supporting his kids, who chooses alternative therapy without avoiding medical procedures, isn’t a scientist, of course, he’s a Person engaged in a Fight to the Death for Survival and Flourishing.

And grandchildren.

This person should not be told, implicitly or explicitly, that alternatives are useless because not verified for they are verifiable and falsifiable, in the latter case especially if they do harm. And the sterling reputation of Oxford University Press should not be wasted on such an opinionated, and, in its last chapter, incorrect book.

My doctor-father is of course spinning in his grave where I hope his Beautiful Soul rests in peace. He would not agree with my views on alternative medicine.

But at a deeper level, my father did, in the 1930s, study philosophy and logic with pleasure at university, and continued to study philosophy until the end of his long and noble life. He would start ordinary medical lectures at non-teaching hospitals with references to Aristotle and Galen, and link these to the latest neurosurgical procedures of which he was a master. Non-western doctors, in my experience at Swedish Covenant, admired him for their Chinese, Hindu and Muslim cultures were more closely linked to the Confucian, Vedanta and Q’uran traditions of respect for precedent, compassion for suffering, and love of the natural world of those traditions, yet my Dad spoke from his Roman Catholic tradition, respecting life (including the often overlooked right to life at the end of life) and above all doing no harm…say by destroying the self-esteem and self-respect of a patient by treating her as an Object and mocking her alternative therapy in a superior tone.

It will come, as Albany says in Lear. The reversal of enlightenment, from falsifiability, to verifiability, to verified, and from there to Fundamentalist religious terror, and the victims will be the patients, targeted as they are, post-2008, by “austerity”. And We The Living (to steal shamelessly from Rand, who doesn’t deserve the title of philosopher nor her phrase) will eat whole grains and forgive each other. We will eat bread and salt and speak the truth.

My butt hurts not at all. Here. In this moment. “For all is always Now” (TS Eliot)

Dumber than Von Neumann

I was sitting in a cafe wondering if I was smarter than John von Neumann. Nope, I ain’t.

I have confused, in my previous posting Summa Contra, the folk form of Pascal’s Wager with the real thing. The holy sisters used the former form: “believe in the Catholic church and follow its rules or go to hell: this is rational because the gain is infinite as is the loss.” In Summa Contra I certainly meant this form which indeed is how the elite does crowd control in Christianity and Islam. Hinduism uses an older form in the hope of reincarnation in a higher caste.

But this is the Wager.

1. “God is, or He is not”
2. A Game is being played… where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
4. You must wager. (It’s not optional.)
5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (…) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

At this point we must acknowledge our repulsion to the cold and unemotional reasoning here in which there is no love of God as you understand him, just game theory, which probably attracted von Neumann. To play chess with death like the knight in The Seventh Seal is one thing. To play games with God, or deus sive nature, is to mock God. Not cool. But let us proceed.

The fallacy in Pascal’s real wager is that God would condemn unbelievers to annihilation. Most of us understand God as a perfection, or, in “process theology” as that Being who most seeks perfection.

To love is a perfection (to most of us, I’ll not argue this in detail, my butt hurts).

But a God who only rewarded belief would be less loving than a God like my Dad or in the parable of the Prodigal.

I conclude that the wager fails. Besides, the younger and cuter nuns, who also preached against racial segregation, said that we should love God as an end in itself like an artist. Once again we find ourselves against a wall, “wondrous high”: the Kantian block.

Good. I am not as smart as von Neumann. I should also read more philosophy. I really wasn’t aware of the magnificence and depth of Pascal despite his flaws we all share: “you must wager”. I know it is the fashion among great men of my age to brag about not reading a book but I don’t.

Summa contra

Sorry, but I have to note this down.

I. In the beginning, art and religion were one, connected by the Latin particle “sive”, which means the one or the other it doesn’t matter. Many unities are divided this way.

II. But in conditions of scarcity, crowd control by the elite is Job One from their point of view. They used human sacrifice and slavery. But the Torah bans human sacrifice in the story of Abraham and Isaac, and Christianity ended slavery (but it took 1800 years and William Wilberforce).

III. The elite in Christianity and Islam use Pascal’s wager that it’s best to follow the tenets of organized religion lest you be wrong and suffer infinite damnation. This is of course fallacious since there is > 1 organized religion.

Why didn’t Von Neumann see this? The founder of modern game theory, when diagnosed with pancreatic or bone cancer, probably as a consequence of his exposure to radiation at Bikini Atoll, converted (back) to Catholicism owing to Pascal’s wager but failed to see that where n is the number of religions that preach damnation, n > 1. It is true that the Knight (Ritter) plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal but it would rather seem blasphemous to play a two person game with God as you understand him. “God is not mocked”.

IV. Religion takes the creation of art out of the hands of ordinary people and so divides itself from art and is usually anti-art, given the numerous religious proscriptions against various art forms (dancing, image-making and so forth) because bottom-up artistic expression, being like religion at the boundaries of the known, is an end in itself rather than a market transaction. If you do something with no economic reason, the “reason” is a ding an sich.

V. All religions are wicked and a form of crowd control. The desperado can only be frightened by something beyond.

VI. However, one must have absolute respect for all forms of religion regarded as expression, because even folk manifestations are coming from the same place as high art and are often more honest. It would be polytheism for a “monotheist” to claim, as many monotheists do, that the person of a different religion worships a different God.

For Malaysians to prohibit Christian Malays to use the Malay word for God because it sounds like “Allah” is itself blasphemy. For American Christians to insult Islam’s God, is blasphemy. Different descriptions, same God. Therefore “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”.

VII. Sex is about other people. Some people say that all forms of sex are OK if you don’t hurt anybody. The problem is that it’s really easy to hurt people when you get naked, including new guys for whom you are responsible.

VIII. Many world religions close off revelation at a certain point. For example, the Revelations say that anyone who alters the Bible “shall be cast into the lake of fire”. But the Enlightenment was a revelation as was “we believe these truths to be self-evident” and “shall not perish from the earth”. I derive this belief from the idea of God-or-nature: if God is in all, he’s in the room.

Health note

In addition to a herniated disk I also have a large amount of swelling which my doctor attributes to lymph nodes and a high ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) which can indicate a variety of conditions, some bad, some not so bad. I went in for a test yesterday and will get the results tomorrow. More detail will be available on my Facebook page (Edward Nilges in Hong Kong).

Do not rescusitate? To honor my father I am “resuscitate me or die, motherfuckers” since I have a lot of unfinished business both in art and with my kids. As Billy Blanks (he of my TaeBo workout says) you have to walk through the fire.

One doctor concerned about my weight loss. I THINK it’s because I have long learned to be temperate around food, and the low salt content of even Western style food here in China has acclimated me to just enough. Unlike Steve Jobs in his cancer, I feel hungry and don’t get nauseated when I chow down. I am “hot” as they say but I also need to remind myself that pride goeth before a fall.

My Pole star is Kant and science. I do not know what lies beyond but I have long learned that being good to one another is something that skepticism cannot easily question and remain, in fact, a healthy and enlightened skepticism. Christ was on target on the Mount and left his story for us to know is all I know.

The anguish is in the proposition which is certain, that for any meaningful scientific statement such as Borges’ “the true story of my death”, s, its probability P(s) lies between certainly false (0) and certainly true (1): 0<P(s)<1. Whereupon we can rejoice and be serene as was Kant, striving to complete Der Kritik, or Spinoza on his last day on earth, deus sive natura.

I will keep this blog informed as to what happens. Remember that I love drama and being the center of attention, but always tell the truth.

I dreamed last night a happy dream: I took my son to a platform for the observation of the sun and higher and higher altitude which also had a “virtual reality” way of seeing how it is to breathe at higher and higher levels. I bought him a souvenir of our visit.

Trying to take Rand Seriously: a Note on Hobbes and Rand

Hobbes excluded women from his model in which “man” in a “state of nature” lives a life that is “nasty, brutish and short” because Hobbesian “man” never cooperates in a sustainable way, but sooner or later and of necessity comes to blows with his mates.

Hobbes plainly needed to get out more. He never saw real ordinary men take care of their families (if “man” contends with “man” why will I forgive my sons for never talking to me? For I will, goddamnit), nor ladies cooperate in baking a cake or making lasagna.

Hobbes, unlike Rand, did not believe in a “rationality” that would cause men by magic to agree on the most “rational” course of action. Rand thought that labour unions would always see the “rationality” of individual secret contracts with employers and self-dissolve.

Rand’s “rationality” all stems from “self identity”, the proposition what is, is, a=a. Although she never read Kant, and hated him in her ignorant fashion, she actually here reinvented the wheel of “the transcendental unity of apperception” on which, in Kant, our ability to reason is based, for unlike babies before a certain age and alcoholics in a blackout (if you prefer, Bismarck’s “drunks, children and the USA” whom he said “God will protect”), we transcendentally know, as a precondition of ordinary knowledge, that “I experience a manifold of sensations and thoughts based on sensations and those experiences and thoughts are mine, they make up Me”.

That is, in Kant, it is a synthetic apriori that ordinary knowledge, call it k, is preconditioned by transcendental knowledge call it K. K->k.

Rand seems to have believed that only right-wing right-thinkers actually have transcendental unity of apperception and know that a=a, whereas liberals are like Bismarck’s “drunks and children” who enter fugue states and blackouts in which the sense of an “I” only flickers in and out: and in their madness, they pass laws for welfare, unemployment insurance, public libraries and day care centers. The classic case would be the alcoholic in a blackout who’s still apparently functioning (let’s say he’s laying bets in a casino or voting in the Senate) but will have no memory the next morning because he’s burned out or temporarily shut down brain wiring that records events while retaining some brain function.

Old joke: Lincoln got drunk. When he woke up, he said, “I freed what?”

I would note, pace Rand and even Kant, that nobody has complete transcendental unity of apperception because we all forget things. As Shakespeare’s Henry V said upon St Crispin’s day,

Old men forget, yet all men forget
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall their names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Be in their flowing cups, freshly remembered:
Harry the King, Bedford, Exeter, Warwick and Talbot!

This shows that the unified Kantian self is not perfect. If it were, it would forget nothing. While John von Neumann, a mathematician and early computer scientist, observed that “there’s no true forgetting in the human nervous system”, and it is possible to “recover” memories, the Kantian “transcendental unity of apperception” is an ideal and a limit, and Rand seems not to have understood this in the slightest.

Whence, I believe, her “male” contempt for altruism (based on forgetting the Self) and “weakness”. Whence the profoundly irritating habit of CEOs and other thugs of pretending to know and remember everything, and to call their employees or opponents liars when their employees or opponents point out aporias and contradictions in what they say. To “stonewall” as Richard Nixon’s advisers recommended in Watergate, or as SCOTUS justice Clarence Thomas stonewalled Anita Hill, admitting not a jot or tittle of fault…not even a grinning confession of having been a badass when younger…after being confronted with her claims that he’d sexually harassed her.

The fact that “Stonewalling” didn’t really exist before Nixon, and that President Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara found themselves unable to lie to themselves about Vietnam only four years before Watergate, and its ready usage since Watergate, especially by the members of George W Bush’s administration, shows us that it’s an historical development, a new response, one that may be literally psychotic. The fact is that Tony Blair may now be regarded as a psychopath by the majority of Britons and, whatever your politics, the troubling split between Blair’s own self-opinion and the opinion others have of him, such as the parents of British soldiers whose lives were thrown away by Blair, is very troubling, for it indicates a deep change in human nature…in which Leviathan, the Hobbesian ruler, lives in a state of nature while ordinary people don’t. We have to face facts with Marx’s sober senses: the fucks at the top have become nasty and brutish. A lot of them are short, too, and this started with Napoleon, perhaps the first step in this devolution. But a long digression here must be nipped in the bud.

A society dominated by such legends in their own minds, such would-be uber mensch, such neo-Troglodytes, is one of an eternal self-presence that can never admit it is wrong, that, iike the Bourbons, “learns nothing, forgets nothing” and, in the words of a theorist of organizational dysfunction (Anne Wilson Schaef), is an “addictive system” “which has no memory”: precisely because it insists that it does.

Napoleon’s treatment of General Hoche at Marengo comes to mind, but again, I digress. I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached but somehow I remember this. Today’s tendencies organically exist even in the distant past. And note: it never occured to Danton or Robespierre to stonewall or lie: Danton was always pretty forthright about his centrist and pro-bourgeois views while acknowledging the needs of the Mountain, and Robespierre ended up as a target of mockery because of his sincere refusal to do without the concept of a Supreme Being, which, unlike later dictators, admits that the dictator has a Higher Power and therefore unlike a “real” dictator. If you can’t follow this stuff, which is based on the French Revolution, don’t worry about it.

In such a society, to admit any forgetfulness, where a is not a, is to be femininized. If you’re a woman, this is to be relegated to historical status as baby factory. If you’re a man, you’re part of an underclass. New Men lie without compunction, steal ideas and will take all the credit and your girl, as did Napoleon to Hoche (Josephine de Beauharnais was actually Hoche’s bint: but I digress, for the last time).

Philomoria

I guess there’s a market for his crap, but Alain de Botton’s ravings on the BBC today are worse than Ayn Rand, a form of love of foolishness as opposed to philosophy: a philomoria.

Ayn Rand addressed real philosophers (if sometimes she seems not to have read anything more than an encyclopedia article on some) and had a dedication to her perversion of the truth, but de Buffoon does violence to the truth in the service of the corporate state, if this article is any guide. Let’s take a look at some examples.

(de Botton is writing about Britain’s new “coalition” government of Tories and Liberal Democrats, and their cuts to education funding, especially arts and humanities. His words are in italics)

Speak to anyone working in the humanities within academia right now and you will hear that this country is about to enter a new Dark Age. The reason lies in the coalition government’s decision to impose swingeing cuts on almost all departments.

…except science, engineering and that sort of computer training that guarantees unemployability…

Philosophers, historians, classicists and literary critics feel especially badly let down. They fear a new age of philistinism, a moment when the nation finally gives up on serious culture and focuses instead on making money and inebriating itself on talent contests and celebrity chat shows.

You got that shit right, Alain.

If asked to apportion blame for what has happened to their departments, these academics do not have to search long for an answer, obviously “the government” is responsible. It is the government that has failed to appreciate the valuable work that the humanities do and it must therefore be scorned accordingly.

Well, it is: both Labour’s profligacy and the focus of Tory/LibDem cuts are government actions.

I want to try to respond to familiar stories of our times, with a little more analysis and opinion than is normally allowed in the media. I’d like to provoke thought, analysis – and the occasional disagreement.

And pick up a few shillings…

I’ll be looking at the way museums work, how people talk to one another, what a non-scientist can say about environmental catastrophe and why marriage is a spiritual discipline.

Gee, marriage used to be fun back in the day
Marriage was fun, and, in the old sense, rather gay
“Spiritual discipline” was for the monks and the nuns
Marriage was all about hot dogs and buns.
In your famous old Civil War, the Puritans
Were after Oliver’s fall, also-rans
But now they blight your green and pleasant land
Groaning like clock gods to the commuters in the Strand.

The dialogue with listeners through comments is also part of the pleasure of the exercise.

…until you see comments from a certain obstreperous and scurrilous Yank (me)…

It could seem unfair to knock someone when they are already down,

Not at all, Alain baby. It’s been the occupation of the bully since time, out of mind. Let’s blame the victim and feel all right.

but personally I can’t help but feel this approach and analysis lets academics off far too lightly. I have spent most of my professional life around and in the shadow of academics in the humanities, and have benefited hugely from the stored knowledge that they sit upon.

You cashed out, and like Lenin and many other “intellectuals”, you scorn the losers and the competition as semiotics of the inner contour of your own hidden weakness.

However, right now, at this difficult moment in the history of British universities, there is a need to acknowledge that at least some of the woes that have befallen academics is squarely their own fault. To put it at its simplest, academics in the humanities have failed to explain why what they do should matter so much. They’ve failed to explain to the government, but this really only means “us” – the public at large.

Excuse me, sir. The public voted, narrowly, for the Coalition, which was formed because no one party received a majority. Under your Constitution, the resulting executive has broad and Royal policies to make radical changes in the name of your Queen, changes that in my own USA would have to be approved by Congress.

This is how your mad woman (Thatcher) destroyed popular local councils, including the Greater London Council that staged the Marathon I ran in London in 1983, against the wishes of the majority of Londoners, and many other communities. In the name of a mandate to reduce taxes, she reduced councils that were educating children but retained foolish military expenses such as Trident and the remilitarization of the Falklands as opposed to negotiating their handover to Alfonsin’s democratic Argentina.

She then, late in her term, instituted the medievally regressive poll tax.

These actions were taken without popular approval.

Your Coalition is doing the same thing with a far weaker mandate. And the resources “freed” up by this barbarism will indeed be poured into the rat-hole of popular culture.

Don’t you dare, don’t you dare mock the truth, you swine.

Who is “the public”? The man on the Clapham omnibus? You? And who voted for these cuts? Who voted for aircraft carriers without aircraft when one of these hulks would fund semesters of humanities?

They have allowed themselves to be offended by the very need to justify their relevance, speaking only in dangerously vague terms about the value of culture in helping people to “think” or they have counted on having just enough respect left not to have to spell out why they should exist at all, other than because what they do is just so important.

Here is why you are no philosopher, Alain, no lover of wisdom, but a philomorion, a lover of foolishness.

You did not think this through.

In a middle class existence as opposed to la vida loca, we do many things as part of what a mathematician would call a partial ordering.

Mum doesn’t gas up the car in the snow because she likes to: my kids enjoyed putting our USA self-service gas in Mum’s car for the direct experience but part of being an adult is learning to defer gratification, and do task A so that task B (getting the children to school) can be performed, as part of an overall mission of educating the children properly.

For each task, we might get direct satisfaction from its performance. Many people like driving cars, although few enjoy stopping for gas.

Or, we may take satisfaction in knowing that task A will allow us to perform a more pleasurable task later on. We go to a crowded mall at holiday time and buy gifts for the children in the aforesaid snow looking forward to the task/pleasure of giving them to the children.

Now, in this complex network of middle class anhedonia, there are moments that are pure gratification such as the love of the children. They are end points on what for a rather strange mathematician would be a graph from which no links emerge.

How does this relate to university education?

It relates because today, the widening of access to university education, unaccompanied by a sort of pre-WWI German nationalism or a single religious faith, has cheapened the experience. The poor and lower middle class regard university tasks as means to an end, and your idiotic radio talk is unreflectingly, unphilosophically, philomoronically infected by the universal acceptance of this narrative of university life…one that is simply not shared by its best faculty, whether in the sciences or the humanities.

Let me tell you a story, Alain. As part of an elaborate draft-dodging scheme during a time in which men my age were being sent to Vietnam to kill and die, I learned computer programming. A student in the humanities, I found it tedious at first. But in order to learn it I had to become passionately interested in programming, a common experience of computer geeks.

It became a ding an sich, a thing in itself, a for-itself, and remained so for thirty years. The science became my art in the sense that art and philosophy are best pursued as we pursue love, for their own sake.

Aristotle and the best faculty (the only worthwhile faculty) believe that one of humanity’s final ends is not home ownership, nor vacationing in Spain, nor swilling vintage Port wine, but Truth and Beauty, and your nation of poets and philosophers has come a cropper in the last two years not because your best university faculty were playing Soduku or jerking themselves off, but because the end of life was defined by politicians, corporations and the media as the cheapest kind of financial pseudo-prosperity.

One middle-class narrative admits as much, admits that The Higher Things might be ends-in-themselves, but must be deferred. If there are children, certainly, their needs take precedence; your boy Bertrand Russell was a good father because during his fathering years, he avoided the mental exhaustion caused by his earlier work on the foundations of mathematics.

But since Russell’s time, when children’s needs could be met for shillings and pence at the cornershop with a set of Britain’s Limited toy soldiers, the corporations have ensured that there is no “upper bound” on desire, and make sure the kids always have one more new product to lust, rage and nag after.

Which, along with the government’s preference for keeping labour in one place while capital runs all over the world, by over-encouraging home ownership, ensures that the parents can never pursue cultured pursuits. Their culture turns into its evil twin, entertainment, for by the time the children are abed, Mum and Dad need a program which does all their emotional work for them.

Aristotle’s Truth is eliminated, and while this assassination creates the pathologies you’d like the universities to address, it may not be able to cure them on return, especially if you wish it to be therapeutic.

Now they have learnt that if they couldn’t say in clear terms why they still mattered, then an impatient, harried government might just decide that they didn’t really, and a bored, stressed, stoical wider public wouldn’t bother to raise a hand in protest.

Today, “clarity” means telling people what they want to hear.

Don’t get me wrong, I care deeply for the humanities and believe they have a vital role to play in a healthy society. I just think that the way culture is currently taught in universities is a travesty of its real potential, and that the government cuts are an understandable, if not at all nice, consequence of the failure of current teaching methods and goals.

Here it comes…the public image of the academic, who slaves in fact to write acceptable peer-reviewed journal articles while grading half-literate papers and teaching year in year out, as a lazy and obfuscating sod. The Leninism of the “intellectual” telling the public that all those other intellectuals are lazy sods who write bullshit.

My personal view of what the humanities are for is simple – they should help us to live.

Tolstoyan bread and salt, but it’s bullshit, Alain, for very precise reasons, reasons that you’d anticipate if you were a philosopher and not a philomorion.

First of all, the humanities should also help us to die…as you seem to know.

But far more important is that the very question, “do the humanities help us to live?” (and/or die) is not outside the humanities in the way that the philosophy of mathematics is not itself part of mathematics, and the philosophy of science is outside science.

Whether the truth helps us to live or whether it might actually be rather depressing is internal to the humanities, and your idiotically simple answer should be a question.

Hamlet’s learning the truth from his father’s ghost causes his depression to deepen, from “O that this too, too solid flesh would melt” to the suicidal “to be, or not to be”. But when he learns another truth from Fortinbras’ Sergeant, that men can be motivated not only by comfort and pleasure but for pure recognition as seen in Hegel, his depression disappears.

The truth affects us different ways as does beauty. Seeing the paintings in the National Gallery might lead to frustration if one must return to a bedsit in Earl’s Court. Reading Hamlet might spoil the copywriter’s zippy style.

Or, the gallery goer might get new hope and a print for his bedsit at the National Gallery, and the copywriter may discover that ad copy in iambic pentameter has a great deal of oomph.

It depends on the person, not the subject.

We should look to culture as a repository of useful and consoling ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. We should look to novels and historical narratives to impart moral instruction and edification, to great paintings for suggestions about value, to philosophy to probe our anxieties and offer consolations.

This is what some Victorians certainly believed. But to put it into words does violence to the language…what are “suggestions about value”? Certainly, as a teacher, if I were bear-leading a flock of students through the Louvre, I might certainly explain Poussin’s Wedding of Orpheus by recounting the myth, and ask the students if it’s healthy to grieve a relationship as did Orpheus, or whether he should have paid more attention to Eurydice during the wedding ceremony, instead of riffing out on his lyre.

But this could be done with a print bought at the National Gallery. The whole point of ferrying a mob of urchins to the Louvre is to give them, not only Improving Lessons, but a sensory experience of painting: the smell of the aging varnish, the strange silence, the diffident guards.

This could in some cases become an end in itself outside the middle class rat race, one just as precious as the clamor of kids who’ve got what they wanted at Christmas.

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

Louis Macneice is writing about personal gratification, which is frowned upon today as far as the downsized middle class is concerned. Complementary to the over-gratification of British and American children, such pursuits are frowned upon.

But the university might teach such pursuits, and under the Coalition’s attack lies the suggestion that time itself should reverse, and that gratification, for all but the upper crust, should not be sought in, but replaced by, Church, which deadens and endures.

And when you’ve lived long enough, as I have, and read enough, as I have, you ask with Auden, must we suffer it all again, must you English suffer it all again: the return, not of the repressed, but of repression, and its enforcer, the drunken brutality which is returning increasingly a feature of British life and a throwback to the 18th century.

The university cannot reverse this process but its downsizing is, if not a cause, an epiphenomenon of the overall trend. Basically, a society that defunds the humanities is one in which bullying increases.

It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we can emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish, unempathetic and blinkered human beings, who can be of greater benefit not only to the economy, but also to our friends, our children and our spouses.

Nothing wrong with this (apart from the fact that you forgot to mention that some of us would like to benefit ourselves by being more cultivated individuals for the sheer goddamn hell of it).

But: the elimination of the university, its down-sizing, will certainly cause more people to pursue low amusement, whereas we do not know if the down-sized university will be up to the neo-Victorian task.

You’re asking it to work harder and do more with less. You’re starving it of capital while expecting too much. That is like those cute K-12 experiments in which half the teachers in a school are laid off pour encourager. The results here in the States? Kids spending study hall watching kiddie slasher movies like Spawn of Chuckie, to mention one typical example.

You’re also forgetting brain drain. I met the eminent Cambridge mathematician John Horton Conway at our local convenience store when I was at Princeton…he was examining logic puzzle magazines. He’d been lured to Princeton with a princely salary. If British universities are cut, your faculty are going to flee…to the USA, and anglophone Asia such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

(Conway has since returned to Britain, but before the era of cutbacks.)

Do we learn more from Oprah Winfrey?

No. I admire her, but we don’t.

I’m certainly not the first person to express these hopes of education. You start to hear them in mid-19th Century Victorian Britain, when men like John Stewart Mill come out with statements like: “The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.”

Mill’s sunny optimism was belied by men like Eichmann, who told Hannah Arendt that he’d studied and admired Kant. Since for the most part, cultivation of the mind produces good people (Eichmann an exception that proves a rule), and the end of life is truth and perhaps beauty as opposed to tawdry hollow riches of the sort that produced 2008′s crash, we should just “do it”…fund the universities.

His contemporary Matthew Arnold sounded similar notes, expressing a view that a liberal education should help to inspire in us “a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery”. At its most ambitious, Arnold added, it should even engender the “noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it”.

These well-meaning, mid-Victorians wanted to use humanistic culture to replace scripture. They wanted universities to become our new churches, places that would teach us how to live, but without dogma or superstition.

Claims that culture could stand in for scripture – that Middlemarch could take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered to by Saint Augustine’s City of God – still have a way of sounding a bit eccentric, or just insane in their combination of impiety and ambition. But I want to argue that we are wrong to be suspicious of such claims. Culture can and should change and save our lives.

John Stuart Mill did not argue that we should pursue Culture in order to be more effective in more tawdry pursuits such as business or putting up with Mothers In Law. Instead, he recognized that for Cultured gents, their pursuits were ends in themselves, and that these chaps were usually better ratepayers than the flash chaps, who would, in the absence of any lust for Truth and Beauty, ruin girls and waste family fortunes crying “bring in” or at the gaming table.

Arnold, writing about fifty years later, did make an argument of that form, and it is for that reason weaker. We Yankees say that you can lead a horse to water, and students, exposed to Higher Things strictly to avoid their spending their twenties, in Shepherd’s words from The Winter’s Tale,

…getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting…

usually get wenches with child, wrong the ancientry, steal and fight simply out of human nature, and in resentment at the burial of the very idea that it might just be droll to read Shakespeare.

Alan Bennett’s History Boys was about lessons in life
Though it was at first hoped by men like Arnold and Mill that universities might be our new churches, these centres of learning have never offered what churches invariably focus on – guidance. It is a basic tenet of contemporary scholarship that no academic should connect works of culture to individual sorrows.

It’s a detail, but one that should be noticed if you call yourself a philosopher: churches haven’t always focused on guidance. The Augustinian strain in Christianity preached “predestination”, and this meant that the reprobate could not be guided.

St Augustine and Luther realized, through a glass darkly, something that Baruch Spinoza put into words: “blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself”. The good man doesn’t have to put out an effort (or go to university) to avoid wronging the ancientry, getting wenches with child, stealing, or fighting.

St Augustine and Luther thought this virtue was God’s election. Spinoza was more university-oriented in that his good man would desire knowledge more than wronging the ancientry. But in all three, it is an uncaused state, one that cannot be inculcated through guidance, whether secular or spiritual. Spinoza said, “needs must it be hard”, and “everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare”, and probably believed that it could not be inculcated, especially today, in a society in which parents insist on their children going to uni.

Now, it is true that universities of the Middle Ages and Reformation were founded and funded in a spirit parallel to, if different from, that of today. As Max Weber has shown, Capital jostled Religion aside, or joined it at the head table where they have sat uneasily together ever since, demanding that all institutions justify themselves in service to them, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

A (the monastery before Henry VIII, the Lutheran seminary, the American land-grant college for the training strictly of ministers or teachers) was for B1 (religion). Then, in the 20th century, A became for B2 (the corporation). That was because otherwise, the old Reformation suspicion would arise in the popular mind that the clerisy were not carrying their own weight.

Which they weren’t, and it was a good thing, because sufficient numbers of the clerisy, disguised as far as Parliament or American state legislatures were concerned as servants of God or of Mammon, were actually pursuing a “higher”, or Millsian, form of pure self-gratification, writing poetry and discovering relativity for the hell of it. We all benefited, but that wasn’t the point.

The downsizing of the universities in Britain has to be viewed as a symptom, not even a false cure, of a general brutalization caused by global capitalism. This is because in 1946, in a Britain parts of which had regressed economically and in some respects to the fourteenth century owing to Britain’s two world wars, Labour was nonetheless able to provide National Health while maintaining the reputation of Britain’s private universities (which, I’d admit, received far less funding than they do today, although they did receive some on account of defence spending) and actually creating new public universities!

(Neil Kynaston’s excellent study of this period, Austerity Britain does point out that the expansion after the 1945 Percy report was “spasmodic”, receiving a lot of resistance from the private universities. However, the most significant fact is that investment was not cut back despite the far more desperate situation of Britain at the time.)

The contemporary guardians of culture have a habit of cudgelling anyone who might try to use culture for didactic ends or to open a subject up to a mass audience. When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become very disdainful.

This is because the “lessons” of culture are not one size fits all. de Botton wants a “culture” of T shirts and baseball caps.

Many British youths do have a problem in containing sexual impulses, or as Shakespeare would say, getting wenches with child. Others have the older “British” problem that their own sexuality is too well contained, and they can’t express love, so they beat up queers as a result. These differences are best met by therapy.

Whatever the rhetoric of graduation ceremonies and the ambitious tone of prospectuses, there seems a strange and regrettable truth to confront about the workings of the modern university, that the institution has precious little interest in teaching us any emotional or ethical life skills – how to love our neighbours, clear human confusion, diminish human misery and leave the world better and happier than we found it.

Nonsense on stilts. Multicultural education does help us love our neighbors. Many of the cutback advocates prefer a more traditional education which celebrates ethnic hatred, and might prefer the students to watch Branagh’s rather pornographically violent and somewhat over the top patriotic Henry V. The cutbacks tend to preserve the worst of the old.

There should be classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-Knowledge.

Eye roll. Crotch grab. For one thing, dying, relationships and self-knowledge cannot be separated.

Universities may well be teaching the right books but they too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because they are embarrassed to admit the true nature of our inner needs. They are fatefully in love with ambiguity, they trust in the absurd modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience.

That’s not a modernist doctrine. Instead, the great modernist works (take Joyce), far from having no moral content, address the question of how to live with dignity in a society out of scale with human needs, in which it seems hard to live a decent life: you’re so responsible for your personal means and ends, and the ways and means are so deliberately opaque, that moral choice is obscured; you go to work for a financial firm only to discover when it’s too late that its investments or disinvestments are destroying the environment or people’s lives.

Joyce’s characters are trying to live in a society of bullshitters so clever at narration as to construct a fantasy land in which the “British” were responsible for everything bad, and the Church could not be questioned. Sure, modernism wasn’t about conformity, although that is what de Botton seems to be demanding: that we “contain” impulse and treat marriage like a job so as not to impose costs on a downsized government or damage our all important “performance” at work.

Prior to the current epoch, God and Mammon sat uneasily together despite Christ’s warnings. Today they seem to fuse and the result is monstrous. Spinoza’s, Luther’s, and St Augustine’s message was that the saint does exactly what he wants, not what’s expected of him, but what he wants is the good, which is trivially the only thing we want (the rest is consumerism and its evil twin, addiction).

We have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely dare to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul. Oprah Winfrey may not provide the deepest possibly analysis of the human condition, but arguably, in my view, she asks many more of the right questions than the humanities’ professors at Oxford.

Philomoria. Oprah gets her books from professors, or from students inspired to love books by professors!

An insult to humanities teachers that have to, year in, year out, ask the most serious questions of the soul.

I had to teach The Painted Veil the other day. In preparing, I had to ask myself, am I Walter Fane? I asked my ex-wife during a period of half-reconciliation to come to China with me. During my marriage I’d “contained” my sexual impulses, and along with them, like Prince Charles, my ability to love.

I took only one class at Oxford, and that was online, and I left it because it was too dumbed-down and I didn’t want to overwhelm the teacher as I am carpet bombing Alain here. But I find it very hard to believe that in teaching, for example, The Painted Veil, Oxford professors have the students count words to measure Maugham’s vocabulary or treat the story as anything but profoundly about moral growth. But being responsible professors, they have to show how “moral growth” emerges from the nuts and bolts of character and dialogue.

And…if they are looking over their shoulder to see if they are on the chopping block, they will talk far less about the big questions, and instead teach the facts in a measurable way, in order to justify rehire.

Yes, de Botton is worse than Ayn Rand.

My latest update to the Ayn Rand wikipedia article

I am very serious about these updates, which are always canceled. Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is absurd enough to be an order of magnitude more distant from actual philosophy than the philosophy of Carnap was to Heidegger, and it is tragic that American “tea party” members are reacting to a real impoverishment at the hands of computer thugs, gangster politicians of the right, and financial swindlers by reading Rand.

Ayn Rand was an exclusively self-proclaimed philosopher in her lifetime. Subsequent to that her work has been “re-examined” only in consequence of corporate takeovers of universities, for her philosophy is ersatz criticism of actual power relations.

Her work does not bear examination as philosophy. She makes elemental mistakes:

* Refusal to read or dialog with the tradition
* The logical fallacy of attempting to derive a synthetic apriori from the analytic apriori statement that (x)[x=x]
* A cult-like and polemic style that treats dialog as dissent from unquestioned truths

Citations of her work are of no more significance than citations by philosophers of Mein Kampf, or Zizek’s citations of American movies. It is true that at one place within his own work, the respected Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek does admit that Randroidism has more truth content than the liberal’s attempt to reconcile global capitalism with freedom, but this is nothing more than saying that Naziism was an alternative to Stalinism, and nothing in Fascism or Naziism bears philosophical scrutiny.

Ayn Rand is no philosopher, merely a justification for the impoverishment of the middle classes by computer thugs and tax cheats like Jimmy Wales who have a stunning contempt for followers who, in the name of anti-altruism, altruistically have donated their time to creating wikipedia, only to be driven out by convenience store clerks so that its content may be privatized and ultimately used for profit.

It is true that Marching Morons of the Tea Party movement are waving her book, but all this means is that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American booboisie”. Indeed, the fact that her thought is part of this Fascist reaction to the very genuine expropriation of the American middle class by the thugs of politics and business is nothing more than a mass madness on the order of “the great fear” of the French revolution and the Cultural Revolution in China.

Selfishness is in fact not any more logically prior than altruism. Even Marx got it wrong: sure, there was “primitive accumulation”, but there is also primitive altruism and cooperation and Mom. My own late Mom gave her life to her family and was treated like furniture: almost like Brutus’ Calpurnia, who swallowed fire, my Mom swallowed smoke for fifty years, and it killed her because she didn’t dare talk back: she got drunk in preference to standing up to the neighborhood bully. She gave and gave and got nothing in return for approximately the same reason I get screamed at by my sister for asking help in contacting my kids, but civilization is based on people like her. Ayn Rand shits on her memory. But I shit on Ayn Rand, saying, we have no rights, only responsibilities.

Edward G. Nilges, Hong Kong 23 Feb 2010

“I am sad that my Grandmother has died”: an inconsequential bit of analysis?

The following review of Martha Nussbaum’s contains a minor but I believe original contribution to philosophy. It was printed in the London based journal Philosophy Today in 2007 but its text has not been heretofore available online.

The original contribution is a way in which our language differentiates from reporting internal but physical bodily states (which are facts) and emotions, and it was based on a reading of Nussbaum.

Martha Nussbaum presents a reasoned and passionate defense of the role of emotions in thought which unfortunately devolves to too much “reading” and not enough analysis, in my view.

A fascinating quirk of language, which I discovered while teaching English in Hong Kong and grammar of the form found in “I feel sad that my mother has passed away”, is that this proposition, which plays a rule in Upheavals of Thought, can be translated with only some change in meaning to “I feel sad because my mother has passed away”.

To see the small but significant change in meaning, make another change to the sentence to read “I feel pain because I have a toothache”. Note that this sentence now cannot be translated back to “I feel pain that I have a toothache”. It’s understandable in the manner of Malapropisms that are the bane of the English as a second language speaker, but cries out for correction, because the copula “that” links not a physical feeling with a state of affairs but an emotion, which may include but is not restricted to a physical feeling in ways explored, as Nussbaum shows, by Proust.

The Logical Positivist equivocated physical feeling with emotions but as Nussbaum shows, emotions are linked with states of affairs in a different way than physical feelings.

“Because”, which refers to physical cause and effect, is the adequate copula to link an internally verifiable state of affairs such as toothache pain to an externally verifiable state of affairs such as an actual abcess. It inadequately encompasses, as we have shown, the range of meaning in “that”.

In Nussbaum, feeling emotion “that” is the propositional contemplation of a state of affairs which necessarily changes when our knowledge of that state of affairs changes, and this is dissimilar to feeling either emotion “that” or “because”.

The psychiatric patient feels sadness because of a happy event, or one that we think is unrelated to his “flourishing”, to use Martha Nussbaum’s word. For example, she might be inordinately sad “over the death of an actress named Eva Peron”. She also feels sadness that Evita has died as she contemplates the media reports, and her sadness-that perhaps need to be alloyed by Che Guevera’s reflection on the manipulation of emotions in a Fascist society.

Whereas the fully healthy woman like Nussbaum herself feels both sadness-that and sadness-because of her Mother’s death, and we accept this as normal. Both types of sadness follow the facts in ways we accept as normal.

If Ms. Nussbaum were to have an experience recently reported by the computer executive Steve Jobs, who learned in the morning that he had an inoperable cancer, only to learn in the afternoon that the cancer was curable as it was cured, her normality means that the emotion changes with the facts without being identifiable with the facts in some sillyassed Behaviorism.

Indeed, were she to find on arrival at the hospital that her mother was alive, the sadness-that would change while the physical manifestations of sadness-because might remain in the manner of a hangover. The emotion would change to relief that her mother was alive and that she could speak important words to her, coupled perhaps with anger that the report was false.

The physical feelings (of exhaustion or adrenalin-induced anxiety) might remain and this would be roughly described as a physical feeling of sadness still linked to the false report of death. But its name would change from “sadness” to something like “post-traumatic stress”. And note that one reason why the word “stress” names the situation of people in economic and job circumstances which cannot be questioned is that “stress” can be spoken of without the “that” nonsense. “I feel angry that my boss is a Yuppie pig” changes to “I feel stress”.

Now, the problem is that I miss this level of analysis in Nussbaum, to find it replaced by a sequence of readings that culminate with a singular lack of suspense to the American way of feeling, and are based on slaveowner philosophies of the ancient world, whose material basis Nussbaum fails to interrogate.

In earlier works, she made space in Hellenistic philosophy in philosophical circles for Hypatia and other female participants without historicising Greek philosophy or demonstrating as did Derrida its aporias, and how those fissures are “real things” that infect the way we think now.

Nussbaum fails to critically analyze false consciousness and one of its major supports, false feeling such as was used to justify the Iraq war, because such analysis, necessarily political, is a no-fly zone in the American academy.

Since our emotions, while being different from physical states of affairs, are reportable as states of affairs, emotions and facts form as PR men know a closed system in which it can be easier to manipulate emotions than to govern.

Americans hypostatize a set of emotions accepted as valid and narrated in a single way. Nussbaum encountered, in Finland, a different way of emotional expression but doesn’t consider that emotional syntax may not be the only thing to change.

We assume that other people feel a describable set of emotions isomorphic to ours while expressing them in different ways. The almost-modal case is that of the woman who acts as conduit to the dominant, but emotionally inarticulate, male and who like Evita adopts the intercessory role. She is apt to describe the leader as actually feeling feelings which she and not Peron feels, but to claim that el Maximo is inarticulate about his compassion for the descamisados, with a pitying and superior smile.

For example, I was very disturbed at the was Posner’s “Law and Economics” so neatly deprives poor people of access to the courts where the former convenience of saving the time of court officers has replaced Aristotle’s “equity” and the quality of mercy itself, by imposing completely inappropriate metrics on the one venue in which “your day in court” was formerly a suspense of metrics. I made my concerns known to Nussbaum in email who graciously responded, however with the unsatisfactory explanation that Posner was some sort of bad boy who liked to shock people out of a complacency which in my case doesn’t exist.

The alternative possibility is that an entire generation now coming to power is emotionally stunted in an unprecedented way, and this is on display in the conduct of the current Administration: but I don’t see any critical reflection on this dangerous topic in Nussbaum.

My theme, missing in Upheavals, is that feminism and American culture, have narrowed “feelings” in celebrating them and made us remarkably provincial about feelings, with one result being the disasters of our foreign policy.

For example, feelings about birth happen to be radically different, in my experience, in mainland China and these feelings track the ready availability of abortion.

In America, even the pro-choice have been schooled by the political activity of the pro-life to take birthing and childcare with a great deal of seriousness, that form of external seriousness characteristic of moral panics, where the pro-choice are alarmed by the vehemence of the emotions expressed by the pro-life, feelings which in terms have a generally unreported class-linked subtext, having to do with the injustice of the way in which a woman’s entire prospects change in the lower middle class when she becomes pregnant, and also having to do with the injustice done to her mate, whose career and life prospects are also stunted by pro-life moral panics.

More generally, Americans take the feelings of others, and their own, for granted in an environment where the layering of traditional psychoanalysis is in disrepute. To reflect that in China, government family campaigns and the widespread availability of abortion might make a Chinese woman feel quite differently about reproduction may trouble an American woman like Mrs. Clinton who while she wants women to have equal rights has also been schooled to accept and celebrate the necessary conservatism of people on lower rungs about reproductive choice and personal responsibility, a conservativism made necessary by the end of “welfare as we know it” and the end of any real reproductive choice in many rural areas of the USA while Roe v Wade remains on the books.

This isn’t quite the same thing as “moral relativism”, because ethics has long recognized that if a bad act is unaccompanied by the guilty mind, its badness is lessened or in the case of the “M’Naghten rule” in law, eliminated despite our dismay at the suffering of the victim (which in the case of first-term pregnancy may not exist, as Peter Singer points out).

The problem with reading unaccompanied even by my crude examples of “ordinary language” analysis is that the vivid images of reading reduce purity of heart, that purity of moral seriousness (as opposed to moral panic) where like Kant we retain the conviction that there are good and bad acts while not enumerating their empirical content.

Moral panic can be induced by feminist reading. This happened in the case of Catherine MacKinnon’s needed and valid redefinition of pornography as violence against women which became a censor’s tool in an America where our sexy porn can and does include and encode political dialogue about our pursuit of a happiness which for most Americans is an intimate joke. To ascend to James Joyce by way of Whitman, the Bronte sisters, Dante and St. Augustine is to arrive (as does Orwell in Keep the Apsidistra Flying) at a lower middle class “adjustment” to intolerable lives by repeating Molly Bloom’s “yes” in times of stress in the manner of the business self-help book.

Whitman asked, courageously, for much more than was coming to him in a nineteenth century context where his homosexuality was unmentionable, and is answered in Nussbaum’s sequence of readings by a crabwise retrograde movement with which many Americans have become all too acquainted in recent years: that of a content-free affirmation that is also found in the music of the later Stravinsky and in that of composers under continual pressure like Dmitri Shostakovich.

My fat and it must be admitted prolix pal Adorno merits only a few footnotes in Upheavals of Thought which is a shame, for Minima Moralia in particular is a critical analysis of emotions in lives where the state of affairs is not atomic or restricted to the death of a loved one but global in that we globally can say our lives have been irretrievably damaged by exogenous events.

Part of emotional work in today’s America needs to be empathy for the emotions of the Other. For example, reading 20th century history and Adorno might help us understand that great mystery of Baby Boom Americans, which is the reconstruction of the emotional life of their parents.

And, of course, we need to access Islamic emotional life, which starts with acknowledging how as in Shenzen emotions don’t necessary precede the law. For example, we’ve never realized how Islamic women feel empowered by choosing traditional garb while knowing that their freedom of the will is unharmed, or, historically, knowing that Islamic people in general feel that their religion, by incorporating Christian prophets, is more “civilized”.

A great deal of work needs to be done on the emotions, long equivocated by the indirect influence of Logical Positivism with toothaches and alcoholic hangovers. However, Nussbaums’ account is a one-dimensional track which sends the message that Americans are the best emoters on the planet despite their inexperience with the damaged life.