"The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite."
G.K. Chesterton. 1908.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Reason redux
In the US, the American Atheists organisation is busy promoting its beliefs in an attempt to fight off the perceived influence of the religious Right. Various atheist and humanist groups will stage a 'Reason Rally' in Washington DC on March 24th.
Instead of worshiping God, they prefer to worship Reason.
This idea that Reason should be venerated as the path to truth is becoming something of a parody. Sherlock Holmes embodies this parody perfectly, with his demonstration that deductive thinking (the hallmark of Reason) would solve any mystery. It was a compelling vision, and a great story, but too many people seem to forget that Holmes was a fantasy figure. Ask any detective.
In Star Trek Spock became the post-war embodiment of Reason in action, with his inelegant and decidedly wooden invocation of deductive thinking. Fans seem blissfully unaware that Spock was a clumsy parody of a parody.
The idea that one can reach a solution entirely in one's head promotes the idea of magical thinking - that simply by a process of deduction and will, and a po-faced manner, one can cut through the chaos and confusion and create order and understanding and, ultimately, harmony.
The post-modern embodiment of this idea currently is Yoda. The journey from Sherlock Holmes to Yoda indicates the slippery slope that a worship of Reason entails.
Reason is just thought. To say that an idea is reasonable is to say that it sounds great, but it remains untested.
It is the testing that uncovers the truth, not the idea. Humanists today risk turning Reason into a superstition.
Instead of worshiping God, they prefer to worship Reason.
This idea that Reason should be venerated as the path to truth is becoming something of a parody. Sherlock Holmes embodies this parody perfectly, with his demonstration that deductive thinking (the hallmark of Reason) would solve any mystery. It was a compelling vision, and a great story, but too many people seem to forget that Holmes was a fantasy figure. Ask any detective.
In Star Trek Spock became the post-war embodiment of Reason in action, with his inelegant and decidedly wooden invocation of deductive thinking. Fans seem blissfully unaware that Spock was a clumsy parody of a parody.
The idea that one can reach a solution entirely in one's head promotes the idea of magical thinking - that simply by a process of deduction and will, and a po-faced manner, one can cut through the chaos and confusion and create order and understanding and, ultimately, harmony.
The post-modern embodiment of this idea currently is Yoda. The journey from Sherlock Holmes to Yoda indicates the slippery slope that a worship of Reason entails.
Reason is just thought. To say that an idea is reasonable is to say that it sounds great, but it remains untested.
It is the testing that uncovers the truth, not the idea. Humanists today risk turning Reason into a superstition.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Science versus Reason
Ideologies are exactly like Religions. They are both rationalist. They rationalise their perceived realities. Rationality and Reason are, in fact, simply methods of persuasion. Once persuaded, you are then meant to believe.
Ideologies argue the same way Theologies argued. And both sought to persuade large groups of followers to join them by the power of persuasion.
Science is different. It does not rely on Reason, as many mistakenly believe. It is empirical. It relies on evidence. The force of your argument, no matter how reasonable or logical, means nothing. Only evidence does. Without evidence, any argument is only a theory, and thus not allowed to be called fact, or reality.
The Ideologies of today that pit science against religions, and who claim to align themselves on the side of science and progress because they trumpet rational thinking are completely missing the point.
They are in fact engaging in Sophistry. Which is the ancient art of persuasion through Reason.
This is why sophistry is often equated with lying. Because it frequently is. Reason is no more likely to be truthful than irrationality.
Reason belongs in the realm of politics, not science.
Ideologies argue the same way Theologies argued. And both sought to persuade large groups of followers to join them by the power of persuasion.
Science is different. It does not rely on Reason, as many mistakenly believe. It is empirical. It relies on evidence. The force of your argument, no matter how reasonable or logical, means nothing. Only evidence does. Without evidence, any argument is only a theory, and thus not allowed to be called fact, or reality.
The Ideologies of today that pit science against religions, and who claim to align themselves on the side of science and progress because they trumpet rational thinking are completely missing the point.
They are in fact engaging in Sophistry. Which is the ancient art of persuasion through Reason.
This is why sophistry is often equated with lying. Because it frequently is. Reason is no more likely to be truthful than irrationality.
Reason belongs in the realm of politics, not science.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Liberal Society - Conservative Community
Sensitive Souls
The August 2011 riots that swept first through London, then Britain's other major cities, were a tremendous shock and a severe psychological blow to much of the population. They were not, after all, 'riots', in the political sense. They were in fact simply orgies of looting similar to what we saw on our televisions occuring in Bagdad in 2003.
In 2011 we watched and were transfixed by scenes occurring within our own country, faithfully recorded by the CCTV cameras that we'd installed for our security, as groups of hooded and masked youths rampaged through the streets with impunity, smashing, looting and setting fire to shops. We stared as they humiliated, robbed and beat anonymous citizens, all without protection or recourse to the law. And we watched the mobs rally and organize, coordinated by twitter, facebook and blackberry, with youths on bikes scouting out for opportunities.
And oh how we watched. For the the biggest psychological hit of the whole affair was the fact that it went on day after day, night after night, morphing from a weekend dust up into something that did not seem to want to end.
That was the biggest shock to the country. The fact that it lasted four days.
It was amusing to watch many of the liberals in the BBC or commentating in the Guardian change their tone as the chaos spread. The majority of journalists of course live and work in London, and thus it was more of a shock for them to see smashed glass and flames engulf streets that they recognised. It was dangerously close to the Latte-serving cafes that they patronised. And even more of a shock to them was to witness the Police, whom they had criticised for decades for their brutality, trying to police the mobs in a nicer, more consensual way, as they had been ordered to do so many times. And the mob just taunted them, threw things at them and looted shops in front of them. And the police simply 'held the line', rather than go in swinging their batons.
'The police must do everything in their power to restore order to the streets' the liberals cried, throwing their civil liberties arguments out of the window as they watched the mobs spread through their favourite city. They soon forgot their social justice arguments too as the youths were described first as 'the underclass', then simply 'yobs', and finally as 'vile scum'. For fear had started to take hold in places it had not been seen before.
And we who watched agreed with them. For most of us are liberals too, even those who claim (erroneously) to be conservatives, for we all believe in the sanctity of the individual, and the fear we felt was the fear of the individual, alone before the mob - and possibly its next victim.
And that is the problem of the liberal individual - extreme sensitivity. For the individual is alone, so of course one will be sensitive to one's own fears. They will be sensitive to the power of the State and the Police, in case that power is directed at one. And they will also be sensitive to the power of the mob (or the yob). And there is no paradox. Until you require one to protect you from the other.
Softness
Although Liberalism is a recognised philosophy, most people simply don't understand it or take its main tenets for granted, for liberalism has become, in the UK, the mainstream. The term 'liberal' has also become a euphemism for 'softness'. But the truth is, we have all become soft. Softness too is mainstream. And this is natural.
This is a prosperous society, and a liberal one. Prosperity and urbanization lead naturally to liberalism, for it gifts us with the chance to be free from small community norms and the culture of the twitching net curtain. We don't need to identify ourselves according to what group we belong to. The ties that bind us to our neighbours are loosened, giving us greater personal freedom. That is what liberalism means - freedom.
We embrace the prosperity and urbanization because it gives us pleasures. And the State protects our freedom to be consumers, to be single, to be gay, to be whatever we want. And while this does not always work out the way we want, it nevertheless leads to us being more able to relax. It leads to softness, for softness, mark you, is actually a sign of success.
It is the aim of any civilization to rise up to the stage where it can actually be soft, for softness is pleasant, whereas hardness is not.
Community
And herein lies the problem with a soft, liberal, atomized society. The majority of people watched or suffered in the riots without really knowing what to do. They were helpless. Softness was going up in smoke.
The Turkish, Kurd, Sikh and Muslim communities of London however knew exactly what to do. They didn't need 'social media' to organise. Their neighbours are right next door, and a phone call was sufficient to contact extended family members. Temples and Mosques served as simple rallying points. While other people flapped about, leaderless, shocked and struggling to comprehend, the asian ethnic communities - the only real communities in the UK today - were out in front of their shops and businesses with knives, baseball bats, hockey sticks and swords. They felt no sympathy for the 'underclass' and their social justice problems or their underpriviliged backgrounds. And they certainly did not suffer from guilt at the fact that most of the rioters were black.
No, the message from these tightknit communities was a simple one - 'If you come down here then we don't care whether you're a gora or a kalay, we'll break your legs.'
And in that strange week when it all happened, they received much praise for doing precisely that.
Assimilation
Over the years there has been much talk about immigrant communities not 'assimilating'. These stubborn people have held onto their beliefs, their cohesiveness and their suspicious disdain of liberalism. Their children are still pressured to conform to (small) society norms. Their girls are still under pressure to marry, and marry within the community or religion. The libertine freedoms that are not only celebrated, but actually encouraged and taught, in Britain are scratching against the conservative walls of these communities, eroding them but not yet overwhelming them.
During the riots however there turned out to be many people who were glad they hadn't assimilated. When the shit hit the fan, suddenly these kinds of people were needed.
What does this say about the UK today?
Are we really liberal? Or are we just soft? If liberalism means simply wanting things to be 'nice', is it really a 'value' any more?
If softness means that we don't actually consider any value worth being 'hard' about, then are we doomed to always hand over the mandate for our protection to whoever happens to be passing as soon as things become unpleasant?
If so, do we treasure softness and pleasure so much that we are prepared to barter liberal freedoms for protection? Are we not caught therefore in a dreadful paradox?
Is this the paradox that all successful civilizations encounter?
Are we Romans handing over first the leadership, then the republic, to the Germanic tribes?
The August 2011 riots that swept first through London, then Britain's other major cities, were a tremendous shock and a severe psychological blow to much of the population. They were not, after all, 'riots', in the political sense. They were in fact simply orgies of looting similar to what we saw on our televisions occuring in Bagdad in 2003.
In 2011 we watched and were transfixed by scenes occurring within our own country, faithfully recorded by the CCTV cameras that we'd installed for our security, as groups of hooded and masked youths rampaged through the streets with impunity, smashing, looting and setting fire to shops. We stared as they humiliated, robbed and beat anonymous citizens, all without protection or recourse to the law. And we watched the mobs rally and organize, coordinated by twitter, facebook and blackberry, with youths on bikes scouting out for opportunities.
And oh how we watched. For the the biggest psychological hit of the whole affair was the fact that it went on day after day, night after night, morphing from a weekend dust up into something that did not seem to want to end.
That was the biggest shock to the country. The fact that it lasted four days.
It was amusing to watch many of the liberals in the BBC or commentating in the Guardian change their tone as the chaos spread. The majority of journalists of course live and work in London, and thus it was more of a shock for them to see smashed glass and flames engulf streets that they recognised. It was dangerously close to the Latte-serving cafes that they patronised. And even more of a shock to them was to witness the Police, whom they had criticised for decades for their brutality, trying to police the mobs in a nicer, more consensual way, as they had been ordered to do so many times. And the mob just taunted them, threw things at them and looted shops in front of them. And the police simply 'held the line', rather than go in swinging their batons.
'The police must do everything in their power to restore order to the streets' the liberals cried, throwing their civil liberties arguments out of the window as they watched the mobs spread through their favourite city. They soon forgot their social justice arguments too as the youths were described first as 'the underclass', then simply 'yobs', and finally as 'vile scum'. For fear had started to take hold in places it had not been seen before.
And we who watched agreed with them. For most of us are liberals too, even those who claim (erroneously) to be conservatives, for we all believe in the sanctity of the individual, and the fear we felt was the fear of the individual, alone before the mob - and possibly its next victim.
And that is the problem of the liberal individual - extreme sensitivity. For the individual is alone, so of course one will be sensitive to one's own fears. They will be sensitive to the power of the State and the Police, in case that power is directed at one. And they will also be sensitive to the power of the mob (or the yob). And there is no paradox. Until you require one to protect you from the other.
Softness
Although Liberalism is a recognised philosophy, most people simply don't understand it or take its main tenets for granted, for liberalism has become, in the UK, the mainstream. The term 'liberal' has also become a euphemism for 'softness'. But the truth is, we have all become soft. Softness too is mainstream. And this is natural.
This is a prosperous society, and a liberal one. Prosperity and urbanization lead naturally to liberalism, for it gifts us with the chance to be free from small community norms and the culture of the twitching net curtain. We don't need to identify ourselves according to what group we belong to. The ties that bind us to our neighbours are loosened, giving us greater personal freedom. That is what liberalism means - freedom.
We embrace the prosperity and urbanization because it gives us pleasures. And the State protects our freedom to be consumers, to be single, to be gay, to be whatever we want. And while this does not always work out the way we want, it nevertheless leads to us being more able to relax. It leads to softness, for softness, mark you, is actually a sign of success.
It is the aim of any civilization to rise up to the stage where it can actually be soft, for softness is pleasant, whereas hardness is not.
Community
And herein lies the problem with a soft, liberal, atomized society. The majority of people watched or suffered in the riots without really knowing what to do. They were helpless. Softness was going up in smoke.
The Turkish, Kurd, Sikh and Muslim communities of London however knew exactly what to do. They didn't need 'social media' to organise. Their neighbours are right next door, and a phone call was sufficient to contact extended family members. Temples and Mosques served as simple rallying points. While other people flapped about, leaderless, shocked and struggling to comprehend, the asian ethnic communities - the only real communities in the UK today - were out in front of their shops and businesses with knives, baseball bats, hockey sticks and swords. They felt no sympathy for the 'underclass' and their social justice problems or their underpriviliged backgrounds. And they certainly did not suffer from guilt at the fact that most of the rioters were black.
No, the message from these tightknit communities was a simple one - 'If you come down here then we don't care whether you're a gora or a kalay, we'll break your legs.'
And in that strange week when it all happened, they received much praise for doing precisely that.
Assimilation
Over the years there has been much talk about immigrant communities not 'assimilating'. These stubborn people have held onto their beliefs, their cohesiveness and their suspicious disdain of liberalism. Their children are still pressured to conform to (small) society norms. Their girls are still under pressure to marry, and marry within the community or religion. The libertine freedoms that are not only celebrated, but actually encouraged and taught, in Britain are scratching against the conservative walls of these communities, eroding them but not yet overwhelming them.
During the riots however there turned out to be many people who were glad they hadn't assimilated. When the shit hit the fan, suddenly these kinds of people were needed.
What does this say about the UK today?
Are we really liberal? Or are we just soft? If liberalism means simply wanting things to be 'nice', is it really a 'value' any more?
If softness means that we don't actually consider any value worth being 'hard' about, then are we doomed to always hand over the mandate for our protection to whoever happens to be passing as soon as things become unpleasant?
If so, do we treasure softness and pleasure so much that we are prepared to barter liberal freedoms for protection? Are we not caught therefore in a dreadful paradox?
Is this the paradox that all successful civilizations encounter?
Are we Romans handing over first the leadership, then the republic, to the Germanic tribes?
Sunday, June 19, 2011
'I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.
'People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.
'I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.
'I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.'
Camille Paglia
'People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.
'I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.
'I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.'
Camille Paglia
'Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began. Instead, what it has become in the last 20 years is a white upper-middle-class elitism which preaches to the people and says, "Oh, you don't agree with us? You're homophobic, you're so uneducated. You're in the darkness. You need us to bring light and truth to you."'
Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia
Friday, June 10, 2011
The Greens
The Green instruction to 'lower your carbon footprint' is an exhortation to heat less, consume less, travel less, spend less. This is how the poor live. Green exhortations therefore are for wealthy people to live like the poor - by choice.
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will catch on. Jesus preached something like this, as did Buddha. Confucius did too. Religions have, for millennia, tried to get humans to live within limits - moral limits, limits to hubris, to ego, to extravagance. Considering all the effort that went into these religions, holding back natural human impulses is clearly hard work, like a child trying to hold back a 600 pound rhino.
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will catch on. Jesus preached something like this, as did Buddha. Confucius did too. Religions have, for millennia, tried to get humans to live within limits - moral limits, limits to hubris, to ego, to extravagance. Considering all the effort that went into these religions, holding back natural human impulses is clearly hard work, like a child trying to hold back a 600 pound rhino.
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