 |
|
| Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) |
Percepts without concepts are blind.
Concepts without percepts are empty.
The
light dove, cleaving the air in its free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still
easier in empty space.
Even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared
with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.
(Kant)
| "the fiery brook" |
|
| Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) |
What was at first religion becomes at a later period idolatry.
The negation of the subject (viz., God) is held to be irreligion, nay, atheism; not so
the negation of the predicates. But that which has no predicates has no effect on me; that which has no effect
on me, has no existence for me. To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself. . .
The theory that God cannot be defined, and consequently cannot be known by man, is therefore the offspring of recent times,
a product of modern unbelief. (cf. John Wisdom's parable of the Invisible Gardener.
Cf. Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. PS: if you can't sing
it, you can't hum it either.)
Man -- this is the mystery of religion -- projects his being into objectivity,
and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject.
By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God; the two are identical.
Mann ist was er isst. (You are what you eat.)
(Feuerbach)
(cf. Somerset Maugham:
"Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.")
(Cf. G K Chesterton:
"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false
devils . . . ")
(Cf. Peter O'Toole's character Jack Gurney in the 1972 film, The Ruling Class, who believes
he is Jesus: how do I know I'm God? Because "when I pray to him, I find I'm talking to myself.")
| studied Greek philosophy; still worth reading: |
|
| Karl Marx (1818-1883) |
It is life that determines consciousness, not consciousness, life.
(Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardium et cerebellum.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on his not understanding
it.
-- Upton Sinclair
Marx' advice is often interpreted to mean that economics has priority over culture; but it could also be
taken to mean, e.g., over la longue duree demography will out as well.)
The ruling ideas of any era are the ideas of the ruling class.
(Implication: those of the lower orders enchanted by the ruling ideas are not going to act in their
own best interests. As a past grandmaster of this game, Jay Gould, once gloated: "I can pay one half of the working
class to kill the other half.")
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it.
The demand to give up illusions about [man's] condition is the demand to give up a condition
which needs illusions.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it
were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
(Marx)
| Nietzsche is pietzsche. |
|
| Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) |
He who looks into the abyss should beware, lest the abyss
begin to look back into him.
Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises. ("I despise [myself], therefore
I am"? cf. Mary Wortley Montagu: I despise the pleasure of pleasing those I despise.)
A: 'One is praised only by one's peers.' B: 'Yes!
And whoever praises you tells you: you are my peer.'
Of all evil I deem you [the powerful] capable:
therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because
they had no claws.
Where I found the living, I found the will to power, and even
in the will of those who serve I found the will to be master.
(Nietzsche)
|
| Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) |
When
reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible
person could have written them. When you find an answer . . . when these passages
make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.
(Kuhn)
|
| Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) |
Living well is the best revenge.
(Sinatra)
The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
(Arabic proverb? but many cultures claim it; Turkish version: it urur keravan yurur. Andre Gide
passed it on to Truman Capote)
Better, Faster, Cheaper: choose two.
(Engineering maxim)
It is the first duty of a wine to be red; and the second,
to be a claret.
(Harry Waugh)
I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad.
Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone.
When
I have company I consider it obligatory.
I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and I drink it when I am.
Otherwise I never
touch it, unless I'm thirsty.
(Lily Bollinger, on the subject of Champagne. Who was it that said, no one has ever regretted on their
deathbed that they drank too much Champagne?)
I have taken more from drink, Clemmie, than drink has taken from me.
(attributed to Winston Churchill. Churchill & Nancy Astor mutually despised one another.
The story is told, one night she accosted him on the street, declaring indignantly, Mr Churchill, sir, you are drunk!
Churchill replied, Quite so, Madam, quite so. And you, Madam, are ugly. In fact, you are very ugly. But
in the morning: I shall be sober. So some ills are more long-lasting than others. I take
it that, on Marx' view, the problem with capitalism is that is more like ugliness than like drunkenness.)
(Cf. Willie Nelson: "There's a lot of doctors that tell me/Ya better start slowin' it down/But there's
more old drunks than there are old doctors/So I guess we better have another round.")
Dieu n'avait fait que l'eau, mais l'homme a fait le vin.
(Victor Hugo; "God, He merely made water; but as
for Man, well, he made: wine!")
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself
without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
(Thomas Jefferson)
He who knows one language, knows none.
(Goethe)
(cf. Kipling: "What does he know of England, who only England knows?" Self-understanding too is a comparative
matter.)
. . . the past is a foreign country where they do things differently.
---Gordon S. Wood, New York Review 10 June 2010, p. 67
An idealist is
one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
-- H L Mencken (depends, maybe, on how hungry one is? Hey! How about, give us bread AND roses?
Beware the false dilemma.)
There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only
nervousness or death.
(Fran Leibowitz. Metropolitan Life)
(Where Leibowitz, with Freud, thinks that nervousness is the human condition, Cynthia Ozick, in her very interesting
essay "On Living in the Gentile World," thinks of nervousness as a psychological definition of Judaism -- which
is the opposite of just being natural or seeking inner peace: "To be natural: that way lies ease, and an energetic
and athletic sort of sloth, which is the worst sloth of all, and surrender, and ultimately worldliness and sentimentality."
For an interesting exploration of these same themes, cf. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility:
Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity.)
Don't think of yourself as an organic pain collector racing
toward oblivion. (I said, don't.)
-- Dogbert (famous post-Socratic philosopher)
. . . its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving
others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. (a review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon
of Man)
Once again there is a rootlessness or ambivalence about philosophical thinking, as if the
discovery or rediscovery of the insufficiency of reason had given a paradoxical validity to nonsense, and this
gives us a special sympathy for the dilemmas of the seventeenth century.
A good many years ago a neighbor whose sex chivalry forbids me to disclose exclaimed upon
hearing of my interest in philosophy: 'Don't you just adore Pluto's Republic?'
("Pluto's Republic" is a metaphor for the demimonde of half-knowledge -- where dwells, as Saul Bellow
notes (see elsewhere on this site) "the new mental rabble of the wised-up world." Medawar does not cover the latest
ones, e.g, the Afro-Centrists, the Scientific Creationists, the Holocaust Deniers, and most lately the Birthers, but
anyone who insists on exhibiting how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, finds scope here.)
(Sir Peter B. Medawar, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1960; 1915-1987)
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact" -- part of a
hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess . . . Well, evolution is a
theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are not different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing
certainty. . . "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." . . . In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such
a degree that it would be perverse to withold provisional assent . . ."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"
. . . The public has a distorted view of science, because
children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection
of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find
mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origins we cannot explain. Our atmosphere
is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the
universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The
origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea of how the
electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
. . . Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude
of voices. It resembles Wikipedia more than it resembles the Encyclopedia Britannica.
-- Freeman Dyson, "How We Know," New York Review of Books 10 March 2011 p. 10. (Or, perhaps
-- cf. Popper's two theses, above -- science is both a collection of truths and an exploration
of mysteries; simultaneously Wikipedia and Britannica.)
If you're going through hell, keep going.
(Winston Churchill, 1874-1965)
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful
about what we pretend to be.
(Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007; cf the Buddhist sutra, "Things are not what they appear to be; nor are they otherwise.")
Where I think you may be wrong is that you seem to be thinking that if you decide not
to become one thing, the other thing you become has to be better.
(Doris Lessing, b. 1919. )
Cf. Die Toten Hosen: "Kein Alkohol ist auch kein
Loesung." (Alcohol is no solution? No alcohol is also no solution.) Alcohol does not solve any problem,
but then again, neither does milk.
Cf G K Chesterton: "I believe what really happens in history
is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form
it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory
that turns out to be equally stupid." (BUT cf Somerset Maugham: "from the earliest times the old have rubbed it into
the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and
it profited them to carry on the imposture.")
New
Rule: we have got to stop pretending that, because Communism was not
vindicated by History, therefore Marx remains completely irrelevant. Alas,
we are in a situation described by the old Eastern-bloc joke: the good news
is, everything They told us about Communism is false; the bad news is, everything They told us about capitalism is true.
One sort of reason to continue reading Marx is just substantive. The world in which we live is reverting
more and more to the sort of world in which he used to live. Much of what he said about Victorian Britain could just
as easily have been written about contemporary Russia; just as much of what could be said about the Gilded Age of a
century ago can still be said about the new Gilded Age of de-regulation, the dismantling of 20th-c. social democracy and the
New Deal, and developments like the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. Marx never lost sight of the sheer mendacity of
so much writing about the economy, while at the same time maintaining a keen appreciation of the human comedy that tolerates
and even welcomes that sort of mendacity and self-deception.
Here’s one way in which it would be useful to remember Marx. At
least ever since Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher brought back Voodoo Economics, the dominant narrative framework for talking
about such matters has been: most people (those who are employed) are consumers,
and employers help them by creating jobs so they can live (and consume). (And
so employees, and those they elect, must tread very carefully so as not to frighten the employing class, lest this cause the
supply of jobs to dry up.) Ayn Rand merely had the most extreme version of this
narrative; but in various versions it remains the conventional wisdom that the few at the top of the social pyramid
create while the feckless below them -- Mr. Romney's curious 47% -- receive and consume.
If Marx is to be believed, that is exactly backwards; employers need
employees much more than vice-versa. Every day they work, employees sell their
labor power to their employers, who then turn around and pay them a wage. But
this wage is, and must be, always a fraction of the initial labor power handed over in the initial sale, because the remaining
fraction not paid back is what constitutes profit.
Arthur Laffer was fond of using a bird metaphor to describe the process: if
you just feed the horse enough oats, the sparrows on the roadside get to eat, too.
He had the wrong bird: workers who sell their labor power are not
like incidental sparrows on the roadside; they are more like the goose
who laid the golden egg. The farmer does not lay the eggs, and if he looks
to his enlightened self-interest he will not kill the goose.
If Marx is correct, the wealth of any society (including such a relatively wealthy society as ours still remains
-- despite recent erosions) is not the benevolent gift of entrepreneurs at the top who allow enough to trickle down
to those below; it is the creation of most of that society, the employees
-- Occupy's curious 99% -- who then permit it to be skimmed from the top (to a greater or lesser extent).
These days, it is happening to the relatively greater extent that, for instance (as Tony Judt has pointed out) in 1968
the CEO of General Motors took home 66 times that of the typical GM worker; by
2005 the CEO of Wal-mart took home 900 times that of the typical Wal-mart employee.
(The same year, the wealth of the Wal-mart founder’s family was $90 billion
-- about the same as the bottom 40% of the US population, 120 million
people.) As Bill Maher recently noted, 80% of the wealth created in recent years
has gone to 1% of the population. Imagine a pizza party in which you order a 100 slice pizza, and the first guy takes
80 pieces. (What, you can't settle for just 79? But that's socialism!)
In recent times, the top has been skimming quite a lot. “Starve
the beast,” as Reagan was fond of saying; Reagan meant Big Gum’mint
but in effect it is the goose that is being starved by the long-term effects of Voodoo Economics.
Suppose Marx has got it straight: then it is not at all unfair
to demand (even without necessarily demanding to abolish capitalism outright) that the top might be taxed quite heavily and
the proceeds redistributed to some of those who produce the wealth of the society in the first place, some of whom are now
known by what once might have seemed an oxymoron outright, the working poor.
Since Reagan’s presidency and during George II’s, de-regulated
no-bid entrepreneurs have been allowed (like Halliburton) to use the government as a big private money siphon during the Iraqi
War or (like Countrywide) to drive ordinary homeowning taxpayers into bankruptcy and bring the entire economy to the brink
of collapse; while movements funded by the Koch brothers and other rich Masters
of the Universe have strangled the revenue base. In light of this recent history
it would not seem the brightest move to start by blaming the few remaining unions
trying to preserve a minimal decent standard of living for many people, for a situation in which pensions will no longer be
paid and demands for more equitable distribution of social wealth can be laughed off.
Oh, those bad teachers and firefighters and janitors and policemen; they're the ones responsible for economic crisis.
Why shouldn't they be made to pay by having their unions broken and living like workers in the private sector?
It is as if the second wave at Omaha beach said, oh look the first wave has a beachhead, let's drag them back into the ocean.
It is as if those blinded in one eye said, let's put out the eyes of those with two. (Why does PETA throw blood
on furs in Beverly Hills but not on the leather jackets of Hells' Angels? Why does the Tea Party resent those uppity
janitors but not those Masters of the Universe who in fact extract much more in profits from their labor before they are paid
a wage, than the government ever extracts in tax dollars after they are paid a wage?)
This society is still creating tremendous wealth; but if Marx is correct
is it being badly misused, in a massive process of theft by conversion. The
dominant narrative, that of consumers dependent on the benevolence of entrepreneurs, is very helpful in maintaining such a
process. Is this a proposal to revive Communism?
Nah. More like a proposal to bring back the New Deal. It is perfectly possible to re-read Marx in the 21st century and come to the really quite
moderate conclusion: Mistah, We
Could Use a Man Like FDR Again.
Consider the following Marxist-Menckenist line (with due Mertonist attention to the complexity
of unintended consequences) on why the Tea Party gets its appeal (where the '60's converge with the '80's), by Mark
Lilla, New York Review 27 May 2010, p. 56: "For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name
of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which
is a good thing -- though it has brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and
a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations.
Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have -- and it's left
the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children.
We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them."
It is common to define capitalism
as greed (e.g., Gordon Gecko). This is a psychological/motivational definition.
Marx had another take, which was
structural rather than psychological: capitalism is production for profit rather
than for use-value. The mis-match between what is profitable, and what is useful
or sensible, drives a lot of the irrationality.
But, on the subject of greed, there
can be degrees. Like nostalgia, greed just ain't what it used to be. What
is interesting about recent history is just how short-term greed has become. All
throughout history, ruling classes have tried to accumulate advantage for their families, including at a detriment to your
family. That’s just politics. It
looks to the long term. It has been a common criticism of American capitalism
(in contrast to Japan, for instance) that it rewards the short-term, quarterly bottom line even if this conflicts with long-term
best interests. This flaw seems now greatly accelerated. WWJR? What Will Jenna Rule? A
ruling class that ignores global warming is going to leave its heirs less real estate (Crawford TX may be the new Atlantis) even if Halliburton shareholders are sitting much prettier. Would the Borgias have approved of
this sort of short-sightedness with respect to dynastic interests? The recent
sub-prime mortgage fiasco is another glaring example. Matt Taibbi, in Griftopia (p. 212), claims that Goldman Sachs’ ethical mantra used to be “long-term greedy.”
This is now out the window; the
tendency now is to liquidate the goose for immediate profit and to hell with where anyone will get golden eggs down the road.
“Long-term greedy”
is, arguably, rational; but short-term greedy?
Our current ruling class is seriously
deficient in patricians.
Taibbi’s book is worth reading.
“If American politics made any sense at
all, we wouldn’t have two giant political parties of roughly the same size perpetually fighting over the same 5-10 percent
swatch of undecided voters, blues versus reds. Instead, the parties should be
broken into haves and have-nots -- a couple of obnoxious bankers on the Upper East Side
running for office against 280 million pissed-off credit card and mortgage customers.
“That’s the more accurate
demographic divide in a country in which the top 1 percent has seen its share of the nation’s overall wealth jump from
34.6 percent before the crisis, in 2007, to over 37.1 percent in 2009. Moreover,
the wealth of the average American plummeted during the crisis -- the median American household net worth was $102,500 in 2007, and went down to $65,400 in 2009 -- while the top 1 percent saw its net worth hold relatively
steady, dropping from $19.5 million to $16.5 million” (pp 11-12).
"John Steinbeck may have put his
finger on the reason why the exploited do not complain more than they do when he observed that the average American worker
does not see himself as part of a dispossessed proletariat but as a temporarily embarassed millionaire."
Perhaps on the other hand life
is not a dress rehearsal.
Those who know, but don't know they know, think they
don't know; those who don't know, but don't know they don't know, think they know.
(R. D. Laing [1927-1989], Knots, perhaps ringing the changes on Lao Tzu: "Those who know the Tao don't talk.
Those
who talk about the Tao don't know. " Or, perhaps on Socrates: the wisest
man in Greece only because he did not know but he knew that he did not know.)
Skeptical Fideism
Typically, skepticism is applauded or feared. It
is applauded by those who dislike either superstition as such, or whatever conventional wisdom it is they wish to undermine. It is feared by those who like the conventional wisdom and are loath to see it undermined. Like everything else, conventional wisdom changes;
so whether it is worth undermining at any point in history is a matter both of whose, but also which, ox is being gored. (Thus a claim like “change is good [bad]” is every bit as empty as a claim
like “life is good [bad].” Which change? Whose life?)
Philosophers are thought of as skeptics par excellence. This is only partly true. There are some notable examples
of skeptics who undermine conventional wisdom. Gorgias comes to mind (nothing
exists; and even if it did it could not be known;
and even if it could it could not be communicated), as does Nietzsche. But
then there is Descartes, who adopts a thoroughgoing skepticism (de omnibus dubitandum)
precisely to attain non-skeptical results. Often however skepticism is selective,
and not so thorough-going as that of Gorgias or Descartes. So things are
complicated. But in the game of philosophy, it is perfectly appropriate to play
skeptic with no obligation to replace whatever beliefs one demolishes. It is no objection to any philosopher’s views
that he demolishes without replacing. The
audience may not like this; Deuteronomy warns against it (“cursed is he
who removes his neighbour’s boundary stone”) but philosophy does not worship at that particular altar.
Those who do so worship have used skepticism for non-skeptical ends. A
typical example is: you can’t prove God doesn’t exist? Then God must exist, Q.E.D. Here is an example of skeptical
fideism: “skepticism” used as a means in the service of non-skeptical
ends. (Terence Penelhum introduced the concept.)
Perhaps Descartes counts as its best practitioner. The above example however
illustrates what logicians identify as a fallacy, the argumentum ad ignorantiam
(“appeal to ignorance”). Its mirror image (you can’t
prove God does exist? Then God must not exist, Q.E.D.) is just as fallacious,
and for the same reason: both proceed from a claim not to know (the ignorance
bit) to a claim to know (either conclusion, that God exists or that God does not exist).
Other examples come from the scientific creationist movement. Creationists
typically argue: did you ever personally observe (in a laboratory setting) the
transmutation of species (or other Linnaean classes)? No? Well, science consists in empirical observation, therefore key claims of evolutionary theory are other
than science (faith, maybe?). How very 17th c.; if it is Bacon vs. Aristotle, this seems appealing. But
eyewitness evidence here (as also in legal proceedings, as also in TV “news” where the tail of mobile camera technology
is allowed to wag the journalistic dog) is highly overrated, and empiricism is broader than just eyewitness testimony. To apply the creationist canon for science across the board would be to rule out much
existing science (astronomy, planetary science, geology as well as biology) and that can’t be a good thing.
But skeptical fideism need not be religious. It seems to be a staple of discourse on the internet. Did you actually see the gas
chambers? Where's the video of Obama emerging from the birth canal with Don Ho playing ukulele in the background?
Of course the moon landing was real; that's what the self-appointed elitists want you to believe. There
is more than one sort of guillibility: there is the garden variety gullibility which believes everything it thinks,
but there is also, as Cynthia Ozick says, "the gullibility which disbelieves everything."
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because
rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
(attr. to George Orwell; even if he did not say exactly this he should have)
I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war
by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.
(attr. to George Patton; George C. Scott said it in the film but even if Patton himself did not, it is just the
sort of thing he would have said)
Sure, I believe in gun control!
(It is one species of self-control.)
With corresponding lessons
for philosophy students.
1. Always be sure of your backstop. (Teleology)
2. Brandish a gun neither idly nor in jest, nor point it at anything you do not wish destroyed. (Sometimes even philosophy cannot particularly improve over common sense)
3. All guns are always loaded. (Unrestricted universal counterfactual
proposition with happy potentiality for self-fulfilling prophecy)
4. Gunpowder is like e-mail: never mix with Merlot. (Analogical reasoning)
5. Laser sights, like tracers, point both ways. (Reflexive relationships)
6. But: laser sights while dangerous
individually can be useful in battery. (Multiplier effect, emergent properties, informal fallacy of division)
7. “One shot, one kill” is fine if your target cannot shoot back; otherwise,
double-tap. (Epistemic relativism)
8. Q: First rule of a gun fight? A:
Bring a gun. Q: First rule of a
knife fight? A: Bring a gun. (Overdetermination)
9. There is a possible world in which the identical person might be both armed and literate. (Modal logic)
When seconds
count, the police are only minutes away.
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights.
It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special
classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
-- H L Mencken (Therefore: two cheers for the ACLU. Ditto for the NRA.)
(BTW, why do commentators insist on describing as "liberal" those who wish to annul the right to bear arms?
We would never use the same word to describe those who want to annul the right to abortion, or the 1st Amendment. Maybe
Malcolm X was right: a Dixiecrat is a Democrat is a Dixiecrat; we have a two-party system: right-wing, and extreme
right-wing. President Obama for example is hardly a liberal; for he is scarcely even a Democrat.)
It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something,
but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words,
of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies
which are now contending for our souls.
(George Orwell, describing Charles Dickens)
Exam question: "National policy is now, No Child Left
Behind. However once the kid grows up, it becomes: Devil Take The Hindmost. Discuss." (Bonus points: discuss how the Matthew Effect complicates the picture.)
(On this same subject of public education, the rectification
of names: why is it called "Race to the Top" when, at least from a labor standpoint, it is so much a race to the bottom?
Why say, public school teachers need to have their unions broken and be subjected to the same harsh labor practices as the
private sector, rather than saying, all workers should enjoy the same sorts of protections as unionized teachers? And
why is it that "reform" used to mean, amelioration of shoddy working conditions; while it now means, a return to pre-New
Deal plutocracy and the skewed wealth distribution of the Gilded Age? And why, when "accountability" is invoked,
is it only the harshest and least fair notion of accountability? When the Roman engineers built bridges, they were made
accountable by having to stand under their bridge as the legion marched across. But they were asked to do the feasible,
and given the resources. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, they said to the teachers, if you're so smart, make
the rice grow faster. When the teachers failed, they went to the wall. Which model of accountability do
Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad -- and the Koch brothers -- now have in mind as they attempt
to make public education more business-like?)
Madam, I am civilization.
(attributed to Harold Nicholson when, wearing civilian clothes in 1915, a lady accosted him on street, and demanded:
Why aren't you off [in the trenches], defending civilization?)
(Cf. Thomas Mann, who left Germany in 1933, and said in 1938, "Wherever I am, Germany is.")
An interesting life is the supreme concept of dullards.
(cf the Chinese curse: "may you live in interesting times".)
"And you think a fact is what's nasty."
"Facts are nasty."
"You think they're true because they're nasty."
. . . the new mental rabble of the wised-up world . . .
(Cf. Cynthia Ozick, "On Living in the Gentile World:" "Worldiness: the gullibility that
disbelieves everything.")
And the clergy? Beating swords into plowshares? No, they were
busy converting dog-collars into G-strings. But that is neither here nor there.
When I say American, I mean, uncorrected by the main history of human suffering.
(Saul Bellow, RIP, 1915-2005)
. . .no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility
can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and recount
its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
Susan Sontag (RIP, 1933-2004), "Notes on 'Camp'"
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a
pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
(John Stuart Mill) What color is your parachute? (Cf.
Stalin's question, "The Pope! And how many divisions has he got?" If it did not occur to you to have a parachute
-- Plan B, in other words -- any more than it occurred to the Pope to arm himself, better think twice.) Which is better: growing old, or dying young?
Whoever says, money cannot buy happiness, just doesn't know
where to shop.
But even if money could not buy happiness, it's more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle.
(Cf. G K Chesterton: "To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."
How in the world did Chesterton ever meet Bill Gates????)
Money, however, does grow on family trees.
The theory of knowledge ought never to be about how we know that sticks-looking-bent-in-water
are really straight; it is about how we know that magic is not valid.
-- Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief
L. B. Namier once said that "the crowning achievement of historical study" is to achieve
"an intuitive sense of how things do not happen." It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to
develop.
-- Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." His related 1954 essay, "The
Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," is also directly pertinent to understanding the current climate of right-wing incivility.
A historian told me this anecdote.
Some years
ago, the history department at a certain university was about to award a degree to the most knowledgeable student they had
ever known. His examination papers easily warranted a prestigious First Class degree. Before such a degree was awarded, it
was the custom to interview the candidate in person, this interview being known as a "Viva".
The
young man came in. The panel of professors and lecturers greeted him warmly. His papers were so impressive that they hardly
knew what to ask him. But just to pass the time, one of the panel genially suggested: "Suppose you were in the year 1540,
and you undertook a journey from Bristol to, let us say, London. Tell us about the journey, and what you might have seen along
the way."
The young man stared at them. He looked completely flumoxed. "I mean quite simply,"
the questioner helpfully added, "what sort of conditions there might have been in Bristol, what the countryside would have
been like, what other kinds of people, perhaps, you might have met on the road." Still the young man was silent. Others members
of the panel tried to come to his aid. Then they began to probe.
Gradually it became
clear that this young man, though he'd mastered the most astonishing amount of information, had no picture of the past. It
had never come alive, as a living reality, in his mind. He seemed to know everything, but in fact he knew nothing at all.
They didn't award him a First.
Now if only he'd been made to write a short story...
Edward Rutherfurd,
http://www.edwardrutherfurd.com/how-to-fail-your-history-degree.
Bryan
Magee, in Confessions of a Philosopher, says much the same thing about how philosophy students often fail
-- if not at their degrees, at least at philosophy itself. It is possible to master all the arguments of
a given philosopher, for instance, and see all his many flaws, and yet fail entirely to understand the point of what that
philosopher was doing in the process of the long dialogue known as philosophizing. "I had a pupil who turned in
a couple of well-crafted essays on Descartes, subjecting Cogito ergo sum to effective and damaging criticism, putting
his finger on the weaknesses of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, pointing out the circularity of the overall
layout of the argument. His perceptions of what was wrong with Descartes were many and acute, and on the whole
accurate, and his essays were stylishly written and soundly constructed. Having got to this point, he expected
to go on to do the same with the next philosopher. This is the sort of thing the best students did, and it was
thought to be Oxford intellectual training at its most sophisticated. But I said to him: 'If all the
criticisms you've made of Descartes are valid -- and on the whole I think they are -- why are
we spending our time here now discussing him? Why have you just devoted a fortnight of your life to reading his main
works and writing two essays about them? More to the point: if all these things are wrong with
his ideas -- and I think they are -- why is his name known to every educated person in the Western
world today, three and a half centuries after his death? Why are his writings studied in every major university in the
world, as they are being studied by you and me here now? Why are clever people willing to devote years of their lives
to writing books about him?'" (p. 311)
(cf. Roy Campbell: "They use
the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?")
The good news is, if a proposition
is analytic it is certainly true (and there are such things); the bad news is,
these are few and far between, and many of the important things in life (science, economics, practical decision-making) tend
to turn around synthetic propositions instead.
It follows that very few ideas
are just stupid. (If I say, “no, not all circles are round”
either I don’t understand the language I seem to use, or I don’t
care whether I contradict myself; and self-contradictory claims are, well, just
stupid.) Very many more ideas are plausible, even if they are incorrect. It seems to me for example that the problem with the Flat Earth Theory is not
that it is stupid (it is not; and from one point of view it has some empirical evidence going for it); the problem with it
is, it is just wrong. Two different things.
But that took a while to get sorted.
Likewise for pre-scientific cosmologies
involving, for example, “the talking snake” (in the Garden of Eden) which Bill Maher likes to ridicule. Snakes might talk. Men might “shift skins” and
become werewolves too. Learning the name of a person, or a god, might give us
magical power over them. They just don’t. But it’s not just stupid to imagine they might; at
worst, it’s merely ignorant. (Though stupidity might be defined as ignorance,
persisted in, when one has opportunity to learn instead.)
As Larry Laudan says: most scientific ideas are false. He’s not one
of these (and there are such) who say science, witchcraft, magic, whatever, take your pick it’s all one; his point is if you take the long view (look at the history of science) human beings have tried out a
whole lot of ideas, and in the end we wind up rejecting the vast majority of them, retaining only a very few.
But then, as Popper says, those which we do keep, might still be mistaken (and we might have occasion in the future
to discover them false, too). Science may be our best guess to date; but the operative word is, best.
Thus one of the several reasons we need critical thinking (apart from the obvious, that
it beats un-critical thinking -- don't believe everything you think!) is that our cognitive powers do not get
a whole lot of help from purely analytic propositions.
Stupid
is as stupid does.
(Forrest Gump)
Ronald Dworkin, recently in the New York Review of Books, 9 Dec. 2010, p. 56, on the 2010 American elections:
"Why do so many Americans insist on voting against
their own best interests? Why do they shout hatred for a health care plan that
gives them better protection against calamity than they have ever had? Or stimulus
spending that has prevented a bad economic climate from being much worse for them?
Or tax proposals that lower their own taxes by raising taxes on people much richer than they will ever be? Why do they vote in such numbers for the party favored by the bankers and traders who brought on the economic
catastrophe? . . . True, (Obama’s) improvement is slow -- no doubt slower than everyone hoped and many people expected.
But if someone has burned down your house you would not fire your new contractor because he has not rebuilt it overnight
and then hire the arsonist to finish the job."
Si, ayant frappé ton prochain sur une joue, il te tend l’autre, frappe-le sur le même,
ça lui apprendra à faire le malin.
-- François
Cavanna (no relation) writer for the French anarcho-satiricalist weekly Charlie Hebdo; "If, having
slapped your neighbor on one cheek, he turns the other cheek, slap him on that one too, it will wise him up to the way of
the world." Forgive your enemy but remember the bastard's name.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence.
(William Kingdon Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief")
(cf. George Bernard Shaw: "What a man believes, may be ascertained not from his creed, but from the assumptions
upon which he habitually acts.")
In light of modern attacks from the religious right against secular humanism as necessarily
relativistic, it is interesting to note that Clifford (way ahead of his time about cognition and action, e.g. way before John
Austin & John Searle; and using the rhetoric of Earnest religion) offers an humanistic critique of the
familiar comfortable relativism (often, though not exclusively, religious) in which anything labelled "my (personal)
belief" is automatically exempt from rational criticism.
Belief is interesting on several distinct grounds. Belief
may define religion; or maybe not (some religions depend on orthodoxy, but others soft-pedal
belief in favor of orthopraxy). While it is perhaps always wise to distinguish knowledge from mere belief,
knowledge may be defined as a particular species of belief (e.g., JTB); or on the other hand, as Popper suggests
in his thesis about objective knowledge, knowledge may be defined independently of belief at all. And Anglo-American
law regards belief as soft and minor; acts can be crimes but beliefs like other thoughts cannot. Clifford
suggests otherwise: there is no such thing as mere belief; belief must be earned; belief is not private,
and there is no unconditional right to belief. (In other words: belief is subject to ethical considerations.)
Further, there is no firm line between belief and action, nor between private beliefs and implicit advocacy to society at
large. Faced with those (religious or otherwise) who fall back on the private subjective right to "believe,"
Clifford has no patience. One has no right to believe (anything), one must earn entitlement to believe by doing
one's homework, and if one replies that this takes too much time or abstract learning, Clifford replies:
then you have no time to believe.
Don't believe everything you think.
It's always good news, until it ain't.
-- Tony Soprano on doctors (but it seems to apply more widely)
A philosopher is a blind man looking in a dark room for a
black cat which isn't there. A theologian is the one who finds it.
- H.L. Mencken (Someone, rhetorically, once asked Benjamin Jowett: who is more powerful, the
priest or the judge? He gave Jowett his answer: The priest; because the judge can merely say, you
be hanged; whereas the priest can say, you be damned. Yes, replied Jowett; but when the judge says, you
be hanged, you ARE hanged.)
It is the creed of the English that there is no God and that
it is wise to pray to Him from time to time.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre (wasn't it Thomas Huxley who defined Auguste Comte's proposed "Religion of Humanity" as Catholicism,
minus Christianity?) (cf. Florence King: "As
an Episcopalian I am technically an Anglican Catholic, meaning I have a real feel for theological dottiness untainted by deeper
questions of religious belief. I have no religious beliefs to speak of,
but I stand four-square with the Highs against the Lows on Latin and incense, and I will go to bat for transubstantiation
even though it means nothing to me one way or the other.")
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom
without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
-- H Richard Niebuhr, on the characteristics of liberal Protestantism
Religion is like a nail; the harder you hit it, the
deeper it goes in.
-- Anatoly Lunacharsky
.
. . so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but . . . as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.
-- H L Mencken (Yeah, why is it that practically every guttersnipe & gas-pump mendicant is on such familiar
terms with TheHolyOneBlessedBeHe that they can dispense His blessings so freely -- and tinged as necessary with
a heartfelt dash of ressentiment?) Help someone whey they are in trouble, and they
will remember you when they are in trouble again.
·
It
is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a
board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
-- H L Mencken (cf. Comicus in Mel Brooks' History of the World Pt I: How poor are the Christians? They are
so poor, they only have one god! Was it Dostoevsky who observed that there is better evidence for the existence of the
Devil than for the existence of God? And, except for the long-standing cultural prevalence of monotheism, why after
all don't arguments for the divine support polytheism instead?)
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
-- Benjamin Franklin (a cosmological argument, in memory of Peter Huchthausen [1939-2008] & Ernest Gellner [1925-1995].
Is Munich therefore the axis mundi? If I forget thee, O Paulaner . . . The six food groups:
Hofbrau, Hacker-Pschorr, Paulaner, Lowenbrau, Augustiner, and Spaten. )
Like an angry ex-Communist, he thinks he has changed
his mind merely because he has shifted from love to hate of the dogma which still fixates his thinking.
-- David Joravsky
It is amusing, in their stridency and sense of righteousness, how much the "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Maher,
etc.) behave so much like the targets of their wrath. Could it be that organized atheists are but one more
species of evangelical sect?
Bertrand Russell suggested as much in his modern classic, "On Catholic and Protestant
Skeptics" (In Why I am Not a Christian). Departing from Santayana's observation on how Catholic atheists
may remain Catholic ("There is no God, and Mary is his mother), Russell completes the thought: Protestant skeptics,
like Mill, may remain very Earnest in their free-thought. It is just slightly
so sad to have to put so much effort into being transgressive.
The child of evangelicalism, if he does not believe,
inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference. He is always evangelical. He rejects the religion he grew up
with but he rejects it religiously. He has buried evangelical belief but he has not buried evangelical choice, which
seems to him the only important dilemma. He respects the logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment, the little
cell of belief. This is the only kind of belief that makes sense, the revolutionary kind. Nominal belief
is insufficiently serious; nominal unbelief seems almost a blasphemy against atheism.
--James Wood, The Broken Estate
Education: the casting of imitation pearls before
true swine.
-- Thomas Carlyle
Teaching is a performance art.
-- Camille Paglia
"Experience keeps a dear school." Ditto, all the new
gussied-up diploma mills. Thus, today's fool has a choice.
(Faster. Cheaper? Better? Choose one.)
The early worm gets eaten by the bird; second mouse
gets the cheese.
(Cf. G K Chesterton:
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.)
People may be unfitted by being fit in an unfit fitness.
(Kenneth Burke)
Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
-- Martin Heidegger
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
-- Aldous Huxley (no, despite the source, not a reference to drugs)
Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,
Which runs as follows:
Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising
firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all,
make love to those
Who wash too much.
Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose
the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views. -- W H Auden, "Under Which Lyre"
When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
When bad Americans die, they go to Perris.
Myths think themselves through men.
("Not all myths think themselves through men; some get a little help," Scott Guggenheim commenting on Philippine
cockfighting. Cf. Ernest Gellner: in a truly traditional culture, people do not so much hold beliefs as beliefs
hold people.)
Food is good to think.
-- Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
(Jules Renard)
cf. Yiddish proverb: "Venn der putz shteht ligt der sichel in drerd." or,
God gave man a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to
run one at a time.
(Robin Williams)
G-d gave Adam & Eve the choice of a wedding present:
the ability to piss standing up, or the ability to achieve multiple orgasms. Adam (being the man) got first
choice.
Earn this.
(Capt. Miller to Pvt. Ryan)
Consult your syllabus: exams are obligations (not to me, but to your peers); emergencies might
well be excuses but you must contact the instructor prior to the exam, preferably in person but if not, either by leaving
a message by telephone (213-384-0099) or by email (michaelacavanaugh@earthlink.net) in advance. If you meet this requirement we can discuss arrangements; if not, not.
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