I considered writing a question-and-answer section here, but it was completely insufferable. Needless to say: I haven’t been writing, now I am. I had to spend some time remembering first. Feel free to ask questions in the comment section. I’ll answer them. I’d also appreciate suggestions, by which I mean things I promised to write and didn’t and/or whatever else you’re interested in.

The rest of this is housekeeping.

I replaced the list of history books with a Top Posts & Introduction section, because it felt like there needed to be a directory of some kind. Feel free to offer suggestions or critiques of what I chose to put there.

The history itself was moved to a side-blog, Tauromachy. There are only a few posts there – you’ll notice it stops at around the same time this one does – but I’ll be picking that back up, too. I was waiting to announce it until there were more posts (I did post it on the patreon feed, just not publicly). It will be much shorter pieces, mostly just updates on books. Broadly, the interest is still in forcing myself to actually read the history I should read. More granular interests are 1) historiography and philosophy of history, 2) the history of mathematics as applied to social phenomena.

Samzdat writing plans:

I’m going to finish the Plato series, though it may take some detours. I wasn’t satisfied by the explanation of valuation at the heart of modern policy. Given that this blog is entirely about valuation, that’s a problem. At some point after that I’m going to return to the main mathematics series. I started that prematurely, and the tempo wasn’t correct.

The scraps posts were a good idea I didn’t stick with. That was foolish. I’m bringing them back.

The best book I’ve read lately is Stone Tools in Human Evolution. Other contenders are The Passions and the Interests, and some of the essays in Statistical Models and Causal Inference (e.g. here).

The blog will continue now. Ask or suggest below.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
-Yogi Berra

I

The previous essay was inescapably dense, the abstract territory was by nature abstract, the subject matter happened to be the entire past year of this blog. I think the technical language of the past blog was necessary, but it’s a good habit to try to parse things more carefully, and a few readers have asked me to do so. Moving slowly and picking at specific claims:

We care more about “love” than we care about “the number of desks in Montana with gum stuck to the bottom.” Here’s your question, it’s so basic you want to avoid it, but avoiding it is the entire problem: why?

“Words don’t have set meanings” isn’t anything close to an original thought, but it’s very easy to forget. If you bother to read [anything], you’ll find a shocking number of people coming to terms with that fact. I won’t be able to write anything better than SSC’s The Categories Were Made For Man, so I’ll just link that. Keeping that in mind: Properly speaking, you mean one specific thing called love, it may have a material correlate, may have an action associated, whatever. All that means that whatever is “valuable” there isn’t the word itself, nor another group’s definition of the word, but [this specific definition of love]. The question is this: how do you study that?

I generally dislike the phrase “presumption of objectivity,” because a) the stronger form applies to 16 year olds and almost no one else, and b) the weaker form isn’t a very interesting observation. Overconfidence is bad, sure, but certain types of knowledge are more or less accurate, and some might even be truer. All of the really interesting parts of epistemology come from trying to figure out how that is possible without objectivity, not blankly stating that objectivity don’t real. I think of this as the equivalent of yelling about hypocrisy without ever putting forth a positive platform, but your mileage might vary with that metaphor.

Still. Presumption of objectivity is a problem, but it’s a problem in a particular way. Everyone knows that presuming an end will color the entire study, and about 5% of academics even try to avoid that. Fewer people recognize that assuming a certain method of studying something does the same thing. One reason I prefer the language of “paradigms” for philosophy is that paradigms imply a methodology, and methodology is where this sets in. Different philosophical schools have different standards of evidence – falsifiability for the Popperians, apodicticity for the Aristotelians – that imply what you can know about a thing. In turn, this is going to change the meaning of the concept being investigated. You can’t investigate the same “God” under Popper that you can under Aquinas, but the God of Aquinas is much more important to people.

Show, don’t tell, let me give you a basic example.

II

Say you’re a neuroscientist testing for “love,” and you use a series of definitions that vaguely relate but are imprecise. You only have a definition of “love” based on your particular interpretation of a particular culture, perhaps: “love is a feeling that comes from observing a beloved person.” So you replicate this “love” as best you can – plop a few spouses in front of each other – and scan the loving person’s brain. It lights up – wow! – that must be what love looks like.

How would you know? You could only test against the vague concept of love you’d applied. You assumed what the behavior “loving” looked like beforehand, found its blinky correlate, declared that to be love, but all of that depends on the previous determination of the behavior. Or: the problem is not the scanned brain you got. The problem is in how you got it, in this study, assuming that “love” is the same as staring at the “beloved” object. “But that is what love is.” Says who? Your scan?

What happens if someone comes in the room and starts laughing, “That’s not love, that’s an approximation of it. Love is the action, not the effect.” Do you tautologically test against the same readout? Imagine you’ve solved plasticity and put an identical map on two million other brains, placed them in the same stare-at-the-beloved situation, and everything matched. “It replicated, must be real.”

But no one was doubting that you’d found something real. They doubted that it was love.

III

Last time, I made a point about certain ideas not being subject to empiricism. I meant that relatively strictly, and the above is what I mean. Moving on.

I’m not saying love is anything, I’m saying that it’s a philosophical dispute and you’ve already decided. I’d endorse the intuition that some definitions of “love” have more weight than others. And? They doubted that you were addressing something with the same import, i.e. that’s the exact problem. You can pretend that “the common sense meaning of love” is good enough, but that’s a wimpy way to dodge the question. Whose common sense?

If you want to deny all knowledge, feel free to default to, “Well, it’s semantics, it’s subjective, it’s not a meaningful thing to investigate.” Then why were you investigating it? Probably more to the point: why were you investigating it in that particular way?

I’m not actively trying to make anyone’s life harder. If anything, I’m trying to make it easier, some groundwork in philosophy helps to avoid stupid problems:

1) How you study something determines what it is, which means you’re making a strong claim well before you begin investigating. If you assume that “love” can be studied with neural imaging, then you’re assuming it’s the kind of thing tied to a brain state. That might be justifiable or not, but the method requires you to make an ontological claim well prior to the investigation. “Love” is not a natural kind, and plenty of people don’t even believe that “love” is one thing. The Greeks had three words that translate to it, but none of them meant our “love.” Were they wrong? How?

2) Human beings are interested in certain things more than others. “Love” is only something we study because we have some investment in it as a concept, it’s not a neutral interest, but it’s also not an interest in the word “love.” We’re invested in a very particular conception of what that word means. “Love is a thing tied to a brain-state,” is not necessarily the one all of us are interested in. So what did we just study? The dispute isn’t necessarily over love, nor over neuroscience transmuted into a dispute over love, nor over empiricism, nor over [anything else], and assuming those are separate is already an issue.

I think “method determines object of study” (1) is relatively easy to grasp, but it’s only an important observation in conjunction with “human beings are interested in specific things” (2). This becomes doubly true where knowledge itself is concerned. The value of a fact is going to be determined by your standards of evidence, and the standards of evidence (“what a fact is”) will also change what kinds of objects you can study. If you can’t tell, one of the things that makes it so hard to write about this in plain language is that all of that happens at once.

For instance: “Well, at least one of those can be measured. It may not be the exact thing we all mean by love, but once it’s in quantifiable form, then it’s useful for [doing stuff].” Think about what you just said. You’ve made a whole bunch of strong commitments there, all of them philosophically fragile, and all of them at the same time. A certain kind of knowledge (empirical, quantifiable) is valuable, whereas another (observational, descriptive) is not. This is predicated on a certain standard of evidence (empiricism), it requires you to make ontological claims in order to be gathered (love is this feeling we can brain-scan). But what if the “love” this requires you to study is uninteresting? Why would the information you gathered about it be interesting itself?

Note: “exact” is pretty loose, do you have any sense of when it would be inexact enough to stop mattering? This is mostly important because if you don’t understand the limits of your own paradigm, then applying it at random is the worst possible instinct.

III

Quoting Marginal Revolution quoting an abstract because I only found an earlier version of the paper:

We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of disability on happiness. We show that none of the findings can be obtained relying only on nonparametric identification. The findings in the literature are highly dependent on one’s beliefs about the underlying distribution of happiness in society, or the social welfare function one chooses to adopt. Furthermore, any conclusions reached from these parametric approaches rely on the assumption that all individuals report their happiness in the same way. When the data permit, we test for equal reporting functions, conditional on the existence of a common cardinalization from the normal family. We reject this assumption in all cases in which we test it.

Here’s the earlier (?) version (pdf) of the paper, with a different abstract but hopefully the same content.

From the opening of the paper:

The basic argument is as follows. There are a large (possibly infinite) number of states of happiness which are strictly ranked. In order to calculate a group’s ‘mean’ happiness, these states must be cardinalized, but there are an infinite number of arbitrary cardinalizations, each producing a different set of means. The ranking of the means remains the same for all cardinalizations only if the distribution of happiness states for one group first order stochastically dominates that for the other. But, we do not observe the actual distribution of states. We instead observe their distribution in a small number of discrete categories, essentially a few intervals of their cumulative distribution functions.

Without additional assumptions we cannot rank the average happiness of two groups if each has responses in the highest and lowest category.

Happiness research is self-reported, and it relies on ordinal scales. These merely rank – first, second, third, etc. – without giving any sense of distance between those points. Consider two ordinal scales for height, both ranked smallest to largest:

a) a chair  (first), a one-story house (second), a two-story house (third).
b) a chair (first), a one-story house (second), the Empire State Building (third).

If you only want a list of “quality of object  relative to others,” then these are fine. But if you want to, say, determine the mean height per group, then these will be vastly different.

Most research will need the mean, median, literally anything besides “this thing is bigger than that thing,” meaning you need some way to turn the ordinal scale (rank) into a cardinal one (distance between ranks). This is particularly true if you need to compare different groups – for instance: happiness in one country to happiness in another country.

You can assume that there’s some quantifiable thing underlying the scale, that you’ve found it, and that it corresponds to certain arbitrary parameters. This paper points out that happiness research has done this. Normally, happiness research assumes (implictly or not) that happiness has a normal distribution. This is a terrible assumption, and the examples (a) and (b) should explain why. The Empire State Building is taller than a two-story house, but its ordinal rank does not betray that – both are merely “third.” It’s extremely unclear what the bounds are supposed to be, unless you simply decide one for reasons.

Put a different way: “at least we can measure it this way” is a bad gut reaction. The paper’s conclusion (really, right before the Conclusion) is quite damning:

Thus if researchers wanted to draw any conclusions from these data, they would have to eschew rank order identification. In other words, they would have to argue that it is appropriate to inform policy based on one arbitrary cardinalization of happiness but not another, or equivalently that some cardinalizations are “less arbitrary” than others. It is unclear from where such an argument would come, or why we should apply a different standard for happiness research than other branches of economics.

Even if someone were to make this case, we cannot see how such a standard would say that distributions that resemble objective economic variables would be implausible. In the Online Empirical Appendix we further show that nearly every result can be reversed by a lognormal transformation that is no more skewed than the wealth distribution of the United States. Even within this class of distributional assumptions, we cannot draw conclusions stronger than “Nigeria is somewhere between the happiest and least happy country in the world,” or “the effect of the unemployment rate on average happiness is somewhere between very positive and very negative.” To be clear, we are not proposing that satisfying this minimal criterion would make a result convincingly robust.

As bluntly as possible: The way you define “happiness” predicates the results that you’ll receive.

IV

They wanted to find a kind of happiness their method did not allow for, their method did not allow for this, they did not understand their own method. Mix-and-match paradigms, you can’t empiricism at a subjective experience without some underlying rule, phenomenological reportage runs into philosophical issues that must be addressed pre-empirically. Or:

1) How you study something changes what it is. “Happiness is distributed normally” is not neutral. It may be a methodological necessity, but it’s also an ontological assumption. “Happiness is the-kind-of-thing that’s distributed normally.” That might be justifiable, but when it isn’t, it’s not a good idea to even try.

2) “Happiness” is important to us, but what makes you think it’s this kind of happiness? Pretend that this research wasn’t awful: To make happiness “useful” for their purposes, researchers forced it “be” a certain thing. Here, that means explicable on an obvious scale of 1-10. What they did not realize is that they’re no longer talking about “happiness” the phenomenon we all have a vague sense of. They’re talking about “happiness, which we define as something with this mean and functioning in this way for this particular study of this particular group.” Which is fine, because you can define anything to mean anything to prove your point, but you can’t use it for anything else. Why would you assume that has any value? More to the point: why does that kind of knowledge have any value?

Note that this is the same criticism I made in Everything is Going According to Plan (VI). Admittedly, I was too optimistic right before that section, and while criticizing I allowed for the idea that we might have some vague knowledge of happiness’s correlates. Mea culpa, I’ll be more careful in the future – I retain the sentiment but retract any certainty that happiness is known to be tied to anything:

If you forget that it’s experience, rather than whatever it is you’re measuring (and thus serves as proxy for the experience), certain tradeoffs look… well, they look different, because the experience might have qualitative differences that are not grasped by a quantitative measurement. For instance: let’s pretend we actually have decent ordinal scales for happiness. What is a 5? A 6? Is 6 merely “the experience of 5happies plus a bit more?” What would that mean?

And I know the exact response, because I got it then: “At least this can be measured, it’s useful.” It may be useful, who knows, but useful for what? “It’s the most rigorous way of looking at happiness,” you mean the most quantifiable way of looking at happiness, but no, still wrong. It doesn’t tell us about “happiness,” it tells us about ordered lists of different subjective interpretations of happiness. You’re being confused by words. “Are you saying we can’t know about happiness?” Not at all, you’re presupposing that the only valuable knowledge is quantifiable knowledge. Who told you that?

I don’t want to overstate my hand, so I’ll add that the authors do recognize value in the studies, but it’s not clear exactly what that means, nor what to compare it to. It’s possible to compare, perhaps, one individual’s self-reportage, but you’d need to ask whether they got happier or changed their interpretation of happiness. To compare that to anything, you’d still need to make some strong claim about what happiness “is” such that forms of it may be numerically related:

This does not discount the actual self-reports, themselves. If we are only concerned about the number of people who subjectively consider their emotional state “not
too happy,” we can estimate effects using conventional binary response models. But, it is important to recognize that such an interpretation is much narrower than proponents of the use of average happiness measures currently claim for them.

This isn’t unique to me, and I’m not claiming some special insight. This should have been obvious to anyone whose brain was not melted by physics envy. I’m saying that I’m not trying to make life hard for researchers. The opposite, understanding the issue should have made everyone stop before they bothered. The world is complex, knowledge is hard, own up to it or produce shit research.

Sure, it was also a brief “philosophical” argument, it’s not even vaguely unique to me, a thousand people have made the same point, none of it mattered to happiness researchers. Why?

V

Repeating from above:

I think “method determines object of study” is relatively easy to grasp, but it’s only an important observation in conjunction with “human beings are interested in specific things.” This becomes doubly true where knowledge itself is concerned. The value of a fact is going to be determined by your standards of evidence, and by the same process, the standards of evidence (“what a fact is”) will change what kinds of objects you can study.

We can put it more broadly: “love” is not capable of being decided in the ways we keep trying. “Happiness” is not either. I’ll throw out “good” and “true” and a host of other deep-set values. If you want to pretend that none of that is important, then feel free, but I’m not going to trust you for a second. Even an aromantic anhedonic nihilist will recognize that the preferences of other people are important for determining policy, if not merely to keep the herd from stampeding.

This sounds like a fact/value distinction, but it’s a whole lot more basic than that: what counts as a fact is not the same, not all facts can be gathered in the same way, not all methods of gathering will gather the same things. That doesn’t make epistemology “totally undecidable,” you get that empiricism itself is a metaphysical commitment, right? Everyone makes a choice, explicitly or implicitly, as to how they will investigate the world. None of the methods can investigate everything, choose wisely or get tricked into thinking its facts are “important” without asking why they were facts to begin with.

Question: I assume that some things matter to you. Why? What’s a valuable thing to know? Was someone fascinated by the U-Shaped Curve since childhood, or were they more broadly interested in “happiness”?

I’m not attacking economics, just like I’m not attacking neuroscience, just like I’m not attacking empiricism. That’s missing the point so profoundly I don’t even know how to respond. “I read plenty and have somewhere between contented normie and apocalyptic street-preacher opinions, I am extremely intelligent, don’t @ me.” We didn’t choose empiricism at random, it’s a non-obvious philosophical school that requires epistemological work. Sometimes it breaks down, sometimes its method makes it talk about things that bear no relation to the things we were interested in in the first place.

This particular paper has had (and will have) a predictable response: “Well, let’s just abandon that line of research. We can’t determine anything about it.” You should be going nuclear, and that makes me infinitely more concerned. Economics only mattered to anyone inasmuch as it sought to improve human well-being. Presumably, “overall happiness” is somehow unimportant to that. That may not be true for every economist, but those people only have jobs on the coattails of an older tradition. We don’t give a shit about “utils,” that’s just another word, we gave a shit about “utils via utilitarianism, i.e. happiness.” Feel free to prove me wrong on “happiness,” kind of the point. There’s an implicit understanding of the value of the knowledge itself, it is 100% philosophical in origin, I want it brought to the forefront.

“Well, truths are valuable in themselves, and we should reject uncertain knowledge.”

Wait, you think truth and certainty escape this?

top: Curator’s Corner with Irving Finkel

next: Plato, again

edit: noted that individual reports may still be useful, hesitant about their purpose. Original is here for transparency purposes.

continued from here. note: this is doing a lot of groundwork, so it’s pretty dense.

1

Philosophy may or may not be useless, I say we showed the opposite. Why?

Book IV:

And Adeimantus interrupted and said, “What would your apology be, Socrates, if someone were to say that you’re hardly making these men happy, and further, that it’s their own fault – they to whom the city in truth belongs but who enjoy nothing good from the city as do others, who possess lands, and build fine big houses, and possess all the accessories that go along with these things, and make private sacrifices to gods, and entertain foreigners, and, of course, also acquire what you were just talking about, gold and silver and all that’s conventionally held to belong to men who are going to be blessed? But, he would say, they look exactly like mercenary auxiliaries who sit in the city and do nothing but keep watch.”

“Yes,” I said, “and besides they do it for food alone; they get no wages beyond the food, as do the rest. So, if they should wish to make a private trip away from home, it won’t even be possible for them, or give gifts to lady companions, or make expenditures wherever else they happen to wish, such as those made by the men reputed to be happy. You leave these things and a throng of others like them out of the accusation.”

“Well,” he said, “let them too be part of the accusation.”

“You ask what our apology will then be?”

“Yes.”

“Making our way by the same road,” I said, “I suppose we’ll find what has to be said. We’ll say that it wouldn’t be surprising if these men, as they are, are also happiest. However, in founding the city we are not looking to the exceptional happiness of any one group among us but, as far as possible, that of the city as a whole. We supposed we would find justice most in such a city, and injustice, in its tum, in the worst-governed one, and taking a careful look at them, we would judge what we’ve been seeking for so long. Now then, we suppose we’re fashioning the happy city – a whole city, not setting apart a happy few and putting them in it…”

A) The comedic timing here is gold.

B) Socrates responds with two distinct arguments. “It wouldn’t be surprising if they were the happiest (because you have no idea what happiness is), but anyway we only designed this city for justice (so why are you trying to change the design?).” I’m going to focus on the latter (design), but the former (happiness) will be important for everything here on out.

C) Question: what is the ultimate purpose of the noble lie? “To raise the guardians to protect the city.” What’s the point of the guardians? “To make the city function.” What’s the point of the city functioning? “To obey its rulers.” What’s the import of the rulers? “Only they craft and enforce the city’s customs.” Fine, why do we need those customs? “So that the guardians can be educated into guarding the city.” Yeah, but why do we need them to guard the city? “So that it can function safely.” For what? “Sorry, isn’t it obvious? For justice.”

But we defined justice as the city functioning.

The definition of justice arrived at (“not interfering with others”) is weird but fine, and it isn’t where things start to break down. Socrates was asked to prove that justice is a terminal value with the implied condition that words are just words and no philosophy is allowed. Seems hard, but what did the feverish city prove? Justice is having a just city for justice, so you should care about justice in order to have justice. Hey, that sounds about right.

The best you can say, lacking some other measure, is that something “works for working to keep working.” Thrasymachus sounds like he has another measure (“advantage”), just like he sounds like “a hard-nosed political realist,” but Thrasymachus sounds all the time about a lot of things worth sounding around. That merely makes him loud. Here, he’s raucously tautological: “justice is the advantage of the stronger,” with “stronger” defined as “he who rules,” and “he who rules” defined as “he who is best at ruling,” making justice good for the justice necessary to help the ruler ruling to keep being a ruler.

We’re talking about the use of things, for instance “justice” or “philosophy” or “anything else.” But useful for what? Is it useful for being useful? Not even Sisyphus was required to best his timing with every heave, but I’m supposed to accept that as a core value? Efficiency for something is wonderful, efficiency for its own sake is hell. Am I supposed to act like the “for” is meaningless? Someone knows, they’ll substitute a substantive for you, be careful when you talk about utility. You can swallow the preposition but you’ll choke on the noun.

2

Books I-III are the foundation of the city and a description of its basic structure. They’re explicitly philosophical, by which I mean the city is still clearly a metaphor for Justice and Truth and Goodness of the Soul and Other Such Capitalized Words. That culminates in early Book IV, with the ability to finally define “justice” based on the design of the city, which leads into the problems above, which leads to the introduction of philosophy in Book VII. By any reasonable standard, that makes philosophy “important,” which is fine, but things can be important in all sorts of ways – hence, Books IV, V, and VI. Everything above is still “ethics” and “more ethics” with a little bit of “politics,” which is neither hard to prove nor really worth proving. Our task was to connect metaphysics, not blather about [whatever is happening up there].

Books IV-V are concerned with the minutae of the city, and they get set off by Adeimantus’s question. They’re technical, where “technical” means “basically playing Sim City,” i.e. concerned with the careful design of the hypothetical city before the introduction of  philosophy. These passages are more or less the reason people mistake the Republic for a political book, but it’s still about the soul. More to the point: it’s still about philosophy, but in the sense of “how to do philosophy,” with the city currently operating as a metaphor for doing it badly. Not coincidentally, “playing Sim City” is also how “Plato”-“loving” technocrats do their realpoliticking.

Thrasymachus has a problem – he assumes that “advantage” has some meaning that “justice” lacks, but the two concepts are inescapably stuck together. The glue is “good,” the issue is “finding it,” the methods are philosophy or […]. We’ve decided to go with the brackets, so what now? “Let’s talk about serious things,” so you assume that the problems work out on their own. They don’t, and now you have a very serious torture garden.

Adeimantus thinks that “happiness” is somehow more objective, which is bizarre, but the problem has compounded with another. He (correctly) intuits issues with the city, and then proceeds to “solve” them in the worst possible way. Thrasymachus was, at least, starting with a blank slate. Addie is not, he has the entire feverish city constructed according to the group’s specifications. He dislikes what came of it, so he wants to sub in some pleasure, but he doesn’t realize that things do not work that way.

Addie thinks the city is able to both define justice and allow pleasure, but what he doesn’t understand is that the conditions of “justice” preclude that kind of pleasure. Alternately, the conditions of pleasure preclude that kind of justice. “Lacking objective definition” means “liable to change,” and “liable to change.” Put a different way: did Adeimantus not think that “happiness” existed before? Why does Socrates claim they’ll be happiest? Addie (correctly) recognized it as a different one than he wants, but he doesn’t understand that justice has the same problem. Add in the pleasure, receive a different justice. Redefining one word redefines the others around it because they’re interconnected.

Words are just words, we agreed with Thrasymachus by design and then proved it via the noble lie and the act of defining justice. Adeimantus: “Oh. Well if it’s subjective, then it must not matter how they get defined or how those definitions fit each other. Let’s pop in some pleasure.” You go through values like a buffet, picking and choosing the ones that seem “nicest” without any regard for what those things mean. After all, it’s subjective. This means the opposite is important, you’re getting confused by words not by uncritically accepting them but because you knew to critically examine them and were bad at it.

3

Want to understand the world? One weird trick, Plato scholars hate him: Addie and Thras are the exact same person, and I’m giving a contentious reading of the Republic here to get you to recognize it. Full-blown Thrasymachus [whatever]ism is popular among teenagers/adults who get intellectually cornered and regress into teenagers, but the Adeimantus variation is extremely common. “Well, there aren’t Forms, and it’s not falsifiable, plus, like, social control, so who cares about justice?” Huh, never thought about it that way.

It’s not that it “won’t work,” it’s that it will always work. Defining justice a certain way is just that: definitional. Defining happiness a certain way is just that: definitional. The problem comes when the words are the same but their objects different, when a not-so-subtle-but-apparently-too-subtle shift makes you prove the opposite of what you meant to, and then when you get confused and think you’re still talking about the same concept. The value of it is different now.

“Extremely common.” You will accuse me of arguing with a cartoon, which I am, but only because people reduce their own arguments to 16-bit. It’s not even a specific cartoon: social constructivists, STEMsupremacists, a sad old academic raising his twitter count so the publishers will take his life’s work seriously. Exact same game, choose your fighter and spend the others, everyone’s a token something:

1. An entire genre of papers attempting to quantify democracy is well-received and cited. The problem is that everyone decided that defining democracy was “boring” and, perhaps, “hard,” and most certainly “obvious,” so they let the numbers do it for them. Numbers don’t do that, so you have meaningless papers proving nothing about definitions no one would accept. But they do seem “important.”
2. Edgy social constructivists try to evade “scientific objectivity” by redefining Truth as power, accidentally redefine it in the exact same way as the empiricists, use it to prove the exact same thing. Why did they care about truth? Serious question.
3. A prominent Big Thinker writes a Big Thinking History about the causal import of the Enlightenment, defines “the Enlightenment” in 21st century terms, still gives it an 18th century causal role. Further fails to define “rationality” or “good,” argues for an inhuman and impossible world, calls it “rational” and “good” because he’d set it up that way.
4. Same big thinker relies on bad social science genre, accidentally points out concentration of power among the wealthy, gets confused because it’s defined as  “democracy,” and “democracy” is certainly an important word.
5. Various extremely staunch scientific realists decide to be a little bit too realist. In so doing, they reaffirm the Platonic forms, probably God, and almost certainly clear the way for a kind of moral realism they would find antiquated and a little scary. But it does, technically, “work.”
6. Both “postmodernists” and people who fucking love science crash into the fact that truth doesn’t mean what they think it does, so science doesn’t mean what they think it does, but since they were arguing with the old definitions of the words anyway they just keep doing that. This time, with inapplicable arguments.

Not one single person failed to prove something, but neither did any of them prove what they set out to prove. The problem in approximately none of these cases is people being wrong. The issue is the precise way in which they went wrong.

4

Philosophy is not a science, but philosophical schools are somewhat analogous to Kuhnian paradigms. I think this is a more helpful metaphor for us than the city, the current essay is going to expand on it, I’ll need it for more important points down the line.

I’ll make this argument, be suspicious of it: Books IV-V are, if anything, more metaphorical. Plato seems to treat Sim City as a serious entity, but that’s only a response to Addie’s latter-day Thrasymachus. The city is a paradigm, change one part and reformulate everything. Might need a different paradigm, might simply revise the old ones, doesn’t matter, same deal. Their style is a way of getting around the common and obvious critiques: “Yeah, but isn’t that just being a little pedantic?” I dunno, how low-res are you willing to be? Take a city and declare the only law: “Be nice unless you must be mean.” Think it’ll go well? What about if you change the definition of “mean” every few years?

That same aspect makes them less helpful here. They’re hard, proving that “Plato says this thing” is only interesting if you already care about Plato. It’s more valuable to speak broadly, by which I mean not at all about Plato. Kuhn is a better metaphor for our time.

Kuhn. Just like in philosophy, the kind of question you ask gets restricted by the paradigm, e.g. an eliminative materialist won’t be asking questions about qualia. Similarly, the objects you’ll interrogate are determined by the paradigm, e.g. consequentialists are much more likely to examine empirical results, deontologists more likely to take principles to their logical extremes. Certain proofs become uniquely valuable for a paradigm (say, “light” for Einstein or “virtue” for Aristotle), but these values become almost identical with a certain methodology. The methodology necessitates the value and vice-versa. Finally, normal vs. anomalous gets determined by the paradigm itself. “Right” or “wrong” answers are only right or wrong in relation to the theory, not in relation to “real truth.”

Paradigms are inherently ambiguous, by which I mean “incapable of being reduced to a list of rules,” and schools of philosophy are no different. No school has a “list” outside of wikipedia, they aren’t perfectly mathematical, there’s always guesswork and movement. Scholarship in philosophy works much like the scientific articulation of a paradigm. Without some wiggle-room, every change would require a paradigm shift, and the ambiguity works like a shock absorber. Certain changes do revise large parts of the previous theory, but there’s still general agreement over methods, objects of interrogation, etc.

Put a different way: two Heidegger scholars screaming about “enowning” still agree that “enowning” is important enough to scream over. Even if you’re arguing that it’s unimportant for Heidegger’s work, you’re still admitting that its relative unimportance is important enough to draw attention to. They’re under the same paradigm, everyone else knows it, that they have opposite interpretations of it changed nothing. Or: Most of the hate directed at careful scholars completely misses the mark. You can argue that the entire theory is worthless, fine, but it’s hard to ask a scholar to do anything besides minutae. It would be like demanding that every scientist come up with a new theory. This sounds like a defense of academic philosophy, but really it’s a pharmakon. 

5

How is more important than what. Aristotle, Mill, and Kant all agree that “lying is bad.” Do they lie in the same way? Before answering, consider that words are meaningless and qualitative valuations liable to change.

There are a couple of results of this, and I hope the metaphor makes them easier to grasp:

First, it’s best not to think of results or specifics so much as methods, values, questions. How is more important than what, good=good=anything, and if you’ve ever read a philosophy book, you’ll know that they aren’t great about laying out definitions anyway. Where philosophical schools preach certain values, those values should be thought of as connections and tools rather than specific things. “Something that makes things visible or affords illumination” is true for Ptolemy, Newton, and Einstein. You need to have a more global understand, because you need to understand where the word can be used, why it gets used that way, and where its limitations are. Part of the issue is just that all definitions are going to arrive together. Context is king: e=mc^2 only makes sense with an understanding of m and e and the background knowledge of what that all came from.

Second, a question comes from paradigm, so certain pedantic changes are less pedantic than they seem. Philosophers may seem to agree on the importance of a concept (“Justice, I like it”) but they rarely use it the same way. This raises the stakes of things that seem small. For a given school, the solution to “why does non-euclidean geometry work?” is going to be tangled up with, say, why you should follow the golden rule (not a hypothetical). This is for an obvious reason: if you solved one problem with an equation, and that equation gets revised, you’ve now solved none problems. I recognize how weird this sounds, but recognize that if you only think that “light” means “something that makes things visible or affords illumination,” then the differences between Newton and Einstein actually don’t make much sense.

Third, paradigms are mostly incommensurable. Imagine plugging the periodic table into the world of phlogiston. What would happen? I have no idea, but it would not speak well of anyone involved. You might be able to get something out of it, but it’s hard to tell what anything there would actually mean. Similarly, try handing a deontological response to an ethical dilemma to a utilitarian. “No.” Good call. An obvious corollary is that – for the most part, exceptions are always there – no paradigm can really “disprove” another. They’re using completely different words even if they’re using the same words. What seems anomalous and paradigm breaking to one will not appear so to the other, because they have completely different standards for “anomalous behavior.” It may not even make sense.

Fourth, and most critically: some words are “important,” by which I mean they sound important. Freedom, truth, justice, etc. These have no meaning on their own, and a one-sentence definition will not actually get at their importance. Over time, due to their use in a paradigm and everything they’re connected to, the sounds have built up a valuable sediment, but the accrued value doesn’t stick to the phonemes. If you change everything around them, that word is no longer important at all. It’s not even the same concept. This sounds obvious, and it is, but what is less obvious comes from the first and second points: even if the one-line dictionary definition is the same, and so it looks to you like it’s the same with relatively minor variations in use, those minor variations might have utterly unsettled the whole. If your mistake the sound (worthless) for its use (important), then you’ve appropriated the value without retaining the concept.

Yes, these are broad strokes for an idealized version of philosophy.  Yes, these are also assertions, I’m explaining how I’ll be using the words “philosophy” and “value” and “important” and “paradigm” for the rest of this series (read: this blog). Finally: yes, I know someone’s read a Nietzsche and will want to own me about “human reason and moralism.” It is true that people may have predetermined the morals and then built the metaphysics to justify those, rather than deducing ethics from pseudo-first-principles. In fact, I think it’s likely. Go reread and pretend that the values came first, it changes nothing but time and rhetoric unless you think that “reason” already has some special non-descriptive value, in which case –

6

Imagine an Extremely Important Lever in a factory. Due to a quirk of wiring, it has to be pulled at exactly the right time or the factory goes up in flames. Accordingly, the worker in charge of the Lever earns high wages, enjoys the station’s status and respect, etc. The factory is eventually remodeled and they fix the wiring problems. The Extremely Important Lever is still there for historical purposes, but now it only controls the lights to a supply closet. Is it the same Lever, does that Lever have the same value? If you wanted to argue that now salaries should be more equitable, what would you need to understand? Would it be enough to grasp the Lever’s shape, size, timing, the names of the operators and their yanking history?

If you want to understand why Adeimantus’s request is so bizarre, consider that plugging “pleasure” into the Feverish City is demanding that the Lever (justice) retain the same value (justice as staying in your lane), as though “uniform cyclical motion” was equally important to Newton. If you want to know why (1-6) think they did anything at all, consider that they presumed the value of  a specific paradigm’s word (democracy, truth, good, etc.), changed the paradigm, and thought that the word was still important. It isn’t, it doesn’t even have the same meaning. We only cared about “democracy” because it had one specific use and a few specific connections, without those it’s just a sound.

“Fact/value.” Kind of, not really, fact/value needs to be understood in a particular way, that comes next time. Everyone knows that Saxonisms like “good” and “mean” and “kind” are the useful part of philosophy while the hyphenations are masturbatory, except that the truth is precisely the opposite. The import of those words only depend on the paradigm (alt: the noble lie). “Is it the same lever?” and then: “It’s the same material on the same wall, duh.” I could respond with an observation about reality, but ontology does seem kind of pedantic. What about the particular wire at floor 3, hallway B?  “Uh, why are you asking me these frivolous questions?”

7

Kuhn’s views may rankle some, but he at least allows for some kind of progress. It’s not Philosophical Truth, but more and more solutions can be incorporated into the paradigms. More to the point: he provides a very solid defense of the physical sciences.

The interconnection between philosophy and science should be obvious enough. While normal science has no need for philosophy, extraordinary science requires it. Extraordinary science – preparadigmatic and crisis-periods – are characterized by an abundance of competing paradigms, and thus all arguments are primarily philosophical. Not arguments over the facts over which facts are relevant, which categories they belong to, and how those categories interrelate. For much the same reason, he later decided that the social sciences were and might always be preparadigmatic, i.e. not sciences.

In extraordinary periods, competing paradigms argue philosophically because they need to use philosophy (or “qualitative work” if you’re a prude) to determine the categories they’ll be testing. In turn, the sciences adopt a paradigm because it’s demonstrated solutions for “more puzzles”. Bluntly: philosophy alone cannot convince scientists to adopt your paradigm. It has to allow for more puzzles and give you the hint of a solution or two. Another blunt thing: this is where the metaphor begins to break down.

A science will have a given paradigm at a given time, but philosophy is perpetually pre-paradigmatic. This is for a few reasons: 1) It just isn’t that way, sorry. 2) Truth-standards are, by definition, determined by philosophies. They’re pre-empirical, you need to know what “something works” looks like before you can declare empiricism the workiest, meaning that “more puzzles” is not actually possible under different philosophical paradigms. 3) Different value systems are a part of the game.

“Fact/value.” Kind of, not really, fact/value needs to be understood in a particular way, that comes next time. When misunderstood, that can lead to the following: “unfalsifiable means irresolvable,” which is a weird thing to say, because you resolved the importance of empiricism just fine. “What?” Can you falsify falsifiablility? Sorry, I missed Popper’s empirical demonstration of it. I’m not trying to gotcha, I’m establishing base-level honesty. Variants of empiricism require pre-empirical work, which means they have non-empirical results. Are those unimportant? You realize that there are many different ways to respond to “unanswerable questions,” right?

I care about science too, why do you think I bother to write about it? Here’s your problem: certain values – say, truth – are different from field to field, and all of them will always “work,” because “working” has no meaning outside of a broader value system. Hell, even saying that something is “untrue, but it still works,” requires that. Plenty of people admit lies into their value systems, see: me.

That being said, unfalsifiability is important, and it’s interconnected with the “words are just words” position. The reason you need to care about the limits of a given mode of inquiry is that within certain limits, it will always work. It will never stop working, it will never arrive at a crisis on its own, you don’t get God’s hand reaching down to tell you when to stop, you have to stop yourself.

Put a different way: philosophy is not science, because it can never drive itself into crisis empirically. It can do so qualitatively, sometimes, maybe, bigger question. The immediate result is this: no crisis, but we do still have incommensurability. Want to see what happens when we don’t understand that?

8

This is dense, I know. It will be the most dense in this series, and it should be clarified by later pieces. It’s a necessary foundation for what comes later, and I couldn’t see a way to put it that was not overly [like this]. Let’s recap:

• Schools of philosophy work like paradigms – the questions, methods, etc. are tangled all together.
• Sometimes they overlap, but more often the overlap is superficial. Words that look the same will have very different uses and connections.
• Values get determined not axiomatically, but more loosely. They’re part of a whole. “Value” there should probably be clarified: I mean both value in the sense of a variable, i.e. use and meaning in a system and value in the sense of “importance, both ethical and metaphysical.”
• Changing aspects of the paradigm mean you’re not discussing the same object.
• Truth-standards are one of these, meaning that philosophical schools don’t run into crisis. You need to take great care with the philosophical reasons behind a certain value.
•  …Because they’re still incommensurable, and the similarities of the words, and the sense of their “importance,” tricks people into crossing paradigms.

Normally, this means you just say something meaningless. Other times, it overlaps with definition drift. (Then again, definition drift is worth investigating.)

There’s one way to deal with this problem: “who cares?” It’s not a serious response.

Values may come from philosophy or noble lies or God or drinking your brain soft, but they’re there. Problem for another time, it’s a doozy.  “Who cares” turns you into a puppet, see Thrasymachus. Hope your esophagus is particularly large. If someone’s feeling extra clever, you get “not even wrong” and, indeed, this is the exact problem. The only thing worse than having a crisis is not having a crisis.

Let’s work through a misunderstood example: Polanyi’s economic bias (or economistic prejudice, he uses both) and the double movement.

I’m going to mangle this to get the point across, the above article does a better job going through it all. Still, it’s important for us:

18th-19th century liberal economists needed to define wealth, so they galaxy-brained a measure for wages. This fit nicely for their purposes, it made things empirical (read: measurable), and the trend-lines were up. It also blinded them to certain phenomena, namely what everyone else meant by it and why they cared in the first place. Applying this – and thus defining “social progress” in a certain way that allowed for certain behaviors – is what Polanyi calls the economistic prejudice.

The traditional definition of wealth incorporated family and communal land and gifts and etc. These have obvious non-material value in addition to material value. Usufruct land provides food, families help you out when the harvest goes poorly, local churches provide a safety net different in kind from the poor-house. The results of the first movement – communal property was enclosed and sold, better wages came from a distant town with no family, religiosity fell as a result of work hours, etc. – damaged that. In their paradigm (not measurable, or at least not in the same way) wealth had fallen. They began to rebel, but their rebellions were in such a language as to be unintelligible. Liberal economists: Everything is going well, economy is booming, wages are wealth and wages are up, why are the plebs grumbling, are they daft?

This is not the problem.

Peasants were unhappy, liberal economists had all the power, their game their rules, the pleb definition of wealth is out. All of those traditional components (family, land, community, etc.) get reframed as solely cultural, and thus not a question for political policy. To argue about Serious Political Things, you have to talk about Serious Economic Things, i.e. the peasants had to translate their demands into liberal economic language. The solution could only be thought of in certain terms, and those terms couldn’t deal with the solution. The forms of aid proposed and the economic laws suggested all ran contrary to how the system worked, and if you’re crazy you might say “Good, burn it down,” but then you’d miss the broader point: the peasants couldn’t get what they wanted either. We’d (still) call it “cultural” rather than political, no proposals could properly address the actual “wealth” that the peasantry was talking about, burning the system down would take everyone even further.

Or, the problem is this: Since the peasants had to substitute their demands into a different system, the political results of those demands overturned everything. A value from a completely different system had been subbed in, which (checking Kuhn above) means that the rest of the system was getting subbed in, and solving for one system of equations with the x-values of another is never a good thing to attempt. x=7=x=39. Mathematically, this seems wrong.

Wealth=wages only one equation, but the rest of the paradigm was built around it, and the rest of the paradigm just happened to be “all of society.” Laws, theories, regulations, private firms, etc. Changing the definition of “wealth” is whatever, but changing it within all the rest of the is a little less whatever. Accounting for the wrongness meant incorporating a series of proposals that could never work within the system. When you try to translate “mere cultural concerns” into economic language, it goes poorly for the “cultural concerns” as well as the economy. When attempted, it meant pervasive inefficiencies, incoherent solutions, and worsening deprivations. Or: the entire system got scrapped. Here, “entire system” means the reigning global order, and “scrapped” means everything that happened from 1920-1950. No, this is not the entire story, but that was a major part. It still is. Why do you think so many mass movements tried to fit clearly cultural concerns into economistic language? Why do you think so many still do?

Polanyi refers to this type of social upheavals the “double movement.” People who read Polanyi tend to focus on the damages of the first part – enclosure acts, wrong-headed application of bad definitions, etc. – while ignoring the second. This second part of the double movement – “formalized local economics” did just as much damage, and it’s a prejudice to focus too hard on either part. It’s also foolish to argue of the facts. Wealth=wealth, look above, neither is truer.

The better question to ask is not truth, nor accuracy. It’s “why did we care about wealth in the first place?” followed by, “Wait, did we just forget why what we were measuring mattered?”

9

Polanyi’s argument is a textbook example of incommensurability, but it’s not an example of crisis. A crisis only comes where an observation is interpreted as an anomaly by the paradigm itself, but that could never have happened here. w=t*l will always empirically justify itself because there’s no “wealth” sitting around in object-space to tell you that it is not true. More to the point, if you think “wealth” can be measured with a few quick surveys and an equation, then nothing outside of a philosophical argument will prove you wrong. Here we’re pretend that this is impossible, meaning that, yes, nothing will prove you wrong.

Both systems worked, they were simply incommensurable. I’ve discussed the fallout in some detail, where I describing it as “translation issues.” The thing that looks like a “crisis” is actually one paradigm being substituted into another. You can think of it like a system of equations. The same w-value will always come up for the same system, and it only stops working when you plug in a value from a different one. Hey, that sounds about right.

The single worst way to understand this would be to argue that it was a problem of “fact,” because that’s how you repeat it. Unsurprisingly, that’s always how the argument goes, which leads to the next question: why do you think this happened?

Here’s one option, the better one: someone thought wealth=wealth, they had a paradigm that restricted certain questions, they did not understand where it differed from others, didn’t care, and so plopped in the value from a different one. Hilariously, this destroyed both.

Here’s a second option, far more unsettling: if you’ve unconscious adopted a certain modern paradigm – call it a noble lie – then your standard for “valuable” is something like Kuhn’s version of science. “What works” and also “How many puzzles will it solve?” This gets transmuted into “it works” and therefore “it’s correct,” which tricks you.  “Wealth” is not a natural category, if you define wealth as “wages” then, empirically speaking, wealth will always be wages. What confused the economists was the assumption that, if wrong, they’d run into an anomaly. They didn’t, they ran into a different paradigm and failed to see it.

“Yes, but the empirical version of justice is truer, because it better incorporates the phenomena.” We already agreed that justice was subjective, so what could ‘truth’ possibly mean here? I suppose you mean “this is the observed behavior,” but if so, why are you assuming that it’s an important behavior to classify for observation? There’s no natural category for that, so the only possible justification is that the value is important to you, but then you betray the uses and connections that made it once useful. Why are you trying to keep the word anymore? Is it particularly mellifluous?

10

You have to be philosophically rigorous (read: care about qualitative arguments over subjective unmeasurables) because one cannot leap straight into the forms. This is for much the same reason that incommensurable paradigms means you have to be very careful about the limits of your own.

Where Kuhn gets accused of relativism is precisely the truth vs. puzzles question, but he points out (and it’s a good thing to point out) that there is an objective value here: puzzle solving is objective, inasmuch as “more puzzles” can be compared to paradigms with “fewer puzzles,” and science does not dispute its value. See above. Of course, Kuhn himself points out that his theory is totally relativistic when applied to anything like “society” or “thinking.” Kuhn was right.

“More puzzles” in the human realm is a value, as in “one of several options,” and there’s no clear reason to favor it and many reasons not to. If you optimize exclusively for “solve puzzles,” then you start to lose everything for that single one. Note that, based on everything said, it is impossible not to do this.

Ptolemy had a specific goal, “retaining uniform circular motion.” He contorted a whole bunch of things to achieve that, and there were epicycles everywhere, but he did manage to save the appearances. There were philosophical arguments for this, and there were philosophical arguments against this, but neither of those was quite as important as the Copernican ability to add to the stack of explicable phenomena. Copernicus completely changed the heavens, this is a good thing scientifically. The same action in the human realm – the same changing of the heavens – is not automatically good. We have values for reasons beyond solving puzzles about the values, right?

Or: Imagine trying to convince the Guardians that they should value “citizenship” without reference to this particular Noble Lie. Give it some pleasant, milquetoast definition that we all like, that allows for more phenomena, and that gives them their little pleasures (for Adiemantus). Let’s say that “citizenship” actually means “under the same legal framework.” Is that it?

The guardians set the legal framework, why not set it to their advantage? “Well that would be oppressive.” Who cares? The Guardians are also soldiers, hence the name, they kill people for the material good of the city. They’re allowed to do that because the-people-they-kill have no relation to them, and the Noble Lie is meant to convince them that they cannot do that to the people-they-govern because the-people-they-govern are family. If you get rid of that, they’re now equidistant from the people-they-kill and the people-they-govern. Do you seriously expect them not to at least hustle the governed out of a few bucks? Is killing less oppressive than scamming?

The Guardians valued a very specific citizenship, and we certainly can generalize it into “citizenship under the same legal framework.” That will allow us to solve more questions of fact re: citizenship in the world, how people in states behave, etc. The question you need to ask is: why does that “fact” have value?

Someone will now accuse me of being a relativist (it’s the opposite), because they will not have understood. I’ll put it plainly: these are not natural categories, their reality depends on your paradigm, under an empirical paradigm “justice” and “virtue” and “kindness” most definitely are not real. You grouped a bunch of phenomena under a certain label and act like it’s a meaningful category. Which it is, maybe, but only because there was some anterior version you’ve swapped out.

The definition will always work, not all of the definitions have the same value. We invented the facts, then we’re surprised that they’re invented, and in our surprise we argue about which invention is the least invented.

Works for what is the question, which means we start here: They both work, both are useful, they’re equally subjective. “Equally subjective” does not mean “equivalent.”

It also doesn’t mean “equal,” and if you think it does then you probably think that useful things are used for using.

top from True Detective

On Plato’s Republic, parts I-IV

Fuck it.

Nathan Robinson asks, “Can philosophy be justified in a time of crisis?” He elaborates:

One of the most important, but least asked, philosophical questions is: which philosophical questions are worth asking and which are a waste of time? I think, as I argue in my (non-existent) academic paper “Can Philosophy Be Justified In A Time Of Crisis?”

[…]

Every area of thought, then, has some implicit hierarchy of what constitutes a useful addition to the sum of human knowledge. What’s strange to me, though, is that even though every field quite clearly distinguishes between thoughts that are worth having and thoughts that aren’t, there’s often little inquiry into how those notions of “the thoughts worth having” are built and whether they are sound.

Yeah, I know.

I’m going to deal with this seriously and under the assumption of good faith, so let’s be uncharitable at first. Robinson has gotcha’d the field of philosophy with a bunch of classic questions from the field of philosophy, which is hilarious, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being trolled. I’m pretty hot headed, so far be it for me to accuse anyone of being comically arrogant. Let me offer a life hack instead. Since these questions are hard, reading a few books is often faster than reinventing epistemology, making philosophy, at the very least, a good way to avoid embarrassing yourself. There, done.

This style isn’t unique to Robinson, he doesn’t deserve special blame, he’s just loud and sometimes I read him. Feel free to hunt down the same sentiment [literally anywhere], or tell me that I’m wrong because some sadsack humanities puppet gets 1000 words on “critical thinking” sandwiched between the culture war and the Gell-Man ammunition. At that point you may as well give up. Equally bad arguments: “to debate the value of philosophy is philosophy,” which is true, but fighting fire with fire is less desirable than not having a fire in the first place. “Science wouldn’t exist without philosophy,” which is also true, but one-and-dones are just that. Chemistry also needed baths of hazardous chemicals but I don’t see anyone volunteering to chug Hg when they pop an aspirin. Robinson et al. deserve a serious answer from someone without mercury poisoning.

As a line of last resort, you have “ethics,” which is wrong. Current Affairs et al. aren’t against practical philosophy, they’re against hyphenated philosophy, which is a distinction everyone but philosophy professors understand. You can tell that they don’t understand it because their justifications are always in favor of philosophy’s import for “ethics” and “also ethics,” without considering the relationship of “even more ethics” to the ontological status of sets.

A crude human caricature (Ivory, 2011) sneers that “philosophy is its own justification,” but this is not philosophically or historically true. Philosophy books traditionally went out of their way to justify the practice, and the traditional response is the correct one. It’s also a long one, I’m going to take my time narrating how it comes to be before explaining why it comes to be that, so this part holds much tighter to Plato than others. For the purposes of this article, Plato and Socrates are identical thinkers. I’m contractually obligated to point out that this is academically unjustifiable, but I’m not an academic nor a philosopher. Ok.

First, why do you care about anything?

I

So you go down to some Mediterranean port city for a vacay, because the job is hard and there’s a banging festival and one day you’ll die like a shivering cur.

Lolling in the sun and mangling a fruitbooze, you seize upon a sympathetic listener and confess a certain dissatisfaction with the earth. They have very little in the way of practical advice, and like a philosopher they insist on a single point: What, exactly, do you think “good” is, and why do you think you deserve it?

You’re no fool. You may be middle-class-management now, but in college you were a radical, i.e. you slammed a verse and Mom got you Orientalism for Christmas. Thinking about ‘the good’ is impractical, and besides it’s naive to think about non-subjective forms of the Good, and besides it’s an ivory tower preoccupation, and besides everyone already knows it, and besides it’s culturally determined, and besides it’s merely a sign, and besides it should be determined scientifically, plus, like, axioms and Godel? It’s far more useful to think about the practical, useful, calculable things. “You just mixed up several stereotypes.” I did not.

Unpopular opinion, but consider that you might be Thrasymachus.

Here are the Republic’s characters: Glaucon, Adeimantus, Polemarchus, whom I will refer to as “the youths,” Thrasymachus, who is just Thrasymachus, and Cephalus, whose section got cut from the essay. It starts with Socrates and some youths being interrupted by another bunch of youths, who want him to travel back to their house. It’s written in the first person, so “I” in quotations is Socrates.

Polemarchus said, “Socrates, I guess you two are hurrying to get away to town.”
“That’s not a bad guess,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “do you see how many of us there are?”
“Of course. ”
“Well, then,” he said, “either prove stronger than these men or stay here.”
“Isn’t there still one other possibility . . . ,” I said, “our persuading you that you must let us go?”
“Could you really persuade,” he said, “if we don’t listen?”
“There’s no way,” said Glaucon.
“Well, then, think it over, bearing in mind we won’t listen.”

This is a joke, but remember it for later parts. They begin discussing justice, a few definitions are offered, Socrates smacks them down, and finally the real game begins. Thrasymachus (literally “rash in battle”) launches into the debate via moral outrage:

“You know very well that it is easier to ask questions than answer them. Give an answer yourself, and tell us what you say the Just is.”

Socrates has no definition, so he prods Thras into revealing his. The offering: “Justice is the advantage of the stronger.” Say it: “Duh.” Socrates points out that the stronger can order the weaker to harm him (this will be important), meaning it is his thought of his advantage, which confuses the entire issue.

Thrasymachus is implicitly defining justice as utility and expediency. For more or less this reason, he redefines justice when Socrates pushes him: “justice” means following the laws, which sounds different, except that the lawmakers are merely the strongest around. They wrangle over what that means, with Thrasymachus making increasingly legalistic turns –  it’s descriptive, “justice” is following the laws some stronger lays down. Socrates points out that rulers also make mistakes, and Thrasymachus then clarifies in, perhaps, the most important line in the dialogue:

“Do you suppose that I call a man who makes mistakes ‘stronger’ at the moment when he is making mistakes?”
“I did suppose you to mean this,” I said, “when you agreed that the rulers are not infallible but also make mistakes in some things.”
“That’s because you’re a sycophant in arguments, Socrates,” he said. “[…] The man who makes mistakes makes them on account of a failure in knowledge and is in that respect no craftsman. So no craftsman, wiseman, or ruler makes mistakes at the moment that he is ruling, although anyone would say that the doctor made a mistake and the ruler made a mistake. […] But what follows is the most precise way: the ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, does not make mistakes; and not making mistakes, he sets down what is best for himself. And this must be done by the man who is ruled. So I say the Just is exactly what I have been saying from the beginning, to do the advantage of the stronger.
“All right, Thrasymachus,” I said, “so in your opinion I play the sycophant?”
“You most certainly do,” he said.
“Do you suppose I ask as I asked because I am plotting to do harm to you in the argument?”
“I don’t suppose,” he said, “I know it well. But it won’t profit you. You won’t get away with doing harm unnoticed and, failing to get away unnoticed, you won’t be able to overpower me in the argument.”

Socrates, naturally, eviscerates him.

There’s a lot to address here, but let’s stick with the point that gets the least attention but should get the most. Socrates wins the debate by tricking Thrasymachus in a few ways (too long to go into), which is “unfair” but by Thrasymachus’s own argument, Socrates is just and Thrasymachus is unjust. It doesn’t matter how or why Socrates won, only that he did. Definitional: He’s the stronger, Thrasymachus is the weaker, where Justice=advantage of Stronger, the Stronger’s view of justice = what it is. Socrates claims his justice is to his advantage, and thus it is so.

“You disgust me, Socrates. Your trick is to take hold of the argument at the point where you can do it the most harm.”

Technically the entire exchange is paradoxical. Socrates’ definition is true only if it is not true (because Thras’s is true), so the the Socratic naive justice is correct, not because it actually is, but because he’s the stronger, and thus his definition is wrong. Ok. He knows it, grows red with embarrassment or wrath or both, and no one is satisfied by Socrates.

This defeats neither of their arguments (the exchange is a paradox only if Socrates disagrees with Thrasymachus, which-), but it does open up a reading: whether you buy Thrasmyachus’s argument or Socrates’ argument, you still need to pay attention to the ensuing discussion. It’s predicated on that exact clash, with Socrates implicitly assuming the Thrasymachus position.

You’re wondering why this follows from the question of philosophy. It’s because Thrasymachus is making a case against philosophy that’s just close enough to be the exact same thing as modern attacks: his core point, though it’s never phrased this way, is that Socrates assumes that justice is “Justice.” It’s a Platonic Form, something Real that can be discovered, rather than a descriptor we give to contingent, socially controlled behavior. Aware of it or not, “What is justice?” means “What do we right now describe as justice?” to which one may as well respond: “I dunno, isn’t that ethnography or something?” Justice in the context of 5th century Greece, justice in 19th century Senegal, neither Capital-J-Justice. It’s a linguistic artifact, huh, words are confusing.

Since he redefines power as “making no mistakes,” the question doubles back to expediency: how can philosophy help you achieve that goal, i.e. have power to do […]. What useful knowledge does it offer, why does it insist on asking about abstract justiceses rather than focusing on the here and now? Metaphysics has no point if everything is just appearance and ideology.  That Thras’s souls slides towards dominance and pleasure is merely one intuition among others. One could also, like, feed orphans and puppies or something I guess.

You can rephrase the debate in a single question, which they do: is it better to appear just or to be just? Thrasymachus says “appear,” which is perfectly consistent. If there is, in fact, no justice at all, then there’s no real reason to do anything besides your petty inclinations. Virtue is not real, the Good is not real, Justice is not real, morality is absolutely not real. You can whimper and whine, but the grovelling get the wall, too.

Socrates says “be.”

II

The first few books of the Republic don’t even try to counter Thrasymachus. They spill ink entrenching his position and weakening Socrates’, which sounds weird only if you think that winning is a live possibility without understanding the rules. “What rules? Win what?” Actually my point.

Anyone who pretends to know definitively “what Plato thought” can be safely ignored, but make sure to ignore people who think that that’s the point first. Plato is about how to think, not what to think, and here is his lesson: Philosophy is often glossed as “footnotes to the Republic,” which is a perfectly serviceable definition. Less often do the glossers mention that the Republic is mostly a response to Thrasymachus. Responding to Thrasymachus takes a dialogue about “Justice” that turns into a dialogue about the soul that turns into a dialogue about politics that turns into a dialogue about epistemology that turns into a dialogue about ontology that all revolves around the value of philosophy. The question Robinson et al. want to ask is why?

On a narrative level, the answer is easy. Thrasymachus glows red and shuts up, but the other participants (Glaucon, Adeimantus, Polemarchus) immediately resume the line of questioning:

Now, when I had said this, I thought I was freed from argument. But after all, as it seems, it was only a prelude. For Glaucon is always most courageous in everything, and so now he didn’t accept Thrasymachus’ giving up but said, “Socrates, do you want to seem to have persuaded us, or truly to persuade us, that it is in every way better to be just than unjust?”
“I would choose to persuade you truly,” I said, “if it were up to me. ”
“Well, then,” he said, “you’re not doing what you want. Tell me, is there in your opinion a kind of good that we would choose to have not because we desire its consequences, but because we delight in it for its own sake-such as enjoyment and all the pleasures which are harmless and leave no after effects other than the enjoyment in having them?”
“In my opinion, at least,” I said, “there is a good of this kind.”
“And what about this? Is there a kind we like both for its own sake and for what comes out of it, such as thinking and seeing and being healthy? Surely we delight in such things on both accounts.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And do you see a third form of good, which includes gymnastic exercise, medical treatment when sick as well as the practice of medicine, and the rest of the activities from which money is made? We would say that they are drudgery but beneficial to us; and we would not choose to have them for themselves but for the sake of the wages and whatever else comes out of them.”
“Yes, there is also this third,” I said, “but what of it?”
“In which of them,” he said, “would you include justice?”
“I, for my part, suppose,” I said, “that it belongs in the finest kind, which the man who is going to be blessed should like both for itself and for what comes out of it.”

Since Glaucon is demanding that Socrates prove justice to be a terminal value, Socrates has to prove that they exist, that they can be compared (if they aren’t objective), and what they are.^[1] “Well, that’s only set up by Glaucon, it’s not realistic,” which is wrong. Tell me: how do you argue for a moral good without any of that? “It’s nice.” I don’t realy believe in objective good and evil, but the possibility of objective good is vastly greater than the possibility of objective niceness.

On a metalevel, the answer is the same reason that no one knows what Plato really thinks. He wrote dialogues, each with different interlocutors, different themes, different arguments. There is no manifesto, you lack all charts and diagrams, absent re: careful essays, his hidden doctrines are plainly not hidden, why aren’t you reading the Seventh Letter esoterically you coward, excuse me. He contradicts himself dialogue to dialogue, partner to partner, which is intentional and important. The Platonic style is to follow the thought of the other and work back from there.

The generic Platonic set up: Socrates addresses some elite, often credentialed Athenian on the subject of their credentials and/or interests. To Euthyphro, a priest taking his father to a court of law, you ask about justice and the gods. To Theatetus and Theodorus, mathematicians noted for their work on irrational numbers, you interrogate knowledge and its limits. To Lysis, an exceptionally bangable and greased-up youth, you discourse on love and friendship. On a meta-level, this may be an accident (they’re the best educated in a topic with social cache) or it may be an integral component (because Plato is extremely political). Depends on the interlocutor (the best way to judge is how heavily he utilizes myths).

Those interlocutors require different kinds of arguments (and thus receive different kinds of conclusions).

The Republic is about “justice,” but it’s really about terminal values, which means it’s really about philosophy, and the interlocutors are the wrong people to determine this. The Youths are Athenian youths, meaning hot-blooded and political, more interested in discussing the city more than the spirit. Accordingly, Socrates drops into a grand metaphor. Model the soul as a city, which we know can be more or less disordered, better or worse, wealthy or poor. Ignore “the good soul,” which we have meager if any opinions about. Everyone has strong opinions about what a good city looks like.

Socrates has one, and it’s almost instantly rejected. The City of Pigs, which I’ve brought up and will continue to bring up, is a pleasant little villa where everyone lives moderately and works diligently, occasionally breaking to enjoy a celebration of the gods. It’s abstemious, harmonious and, you know, boring. You can tell because the youths say so: people need couches and sauces for a good life.^[2]

Socrates: Oh, you meant a festering soul, my bad.

This complicates things. Now the Republic has luxuries, but with luxuries come wars, inequality, and discord. To return a war-time city to a place of harmony requires something vastly different.

The soul has parts, which sounds weird but is very obvious. Sometimes you want to do something (appetite), but you know it’s morally wrong (reason), so you fight with yourself (will, thumos). A city has parts, too, in roughly the same way (rulers, elites, and workers), but we didn’t need to bother with those in the city of pigs. Now we do. A city with luxuries means a city that gets ransacked, which means hierarchies develop between soldier and citizen.

Socrates focuses on the behavior of the warrior class – the elites, called auxiliaries or guardians. The elite need to make the city function, which means they need to be disciplined, which means they need education. None of the interlocutors know what the good is yet, nor what Justice is, but they do know practicality.

The most notorious section of the Republic concerns this very problem: Socrates bans the poets Hesiod and Homer for telling bad lies about the gods and the nature of the good. Truth is important, but pragmatism is even more important. The Iliad’s Gods are particularly cruel and flighty, Homer is terribly persuasive, the Guardians might get ideas. In other words: they would not be able to control themselves but, by Thrasymachus’s definition of power and justice above, they then couldn’t be elite. Introduce new variables, old habits have to go. City of Pigs won’t work, so now you get the second Republic. In Kuhnian terms, the former paradigm could not accommodate new observations (sauces), so you rearrange the system ground up.

This first turn, the movement towards practicality, requires the rest of the dialogue. Suddenly, you’re not dealing with two or three questions. You’re dealing with twenty or thirty. You have to introduce a ridiculously complex hierarchy to function, but at least we have couches.

We’re still talking about justice. Is it the same one we started with?

III

Let’s pretend that I didn’t just answer Robinson’s question.^[3]

Plato’s complexity gets lost in the public sphere. I blame someone, probably academics and journalists. “Philosophy is a public good, read Plato.” So they hand you a cartoon with a quotable or two: “The Forms are zany, but check out this thing about democracy and haven’t you seen the Matrix?” Granted, everyone is always stupider than you.

Dialogues start with a question, they quickly veer away, occasionally into several different metaphors that tuck into one another like matryoshka dolls. The Republic follows other dialogues in this pattern: adopt the stance of your opponent and radicalize it for your own purposes. This would be why Thrasymachus calls him a sycophant (the word συκοφάντης meant someone who brings false suits or otherwise perverts a legal system to their end), why no one really knows what Plato himself thinks, and also why I can tell you that most readings of the Republic are bad. The metaphors are investigated is detail, with minor changes resulting in the need to rework the entirety of the dialogue’s theme, for more or less the same reason that paradigms require a reworking of all previous solutions. But no matter where they go, the opening echoes across the dialogue. Lose sight of the original point of contention or who you’re addressing and you’ll get caught in the minutae, which is 100% intentional on Plato’s part and 100% why people get confused by the Republic’s political sections.

Thrasymachus is making an argument against philosophy, let’s tune it to the modern soul: the moment you’re using words, you’ve left the realm of pure thought those distinguished fellows of the Thinkery so adore. “Justice” has no clear referent, how do you know that you’re not just talking about the Man’s Justice? One needs a value to declare an argument “good” or “bad,” but it’s more than likely that any values will have come from the same system you were questioning. Everything is a tautology with extra steps, enjoy.

Worse, all words have some social connotation, but not all words are equal. Some words have a kind of gravitas that confuses good citizens, the little flair we reserve for Notably Important Things, such as Justice, Virtue, Jesus Christ, Thicc. Justice is the exact kind of word that would be the target for social conditioning, or: were justice merely the will of the stronger, the stronger would definitely pretty it up before others.

City of Pigs->Feverish City looks like a concession to the other interlocutors, but it’s Thrasymachus to the core. He’s the one who brought up justice as law in the first place, and the Feverish City’s extensive laws are our model. Since “model” here is “model of justice,” that makes the rules of the strong and, by implication, following the rules of the strong a definition of justice. It’s more than possible that Justice has changed from city to city, meaning there’s no “objective” form outside of a political context, i.e. Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus is also the one who first defines “knowledge” as something synonymous with power which certainly sounds a whole lot like the philosopher king.

“Radicalize it.” Despite throwing out the poets for lying, Socrates allows for the rulers to lie at their own discretion:

Further, truth must be taken seriously too. For if what we were just saying was correct, and a lie is really useless to gods and useful to human beings as a form of remedy, it’s plain that anything of the sort must be assigned to doctors while private men must not put their hands to it.”
“Yes,” he said, “it is plain.”
“Then, it’s appropriate for the rulers, if for anyone at all, to lie for the benefit of the city in cases involving enemies or citizens, while all the rest must not put their hands to anything of the sort.”

If the Thrasymachus position were real, then you’d be able to see it from a model. Luckily, we have just such a model: the feverish city. Despite the metaphorical nature of the Republic, the political philosophy behind it isn’t magical. Socrates and the youths are treating it like a real city, meaning necessities in it should look something like necessities in our world. That doesn’t mean it’s the only city, merely that its unique circumstances should predict certain responses.

Do we need to add in a series of values, myths, customs, in order to make it work? If so, then that would be relatively strong evidence that justice has, in practice, been the will of the stronger. I suspect it would look a lot like obvious and easy moral sentiments, the kind followed and left without question, the kind of truths that one desperately clings to. You’d want your people to believe that it was the truth and thus, critically, care about the “truth.” For instance, this is how you determine who should rule:

[SOC]: “Don’t you too believe that human beings are unwillingly deprived of good things and willingly of bad ones? Or isn’t being deceived about the truth bad, and to have the truth good? Or isn’t it your opinion that to opine the things that are, is to have the truth?”
“What you say is correct,” he said, “and in my opinion men are unwillingly deprived of true opinion.”
[…]
“Now then, as I said a while ago, we must look for some men who are the best guardians of their conviction that they must do what on each occasion seems best for the city. So we must watch them straight from childhood by setting them at tasks in which a man would most likely forget and be deceived out of such a conviction. And the man who has a memory and is hard to deceive must be chosen, and the one who’s not must be rejected, mustn’t he?”

It’s at this exact moment in the dialogue that Plato rolls out the Noble Lie. “If they are real,” they are definitely real.

Idiots with columns are going to claim – with special reference to Wolfowitz, i.e. Strauss the infinitely lesser – that the Noble Lie is a tactic elites use to elicit political responses in the demos, and they then get to debate the relative merits of misleading the demos. “Very effective,” but “sounds undemocratic”, etc. This is pleasant for elites who need the daily tuppence to remind them who they are, so it certainly sounds reasonable from the perspective of a raging narcissist. It’s also dead wrong:

I’ll attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams; they only thought they were undergoing all that was happening to them, while, in truth, at that time they were under the earth within, being fashioned and reared themselves and their arms and other tools being crafted.

The noble lies (plural) are (1) that the citizens sprang from the earth as brothers, and (2) that their souls contain different metals. These are meant for the elite, not the commoners, to ensure that they don’t abuse their positions. The city’s population is divided into gold souls (rulers), silver souls (guardians), bronze and iron souls (workers), with the guardians under special scrutiny.

The first lie is meant to persuade them that, despite their social status, they have common bonds with the lower classes. Here’s how it comes about:

“I shall try to tell you,” [Socrates] said. “Surely the most terrible and shameful thing of all is for shepherds to rear dogs as auxiliaries for the flocks in such a way that due to licentiousness, hunger or some other bad habit, they themselves undertake to do harm to the sheep and instead of dogs become like wolves.”
“Terrible,” he said. “Of course.”
“Mustn’t we in every way guard against the auxiliaries doing anything like that to the citizens, since they are stronger than they, becoming like savage masters instead of well-meaning allies?”
“Yes,” he said, “we must.”

The second lie, the one about different metals in the soul, is even more explicit. It ensures that they remain in poverty so as not to be corrupted and abusive, and also protects against nepotism:

They’ll go regularly to mess together like soldiers in a camp and live a life in common. We’ll tell them that gold and silver of a divine sort from the gods they have in their soul always and have no further need of the human sort; nor is it holy to pollute the possession of the former sort by mixing it with the possession of the mortal sort because many unholy things have been done for the sake of the of the many, while theirs is untainted. But for them alone of those in the city it is not lawful to handle and to touch gold and silver, nor to go under the same roof with it, nor to hang it on their persons, nor to drink from silver or gold. And thus they would save themselves as well as save the city. [But] Whenever they’ll possess private land, houses, and currency, they’ll be householders and farmers instead of guardians, and they’ll become masters and enemies instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they’ll lead their whole lives far more afraid of the enemies within than those without. Then they themselves as well as the rest of the city are already rushing toward a destruction that lies very near. So, for all these reasons,” I said, “let’s say that the guardians must be provided with houses and the rest in this way, and we shall set this down as a law, shall we not?”

Don’t get me wrong, Plato was not an egalitarian, but that’s kind of the point. If you aren’t an egalitarian, then you’re hyper-vigilant about the elite. Let me bring back a point I made earlier: the Platonic dialogue is Socrates interrogating the elite, never the commoner, and now we’ve seen that the Socratic position is that elites are the targets of the noble lie.

“But this is still the model, right?” No. Consider the following hyper-condensed argument:

(1) Socrates and the Youths agree that the aristocrats do not care about the plebs and will use their position to their advantage.

(2) They agree that this isn’t ideal, considering “gutting the poor for money” is widely considered a bad thing.

(3) Hence, the noble lie is necessary for the aristocrats to care about the poor.

(4) Socrates is not merely describing the upper classes, he’s talking to the upper classes. Glaucon, Polemarchus, et al. are all elite Athenians.

(5) But by (1), they shouldn’t intuitively care about the poor, because (4) they’re all aristocrats. Unless:

(A) Their conception of the nobility is incorrect. Or,

(B) They’re already under the noble lie.

Just joking, you don’t get a choice, option (C) is the correct one: both.

Some will bring up [whispers and the faint sound of wind], they’ll be wrong. Strauss was a wonder, half his students are tyrants, they’ve read themselves blind. The noble lie is impossible to apply to the commoner class, because they will forget it. Remember how you chose the guardians? Fidelity to the “truth,” a good memory, and the inability to change their mind.

IV

One could well ask why our culture has adapted the Noble Lie the way we have, the easiest answer is illiteracy, the second-easiest answer is narcissism, but that would be a very different piece than the one I’m choosing to write. “The plebs need elite control, and the elites will do what’s best,” certainly sounds like something a poorly-lied to Guardian would say, but that’s just me. As a side note, this is the strongest possible argument against currently lying nobles. If these idiots can’t even read their own Elite Literature, there’s no way in hell I’m trusting them to determine mine.

Because these are dialogues, reading Plato isn’t quite the same as reading a treatise. There’s a narrative arc to the philosophy, miss it and lose out on what he’s saying. This means paying attention to how the dialogue’s interlocutors (and Socrates) behave and speak, how their thoughts align with previous actions, and who these people are (for almost all were real people), are all important. I point this out so that you understand why the timing of certain lines is so critical for understanding:

Up until the noble lie no one could define Justice. Now that it’s been unfurled, as though he needed it beforehand, Socrates strikes ahead. Injustice is defined, where “those three” are parts of the soul, analogous to the Republic’s three classes:

Mustn’t it, in its turn, be a certain faction among those three – a meddling, interference, and rebellion of a part of the soul against the whole.

While justice is the opposite. It’s non-interference, letting all parts perform their task without meddling. Note: Socrates was famous for his meddling.

If the original problem was that “justice” can’t be defined without reference to some “law” (noble lie), which traps all thought within a social context, then this looks like a wholesale admission of the charges. Socrates gives no definition until the city provided him with one, and, further, the definition he gives just so happens to conform to the noble lie that the interlocutors have already accepted, i.e. it’s real and the Athenian elite in the discussion have adopted the noble lie. All of the pragmatic political science fits neatly into the Thrasymachus model: what we call justice is custom, law and good are descriptively the same and normatively don’t exist, quelque chose quelque chose biopower. Guess it’s time to pack it up and go home, it’s just words debated in a particular context.

“I knew that philosophy was worthless.”

This may or may not be true, but we just proved the opposite.

Continued here.

top image from Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos

1. This is a joke worth pointing out: Thrasymachus boasts “You won’t get away with doing harm unnoticed,” then in response to Glaucon Socrates immediately describes the Ring of Gyges.

More generally, and less of a joke: the idea of “escaping” is central to the Republic, and it’s one of the themes that echoes all across it. Part of this comes from the death of Socrates, but not all of it. It normally, but not always, comes from some pun on the Greek λανθάνω. These will make more sense later, and I’ll bring them up then, but if you’ve read the dialogue and need examples: λήθη (forgetfulness, one of the rivers of Hades) comes from λανθάνω, and thus ἀλήθεια (truth, uncoveredness) pairs with recollection. See also: the Cave. ^

2. Side note, but since I’ve brought it up already: another way (both could be right) to understand the transition from City of Pigs to Feverish City is as Plato’s transition from Socrates-Scholar to Plato, a kind of recognition that he’s shifting focus in the wake of the trial and moving into the later philosophy. Note the resonance to “escaping” in Footnote 1, i.e. that Socrates did not whereas Plato might now hide certain things. ^

3.  “Answered the question.” The reason practical philosophy requires hyphenated philosophy is that grounding it requires ontology, epistemology, and metaethics. “Can’t you science it?” You need those to science, ontology (to know what exists to studying and how it does that existing), metaethics (to know what the value of a given study is and what values can even be under study), and epistemology (to know how you know any of that, and thus where questioning leaves off). ^

coming from Science Under High Modernism. vaguely related to: Everything is Going According to Plan.

I

Kuhn is most interesting for examining the uneasy relationship between politics, science, and philosophy, but that’s going to come next time. First, I should address a question that I keep getting asked. I assume it’s the same for anyone who writes about Kuhn:

“Was Kuhn a relativist?”

There are two questions bound together here. The first is whether or not science progresses. The second is over relativism. Kuhn’s answer to the first is his answer to the second. You can deny that his answer to one is a satisfying response to the other, hence the separation.

Towards the end of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn points out that his interlocutors all claim that science advances towards Truth-capital-T, but there’s very little reason to assume such a thing happens. After all, we don’t exactly know what we mean by that, making it somewhat hard to tell if we’re on the right course:

Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process.

It’s certainly correct to say that science advances (though you’d have to emphasize it does so in stages) but it’s not necessarily advancing “towards” anything. After all, you don’t know that there are anomalies beforehand – if you already did know, you’d have entered a crisis period already. To say that science is advancing “towards” truth presupposes that we know there will be a stopping point, that it’s on the right track to get there, that there’s an interpretation of the end point we’ll agree on.

This is a pretty basic argument, and it’s not really his main one. His own is much better, but it’s a little harder to conceptualize.

II

Imagine that you’re playing a really boring computer game, the purpose of which is to fill all 100 squares of a 10×10 grid. Clicking on the screen fills the next square, but there’s a catch. Your cursor moves through a random assortment of colors,  and you can only advance when you click with the correct one. Every time you click with the right color, it fills the next square,  and it also changes the color of all-previously-filled-squares. So you watch the colors cycle, finally click blue, and the first box fills up with blue. Then you wait, try a few colors that don’t work, and finally land on red. This fills the second box, and both boxes turn red. Same thing with the third, which turns green, and so on and so forth. The correct color is probably randomized, you’re uncertain, there’s definitely no pattern you can determine. Sometimes they even jump back, so clicking forty-seven makes all forty-seven as red as click two.

If someone asks you, “Does the game progress towards 100?” then you’ll probably say yes. Even if you’re half-way through, still trying to get 52 filled, it’s a reasonable assumption. There’s a continuity there: 1-2-3-…-100.

What if they ask you, “Does the game progress to red?” If you’re at 52, then you have no idea – last box could be cyan, could be black, could be anything. Even if you’ve completed the program and on click 100 all the boxes do, in fact, turn red, it’s still an odd question. The numbers build on one another in a clear way, but the colors are just different. Moreover, box two has to follow box one, but the colors might be randomized. You got green for three, but there’s no reason to suppose that it was necessary to have gotten green. Maybe it was just the luck of the draw. Maybe the program was actually asking for the correctly timed click, but you assumed that it was based on color

For Kuhn, the numbers are puzzle-solving and “amount of puzzles that may be solved.” The colors are “truth,” here considered as Truth-Capital-T, the ontological reality of all realities, whatever the paradgim says is “what nature really is.” The color changes are paradigm shifts, they allow for movement and they change everything before them, but they aren’t continuous. There’s no clear pattern from one to the other. We might get tricked into thinking that there is (1 is blue, 2 is red), but if we want to be rigorous then…

The point of the metaphor is that puzzle-solving continues and progresses, but ontological underpinnings are not easily compared. In Kuhn’s famous phrasing, they’re incommensurable – from one paradigm the problems of the other look different, don’t quite match, don’t really work. Hence, discussing progress as anything more than “amount of puzzles” is almost certainly a bad idea. It’s much like saying, “Indeed, the game tends towards red.” But in what way? Certainly not in the same way as it tends towards 100.

In an afterward, long since accused of being Peasant King of PoMo Mountain, Kuhn clarifies his stance:

Compared with the notion of progress most prevalent among both philosophers of science and laymen, however, this position [“better as solving puzzles”] lacks an essential element. A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.”

There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences.

Kuhn is saying two things here, and neither should be all that controversial. What he’s calling “ontology” = Truth-Capital-T, and I’ll use both accordingly. Chill, continentals, “ontology” is what you make of it or whatever:

First, paradigms are incommensurable in terms of “description of reality,” not in terms of number of puzzles.

One of the main issues with paradigms is that data and problems aren’t necessary coherent one to the other. The way one paradigm will interpret a phenomenon – and thus what it finds worthy of investigation – will require the entire paradigm behind it. Theoretically, this makes every paradigm a kind of black-box. In practice, there’s an easy movement between one aspect: one can handle more problems, even if it conceptualizes them differently.

Newtonian physics makes several ontological claims (the universe is corporeal particles), Ptolemaic astronomy the same (circles are fitting for the heavens due to their divinity), etc. Both of these are wrong. Newtonian physics, however, can solve many more puzzles. “Amount of puzzles solved” is commensurable – it carries from one scientific set to another, there’s a quantifiable, comparable idea of progress. The ontologies of the paradigms display no such progress. One might allow you to solve more problems, but whatever is in the background of those problems isn’t building on the former paradigm. It’s totally overhauled it – the first block is blue until you press the second block, at which point they’re both red, in the same way that a new paradigm re-characterizes the old one’s problems. Since there’s a stark division between the puzzle-solving and the ontology-claiming, one can show progress while the other does not. The grid-game tends towards 100, but it doesn’t tend towards red. Or, at least, it requires a very different argument to say that it tends towards red. Click 3 makes more boxes green, but green isn’t “more” than blue. “More what?” Exactly. “Waves are-” It’s a metaphor.

Because of this, the success of a paradigm may not be for the reasons it claims (i.e. accurate description of the world). This is good. Ptolemy believed that circles were required to save the appearances of the heavens, which is wrong, but his results are still accurate within minutes of modern measurement. While this is still “inaccurate” it’s not nearly as inaccurate as “epicyclic geocentric circles.” To be more careful: it’s “wrong” in a very different way. Still, it’s only because of the break between “puzzles solved” and “truth” that we can compare increasing puzzle-solving. If they had a 1:1 comparison, Ptolemy’s measurements should be wrong in the same way as his physical theories are wrong. A certain ontological commitment behind a paradigm doesn’t necessarily tell us much about how good it is at solving problems.

This gets intensified by the idea of paradigm shifts: Science progresses step-wise, not smoothly, in a series of crises and leaps. The only thing we know is that the ontological claims get completely reorganized in a way that little else does. To be able to conceptualize and deal with “more problems,” you need a completely revamped paradigm. Hence, it’s historically unlikely that any current view of reality will remain the same after the next paradigm shift. It’s certainly possible, it just hasn’t happened before, and it would be somewhat weird to expect it to. We can’t say either way. You’re at block 78, everything is red, what color will the next block be? Who knows – it’s unlikely to remain red, but that’s also just an assumption. The point of this is the following: it’s premature to say that science tends “towards the truth” until we’ve solved all the anomalies. Solving them might require [radical departure], or at least history suggest as much.

I’m overstating the case by comparing geocentrism and heliocentrism, but he really is trying to be as strict as possible. It’s provisional, can be falsified but not proven. One can at least imagine a new paradigm where the universe actually does move around the earth. It’s unlikely, but that doesn’t much matter. At stake is progress: neo-geocentrism would still continue the “more puzzles” view of progress, but it’s hard to say whether or not it’s building on the current model towards [future one]. It would certainly feel like a return to an older view of reality. At the very least, it would be different in a way “more astronomical charts” is not different.

This does not allow you to pick and choose whatever you want. Or, well, it does, but you were already free to do so.

Second, there’s no reason to assume that the final description will give us a “Full and Complete” view of reality.

Instead of territory, you get maps; instead of truths, you get predictions. An ambiguous construction of “what’s really going on” may be tacked to that, but it’s neither necessary nor certain. Again, not very controversial.

There are metaphysical commitments that predate the puzzle-solving, meaning that it can’t use its own predictions to test its own predictions. Horseshoe theory in action is discussing philosophy on the internet, so you can try this one yourself: argue with a scientifically minded young empiricist about the nature of mathematics, “How can you be sure that equations are ascertaining something rather than hiding it?” read: “Is science truly objective?” A thousand humanities students just groaned, because they know the exact conversation to which I’m referring. A thousand young STEM students also groaned, for they know the exact conversation to which I’m referring.

In the strictest sense, you can’t determine the “truth” of a paradigm from its success at puzzle-solving, because there’s always a host of pre-paradigmatic intentions. Phrased in a different way, trying to gauge the “true truth” of a theory by number of accurate predictions is affirming the consequent. An obvious and indifferent fact, absolutely shocking in its impact, as prosaic as it gets: Paradigm A -> result B /= result B -> Paradigm A. Do not do this.

This resolves many issues. For instance: multiple ontological commitments can exist within a paradigm, which shouldn’t really be possible if affirming the consequent is acceptable and/or helpful. Interpretations of quantum mechanics is the most famous contemporary example of this, but plenty exist. The equation is not the same as its interpretation, multiple physical models can account for the same predictions. We simply can’t say either way, and trying to requires something other than normal science.

The same is true of certain epistemological commitments. A modern physicist’s minimum paradigmatical commitment is to mathematics as a tool, not anything deeper. She could be a realist or anti-realist re: mathematical objects, provided the first commitment is intact. Interpreting mathematical objects as a Platonist, say, certainly changes how she ought to think about the universe, but it’s not something easily tested, nor should it impact the work she does. (Of course, one should note that math as a tool for physical prediction certainly is a philosophical commitment, and one that Enlightenment thinkers had to defend).

Of course, almost all of this is totally uncontroversial. Bayesians build priors via these processes, but those aren’t meant to be set. Popperians recognize that you can’t positively prove a theory. So on, so forth. Scientism is a by-word for too much faith in Empirical Unerring Truths, but basically no rigorous thinker believes that science heads towards absolute truth. Assuming that requires a serious misunderstanding of the scientific method and/or being drunk and mad at the comparative literature department.

III

“Is this relativism, though?”

The broad result of this is the following: progress-towards-Truth is wrong, but progress-towards-more-puzzles is correct. My personal feeling is that Kuhn overplays his hand a little bit – scientific achievements incorporate successful metaphysics, i.e. mathematics in physics, but it’s not an easy thing to call “progress” in the way we normally mean that. We also don’t know if there will be a Hegelian end of history (doubtful). I take Kuhn’s point, though: science has very little to say about the deeper sense of truth normally associated with philosophy. Since that’s normally considered to be part of a full true picture of reality, there are problems.

Truth is a binary, and science currently fails. Try plan B: science at least tends towards Absolute Truth. Kuhn’s argument gets rid of that. When Truth-Capital-T is your only value, Kuhn absolutely is a relativist, but you’re going to have a hell of a time arguing for [anything]. You can’t compare the truth values of two paradigms, we don’t even know what that would look like beyond the general assumption that such a thing is impossible. Two things are equally false, then the choice between one or the other must be arbitrary. Any value besides truth is meaningless. In other words: “better puzzle-solving” is arbitrary, it does not matter, pick and choose particles or continuity at a moment’s convenience. Any reasonable rigor vs. empirical science is going to bring you to something closer to Kuhn than not. Rejecting puzzle-solving will then take you to absolute nothingness, i.e. Straw Man Post-Modernism or whatever the kids are calling it.

Note that this isn’t an expression of indifference towards truth, but the opposite. It’s being extremely rigorous about science’s own claims re: truth, taking it at its word, but judging it by a particular value system. Hilariously, the opposite of what we take to be relativism.

Thankfully, truth isn’t the ultimate arbiter.

I’ll gloss relativism as “your call” where “your call”  implies that the judgment is arbitrary for anything besides the individual. By this definition: no, Kuhn is not a relativist. Kuhn gets around charges of relativism in basically the same way:

Taken as a  group or in groups, practitioners of the developed sciences are, I have  argued, fundamentally puzzle-solvers. Though the values that they deploy at times of theory-choice derive from other aspects of their work as well, the demonstrated ability to set up and to solve puzzles presented by nature is, in case of value conflict, the dominant criterion for most members of a scientific group. Like any other value, puzzle-solving ability proves equivocal in application. Two men who share it may nevertheless differ in the judgments they draw from its use. But the behavior of a community which makes it preeminent will be very different from that of one which does not. In the sciences, I believe, the high value accorded to puzzle-solving ability has the following consequences [it is not relativistic].

It’s right to say that science isn’t getting closer to the “truth,” and it’s also probably right to say that one paradigm’s ontology can’t be compared to another’s in terms of Absolute Truth. At the very least, we don’t have tools to do so in a rigorous way. Still, Absolute Truth is not the only variable – in the sciences, puzzle-solving is the primary value, and we absolutely can compare the puzzle-solving powers of one paradigm with another. This is no small thing. Included under the “puzzle-solving” rubric are vaccines and space travel.

You’ll recognize this as “the exact same thing we all say,” and I agree. Given that fact, you might be wondering why I’m bothering to lay out Kuhn’s argument in (I hope) painful detail. It’s an attempt to ward off a confusion. For some reason, the people who ask me “Why do you care about Platonic Truth at all?” are the very same people who ask me, “Why are you so concerned with values?” with the general understanding that such things have been settled by decent society.

The answer is the same in all cases, “We’re already using something else,” which is why the questions should concern you. If truth is so obvious and also so unimportant and also comes from science and also justifies science and also has so little to do with science, then why wince when I say “We use lies to justify ourselves, science is inadequate, truth it too, this is good”? Provided you don’t take any of that seriously anyway, it’s just stating the obvious.

Or, if Kuhn is simply telling us what we already think, why does he have the reputation he has? Why can I search his name and find Errol Morris’s feverish ravings, ten billion hard-nosed “realists” shrieking about the post-modern threat?

What do you want to hear, besides what you already know?

top from Satantango by Béla Tarr

I

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn attempts to describe how science progresses and changes; in the process, he finds that any single definition of “science” will be misleading. Following this, he crafts an argument (at least implicitly) against many of the common definitions being argued at the time (and many in our own).

Kuhn was writing to philosophers busying themselves with the definition of “science.” It turns out this is actually an incredibly difficult task. Kuhn makes it easier by turning to historical events in lieu of abstracts, which immediately makes it harder: there are distinct periods with different behaviors. Accordingly, he distinguishes between pre-scientific activity (pre-paradigmatic), normal science (under a paradigm), and extraordinary science (post-paradigmatic). Normal science is the heart of the book. One of Kuhn’s central claims is that we’ve been so blinded by the flashiness of extraordinary science that most philosophy of science creates theories solely applicable to that period, like a Philosophy of Football that theorizes everything in terms of fumbles. Very exciting – totally useless for 99% of the game.

At a certain point in any paradigm’s history, normal scientific work runs into anomalies – observations discordant with the paradigm’s broader theory. Some will be resolved, others will add to or rearrange parts of the paradigm, but a few are irreconcilable with the broader paradigm. Then you get a crisis. At least some work during this crisis will try to overhaul the entire structure (most work  will be frantically trying to save the old paradigm), and that work is extraordinary science. Finally someone provides a satisfying new theory, there’s a paradigm shift/revolution, and normal science continues.

Most of this essay is about normal science, which might look kind of weird if you only know Kuhn as the crisis-paradigm-shift-revolution guy. Questions I will ignore: what progress means, the definition of truth, whether Kuhn is normative or a descriptive, why Popper got so mad, how paradigm shifts, like, evolve quantum consciousness. He does directly address Popper and the Logical Positivists, but getting into that debate would distract. Kuhn and Popper are way closer than the sheer vitriol suggests, and Popper begrudgingly admitted that Kuhnian normal science was an accurate account of most scientific work. Since that’s my focus, I’m going to pretend that no discord exists.

II

Kuhn is particularly concerned with two semi-popular views of scientific work. The first is something I’ll call the “Baconian” model, though Pop-Bacon is more accurate. It’s not the focus of the book, but it leads into the central problems. In the Baconian model, the best science is done without prejudicial structures – data are taken at face value. There’s a gigantic table of relevant observations and their shared characteristics, and theories emerge from close comparison of it all. This model falls apart pretty much immediately.

It looks closest to what Kuhn calls pre-paradigmatic science. It also looks like post-paradigmatic science, but it can be hard to different pre- and post- (which Kuhn admits) for reasons that will become apparent. Either way: it’s not an accurate description of either, and it’s definitely inaccurate for normal science. Kuhn:

The Baconian “histories” of heat, color, wind, mining, and so on, are filled with information, some of it recondite. But they juxtapose facts that will later prove revealing (e.g., heating by mixture) with others (e.g., the warmth of dung heaps) that will for some time remain too complex to be integrated with theory at all. In addition, since any description must be partial, the typical natural history often omits from its immensely circumstantial accounts just those details that later scientists will find sources of important illumination. Almost none of the early “histories” of electricity, for example, mention that chaff, attracted to a rubbed
glass rod, bounces off again. That effect seemed mechanical, not electrical.

First: there are a lot of coherent explanations for [list of facts], so something else has to be going on. Almost as soon as there’s one theory there’s a bundle, and each of those considers different observations to be important. Kuhn calls this effluvium of activity a pre-paradigmatic period, where different schools vie to explain the strange bundle of facts in very different ways.

Second: Very primitive forms of science often do compile a big list of things, but many of those are rejected and discarded by mature versions of the field. The issue is that there’s no such thing as a “significant datum” outside of its significance to a framework. Different schools accept or reject the same data, not everything is understood as equally relevant. Anything with a theory is already interpreting data according to a certain prejudice, and “anything with a theory” is most of science. It’s not even desirable to lose that bias (whatever that even means) – if you do, you admit a bunch of useless bits that illuminate nothing. It may also be better to say “observation,” because “data” might not be the same paradigm to paradigm – the numbers assigned by one paradigm’s instrument are often incomprehensible to another.

Eventually, one of the many theories proves convincing enough to be adopted by some critical mass of practitioners, at which point it becomes the field’s paradigm. More carefully phrased: a series of experiments, models, and vague theorizing is adopted and emulated. From here on out, the pseudo-Baconian period is finished. A technical jargon develops for that field, it no longer draws quite as readily on other fields, etc. Scientists now learn the paradigm itself and restrict themselves to its problems. That is to say: they do not accept a random allotment of phenomena uncritically, nor do they need to concern themselves with ascertaining some theoretical connection from the ground up. They become specialists in a paradigm, and now they perform normal scientific research.

This is the vast majority of actual scientific activity. Much of it is getting precise measurements, reappraising old phenomena, etc. The most “important” (at least for us) is what Kuhn calls “articulating the paradigm” theoretically. This sounds like what it is: no paradigm is perfectly complete – it’s more like a guide – so scientists labor to expand upon it. They add new techniques, more theoretical backing, etc.

Kuhn’s preferred metaphor for normal science is puzzle-solving. This is extremely close to Popperian problem-solving, but there’s a major difference: problems don’t say anything about how one should solve them, nor do they delimit solutions. Puzzles do. There’s the correct order to the pieces, there’s a certain “image” that the completed puzzle should convey, and there’s the far-more-general sense that “completing a puzzle” is gone about in a certain way. The reason that practitioners of normal science restrict themselves to a given problem set is for much the same reason. Theories don’t just tell you how to interpret phenomena. They also tell you what questions to ask. Kuhn:

If it is to classify as a puzzle, a problem must be characterized by more than an
assured solution. There must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained. To solve a jigsaw puzzle is not, for example, merely “to make a picture.” Either a child or a contemporary artist could do that by scattering selected pieces, as abstract shapes, upon some neutral ground. The picture thus produced might be far better, and would certainly be more
original, than the one from which the puzzle had been made. Nevertheless, such a picture would not be a solution.

There are a lot of examples of this (most of the book is, properly, history), but I’m not sure it’s necessary to really go into any. It’s pretty apparent on the surface that, e.g. particle physics restricts a practitioner’s concerns, methods, and analysis to a particular range of problems, and that 1) these are not the same problems as, say, botany, 2) no particle physicist will spend their time recreating Newtonian proofs of corpuscular motion and, 3) the methodology is not random.

Critically, this is equally true for anomalies. Under [paradigm], the behavior of [object] should be X. The empirically observed behavior of [object] is instead Z. Note that the object’s behavior is not “anomalous” in itself any more than a puzzle piece can be mismatched on its own. If Bacon was gathering his list of data, it wouldn’t be bracketed off to the  side or underlined in red: “Exceptionally Important and Confusing.” The pre-paradigmatic scientist would treat it just like any other observation. How could they not? It’s not anomalous-in-itself. Only the broader paradigm/puzzle makes it so.

Similarly, assigning import to anomalies is basically post-hoc. Consider Mercury’s wobble. Newtonian physics predicted a particular orbit for Mercury – it came close but not quite, and no subsequent work could resolve the problem. It took the complete reevaluation of physics, i.e. Einstein, to provide any coherent explanation for what was going on. A) Newtonians needed relativity to resolve it, but Newtonian physics was equally necessary to register it as “a problem.” B) Kuhn points out that it didn’t really lead anyone to doubt Newtonian physics. Other issues came to the fore – only in light of the new paradigm did Mercury’s wobble become something very significant.

In other words, violated expectations are key, but that also tells you something about the necessity of normal scientific work. Articulating a paradigm sounds boring when compared to creating a new one, but it’s a critical stage for determining the failures of a given paradigm. If you already knew where a theory failed, you’d have moved on to a new theory. Anomalies are found organically and accidentally, normally by work-a-day observation rather than creative geniuses.

III

Kuhn is most famous for the anti-Baconian view of science, and paradigms often get conflated with something like “theory.” This is deeply unfortunate: the anti-Baconian model isn’t strictly Kuhnian, and “paradigms” are meant as a response to the list of rules.

The “list of rules” model  is easiest to understand as a reaction to the Baconian model. Science can’t only be unbiased observation, because [everything above]. It can’t just be empiricism, because everything above is empiricism + [many]. Still, something must separate scientific activity from non-scientific activity. There’s an assumption that “Science,” if properly understood, must be something defined by a narrow, carefully defined list of rules. More to the point, everyone more or less understand that there are big changes that require a reworking of everything before them. Perhaps because of that, it certainly feels like a set amount of rules should separate Newton from Einstein.

At first glance, this seems promising, and it’s extremely important to emphasize the following: Kuhn isn’t saying that there aren’t rules for science. It’s pretty clear that there are above, and the rules he discusses are basically what you’d expect: “explicit statements of scientific law and about scientific concepts and theories,” “a multitude of commitments to preferred types of instrumentation and to the ways in which accepted instruments may legitimately be employed,” “higher level, quasi-metaphysical commitments,” and at the very highest level “[the concern] to understand the world and to extend the precision and scope with which it has been ordered.” He’s simply saying that there’s no such thing as a “complete list” – you could subtract all of those from the paradigm and there’d still be a remainder, something else is going on underneath the explicit commitments.

More to the point: even those rationalizations, when attempted, may be extremely different. There are different fields, subfields, problems, etc., and most of the scientific work done there has trained the specialists to think a certain way:

An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum. Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing. As we proceed we shall discover how consequential paradigm differences of this sort can occasionally be.

IV

Kuhn likes to pull from Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein, not Tractatus Wittgenstein). How close the two are sounds like a monstrous tangent best avoided, but Kuhn clearly chose “rule” to play on Wittgenstein’s point about games: trying to define a game by its rules somehow fails to get at behavior within it, some other quality is needed – as in (from Wittgestein’s Philosophical Investigations):

For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet. (But this never bothered you before when you used the
word “game”.)

“But then the use of the word is unregulated —– the ‘game’ we play with it is unregulated.” —– It is not everywhere bounded by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one may throw the ball in tennis, or how hard, yet tennis is a game for all that, and has rules too.

And yet – we all recognize a game and not-a-game. Paradigms are much like that. One way to put it that telegraphs the twist ending: paradigms are illegible, and “lists-of-rules” are attempts to make them legible.

The Wittgenstein quote shows you one aspect – trying to define a single paradigm is impossible – but Kuhn is more focused on the abstract “Science” itself, arguing against the view that “science” is a concept that can be easily defined. After all, he’s debating a bunch of people who all though that they had defined it (their massively different definitions notwithstanding). You might wonder why this seems important, but note that we do this all the time. Debates over what is or is not science is pretty much a constant. Probably because of this, Kuhn is much more focused on behavior, and that behavior shows radical differences paradigm to paradigm.

It might be easier to think of paradigms as a way of centering “sciences” plural rather than “science” singular. These sciences don’t seem to concern themselves all that much with the abstract – they take rules as necessary from their paradigm, but the paradigm itself is mostly about legitimacy of problems for their field. If there a hard-and-fast rule for [scienceing], we should expect a practicing scientist to be able to provide it. Ask a Tyson: “What’s the Constitution of Science?” Not only do we not see this, we quite often see the opposite. Following Wittgenstein, Kuhn compares it to the difficulty of trying to carefully define what all games have in common.

This is more or less the first in a series of four points on why we should accept ambiguity (or paradigms) rather than rigid rules when trying to describe science. In order, the anti-list-of-rules argument is:

1) The hunt for explicit and articulable rules – that is, binding and explicit statements about what [field] is or what “Science” is – almost always fails. There’s no example of a perfect list of rules for any given paradigm – historical or present, compiled by scientist, historian, or philosopher of science.

2) Scientific education itself is almost never composed of “rules.” That is to say, it may employ various facts and many examples, but the “set of rules that makes this a science” is illusive. Indeed, the process of learning that Kuhn discusses spends much more time on concrete examples than it does the “grounding” of those:

Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. […]

That process of learning by finger exercise or by doing continues throughout the process of professional initiation. As the student proceeds from his freshman course to and through his doctoral dissertation, the problems assigned to him become more complex and less completely precedented. But they continue to be closely modeled on previous achievements as are the problems that normally occupy him during his subsequent independent scientific career. One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it.

The “little reason to believe it” is clearly a reference to (1), i.e. if this were the case, we’d expect there to be at least one person capable of providing the rules of the game. Instead, the “copying a model” based learning looks a whole lot more like an apprentice to a craft. It also provides something to test against that isn’t just theory or a phenomenon.

3) If explicit rules are relatively unimportant for normal science, then most scientists should’t really concern themselves with the rules. Or, “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Indeed, this is mostly true, up until a crisis.

While paradigms remain secure, […] they can function without agreement over rationalization or without any attempted rationalization at all.

Of course, it’s obvious that scientists can work without an explicit sense of “rules” – one doesn’t need philosophers of science to tell them how to science. Then again, if we recognize that “science” takes place somewhere beyond rigid and meticulously observed rules, we should be wary of them as the full definition of science.

4) Changes in paradigms may be extremely localized, and rule changes even more so. That doesn’t seem compatible with a particularly rigid set of rules for the abstract Science. If that were the case, paradigm shifts should impact everything all the time, but they’re generally restricted to fields. Within a paradigm, if the rules were too rigid then it would constantly be in revolution – every rule change should change the paradigm. In practice, though, new rules are created (whether these are data points, methods, instruments, etc.) without much major revision of the field. You’ll say this is obvious – of course there aren’t scientific revolutions with each new discovery – but that’s kind of Kuhn’s point. There must be some “give” there, which makes hunting for the abstract list foolhardy. NB: he’s accusing most other philosophers of doing this.

V

If “paradigm” seems incredibly amorphous, that’s because it’s meant to be. Kuhn:

Scientists can agree that a Newton, Lavoisier, Maxwell, or Einstein has produced an apparently permanent solution to a group of outstanding problems and still disagree, sometimes without being aware of it, about the particular abstract characteristics that make those solutions permanent. They can, that is, agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it.

Since “rules” aren’t how science proceeds – at least not normally – you might wonder what, exactly, happens. That more or less comes from the name itself: Kuhn thinks that working-by-models is much closer to how science actually functions.

…the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.

Kuhn compares this to the common law system: one tests a case against certain over-arching principles, sure, but those aren’t the only thing of import. Previous rulings are equally important, even if their relationship to the Ideal Law is somewhat obscured. Accordingly,  whole lot of science is testing experiments against the paradigm, rather than nature itself. This is mostly obvious from the Bacon section, but should be stated again.

One result of this is that “science” is never a constant thing because its rules are never the same. Since scientists aren’t testing against The Form of Science, and they aren’t testing against straight-unbiased-phenomena, then the paradigm starts to become very central. Hence, science under Newtonian physics, or science as Lavoisier’s early chemistry is more accurate than just saying “Science.” There are family resemblances (Kuhn steals that from Wittgenstein, too) but no more. It’s almost closer to a “culture” than anything else, understood by its practitioners but not necessarily in a way that can be vocalized beyond the thing done:

Close historical investigation of a given specialty at a given time discloses a set
of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications. These are the community’s paradigms, revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises.

In other words: concrete>abstract, specialist>scientist. And this, according to Kuhn, explains scientific progress.

Paradigms are adopted precisely because they’re loose – a stray fact may be helpful or interesting, but (by definition) there’s no more work to be done on it. A paradigm with holes, on the other hand, requires work. Its holes must be filled. Due to the nature of paradigms, though, filling these holes leads to revolutions. The puzzles that normal science enjoys are provided it by the paradigm itself, and most scientific work is just filling in the blanks – either theoretical, mechanical, or empirical. Kuhn:

Their achievement [paradigmatic works] was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.

Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’ By choosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together— provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.

These same principles point out anomalies – something just doesn’t match when you try to compare it to the paradigm. They aren’t congruent or similar or [other geometry].

VI

Not all anomalies lead to paradigm shifts, but all crisis periods are marked by this kind of frantic, rule-based theorizing. As a result,  It was always assumed that someone would come along and resolve the problem. He’s pretty vague on why exactly this happens, mostly because he thinks it looks different each time. Again, concrete> abstract. For some, it’s a function of time – long-standing problems have stood long enough that the specialists have exhausted all possible avenues. The Copernican revolution is one example of this. For others, instruments bring new data points (cathode rays), others are theory-induced (Leyden jars), etc. Some characteristics of crisis, however, are the same:

Those characteristics include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance.

When a crisis happens, scientists work in a totally different way. They suddenly go back to careful and rigorous explication of their “rules”:

Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already
achieved. Rules should therefore become important and the characteristic unconcern about them should vanish whenever paradigms or models are felt to be insecure. That is, moreover, exactly what does occur. The pre-paradigm period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to define schools than to produce agreement.

It is as though something were compelling them to justify themselves. One tries to create rules when they did not exist before. Scientists suddenly go back to metaphysics, and a plethora of theories spring up, all possible but all disagreeing. Or, somewhat comically, practitioners resolve anomalies by changing certain small assumptions, in the process annihilating half of the most secure theories.

Furthermore, debates like these do not vanish once and for all with the appearance of a paradigm. Though almost non-existent during periods of normal science, they recur regularly just before and during scientific revolutions, the periods when paradigms are first under attack and then subject to change. The transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics evoked many debates about both the nature and the standards of physics, some of which still continue.

There are people alive today who can remember the similar arguments engendered by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and by statistical mechanics. And earlier still, the assimilation of Galileo’s and Newton’s mechanics gave rise to a particularly famous series of debates with Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Leibnizians about the standards legitimate to science. When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess.

It’s telling that a perfect rule-system is never created. The theoretical commitments don’t persuade anyone. Before a paradigm is adopted, it has to demonstrate not a logical consistency, nor a compelling explanation of the phenomena, but a series of paradigmatic examples along with enough holes for other scientists to be productive. This makes perfect sense from a Kuhnian perspective: they need results and models to test against, not theory.

That does not mean that those theoretical commitments are unimportant. They perform a massive amount of work during the crisis period. They simply don’t determine the entire course of the argument. This also does not mean that crises are “bad.” They’re necessary and desirable. The only danger is if one gets caught in the crisis itself. Kuhn:

Though history is unlikely to record their names, some men have undoubtedly been driven to desert science because of their inability to tolerate crisis. Like artists, creative scientists must occasionally be able to live in a world out of joint—elsewhere I have described that necessity as “the essential tension” implicit in scientific research.

VII

Consider everything below a hypothesis. Or, perhaps, better to say hypotheses, because some might be right and others wrong, and if they’re fully articulated parts might contradict.

“Paradigms,” ironically, seem ridiculously amorphous precisely because they’re so concrete. Rather than dealing with “science” as an abstract, Kuhn forces us to deal with something like this science or that science, and concrete actions are rarely easy to actually define. It’s much easier to apply an abstraction (“Games are rules”) than to really describe the behavior – “this is what it is to play [game].” Of course, those abstractions are only ever rough maps. Take them too literally, and you’ll run into issues. I have a strong suspicion that this is also the reason that Kuhn’s more nebulous view of paradigms has been replaced by the abstract “paradigm is theory,” despite that being the exact thing you’re not allowed to do. It is hard to discuss such things.

The characteristics of normal science are that it has relatively limited scope, a specific and technical vocabulary, is learned by modeling successful practices rather than really getting at the deeper “why” behind those, describes problems in its own language and finds solutions that aren’t really understood by outsiders, and is heavily focused on the concrete tasks before it. It’s very empirical, but in a particular way: it always makes sure to test itself against the tradition. The paradigm itself determines whether a question is legitimate, whether a method is, etc.

Outside the paradigm, scientists understand one another’s work less by hard-and-fast rules than by a kind of family resemblance between them. You can almost understand it as “farming” (abstract) vs. “farming in this particular region.” All of the behavior might be different, but a farmer still recognizes some kinship, while also recognizing concrete differences. Of course, that’s how I want you to understand is, because that’s how I understand, because Kuhn is describing metis.

VIII

Metis is best described here, you won’t understand the rest of this without that, a (really) rough description is that it’s “know how” over “know why.” It’s something between tradition and hyper-empiricism, learned and taught within small communities according to concrete objectives and specific environments, often shrouded in a kind of local language impenetrable to outsiders. Where “metis” relates to set communities, I think of it more broadly as a worldview from which know-how springs. To get it, you have to already be thinking in a certain way, and you take “rules” from that worldview and test against the worldview itself. This has results (i.e. you wanted to appease rain god, but doing so empirically makes the crops grow), but for all its empiricism there’s weird other step.

Kuhn is very set against the rigid list of rules, as the inherent looseness of a paradigm is what allows progress. I think this is analogous to why James Scott is incredibly hesitant to call metis tradition. Not only does that fail to capture it, “tradition” implies that metis is calcified, rigid, set-in-stone. In reality, the practices adapt, new ones are adopted, old ones dropped, when they no longer work – metis is dynamic. Yet there’s some kind of continuity – the “way we do things here” is always the same, even if specific practices change. There’s reason the introduction of a new crop doesn’t rupture the entire system.

If normal scientific work is analogous to metis, then that makes the “list of rules” model something closer to episteme. That makes a whole lot of sense, too. Episteme is scientific-ish, but it’s better understood as taxonomy, closer to rationalizing than rationalism, pattern-matching and abstracting instead of creative work. The analytic behavior associated with episteme makes a comparison to science inevitable, but Scott is very careful  to point out differences. Perhaps it’s better understood as a kind of science fan-fiction – has the same aesthetic and characters, but the heart just isn’t there. Pointing out where they differ has always been very hard, but Kuhn starts to help – one reason we associate “science” with episteme is precisely because we’re thinking of “science” as a rigid list of rules.

Similar to the metic villager, if one were to ask a given scientist why they’re doing [thing], they’d almost certainly be able to tell you why they were doing that particular action.  “[Experiment] should yield [result],” etc. Still, it’s not like the idea of metis precludes explanations – in basically every case, the villager could pretty easily tell you what the result of a thing was, “We’re setting these crops on fire because that makes food grow more readily.” The issue always comes from the deep-deep justification. It’s “because of the gods” is meaningless unless you’re part of the community that cares for those gods. And that seems much closer to what Kuhn is trying to get at, where the philosophical justifications are either absent or… well, useless, unknown, not understood by the practitioners, unnecessary. As much as I’ve always hated the “useful to birds” Feynmann quote, he’s right (if Kuhn is right – dead wrong if Popper is right). It would be like teaching a farmer molecular biology so that they can plant their orchard. The list of rules could easily stall out scientific progress in a whole lot of fields. It looks a lot like applying abstract, alien techniques to local regions. Doing “Science” rather than doing “biology.”

In a broader sense, the paradigm looks a whole lot like the worldview component of metis, especially where it blurs the line between end-goals and means of achieving those end-goals. Just like Scott, Kuhn tends to refer to issues between paradigms as “translation problems,” which makes perfect sense. The data points aren’t intelligible one to the other, the questions aren’t the same, their justifications are incompatible. Trying to move from one to the other is much closer to moving from one language to another than a minor dialectical difference in the Language of Science.

Because it’s formulated as a kind of communal structure, norms and values take the forefront, and these aren’t easily codified.  Kuhn goes into a bunch of historical cases where theories or experiments were proposed or accepted despite a certain “unsicentificness” (in our sense) to them. They couldn’t be easily falsified, or the measurements were off, or… If called to justify them, the community might have serious difficulties – rules were broken – but everyone kind of understood what the person was going for, and it looked just right enough to be ok. Spirit of the law, not letter of the law. That looks like the analogue to local knowledge, particularly when it comes into conflict with state forms of justice.

IX

This is cool and whatever, but lots of things are cool and whatever. The real interest here is the following: I think Kuhn’s model begins to explain what exactly happened with High Modernism. Of course, no small part is power differentials. I’ve talked about that, it’s more important, moving on. Also: plenty of the issues with episteme had nothing to do with science, so this only applies to the ones that do. There’s still a lingering question about the scientists themselves. Didn’t they recognize that whatever they were doing was actually terrible science? Otherwise careful scientists seemingly brushed aside all forms of empiricism, which probably requires some explanation.

I think there are three things going on here, they kind of conflict, I’m unsure which claim goes where:

First, and most obvious: the pre-paradigmatic period is the one that Kuhn claims involves the heaviest debate over the rules of the field. Under the current theory, that would make it the most epistemic period – unsure of itself, unaccustomed to the metic behavior of normal science, much more prone to making harsh distinctions between “science” and “not science” through abstract categories. It would look less for behavior that approximated the paradigm, and more for rules followed.

A whole lot of the fields employed by High Modernism were incredibly young. Scott famously defines the problem of legibility by analyzing scientific forestry, but “scientific forestry” was like a decade old. A host of other problems related to High Modernism came from primitive social sciences, and most of those were also in their infancy. In a weird way, Scott might be narrating the birth of some of those paradigms: modern urban planning, say, definitely comes after Jane Jacobs in anything but the loosest sense. Related, and for another time: “social sciences” aren’t necessarily mature sciences (Kuhn himself is very on the fence), meaning they might remain in the epistemic, pre-paradigmatic stage today. Cf. all the issues of [everything].

If that’s the most epistemic period for [all these fields], that resolves a whole lot of questions.

Second, related: Paradigm-to-paradigm translation problems also crash into episteme. Discussing historical work in science, Kuhn says this:

When undertaking it, the historian must compare the community’s paradigms with each other and with its current research reports. In doing so, his object is to discover what isolable elements, explicit or implicit, the members of that community may have abstracted from their more global paradigms and deployed as rules in their research.

As anyone who’s learned a second language as an adult can attest, translation problems means you start zeroing in on abstract rules of the foreign language as well as your own. Since a lot of those rules are theoretical commitments, it makes some sense that [High Modern Scientist] would focus on those, find mythology, and discount the entire thing.

This seems particularly true given the fact that even if metis looked sciencey (i.e. fewer gods, more electrons), paradigms don’t justify themselves that way. They focus on puzzle-solving and empirical results, the questions of which and resolutions to which may not be coherent to an outsider. In this metaphor, a whole lot of those are social – maintaining tribal harmony and commitment, etc., but even the common ones (“grow a crop”) require some temporal commitment by the scientist. She’d have to know that these bizarre theoretical commitments actually succeed at that, which means hanging out for a while.

Third, which will undoubtedly insult someone: Episteme has more of a “sciencey aesthetic” than anything scientific. Scott brings this up a lot, I’ve talked about it, whatever. One of the issues that Kuhn brings up is that a certain mere sciencey aesthetic might be necessary for normal science. If it’s to admit of  “not-perfectly-Popperian-results,” then the community has to default to other forms of judgment. Some of those are interpersonal (“Science-Guy Todd has always done good work, so…”) but some are just appearance (“sure, it’s not experimental, but look at all those numbers and Greek letters!”). See: physics envy in economics (pdf).

More to the point, the scientist is testing against the paradigm, which means that incredibly divergent practices will be fitted to that. It’s not abstract science, but it’s certainly a kind of aesthetic that metic practices will not have. Note that, unlike the first two, this would not be episteme. It may look like it, but it would properly be the metis of a mature science trampling the metis of a different community.

X

Episteme isn’t bad, any more than the theoretical work done under crisis periods is bad. It’s a necessary reevaluation of an alien situation. I have a strong suspicion it may be more common now due to [many essays later], but losing it would lose many, many goods. Where it goes awry is when it begins to attack organic traditions, trying to make legible what is not legible.

One of the weirder results of Kuhn’s philosophy was an emphasis scientific relativism. A whole generation of philosophers brandished his book as a way to point out a certain groundlessness to the sciences, mistaking “paradigm” for something totally arbitrary, mistakenly demanding a kind of truth that comes from a different language. At the extremes, this tends to mean a total rejection of scientific fact as being “merely contextual fact.” Which is, you know, true, but equally true of everything else. This is particularly jarring because Kuhn provides something that should give you the opposite conclusion.

More than a few times, I’ve associated this a certain ideology around modern science. I still think that’s true (definitely of the ideology), but it’s worth taking the time to make a careful distinction between science, the ideology, and… whatever is under discussion here.

That particular view of science – arbitrary because paradigms – is, somewhat hilariously, the exact thing that High Modernism demands of metis: “Since you can’t reproduce first principles, it must be meaningless.” cf. “Since you think [practice] came from the gods, let’s replace it with pseudoscience.” Whatever role you think the physical sciences have in the modern world, this is not the way to go about that. After all, it isn’t even a description of science. Note the form of the argument: Science fails to reproduce theoretical commitments at all levels, and in doing so, it reveals that it is not Science, but merely an ideology. “Where’s your list of rules? Don’t have them? Must be meaningless.”

If Kuhn is right, we should assume the opposite: it’s precisely the ideology that assumes  the rules it wants to enforce.

top from Star Trek

a late introduction

I

I haven’t been writing much lately. Like many people I waffle between open hostility and absolutely crushing sadness re: Earth and its artifacts. I write better when hostile, but hostility requires an enemy, and the hopelessness of it all brought on whatever it is that other writers have other metaphors for. I tend to say “the feeling of humidity in a dry climate,” and  I trust that people who know what that means know what that means. A few readers noted it in the nihilism article, they were right. I gather this has been going around, I hope you’re all doing well. Still, it’s either break out or there’s a decent chance that I’m never going to update again. Forgive the introduction while I try to jump-start this blog again, I need to remind myself what I care about. There are many new readers since the last one, and they ask good questions, and I have thoughts and answers to write. Besides, they keep asking about the name.

Sam[]zdat is a pun on the Soviet samizdat and Sam’s data (/sæmz/ in Common Yank). The Sam in question is the prophet Samuel. The data in question is the Book of Samuel. It may as well just be called “blog,” because the name is a description of writing on the internet. Accordingly, this is less about resolving anything than just trying to draw out a couple of images.

Early Israelites were governed by judges – highly localized, tasked with interpretation of law and dispute, without the political power of neighboring kingdoms. This lead to local abuses (Samuel installs his unfit sons), but it didn’t threaten the entire people. Still, the dangers piled up, and the abuses piled up, and a kingdom serves for glory that the regional council does not. They tell God to give them a king.

The Host of Hosts makes clear what will happen:

10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.”

As a side note, most of human psychology – at least the interesting parts – can be found in that passage.

God gives them Saul, and Saul does what God tells them Saul will do. His rage is soothed only by the music of a young hero named David. In time, God selects that David for the throne, and Samuel anoints him in shadow, after which Samuel dies reiterating the warnings of God. Saul learns of the pretender, civil war breaks out, and he has the Witch of Endor drag Samuel’s ghost up from sheol. The shade of Samuel speaks in warning and horror. David is victorious, Saul commits suicide, in time David’s son Absalom rebels, and David is again victorious at the cost of his him.

David is preferable to Saul, but he still fulfills the warnings. Famously, he spies on Bathsheba bathing and finds himself overcome with lust. He asks around and learns that she is married to a soldier – Uriah the Hittite. David waits until Bathsheba is pregnant to order Uriah to return from the current military campaign. Why is up for debate – execution or face-saving apology, I choose the former – but either way Uriah refuses. He sleeps outside the palace rather than complete the homecoming, citing loyalty to his comrades, implicitly against the king. The king, naturally, tells his generals to send Uriah to the front lines and order those brothers in arms to abandon him in the middle of the fight. They do, demonstrating a very different loyalty than Uriah’s. In the beginning, God determined that the fundamental metaphysical law be tragic irony, and I know of no greater empirical demonstration for the truth of Biblical philosophy.

It’s common to interpret the story of Bathsheba as a warning about pride and power. Even King David, blessed, just, and nigh-perfect, succumbs to temptation. His musicianship, piety, strength, and virtue are considered parts of his essence. Bathsheba is an aberration, a mistake, a fluke. I see no reason to think this, and every reason not to.

The Bible is poetry, David was its greatest poet, the lines are poorly scanned – we want “just king” to be trochaic, but it’s iambic. Whatever God knew about Kings, he selected David as the essence of that – he was the kind of man to kill Goliath, the kind of man to write a psalm, the kind of man to wear the crown, and the kind of man to lay with Bathsheba. Or, God already told you what would happen – it’s a necessary flaw in the system, the bad thing after the good thing, antagonistic pleiotropy in the organism. He‘ll allow it, you won’t. David has many wives, but Bathsheba is the mother of Solomon and thus matriarch to the Davidic line. That’s not a mistake – it is the death of Uriah, rhythmically bound in conception and execution. The King is always the King no matter his accidents.

Biological metaphors only get you so far, but that “so” is a lot more than most things, and if you’ve read this blog you’ll understand exactly this metaphor: antagonistic pleiotropy. A gene beneficial for reproduction but harmful later is still passed on; we want things and choose what provides them, the provider is passed to other wanters, and then only later does a Uriah come. By then, it’s too late. The best you can do – one way to interpret the Biblical David – is to lionize the negative components.

Revealed truth is extremely clear about this point: You always get what you want, God sees to that. The hard part is in wanting the right thing.

II

Now, I have plenty to say about power and state and kings and God, but that’s for another day. There’s a naivete to the way we talk about political regimes: I used to read Samuel as a rejection of worldly power, which is wrong. “Kings are tyrants, better say no,” is not the Biblical attitude. There’s an extreme ambivalence towards worldly power, sure, but ambivalence means ambivalence. A more complex view might be: the possibility of [noble savagery] is gone, so we make do with the best we can. This is closer, but still not quite accurate. If that were the case, the later Bible would prophesy a pre-Davidic utopia, back to the world of the judges and carefully distributed power with direct connection to the Lord. Note: this does not happen. Instead, David’s rule is the prototypical golden age, and he’s either the Messiah or the Messiah is to come from his line. As in, Christ’s carefully crafted patrilineal descent in Matthew; fulfill the prophecy, welcome back David.

If this seems weird – and it should – know that Samuel is framed in a particular way. It’s not a historical narrative, it’s a prophetic book, and (by tradition) the author was Samuel himself up until his death, at which point he becomes the only prophet brought back from the dead by a mortal from the dead to tell you how things once were and how they now will be. Whatever else is going on, you’re hearing the ghost of the last true judge describe the world after him. He doesn’t like it, but –

That it may be unjust or undesirable or […] says nothing. Samuel’s utopia is not ours, whether by divine law or personal preference The Good has changed. I want to be clear on that: it’s not merely that we cannot go back, that there isn’t a material possibility. It’s that whatever happened in that shift also shifts what we want. We want David now, Samuel does not, the wants are new and different. Hence: our utopia is Davidic, not pre-Davidic. The cynical modern knows this is just “a story,” and “actually, the Bible was compiled as a justification and unifying propaganda for…” Sure, why not – why did those kings include Samuel’s condemnation then? More to the point: why didn’t they feel threatened by the possibility of pre-Davidic millenarianism?

Now, I’m not anti-civilization, nor do I want to return to the past. The judges and prophets system looks nicer to me, and I’m more skeptical of the state than your average tyrant, but those aren’t revealed preferences a la my life. More people idealize the present than the past, always have and always will, always for the same reason: the wants our present creates can only be fulfilled by it. Put simply, we know that the Internet did not exist in 1800. Victorians may have been content, but we wouldn’t be. Samuel’s world “seems” nice to me, but it’s alien and 100% chance I’m transposing future desires onto the past.

Or: It’s best to separate two claims. One, good things from the past are materially closed off, it’s not possible to go back, you don’t get to unseat David and bring back the judges because it’s politically/economically/otherically unfeasible. Two, the idea of “Good” has changed enough to render the reactionary view lost. Trads tell you what they want from the future, not the past. The past is helpful to compare and contrast, perhaps aspects can be recalled, but you have to understand them as the people under them did or you will not understand what their installation will bring. That goes for all sides, everyone, myself included, fails at it. I make no claim to know what “good” even is, merely that whatever it is now has changed and will change again. Drag the ghost up if you want to chat, but you’re talking to the dead.

If you think that the modern world is at least somewhat in crisis – and I certainly think so – then this leaves one option. As Frost puts it:

It’s rest I want—there, I have said it out—
Things over and over that just won’t stay done.
And washing dishes after them—from doing
Things over and over that just won’t stay done.
By good rights I ought not to have so much
Put on me, but there seems no other way.
Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or in so far
As that I can see no way out but through—
Leastways for me—and then they’ll be convinced.

Inevitable, inescapable, can only be dealt with on its own terms. There is no going back, I can see no way out but through.

III

I write about value shift plenty, I think it’s a big deal, and my reading of Samuel has a lot to do with that. Also plenty to be said about centralization vs. metis. Still, it’s just an image, and don’t trust me on it: it’s one reading of Samuel, and not even my favorite. I’m relaying the reading that gave this blog its name, but it’s fast-and-loose enough with detail vs. interpretation that it should’t be read as a proper exegesis. (Update is that I should have made this more explicit.)

The shift from Samuel to David, Judge to King, is a move away from God towards man. God to Samuel: “They have not rejected you, but me.” The prophet Samuel has data on a lot of things: human slavishness, the inevitable costs of systemic change, our total inability to handle that, so on, so forth. But, really, the book is about the confused interconnection of all of that. Political shift is value shift is epistemic shift is a shift in the possibilities of communication: what can be said and how it is understood.

Let’s choose the most interesting view of that last sentence fragment. Samuel couldn’t have made his case no matter what. He was prophet and judge, part of the old system. He may have spoken for God, but God’s direct words didn’t matter any more. David, on the other hand, was a poet. He wrote psalms, and the psalms are all about the human relationship to God. Human agency takes center stage. Horrors do come from Kingship, but the Good changes too, and new possibilities arise. The Bible says that Bathsheba is a necessary aspect to David (read: essence of Kingship), but so is art. Now we write psalms and poems. In other words: the kinds of communication possible post-David – style and medium – are different now.

This is no small thing. I get accused of being a reactionary sometimes, but the reason I’m not is simple: a utopia without poetry is no utopia at all, Tyrants are a small price to pay. Accept the mutation in its whole or die like a dog. Accordingly, I may complain about [everything below], but I accept it as… something. Probably fine. I certainly wouldn’t be writing this without the internet.

Our world has changed no less rapidly than Samuel’s. “Now” starts at a date of your choosing, my preference is Napoleon but Al-Gore-binary is also fine – there’s no easy distinction between political and cultural and economic and technological. The issue is communication, and I say that change in communication is infinitely more of a problem than anyone wants to address. Information has become vastly more important for society. It’s necessary, everything is interconnected, there is no escaping the deluge. At the same time, our modes of communication and data transfer have become so alien that we barely understand how to use them. Get the king, open up poetry. Get modernity, open up….

I want to be clear here: we say “it’s a problem,” while ignoring all the things that make it such. The media, God bless its soul, has responded by addressing falsity on the internet, “Did you know that the kids lie on message boards and/or blogs?” as though this were a novelty. Words have been untrustworthy for forever. I trust that not every Pompeian was the sexual dynamo their walls report. Nor is the problem that “twitter makes us read short, thus thin attention spans.” May be part of it, but those same tweeters pour over thousands and thousands of words on the same subject.

The issue is closer to “truth”. How is it conveyed, how does it reach you, how would you know, how do you incorporate that into your worldview? Samuel had prophecy, David had psalms, we have journals and the internet. All of those change how things are expressed and how they are met and, critically, are capable of expressing different things. Yelling about facts will change nothing if you’re expressing “facts” in a way the medium does not allow, that will not be understood by the audience. “Anything can be said on the internet, it’s the most information of all!” The issue is sorting, but anyway: that’s an assumption. It may be correct, but assuming it tells me that you haven’t addressed the problem. Why not the opposite? We can and do drag teenagers for saying a stupid, do you not think that changes how everyone thinks about communication and what they choose to say? What about “how they say it”?

IV

This is about far more than the technology, but that’s what we’re looking at today. Mediums have their own constraints, blah, here’s an example, it’s also only an image: let’s say that poetry is particularly good at expressing x, and prose is particularly good at expressing y. Technological and political shifts suddenly render prose easier to reproduce and more popular. How do you go about relating x? Alternately: a new medium arises and it’s hyper-efficient at conveying z. Efficient enough, in fact, that people are generally skeptical of x and y – they would be, it’s garbled and mangled by the z-medium. It’s great to have z now – more is always better one insists – but our problem is that x and y may be necessary for a well-functioning society with reasonable citizens.

This only makes sense if you think that certain things can only be said in certain ways. I do. Feynman’s lectures are good for a conceptual understanding, but you can’t use them for engineering. An aphorism is not trying to do the same kind of thing as a research paper. Form/content is not a coherent distinction for almost anything we do, same example I always repeat and will continue to repeat: “Life is pretty sad and it’s hard to make decisions.” Is that Hamlet?

Part of this is form – blogs>essays, tweets>whateverwastweets – but a whole lot is context. How you’re told to approach the information will change your interpretation of it. Some groups make entirely too much of this, others far too little, the Aristotelian golden mean hangs always at the horizon. As horizons do, it recedes as fast as you approach.

The Book of Samuel changes with the simple application of author: Samuel is dead, he wrote it and then got unsheol’d, you’re talking to a ghost. I get that it’s just the Bible, but that’s kind of the point – you’re not reading as it was once read, nor am I, and that’s all social context. Is it an appropriate time to make a “death of the author” joke? Which is, of course, the joke itself, understood only by the expectation that one could make a joke, that “is it time to” is a form of humor, that death of the author is a common trope, that Samuel is dead, that God is dead, that –

I get that I’m not saying anything new here, but you understand how serious this is, right? We don’t have an intuitive feel for how the internet contextualizes writing, likely because 20 years and change, which is a shame, because that’s most of the internet. Someone on a blog is not on CNN, someone on youtube is not watching FOX. It’s not merely that “what information comes through” is different – the way you meet it is different. We understand authority differently, search for answers differently, judge which medium we trust differently. Someone could be telling the truth precisely and persuasively, but if the audience won’t listen it won’t matter. This is a trivial concern unless political power is currently in crisis, thankfully –

We have one pretty good model for how this went in the past, though most have forgotten it. Our media externally responded by fretting over attention spans and fake news. Internally, it knew exactly what to do: turn to the samizdat.

V

It’s a shame that samizdat has become synonymous with “illicit anti-leftist literature,” because that’s the least interesting thing about the historical phenomenon. Some samizdats were anti-communist, but anything from literature to pornography fell under the classification. It was about form, not content.

In 1970, the NY Times reported on a popular Russian joke. It explains a lot:

A Soviet official strides into his wife’s room. “Nastasha, you have been typing for five straight days,” he says. “What takes so long?” “Oh, Ivan, don’t you know? I am typing Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina,’ that’s what.” “But why? There is the book. It’s perfectly legible, you can read it in print.” “Yes, but the children won’t read anything unless it’s typed.”

The word samizdat originally comes from samsebyaizdat, which literally means a “publishing house for oneself.” (Alternate etymology is much the same; sam– and abbreviating izdatelstvo->izdat, meaning “self-publishing.”) First: a hilarious joke for the USSR, given that it implies owning the means of production against the Soviet State. Second: In other words, a blog, but that’s too clever and I’m sorry. Third: Since the state still controlled all printing presses, illicit literature had to be handcrafted. This was normally hand-typed, creating an industry of semi-scribes whose job was to retype any given thing. “Samizdat” only came into popular usage in the 60s. In Stalin’s era they were called “Underwoods,” as in the brand of typewriter one had to write them on. Samizdats were verified by their aesthetic, see the joke’s emphasis on “typed.” It’s not very hard to imagine abuses. Even the government had to get in on the action because no one would trust anything else.

Samizdats created an incredibly weird system of information. All types were popular, but the political ones were useful to reformist members of government as ways to determine popular sentiment. They were also useful to police agencies for much the same reason. Since the samizdat was a useful source of information for [most of the government], and it wasn’t really worth the risk for a lot of people, this meant that a significant consumer of the anti-state samizdat was, in fact, the state itself. That led to a reasonable-if-bizarre incentive system where the more radical publishers were actually more valuable to the state. Even weirder was the fact that many state-run newspapers felt compelled to reply to a samizdat’s arguments, couldn’t do so explicitly, and so developed a kind of shadow-dialogue, each party relaying information to the other in such a way as to render it unintelligible to anyone outside the group. Elites talking to elites they can’t talk to, for the purpose of allaying the concerns of elites who weren’t supposed to know they should be concerned. This is really only a historical tidbit unless you’ve ever read Leo Strauss, in which case it’s only a historical tidbit.

Look at the figures in that Russian joke. They’re officials, i.e. elite, which is correct. Samizdats were primarily read by the elite, just like our current confused system is primarily read by the elite. Since everyone involved knew that the Soviet Press lied, samizdats were often implicitly understood to be true. Historians relay that the typical way to read a samizdat was not dissimilar to how we use blogs: official account side-by-side samizdat’s account, two tabs open in the browser. Check the press against the underground reality, man.

It’s actually somewhat hard to track how warped the effect of this was, but I’m going to try: true information only was understood as true when relayed by fake agencies, and it was often false, but was then made true by the real agency acknowledging it without doing so, that agency relying on the assumption it was true because it had come through the fake channel.

At various points, the state itself had official samizdats printed which were nearly identical but contained information for the party members. At other points, “State Samizdats” were distributed through real samizdat channels, because the Eastern Bloc was completely insane. These were ambiguous enough that party members (many readers of real samizdat) and “illegal” publishers alike both protested that the state make hard-and-fast rules as to what counted as samizdat and what did not. As a historian puts it about Hungary’s version:

The problematic relationship between the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial’ is exemplified in the Hungarian literature on samizdat which includes references to texts in circulation as state samizdat, official samizdat and semi-legal samizdat…  Within this schema, state and official samizdat referred to officially sanctioned material with a restricted and prescribed circulation. Typically this material which included books, foreign translations, press reports and articles carried the legend ‘to be used as manuscript’ and was made available to selected members of the intelligentsia and senior party officials. As with any controlled system of information, access to restricted and confidential material both confirmed and denied status and operated as an instrument for co-option and corruption. […]

Two preliminary comments can be made about this ‘line’ between the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial’. First, it is misleading to view this ‘line’ as somehow fixed or static. While some topics were more or less permanently proscribed, others occupied a much greyer, more ambiguous status. This uncertainty regarding the boundaries was registered most obviously in demands from samizdat activists in some countries for clear legal definitions of acceptable and unacceptable material. Second, there were times when the line between the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial’ appeared to disappear.

VI

Because someone will have read this far and still misunderstand:  “sam[]zdat” says nothing about legality or Overton Smashing or communist-colored pills, that’s a meaningless concern here. Samizdats weren’t even illegal half of the time. The Man has no need to suppress dissident movements, they do that on their own and defang themselves by design.

Information has always been contextualized, see Samuel, but the samizdat is a particularly interesting example. As you’d imagine, samizdats were poorly and hastily copied. Typos and grammatical errors were plentiful, they were smudged and wrinkled, they looked shitty but authentic. Even if it was Tolstoy, this was Secret Underground Tolstoy. Merely by being a samizdat (read: with the aesthetics of a samizdat) it had to be understood in a specific context. The medium and the message were/are one.

Now consider the internet.

1) Shitty but “authentic,” obsessed with image because that’s the only way to convey anything anyone will trust, relied upon not for quality but reputation. Word spreads differently, so different things are relayed, and the sheer glut of it makes sorting methods nearly impossible. Authorities are gone: it’s not possible for anyone to understand the modern world because understanding even a tiny part requires intense specialization. That focus has an opportunity cost, meaning one has to rely on a reputation they cannot judge – outside the their field via specialization – meaning that reputation becomes critical, but the way we judge reputation is… Typed Tolstoy is better than Printed Tolstoy, but Typed Absolutelunatic is also better than Printed Tolstoy. Something about scarcity and value, I dunno. How would you know the difference? So “writers” focus on the clothing or the content, praying that naked earnesty in the facts will help them. What good are those if you can’t communicate them? Truth kept to yourself is as good a truth as nothing. Not even God will listen – he only comes when there are two of you. Worse – your “facts” may well be the samizdats of yesterday:

2) Just as in the bizarre, esoteric conversation between samizdat and Soviet Press, modern news “officially” responds to [blogger], or [tweeter], or […], and all of it is scrambled, contextually intelligible to some tiny, tiny fraction of the populace, the actual conflict unnameable but its pseudo-response widely distributed. Journos screw this up all the time, sure, but that only adds to the confusion. The biggest difference is, naturally, that there is no state-owned press. This is almost certainly worse, because the thing filling in for “state censor” is every other faction. It also gets worse because everyone knows this, which means that everyone is trying to suss out the buzzwords in the media (equivalent to: which samizdat are they replying to?), which means a series of misinterpretations unlike anything the Soviets could’ve imagined.

3) The pretense of decentralization and democratization accompanies a material centralization. The internet may allow for bubbles or whatever, but all of those are in the same ecosystem, and that ecosystem is vicious. Any given bubble can – and knows it can – be swept up into the public eye. Intellectual grottoes before could exist because no one could do anything about it, and attacking them required too many resources. Now the system doesn’t even need to expend resources: it outsources invective with a bare link. In other words, as always, power gives the pretense of openness while retaining the keys.

If certain things can only be communicated certain ways – and I think this is almost certainly the case – then we have new capacities with none of the ingrained knowledge of  their use. On top of that, the “ways” we use them are contextualized, pre-judged, delimited. Overanalyzing death of the author jokes on down the line, up until it influences policy, at which point there will be a better joke.

VII

None of this is original – anyone writing on the internet knows part or all of it. I don’t want the name to imply that I’m relaying secret information some [scary outsider] will gulag me for. I’m not.

My theory is simple: Information is hard to sort, hard to make people understand, and currently distributed via channels that make all our previous theories irrelevant. At no point have reading skills been more important, and we have no idea how to teach them. Most of our supposed teachers don’t even know that they can’t read. At no point has a serious confrontation with aesthetics been more important, and we’ve completely ignored that.

Everything above will get examined in more detail. There’s much to do and little time. Let’s start again.

related to: Enter a search term, e.g. “democracy” and Everything is Going According to Plan

I

The last essay I wrote can be summed up in a sentence: measurement won’t tell you anything unless you know what you’re measuring and why you’re measuring it. This seems obvious and reasonable, which is why it invariably attracts criticism.

There are two bad responses and one good:

“We teach this in 101, you’re not saying anything new.” On the contrary, I’d have no reason to write any of this without the catastrophe of modern academia. Anyone remotely invested in the advancement of human knowledge and/or the use of that knowledge should be screaming right now.

“It’s the fault of media.” This is partially true, inasmuch as the media picks and chooses and can’t read a study to save its life, but even a good review of the evidence would be bad because the evidence is bad.

The more interesting, approximating a comment so as not to put anyone on blast: “Numbers – even imperfect approximations of qualitative judgments – are still a helpful tool for making judgments. For instance, APGAR scores rely on some degree of qualitative opinion enumerated, but they have a definite use and it would be bad to lose them. You’re overplaying your hand by attacking them as inherently bad.”

Normally I’d  just reply to the comment, but I have a feeling I’ll be using these democracy essays going forward and I want to get it clear.

II

I don’t mean to say that all qualitative and/or subjective (ignore that conflation for now) made-into-quantitative measurements are bad and useless. Some have clear and compelling reasons to exist. I’m grateful for the Apgar example because it helps draw out a few distinctions. As [comment] pointed out, “grimace” isn’t really much better than “democractic-ish” as far as qualitative judgments go. First, this is kind of unfair: I doubt many people would prefer Apgar scores to full examinations given infinite time, and it’s only due to the need for a measure right at that second that we default to them. Democracy scores aren’t really like that – I can’t think of a single situation where someone would need to assign one or look one up within a five-minute time span. Maybe if they’re trying to flunk a 101 social science class.

Still, the real difference isn’t time limitations, it’s subsequent tests. They’re imprecise but helpful, and we know this because a) doctors agree on at least a few of the letters and, b) they have solid predictive power:

For 13,399 infants born before term (at 26 to 36 weeks of gestation), the neonatal mortality rate was 315 per 1000 for infants with five-minute Apgar scores of 0 to 3, as compared with 5 per 1000 for infants with five-minute Apgar scores of 7 to 10. For 132,228 infants born at term (37 weeks of gestation or later), the mortality rate was 244 per 1000 for infants with five-minute Apgar scores of 0 to 3, as compared with 0.2 per 1000 for infants with five-minute Apgar scores of 7 to 10. The risk of neonatal death in term infants with five-minute Apgar scores of 0 to 3 (relative risk, 1460; 95 percent confidence interval, 835 to 2555) was eight times the risk in term infants with umbilical-artery blood pH values of 7.0 or less (relative risk, 180; 95 percent confidence interval, 97 to 334).

APGAR scores aren’t, of course, useful for everything. As the studies discusses, the APGAR score gets misapplied:

We cannot dispute the contemporary viewpoint that use of the Apgar score for the prediction of long-term neurologic outcome is inappropriate. However, the poor performance of the Apgar system as a predictor of neurologic development, a purpose for which it was never intended, should not undermine the continuing value of assigning Apgar scores to newborn infants.

Saying “it’s a question of what something is used for” is obvious, but the really interesting thing is this: not only can we tell when APGAR scores are properly used, there’s another observation that informs us of their improper use.

One problem with democracy scores is that they can only ever rely on other democracy scores for evidence. That is to say, democracy is a human categorization for political organization, there’s always going to be an element of human judgment. That’s not unique to democracy, and I can still think of cases where there are still uses for seemingly-totally-arbitrary scales.

For instance, meters do not exist in nature. They’re an arbitrary length we took for various purposes, but despite their arbitrary nature, everyone agrees on what a meter is. There’s a consensus that allows for their use. Democracy is not like this, as should be clear by the fact that all these measurements disagree, e.g. is “mandatory voting” more or less democratic than “free voting”?

There are cases where completely-arbitrary and also-lacking-consensus scales might serve a purpose. Films are different enough that everyone understands and accepts that “3.5 thumbs up” doesn’t mean anything objective. The films that fall into that particular configuration of digits could be anything, they’re all different, whatever. It’s still reasonably useful if you trust the reviewer, which is the point. If [Film critic you like] gives it a 7/9, then it’s helpful inasmuch as you’re interpreting it this way: [Critic] and you have similar tastes, you bet that could be your 7/9. The opposite is also true: [Absolute goon] gives [film] 10/10, a perfect boredom, and now you know to avoid it like the plague.

It would be stupid to assume that those are useful as measurements of the films alone. It’s better to say that they’re measurements of films based on your measurements of the person.

Of course, there’s an easy test here. I can watch the films myself to decide whether Ebert and I share tastes, and use that information to gauge subsequent reviews. I can also read his reasons behind that. If someone gives you consistently bad recs, if their Top 10 is all Dorm Room posters, “Scarface is underrated”, then you have something to check against. There is an object outside the person to correct your estimation of their estimations, and I’m sorry that a highly intuitive statement just looked so convoluted.

Now what of democracy?

III

I say that [democracy index] fails at all three of these. It lacks an empirical correlate for the Apgar-style-qualitative-measurements, inasmuch as “democracy” is not a natural phenomenon. It lacks the social consensus of the “meter.” It’s closest to the film review if anything, but there’s no easy way to determine how much you trust the critic. More:

Two things can be true at once: One, [Index] uses entirely good information, absolutely perfect, empirically unassailable. Two, its method of (a) collecting, (b) weighting, (c) interpreting, makes it completely unacceptable.

I think this is mostly what’s happening here. Folded into all of these indices is good information that tells you things. For example: voting records, self-reported trust in institutions, crime rates, etc. I don’t mean that those are all unproblematic to collect, but they generally tell you a real thing about the country. Moreover, any of those has a use of its own. If I want to head to [place] and I’m worried about crime, then looking at relative crime rates is a good idea. If I’m writing a study on international voting habits, I might look at registration and participation.

The issue is that none of those are the report. The purpose of the report is the scale: Democracy 1-10, that’s all it has to offer, that’s what sets it apart from the disaggregated data. The rest of that information is public, and what is not public is the expert opinion that goes into the ranking. In other words, the utility of the disaggregated information is not relevant to a criticism of a Democracy Index’s methodological flaws. All the Index adds are those flaws.

The trick (and it is a trick) is that they rely on the strength of someone else’s data to establish their credentials. In other words, they’re confusing the empirical work with their interpretations. “[Index] is a combination of miraculously incorruptible public records, death, and taxes.” So you say: must be legit, those are all uncontroversial and certain. But none of those are the index, so to understand the index you need to know why those were chosen and what the purpose of the scale is.

My argument is simple. In bullet points:

• Much of what goes into [score] is qualitative estimation.
• A bad qualitative argument gives a “3”; a good qualitative argument also gives a “3.”
• These are, notably, both just “3.” Everything that would have been useful is now lost. In the rare event that they produce a paragraph or two of justification, I’ll allow for that, but then what use is the scale? Just give me more paragraphs with all the space saved.
• This incentivizes extremely sloppy arguments and partisanship, inasmuch as people can just label a thing [number] and expect it to fly. Note that I say incentivizes rather than “allows for.” This is because the multiplicity of scales – a measurement for every bias – encourages groups to assign different ratings. There’s always a buyer.
• Because you cannot see the argumentation behind it, there’s not even the “do I trust this critic?” test that you’ll have with a film review. All you have is the credentials, backed by being-the-person-who-did-the-study.

Let’s ground ourselves in the scale of the problem, otherwise it’ll just be me insisting that no, actually, this is very bad.

Scales only agree on clear cases (Turkmenistan – autocracy; Norway – Democracy). Right off the bat: if you’re pouring money into an institution the very best results of which could be replicated by locking a few undergrads in a room with wikipedia for an hour, then you should probably rethink funding. Whatever. It’s instructive to look at hybrid regimes. From Gunitsky:

The fact that many indices are highly correlated may suggest that they are measuring roughly the same phenomenon. Polity IV and Freedom House, for example, have a Pearson’s R of 0.88. But as Casper and Tufis (2003) point out, highly correlated measures can produce very different regression results. Using three measures of democracy (Polyarchy, Freedom House, and Polity IV), they show that regressions of these highly correlated measures on variables like education and economic development often produce inconsistent results. Moreover, the correlation among measures is highest for clear-cut cases. The correlation between Polity and Freedom House drops to 0.64 when democracies are excluded from the analysis. And when both clear-cut autocracies and democracies are excluded, the correlation drops further to 0.50. This is especially problematic since democracy promotion and foreign aid is often directed at countries in the middle of the range. In these cases, the substantive results of any analysis may be greatly affected by the choice of measure.

Or:

That may superficially resemble checking Apgar scores against neonate mortality rates, but note that mortality rates are predictive. Far more concerning is the fact that the scores actually diverge over time. That is to say, they not only disagree about current democracy level, they also track democratization radically differently:

Such discrepancy is greatest in Russia, where the two scores diverge widely. Starting in the mid-1990s, Freedom House records a steep decline in democratic quality, while the Polity index records a slight rise followed by a leveling off.

But even this is too abstract. I mocked the EIU last time, but it’s not even the worst of the lot. Try Polity IV. Everyone disagrees over what to measure, but there are probably a few factors we’d all agree make something “democratic.” For instance, one assumes that “ability to vote” is a reasonably important aspect of a democratic nation. Polity IV blew that off and blasted ahead, preferring to measure “quality of democracy” by competition and power transfer among society’s elites.

Read Manfried Schmidt’s (pdf) Measuring democracy and autocracy  if you want a full breakdown, but you can get the sense from a few excerpts:

According to Polity IV, democracy is characterised by three key items: 1) institutions and processes that allow citizens to effectively express their political preferences and to combine these preferences into a package of alternatives from which they can choose, 2) institutional constraints on the executive and 3) guaranteed civil rights and liberties for all citizens of the state. If all of these conditions are met, the regime in question is classified as an institutionalized democracy (Marshall/Jaggers/Gurr 2014: 14). When the degree of democracy of a regime type is being measured, though, only the first and second key items are included in the calculations; the third key item, civil rights and liberties, is not used (ibid.: 14).

[…]

The indicators deal with the constitutional reality only in part and with the existence and realization of civil rights and liberties not at all. The basic idea of measuring the constraints on the executive needs to have a more complex measurement added, for instance a measurement on the model of the index of counter-majoritarian institutions (Schmidt 2010: 332, table 8) or on the model of the veto player theory (Tsebelis 2002). In addition, the Polity Project’s measurements of democracy and autocracy are rather executive-heavy. For one thing, the difference between suffrage for the few and suffrage for all adult citizens is not taken fully into consideration in these measurements. This is also true of the treatment of the relative sizes of electorates and of the voters’ ability to have a say in voting the political leadership in and out of office. This has resulted in serious errors.

This actually gets worse, the data is weighted in a strange enough way that several studies had to be done for the purpose of figuring out how it was actually ranking states. The most famous of them is Double Take: a reexamination of democracy and autocracy in modern polities by Kristian S. Gleditsch and Micahel D. Ward. Admittedly, it used Polity III data, but what it found was absolutely fascinating and still relevant. From the abstract:

[The authors] show how the analytical composition of the well-known democracy and autocracy scores is not upheld by an empirical analysis of the component measurements and demonstrate that democracy, as measured by the Polity indicators, is fundamentally a reflection of decisional constraints on the chief executive. The recruitment and participation dimensions are shown to be empirically extraneous despite their centrality in democratic theory.

A later review points out that Gleditsch and Ward were using a slightly more subjective measurement than desirable (decision trees). More reliable methods lead to:

It seems that Gleditsch and Ward’s finding (that executive constraint is the most important component of all of the components) holds up to some degree. It is clear, however, that executive constraint does not “virtually determine” scores on any of the three scales, as argued by Gleditsch and Ward. Participation competitiveness is much more important in determining democracy scores relative to executive constraint. Autocracy scores and the aggregated scale both show executive constraint to be the most important variable, but the other components also have non-zero importance.

The point here is that “democracy measures” are not only not measuring democracy in a way anyone means it, some aren’t even aware of what they genuinely are.

That last author closes with this:

That so much empirical work that theoretically discusses “democracy,” but is in fact measuring something akin to a (or a few) component(s) of democracy (depending on what scale you are using) should be a major issue in all relevant literature.

This plea is thus far unanswered.

IV

A clever contrarian: “Calling Polity IV the ‘worst’ implies that there are relative merits to the studies, which implies that one is better than another, which means it’s not entirely arbitrary.”

This is true, but I don’t think democracy is entirely arbitrary. I just don’t think that quantifying it in this way serves any purpose. The best information we have – and by far the most useful – is  going to be contained in everything that makes up those numbers, not the numbers themselves. The issue is use, and I think the use here depends on a particular role that “measurement” provides.

So, what is the reason to have a democracy scale?

A) I can’t really think of the purpose of a democracy measurement, specifically, that’s separate from a broader political argument. Newspapers use if for opinion pieces, academics need it to make measurements for [reasons], governments and charities want to make determinations for effective aide. It’s extremely rare that the average citizen is going to look one up “just because,” and even in the case that they do, would they prefer an off-the-cuff measure (as above) or something more rigorous? It seems insane to me that one would make the argument that “less information subject to no easy scrutiny” is actually a good thing for how we determine foreign policy, but here we are.

B) No measure will be good, but at least there could be a poorly representative consensus. The issue is that “democracy” is not merely a subjective, difficult, and abstract word with multiple competing interpretations and uses. It carries an implicit moral weight, it’s not a value-neutral term. In other words: it desires exploitation.

Of course, this is the general rule, but it’s also far too broad. I’ll give an example of what I mean, provided you understand this is about more than democracy: Everyone wants “democracy” on their side, and they also all want the empirical evidence to back them. This is for three reasons: 1) Democracy is The Good; 2) Empirical evidence means that you’re objectively correct; 3) It allows you to hide your argument. No one can tell what you’re actually doing, the numbers will be accepted anyway.

I think this is part  of the “it’s the newspaper’s fault,” and kind of. But they aren’t falsifying data, they aren’t even misrepresenting the scales. The issue is that we, as a society, told a bunch of researchers to make us arguments and make them look objective. This is for a host of reasons, but the easiest to grasp is probably the following: now we aren’t burdened with actually making our case.

Take two examples:

• Polity IV data, reproduced in an “objective” way that immediately set off culture war; heading title: “The Empirical View”
• Trump ranked last among presidents by 170 Political Scientists

Which is preferable?

At least the latter is explicit about what it’s doing – it may be the opinion of experts, but it’s still presented as an opinion. Polity IV data is presented as empirical evidence, despite being no such thing; that it incorporates empirical evidence does not mean it itself is. “This is the empirical view.” is hiding an ellipse: “…because it relies on empirical data.” which hides another ellipse, “…which was compiled subjectively and weighted subjectively based on a subjective interpretation of what democracy is.” The measurement, the number provided, is thus a numerical representation of that dude’s subjective views of democracy. “This democracy gets 3 thumbs up.” But who are you and why should I trust you?

Polity IV’s data is used by Our World in Data, which is in turn used by Steven Pinker. I don’t disagree with very much of his data but this is a pretty clear case where one should, and it’s a pretty clear case where he chose a terrible measurement that just happened to confirm all his biases. He’s not uniquely bad in this, and the fact that he’s normally careful is actually most of my point. For everyone railing about biased journalists or the illiterate masses, even the most-careful-pretend-objective-popularizations cannot help but use their favorite data. It’s not a problem with bias, or it is, but not only that: it’s a problem with the fact that we’ve made all arguments appear equally valid. Bad argument “3” is the same as good argument “3”, may as well choose the 3 on your team.

As a side note, it is also kind of funny to note that Pinker is accused of technocratic neoliberalism, by which the accusers mean that he ignores democracy in favor of elite control. To prove them wrong, he shows that democracy is increasing according to a measure of democracy without civil rights or the ability of the citizenry to participate in political questions.

V

For all of these reasons: yes, democracy measures are still useless and bad. The same is true for almost any quantiative measure of a qualitative question that – and this is the critical part – involves questions of morals, terminal values, and social approval. I didn’t overstate my case, I understated it.

Now I’m going to risk overstating my case, because you must hear what I will tell you. Here are four things that fall out of this. I’m reasonably certain of the first two. The third I’m reasonably certain of, but unsure how big of a deal to make of it. The fourth is an ought, not an is. All deserve more time than I’ll give them.

1) One of the weirder responses to the replication crisis (and adjacent crises) is to focus and critique only levels of technical proficiency. It’s not that I think this is unimportant – the story Jacob tells here about his psychologist friend gives me nightmares – but proficiency is not the only problem.

If you read enough Andrew Gelman – and you should read more than enough Andrew Gelman – one of the things you realize is that for every mathematically challenged study there’s one that just doesn’t understand its own tools. At times, technical skill is a net-negative, as in people running robustness checks in order to hide their findings. I think that’s rare, but it does happen. More common is people just not getting what statistical tools are used for or how they relate to the object under study. So far as I can tell, the vast majority of the replication crisis doesn’t come from – or at least isn’t because of – technical problems. It comes from a completely batshit mixture of assumption and misunderstanding and relying on bad studies that were themselves never critiqued.

I think the easiest way to put this is “not understanding how to form qualitative arguments,” as in: not know when to apply what method, never really learning why some tools do some thing. You see it here, in everything I wrote above: the researchers appear to not understand that they were assigning numerical values to their own opinions, because they do not understand when or why or how to assign a quantitative scale.

I’ll just say flat out: we’ve become bad thinkers, we cannot make qualitative arguments, we do not even understand the tools that we’re using. Trying to fix technical problems without addressing this will only make it worse, but for some reason that’s what we’ve mostly settled on. Also: I have no idea how to address this. Maybe read Plato or something.

2) It’s not just soft sciences, and it’s not just from misunderstandings. Scott:

We know many scientific studies are false. But we usually find this out one-at-a-time. This – again, assuming the new study is true, which it might not be – is a massacre. It offers an unusually good chance for reflection.

And looking over the brutal aftermath, I’m struck by how prosocial a lot of the felled studies are. Neurogenesis shows you should exercise more! Neurogenesis shows antidepressants work! Neurogenesis shows we need more enriched environments! Neurogenesis proves growth mindset! I’m in favor of exercise and antidepressants and enriched environments, but this emphasizes how if we want to believe something, it will accrete a protective layer of positive studies whether it’s true or not.

“Prosocial so true” is a subset of the much larger problem: sneaking moral judgments into “scientific language,” which is to say: acting as though you’re being value-neutral when you are not. I have zero idea if this is conscious or not, but I don’t think it really matters much.

That the social sciences are worse than the others, that they’re failing to replicate and that the results above (“democracy”) are so fucked as to be impossible to even begin replicating, is a natural progression. The social sciences study the things absolutely closest to us, the things we consider most important as a society. They’re practically designed to enumerate bias (literally), and so of course they do.

When I ask for “better qualitative research” and the elimination of these terrible faux-empirical scales, it’s not because I think that’s an actual solution. It’s because I want to force the actual methodology into the light. Arguing for them from “objective” standpoints isn’t defending the sanctity of quantitative methods, it’s providing cover for bad qualitative ones.

Which leads into:

Every other week the thinkeria says that American voters are shockingly ignorant, as proved by [thing], and they vote according to [group loyalty] and [irrational beliefs]. All true. Anyway, then some Extremely Serious Man will pronounce that we should train people to follow the scientific results, make their case based on the empirical evidence, input big data output big democracy.

This seems extremely rational, a very common sense solution, expectoration of divine reason. Allow me to suggest that it’s the single best way to destroy both science and also humans.

Proclaiming that your preferred policy is objectively correct because of [questionable data] is obnoxious, sure, but I don’t care about that. Think about what it incentivizes in the oppo. The moment people can only argue – are only allowed to have viable subjective opinions by passing them off as objective data – they’re going to do everything possible to produce results needed for the argument.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t train people to be as rational as possible – although I have no idea what such a thing means – but that we need to be exceptionally careful about what argument goes in what box. If you’re making a case for terminal values but it has to be objective, then expect that paper to be infected beyond measure. Rather than making the careful, philosophical argument such a thing deserves, you’re hiding all of that behind falsified numbers. You might be wondering why this is “worse” inasmuch as it’s basically the same “irrationality” and motivated reasoning as before, and you would be right. But note that it incentivizes different behavior in academia, and thus in journalism, and then…

When I say something like “empirical truth is a terrible lone value for protecting truth” it sounds like some edgy humanities shit, but everything above is the kind of thing I’m talking about. We will lie anyway, and making “facts” the measure of an opinion’s worth only incentivizes the proliferation of bad facts. Instead of there being certain genuine facts and then a bunch of uncertain but viable arguments, there’s a proliferation of terrible arguments presented as terrible fact. How do you plan to counter that? Their 3 is as good as yours, have you paid no attention to social sciences for the past decade? Consider that different terminal values exist, that respecting them as arguments in themselves at least eases the demand for terrible, falsified reports to confirm those as “the Truth.”

You’ll note that this is “reasonably certain” inasmuch as this is already happening. I expect it to get worse and to worsen in linear relationship with demand that all arguments have some data behind them, the data of which will be aggregated opinion.

3) Far less certain, and mostly social sciences specific: One of the more interesting questions that I have no idea how to answer is to what degree social science has begun to report on itself. I mean the following: the reports and studies and books and articles that come out referencing or relying on academia don’t pop into existence and disappear just as quickly. It’s all well and good to talk about the anti-democratic nature of the IMF or failures of USAID or [whatever], but those organizations are using the tools provided by the academics that later condemn them. Last time I talked about a direct case of this (the EIU using studies that used the EIU to produce the study), but almost none of it is going to be that direct. It will take place in terms of, a) government reliance on academic work and, b) media presentation of those reports that influence the populace.

I’m putting this in the “far less certain category” and already admitted to overstating the case, so let’s be as direct as possible: for all the talk of the “anti-democratic effects” of [organization], there’s basically none on the fact that most political methods, half the terminal values, and all “real empirical research” from which it derives, is provided by an unelected bureaucracy of academics and fellow-travelers who do not even realize the power they have. Moreover, it’s hard not to notice that if so, most of their reports are going to be explanations in some way of the impact of previous reports, some monstrous and ungainly turtle-ladder of misunderstood and misapplied research methods is being built.

I don’t know quite how new this is, but there’s definitely been an increased demand for technocratic solutions over the past century, and it would not shock me at all to learn that very recently Polity-IV-style data-science had suddenly assumed a billion more powers on the politometer than it previously did, and if social science is increasingly reporting on the effects of social science, there’s a bizarre conflict in its own data that’s almost impossible to untangle. “No longer a democracy,” says the EIU, so people lose faith, which makes us drop on the democracy scale, which makes…. One would assume that this ought to cause some degree of consternation or something. One would be wrong. Most causes are just going to be “the government” or “[such and such] firm” as though “the government” and “that firm” make decisions without reference to the sciences.

This is obvious for anyone with a particular taste in philosophy, but it’s not nearly as obvious as it should be to academia proper: presumably these studies have some effect, and presumably subsequent studies are studying some part of that effect. How big is that? Is it minor? Or is it like a missionary forgetting their role and claiming that the people converted on their own, and that this is a sign of the divine? At what point does a single researcher choosing between 3 and 4 have a significant say in who gets what developmental loan for democratization efforts? And when the inevitable later study examines the “Impact of [such-and-such] Effort”, how seriously are they going to take that 3-4 waffling?

You might wonder “why does anyone put up with this?” and the obvious answer is that they don’t. There’s tremendous consternation in the media (and the academy) about “anti-intellectualism” and “lack of faith in the media,” and these are real phenomena. The question is where they came from, why now. The media offers thirty dozen equally ingenious explanations, but they all presuppose the same thing: that people are wrong to have lost that faith, that it’s some flaw in them rather than that our media and its academy has failed to earn that trust. That the plebs are right, and our technocrats are elitist without being elite, blinkered by bad studies and their inability to know why these are bad studies.

“Why do they hate us?” Why shouldn’t they? If I had a semi-benevolent overlord that couldn’t tie his shoes I’d hate him too. I know this because I do and I do.

4) The absolute worst response to any of this is to abandon the social sciences and the humanities for being “uncertain” and “subjective.” a) qualitative does not mean subjective, learn to read words; b) tune in drop out only works if you’re a moron with a trust fund. That you’re relatively impacted does not mean other humans beings get off so easy.

If you can hack it then it’s your duty to enter the field and fight. There are no other options.

top image from The Decline of Western Civilizaton

I

The Economist: Democracy continues its disturbing retreat

The US has been classified as a “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)’s Democracy Index for the second year in a row. First, in 2016 (study released 2017), and now 2017 (released 2018). I’m going to privilege year under study and call the first the 2016 report and the second the 2017 report.

The global picture and a bonus briefer on our shortcomings:

Almost one-half (49.3%) of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort, although only 4.5% reside in a “full democracy”, down from 8.9% in 2015 as a result of the US being demoted from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” in 2016 (see Democracy Index 2017 by regime type, page 2). Around one-third of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule, with a large share being in China.

Here’s the report (pdf), methodology at the bottom. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index scores countries between 1-10 based on five factors: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.

You might wonder how one measures any of that, and you would be right to, and I have nothing to offer you but confusion. Apparently, the EIU uses both “public opinion polls” and “experts.” Since I cannot find any information on the specific experts – the website gives me all analysts, the editor of the report, and no further information – I’m guessing this means “some suits + World Values Survey.” No, I am not joking:

A crucial, differentiating aspect of our measure is that, in addition to experts’ assessments, we use, where available, public-opinion surveys—mainly the World Values Survey.

Here’s how countries are scored:
10-8 =  Full democracy.
8-6 = Flawed Democracy.
6-4 = Hybrid Regime.
4-rekt = Authoritarian.

In 2016 the US dropped into the “flawed democracy” category, and this trend continues. You might wonder “dropped how” and the answer is .02 democracies, because as of 2017 we’re a 7.98. No, I have no idea what that means either. According to the report, we’d been teetering on the edge for a while due to low confidence in institutions, and that finally pushed us over.

This is presumably a worrying trend or something, although I have no idea what it’s a trend of. Still, it’s a relatively minor fall with many causes and we should probably keep our heads cool. It’s worth noting that if we were downgraded due to trust in the system, inaccurately reporting that the US government is no longer democratic probably isn’t the best way to rectify that.

These are the best democracies in the world — and the US barely makes the list

America falls short of being a full democracy for second year running, report finds

And, finally, from Democracy Dies in Darkness itself:

U.S. democracy is in grave danger, a new Economist report warns

II

So now we all know a thing that was predetermined by an arbitrary system. Go into the articles themselves and they’ll be careful to point out three things:

1) This is not about Trump – according to the report he benefited rather than causing. I assume this is why Trump features prominently in the ledes.

2) Democracy is falling on a global scale, so this isn’t just about the Anglos. That’s a lie, intentional or not, and it’s why the 2016 America-is-downgraded report objectively-and-globally opens thus:

Caveat, buried deep in the report itself: “Maybe Brexit is a sign of a strong democracy.” Who knows either way? (Everyone who looks at the front page knows it is not.)

3) The US, 7.98, is still ranked 21st in the world by whatever units they’re using to rank. Note that none of this matters because the measure doesn’t matter, only the phrase matters, and the phrase’s use is arbitrary: “Flawed democracy” might be 9 or 7.4 or 6.3, how would anyone know? It’s not a natural category, you can’t test it against anything outside of the court of public opinion. Failing the court of public opinion, you can rely on the experts.

The fairest presentation of the report is going to lead to issues, because the report itself is a mess. They get expert opinion on a series of questions, weigh those against public data, and release none of the results except a final tally. For instance: “confidence in institutions” is clearly important, lacking it hurts you. But also important:

Question 32. The preparedness of population to take part in lawful demonstrations. 1: High. 0.5: Moderate. 0: Low.
If available, from World Values Survey % of people who have taken part in or would consider attending lawful demonstrations.
1 if over 40%. 0.5 if 30-40%. 0 if less than 30%

There is, presumably, some correlation between “lost confidence/discontent” and “% who have taken part or would consider taking part in protests,” they give opposite scores. At the very least, one might imagine that one leads to the other, e.g. the United States for the past five decades. Who knows how opposite points are weighted.

You might also wonder what a flawed democracy is. Read on and continue to wonder:

Flawed democracies: These countries also have free and fair elections and even if there are problems (such as infringements on media freedom), basic civil liberties will be respected. However, there are significant weaknesses in other aspects of democracy, including problems in governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation.

To be fair, sounds like home, which it’s supposed to, because all of those are meaningless sounds you can apply to anything at any time. It’s political astrology. “There are problems, basic civil liberties will be respected.” Basic is doing all the work, I have no idea what a non-basic civil liberty is, I assume it’s when you turn the Bill of Rights to 11.

Of course, everyone already knows what a flawed democracy is, the same way they know what “underdeveloped political culture” means. It’s that dude down the street, the guy he voted for, and why he voted.

III

First off: this is how you invent a world we all have to live in while pretending you didn’t. Ok? Ok. Next:

There are two major problems here, the first social and the second academic. Since the first feeds the second, let’s address it up front.

I hope that none of my readers is naive enough to think that all of this would be the same had Hillary been elected. It would still be bad, just bad in a different way. Breitbart is nightmare bullshit, but so is everyone. “Fake news,” data point: this entire report.

The 2016 report got a lot more play than the 2017 report, for obvious reasons. Trump gets elected, we get downgraded, what a scoop. The conspiratorial take is this: it isn’t too hard to wiggle that .02 for all the headlines, especially considering that there’s no way for anyone to check. I have no idea if this is true, my own position is “had to look up defamation laws before writing this,” thankfully that doesn’t matter anyway.

First, there are dozens of democracy watchers, all with conflicting scores, at least one will give you the headline you need. Second, all you need is the headline. The primary way that people learn about these things isn’t the newspaper’s writeup, it’s names, ledes, friends, facebook, whatever. “America no longer a full democracy, I knew he was an orange fascist.” At best some politico will namecheck the report at a rally: “America is [good things] but we’ve lost our way. An important democratic watchdog has recently warned that our democracy can no longer be called a democracy. It’s surely because of the […]. Vote for me to reverse it.” Please clap.

Even the fairest presentation of the report is going to lead to issues, but the presentations are not fair. Despite the Hail Mary at objectivity, check the title which no article can resists pointing to: “Democracy Index 2017: Free speech under attack.” One will inevitably conclude that the US is among the underattacked, but the US receives the highest possible score for free speech (10/10), and none of them mention it. It’s Europe that’s losing its media freedoms. The only threat to America is, apparently, college students:

Governments, in democratic as well as authoritarian countries, are deploying defamation laws, prevention of terrorism laws, blasphemy and “hate speech” laws to curb freedom of expression and stymie media freedom. Non-state actors, including militant Islamists, criminal gangs and vested interests also pose a growing threat to free speech, using intimidation, threats, violence and murder. Freedom of expression is also under threat from those who claim the right not to be offended. This is leading to growing calls for “safe spaces”, “trigger warnings”, “hate speech” laws, no-platforming, tabloid newspaper bans and the policing of the internet to cleanse it of “offensive” content.

Agree or not, this isn’t quite what you’d gather from the write-ups.

That these are used to sell papers rather than [anything else] is obvious beyond belief, but I do want to show it. The report itself looks a whole lot more “right wing” inasmuch as it calls trigger-warnings a threat to democracy, but don’t get fooled. Note that Breitbart didn’t blast the news through the roof. It certainly seems like they should – shouldn’t they be salivating over “Democracy Index downgrades us because of snowflakes”? But Breitbart understood that this was partisan rhetoric masked as report, which is why they deployed their own: Economist Ranks Israel Among World’s Most Democratic Nations. I know, shocking.

I’m not defending Trump, nor do I think “the media is out to get him.” I’m saying the media is out for itself, and if it can make it look as though the state is gunning for them, that makes sharing their articles much more important. Trump as a real human and political actor rather than as TRUMP is irrelevant to the equation. He’s a useful tool here, not a material reality. By presenting itself as the target of political assault, Democracy Dies in Darkness makes its own proliferation a political act, i.e. “They don’t want you to see this, but  – ” This is for the same reason that Twitter banning accounts is a great marketing move. Everyone who remains now has some stake in it, there’s a hint of danger, “This must be important or else the system wouldn’t attack it.”

Since it is a fact that the insinuation of these articles – whether by indolence or cognitive dissonance – will be “Trump has undemocratized the US” consider what that means for the democracy dies in darkness set. They did nothing, and thus do not have to reconsider their actions. Now everything that goes wrong is not your fault, how could the people be wrong if we’re a flawed democracy? Special interests or some shit. Yeah, yeah, “blaming the outgroup” but who cares about that? Far more interesting is this: the definition of “democracy” is unproblematic, it’s been quantified, the Scientists Are On It, it requires no action from the demos. “Do we live in a democracy or not? Better get the elite’s assurance.”

“Who cares about the definition?” Everyone, all of it, that’s what this is, that’s what the report reported at you.

IV

“It’s been quantified. Science is on it.”

About 15% of my readers cringed and blanked out at that point. I don’t blame you. Mocking quantification has an uncanny correlation with writing the philosophical equivalent of a barcode neck tattoo. “They’re turning us into numbers, man.”

Everything can be quantified, but not all quantifications are made equal. Or: everything would be roses if we could turn humans into numbers, but we do not yet know how. Our brains do not allow for that, which is a problem if you’re studying things that exist only in the brain. “Democracy” does not have an objective definition, there is no natural phenomenon to control for, we lack the ability to correct regime change against red-shifts. Empiricism is great if you’re studying empirical phenomena, but if you mistake qualitative attitudes for numerical expressions, you’re in for a world of hurt.

That does not make it unimportant. At least as a word, it brings up pleasant associations and makes us feel we should Act In a Way. In other words, how much money would you pay to live in a country .02 democramperes more democratic vs. how much would you pay for your country to move from “flawed democracy” to “full democracy”? Here I assume you aren’t Mencius Moldbug, but in case you are just flip the questions and you’ll get it.

This report is defining it while pretending to study it. You might think the issue is merely the labeling – too qualitative, arbitrary categorization, just report the numbers – and that would be a compelling point. “Politics is a spectrum disorder” is certainly a fine definition of the object under study. That’s just another trick, but I’ll grant that it’s a clever one.

1) There’s no way to report that data non-qualitatively. Even lacking categories (“full” or “flawed” or “hybrid regime”), it will be presented qualitatively, e.g. “Top 10” and “Top 50” are qualitative evaluations with numerical masks. To understand why, consider the massive difference between Top 10% of x and Top 11%. “Meaningless.” Not to the admissions committee. The media knows this, see: Hotel Concierge’s piece on happiness. They’re making a different point than me, but the reasons are the same.

2) There’s no way for an individual to interpret that data non-qualitatively, because outside of, say, “voting registration/populace” you’re not talking about a naturally numerical phenomenon. When I say “Moldova is a 5.94” that gets translated into pictures in your brain. What are you conceptualizing for the number? What about “Worse than Albania, better than Guatemala”? “Midway between Croatia and Uganda”? Anyone who claims that they’re capable of just thinking the number is lying. The measure itself is based on qualitative phenomena, which means the number-as-number is meaningless.

3) This will get ignored, but still must be said: I don’t discount the individual studies that go into an index. Voter registration, reported confidence in institutions, number of journalists in prison, etc. are all valuable in themselves.

Still, point at which one of those is democracy. The criteria is going to be qualitative by nature. That comes both from which variables are assigned (e.g. is “loss of confidence in government” a sign of democracy or not?) to how those are measured (do I assign “sense of political commitment” in Serbia a .5 or a 1?).

It’s (3) that’s the big one. No matter how many ways you cut the data, you’re trying to assign objective measurements by subjective criteria. Somewhat ironically, I can empirically prove that. Seva Gunitsky, discussing post-Soviet States, charts a bunch of different democracy measures against one another, and finds out that there is… well, see for yourself:

Two theories. They aren’t all of it, but they’re worth considering. They also aren’t mutually exclusive, and I assume that both are happening:

A) Sometimes Person A makes a claim about [concept], and Person B disputes that claim on the grounds that Person A doesn’t have a very clear definition of [concept]. Person A responds that simple, common sense definitions of [concept] are obvious, and Person B is making nonsense semantic arguments, “like a philosopher,” except this is 2018, so “like a postmodernist.” What’s going on above is the proof of that. “Obvious” things like democracy aren’t agreed upon. “It’s just a semantic argument, we should look at the data,” but the data is predicated on the semantics. Misunderstand that and create full-blown postmodern hyperreality.

B) Since the point of the studies is the measurement of democracy itself, each new one is incentivized to be at least slightly different. No point making a new measurement that conforms to all the old ones, after all. This means this does relying on even more qualitative arguments, because the reliable data is already shared. Also means forcing those arguments to be quantitative to change the measurement. “Oh.”

Someone made the decision to define “Flawed Democracy” as “8.0 to 6.0 Democramperes.” The reason it will never drop arbitrary categories like “hybrid state,” is that those categories are its raison d’être.

It’s not that the EIU report has good or bad information, plenty of its variables are measurable, none of those are the report. All of them are public: Pew, Gallup, World Values, etc. Its works cited looks like the NYT bestseller list: Lilla, Murray, Fukuyama, Putnam. I’m not saying any of those are bad books, who cares if they are, there’s no particular expertise required to read them nor are the paywalled by anyone but amazon. The only thing this report adds is the categorization, backed by [something], carefully curated by “a panel of experts.”

V

I’m banging on the EIU because it pounced on me from the shadows of google, but don’t get confused: each and every measurement has the same problem. Freedom House, Polity IV, all of them.

The second a report is classified as A Report, an entire ecosystem of knowledge blooms out. Part of that is public information: “We live in a flawed democracy” passes from headline to reader to watercooler to common knowledge. A whole lot of it is subsequent work, which informs itself, which then informs later work.

For example: The 2017 EIU points to a Pew poll that reports on attitudes towards democracy in authoritarian vs. democratic societies. In what I’m sure is a coincidence, that Pew Report used the Democracy Index’s 2016 report as its measure. Nobody bothers to mention this, but something something snakes and swallowing and tails. At some point, you’re left holding a pile of data sets all impossibly tangled up in earlier incarnations of the same data set. A Social Science rat-king, if that rat-king had the power to loosen the IMF’s wallet. “What-” Who do you think relies these things?

That sounds “conspiratorial” except it isn’t. This is A Report, what else are you going to use? Go on google scholar and search “Democracy Index” or “Freedom House” or “Polity IV.” To really get your blood boiling, observe that all of these are cited in two ways:

1) By one or two careful Political Science papers pointing out methodological flaws with more respect than I am. Credit where credit is due, I’m not trying to slander the social sciences in total, most of them get the problem. But.

2) By thousands of other papers unquestioningly repeating the data, half of those papers used by other papers, and…

For all the talk of the replication crisis – and for all that there’s less talk than there should be – the actual extent of it almost never reaches the surface. This isn’t properly a replication problem (different measurements by design), but it has the same underlying issue: We pretend that bad studies are discrete. “This one failed to replicate, toss it out,” but none of them are self-contained. How many subsequent papers turn to it for evidence? How many of those papers are cited as crucial evidence? How many become underlying knowledge for the next generation of scientists? A frantic undergrad could tell you that the strength of a paper lives or dies with its citations. Would that we had more frantic undergrads in high office!

Last: what gives these reports their devastating import – what makes them not “Jeff’s Words and Numberthoughts” but The Official Report – is the expertise assigned those behind them. That expertise is granted by citations, media exposure, position as “Editor of [report].” Or: why do they get to assign the facts? They’re the experts. Why are they experts? Because they’ve assigned the facts. See how that works?

Don’t like it? “Well, where’s your data?”

VI

My position is totally banal: “mixed methodology is good,” someone will still find a way to attack. Everyone believes in mixed-method social sciences until their preferred method doesn’t work, and then the knives come out. I guarantee this essay is taken as evidence of “qualitative bias,” which is insane, because I’m trying to point out bad qualitative arguments infecting empirical studies. I’m not against empiricism, I’m pro-empiricism, which is the issue. The only bias I have is the following, and I need you to think real hard about it: that does not allow us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That we cannot perfectly measure “democracy” – that we shouldn’t even try – does not make it a meaningless concept. It merely means it must be addressed differently.

Since I talk about “values” a whole bunch, and I occasionally attack data, people might get the impression that I’m saying something like the following: “Quantification of [nice concept] is bad because it damages the human spirit, it ignores Important Ethical Concerns and Real Human Values.” Fair enough, I know that exact argument, it’s a bad one. I’m saying the opposite. Misapplying quantification does not evade or ignore values, it encodes them. It takes unexamined assumptions and pretends that they’re dispassionate measurements. What happens subsequently is the defense of them as “empirical science” by people who don’t know what either of those words mean. Of course,  it isn’t a defense of science, it’s a defense of your own preferred values, e.g. look at the reporting above.

Quite a few of the most important aspects of human life are going to be very hard to study using empirical methods. They cannot be easily quantified (if they can be at all), and feigning objectivity with “the data” does not tell me that you’re a serious thinker who’s looked at the facts. It tells me precisely the opposite – that your mind was made up, and you hunted out whatever suited you. Repeating these only damages [everything]; I 100% believe that American democracy is decaying, should I use the EIU as my source? Do I need a source to get the point across? Serious question, ask it to your soul. What kind of argument do you accept for what, and what does that preference incentivize?

The issue here is not “quantitative vs. qualitative.” It’s bad qualitative vs. good qualitative. At some point we decided that “objectivity” means “numbers” and “that guy with the numbers” translates into “expert opinion.” To be taken seriously, “experts” began frantically hiding opinion behind “data” and, seemingly, forgot that they’d done so. In other words: there are opportunity costs to consider, how much researcher time goes into what, how much training goes into what. Observe the EIU report: “flawed democracy” is qualitative, determined by qualitative judgments of qualitatively-assigned variables, all of it based on a “quantitative” scale, itself qualitatively defined.

The easiest way to show that this is “bad” is to point out that the data sets all disagree. That’s not actually why these studies are bad. It’s a pretend problem, it still assumes that there’s a reason they “should” agree. But why? If they agreed would that be better or worse? What would you have proven?

The point of these papers is to say something about “democracy,” but even if every graph were identical they would not be talking about democracy. Given that democracy is subjective, that there is no objective measurement, you’d merely have established consistency in the way that experts define democracy. This is for exactly the same reason that “loss of confidence in public institutions” is not causal for the US becoming a flawed democracy, it’s causal for the Economist Intelligence Unit labeling the US a flawed democracy. Everyone dutifully reiterates this in one sentence, forgets it in the next.

The only useful information that could be extracted would require an examination of their qualitative account, because that’s going to tell you: a) where the definition comes from and, b) why they’re applying it here. The numbers aren’t numbers, they’re opinions with the gall to arithmetize themselves. Democracy indices are an example, but they’re far from the only one. See: [almost any abstract concept we care about]. Mathematizing them is a) impossible and b) far less desirable than producing good arguments. Unfortunately, it breeds bad ones. If  “flawed democracy” was the EIU’s desired outcome, then not enough time went into their argument. It’s tossed off in a few sentences and given a stamp. Instead, all of that time went into seeing which measure on the predetermined scale could be messed with to produce the desired result. Go back to that definition of “flawed democracy.” Would that fly as a rigorous account anywhere but here? “It has to fit a lot of numbers.”

Were the reports presented as they are, i.e. philosophical arguments, opinion pieces, occasionally employing empirical data but not limited to that, the authors would be required to show their work. If they did it badly, then you’d know not to trust them, they would not be experts. Here, you know to trust them as experts because they are presented as such and because the presentation lacks their argumentation. I read the op-eds and I take my priors off stun; here, I just have to assume they more or less know what they’re talking about. Consider just how perverse this is.

In other words: encouraging “data” from opinion means you do not even get a good opinion. You get nothing, numbers on a page, each one encoding an assumption and evaluation that you are not presented with. And all of that changes “democracy” in the social sphere. That those reports use reliable, genuinely empirical evidence – voter turnout, etc. – says nothing about their judgment of “democracy,” and that is the only concept that they can change. The closest they have to arguments are justifications for changing ratings, which are casually reported as causal factors in “democratic decline.” Note that these are a couple of paragraphs per region. “Sounds like expertise to me.”

Now: picture – and I mean really silver screen it – an argument between Person with Numbers and Charts vs. Person with Opinions. You and I both know how America views that debate, and if not America then “reasonable, evidence-minded people”=the kind of people who get Wowed by the Economist. It is a fact that these are not facts, but everyone wants the Facts anyway, there must be a chart, we are compelled by eutaxy, the rest is “merely philosophical speculation.” But that “merely philosophical speculation” is, in fact, the evidence. When you discount it in favor of “data,” you have not gone straight for the hard truths. You’ve buried them.

Keep in mind, by [argument above] it’s irrelevant what those numbers and charts are. They’re opining in units, a sciencey flair and nothing else, and yet we do not treat these as equally qualitative arguments. “Uh, we do.” You’re blind. Sorry, no data for that one, either.

VII

We applied incorrect tools to a problem and incentivized the worst use of them. Now we sagely nod about the problem while hoping it disappears. But the problem won’t disappear.

The only justification of a democracy measurement is its precision, e.g. [event] occurs and then +.01, wowza, let’s [event] a few more. Hence, the measurements’ use up and down the entire “objective” “data-driven” sector; pseudocolumns to datajournos to the IMF, World Bank, and USAID. At least USAID recently admitted it didn’t work, but note that this does not matter. All aid – whether by banks or the Fed, lack or surplus – is going to get run through the public ringer. How do We the People determine its effectiveness? What lets us know the thing to do, all the while casually determining the economic course of [nation] from our couches? Answer: Democracy is Under Assault and it Seems We’re Not Helping Any. Thanks, I didn’t know that.

The studies are already here, they’re already proliferating, our response has hilariously been to keep creating new and different democracy indices, forever ignoring the underlying problems. To repeat for the zillionth time: those concepts determine our entire debate. Like it or not, there are not objective scales for most of human society. The scale is meaningless by design, you’re either thinking about a qualitative concept or nothing, pretend it’s an easy common-sense concept and crash into [everything above].

Maybe you don’t care about politics, but this isn’t just about politics. “Democracy,” sure. What else does it apply to?

still from Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel

note: this is very long.

You taught me language, and my profit on ’t

Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!
-Caliban, The Tempest

I

Their ideals had begun to turn on them.

If you want to be a philosopher about it, the problem is being vs. becoming, Heraclitus’ Fire and Flux vs. Parmenides’ Oneness and Rest. Plato unites these, so the story goes. This isn’t exactly true, but it’s close enough: the very highest things are Being, so eternal, and the very top of that is the Form of the Good. The lower things of this world are becoming – shadows in the cave – but they partake in Being via the forms. Man has two natures – flesh and soul – flesh is becoming and soul is being. The best human life, then, is one that partakes in the eternal, and especially in the form of the good. Normally, this is just called “Truth.” It’s important that this work in a particular way: if there is no access to being, then all our knowledge is shadow and wind. This worked out very well for us for a time, truth was a fine friend, it even gave us a God or two for when the nights were particularly nocturnal.

Then the first problem: Truth unsettles everything around it. Empiricism is a very effective way to pursue our ideals, and it pursues them right off a cliff. Turns out there is no metaphysical ground, atoms in a void, many worlds in the multiverse and the You in each of them is terrified and confused. Theoretically, you were supposed to find a sobering and harmonious universe. What you find is a teenage goth’s wildest fantasies: there is no heaven, there is no God, there is no meaning, morality is arbitrary, justice is the will of the stronger, humans are self-deceiving moral monsters, fuck it, I’ll be a gnat next life. But you can’t just lie, that’s still wrong for poorly understood reasons, we can’t go back.

We want a reason to exist, so that’s a bummer, but not really the end of the world. I guess you can just mope or something, Siouxsie was pretty cool. So you Phil 101: “Humans determine their own meaning.” Blatantly untrue if you’ve talked to one, but I understand the significance of the words. It’s a subjective phenomenon, we are subjects, maybe meaning [static and wails]. I don’t even disagree, I just don’t think you understand. Not only did you not make that choice, it’s not even the right one. “How wondrous to exist and Sisyphus really digging the struggle,” is no meaning at all, it’s too abstract, it’s both flabby and hollow at once, it’s only possible for a weakling to raise it because it’s so empty. Everyone wants “good things” and is quite sure that “good things” are rather important. Does that help us coordinate for the specific goods we want?

Here’s your second problem: Truth unsettles itself. What truth does find doesn’t look much like its first mandate. Not only are there no Platonic Forms, there’s nothing that even resembles objective truth. The human mind evolved to lie to itself, to interpret according to experience, but even checking experience against experience is merely the best approximation of a human experience. It may be our best interpretation, but scientific truth is just an interpretation conditioned by the creature experiencing it. No, sadly, there aren’t better ones. Trust me, I’ve looked. Without Platonism you’re screwed for the deep deep grounding. This should change something maybe, if there’s no moral purpose and Truth is just an interpretation then why not discard it for happiness? Deepak Chopra seems like he has a pleasant outlook – I imagine it’s much like thought thinking itself through a lukewarm bath. That it’s “wrong” is no count against it if you can’t justify your own truths, but you still can’t seem to lie to yourself.

Good instinct. But also why silent black screen, slow rise of a single note, cigarette-voice: Their ideals had begun to turn on them.

Here’s your third problem: it is hard to be a creature of becoming that understands being. We judge ourselves by unrealistic standards. “Understands.” Now you know that’s a ridiculous problem to have, an artifact of evolution, just some cave-man shit. Does that make it go away? It’s the thought of it that hurts, not its reality. Zeus isn’t real either but it’s the reason you understand why Homer made Zeus judge: “Of all the living creatures, man is the most wretched.” You are a creature that has some notion of ephemerality, some desire to be more-than-that, and finally the knowledge that this is impossible. Eat up.

II

The number one question that people ask me is what I mean by nihilism. The second is what I propose to do about it. This is about the first.

Hedge maze: I don’t have the groundwork necessary, because that’s coming the epistemology/math series, and I can’t go over literally every essay I have planned at once, and certain things take time to say. Apparently I tried anyway, because this is now 12,000 words, my bad. Turns out I’m telegraphing the entirety of samzdat, so treat it reasonably: it’s a map, and thus not the territory.

Nietzsche takes are subject to Formula 1 Gresham’s Law and I avoid him for that reason, but evasion isn’t really possible here. Anyone talking about nihilism is going to be talking about him, and I’ve noticed him creeping into my essays more and more. This is almost certainly a sign to just do it and be done with it. He’s not my end, but he is important for this, and he’s often misunderstood. I’m not actually European, but pretend I’m an Italian Grid Girl if it makes it easier.

In a sense, nihilism is merely an observation: the things that we once used to justify our existence are gone. God, nation, virtue, justice, #whatever. Those were unsettled by truth, then truth unsettled itself, and our intellectual culture is still reeling and frantically trying to escape the consequences. If you don’t think that thoughts spring ex nihilo from Cartesian super-reason, then this is likely important for “ideas” plus “everything going on within and after and behind those ideas.”

The closest that Nietzsche gets to defining nihilism is the beginning of the Will to Power: “Our highest values devalue themselves. There is no ‘why’.” This is pretty close to the popular understanding of “nihilism” as meaninglessness. He then uses the term – as I do – in a thousand different ways. This requires some explanation.

In a sense, the easiest way to think about the broader nihilism is as a construct. It stands in for whatever’s behind a bunch of correlated phenomena (vaguely similar to the g factor, I guess). So, say, anomie, meaninglessness, lack of coordination, fanaticism, narcissism, etc. are different things but they correlate. The use of nihilism for all those is a way to point at some underlying, yet-to-be-understood cause beneath them. (Note that some of these run into all the dangers of ordinal scales,  e.g. Sam is a 5 in happiness and Sue is a 10. Did that rank happiness, their private definitions of it, what they ate for lunch, their conformism, or how agreeable they are to the tester? W/e, side complaint, moving on.)

“Why call it nihilism?” Well, it explains [some]% of variance in the stuff above, but 100% of the variance between people who say “life is meaningful” and people who say “life is nothingness.” But of course there’s more, because he did think he could define it. He does above. He even thought that he’d figured out very roughly what happened and why it had happened. So in addition to all that it’s also about everything.

III

“Loss of values” is the normal way I use the term, where value=whatever is important to you or your society. This is slightly different but related to norms for a pretty obvious reason: norms are mostly set up to help us achieve some aim, but that itself implies the value.

An important thing to understand about Nietzsche before going forward: he thinks that the unconscious is vastly more important than conscious thoughts. As in:

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” One thinks; but that this “one” is precisely the famous old “ego,” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” (From Beyond Good and Evil)

One: that makes the opening section a myth, i.e. my intro was all intellectual development, but the material causes are equally-or-more important. I think more, and that’s why I write about them.

Two: This is also a way to understand why those different things should have any overlap at all, but that’s a much longer argument.

Three: from time to time, Nietzsche amuses himself by proving things from four or five causal directions, generally under the spirit of sussing out the best, but also under the assumption that all of them kind of play into the above. This makes him hard to read, and also explains why five people can return with five interpretations. That’s intentional, reading requires “delicacy and tempo,” (his words) but also why someone will enter the comments section and say nah but here’s a Nietzsche quote that says – Don’t care, they’re wrong. For instance: every mohawk knows about philosophizing with a hammer, which is So Manly. Nietzsche was thinking of a tuning hammer.

Four: This will have profound consequences for resolving the problem that I will not go into. Also: existentialism is hilariously inadequate for the task of not-hating-yourself and not-making-a-bad-world. I admit that it was adequate for Camus’ sex life.

If I don’t think that ideas matter much compared to material circumstances, you might be wondering why I spend so much time writing about them. It’s because we are very bad at consciously recognizing valuations underlying our arguments, we’ve lost the knack for it, and this shines through in argumentation. This is for one unbelievably obvious reason: you have to pull things down to the moral axioms for arguments, which lets me see what’s under the hood.

Another way of putting this: it comes out in how we argue for things, not what we argue for. “I believe in plenty of things! I can tell you all about them.” But what if in the process of getting there you undermine every reason to believe in those things? Why do so many hardcore physicalists make arguments that collapse into really weird metaphysics? The lazy response, find it on reddit: “Uh, it’s just scientism being too stupid for philosophy.” Oh, they’re dumb, is that all? Guess it’s time for a coffee break. Better argument: the particular way we evaluate truth, and especially “True True Truth,” is coming from an old Platonic ideal. Since the “STEM Materialism” vs. “Theist Theism” vs. “Humanities [Romanticism?]” argument is precisely about that “True True Truth,” it’ll get unconsciously invoked. Or:

After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries — a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. — And we — we must still defeat his shadow as well! (The Gay Science)

This is a Plato joke, and whenever Nietzsche says “Christianity” think “Platonism.” We’re still sucking up aspects of truth that we have no right to without something else. “Good god, you’re an irrrationalist.” No, I love reasons, using them is one of my favorite hobbies. Missing the point. How do you avoid the self-referential statement? Truth must be justified, there are no higher values to justify it, it is the highest, it undercuts itself.

“This is a Plato joke.” The shadows are Christian (Platonic) values like morality, truth, whatever. In Plato’s Republic, those shadows on the wall meant a specific thing: they’re the vague, fuzzy reflection of the Form, of whatever is actually going on, which means this aphorism collapses into itself in a very particular way: a) most obvious, but none of those are real things, the Forms are gone, leave the cave and it’s just emptiness; b) not only are those values not real, but we don’t even understand why they were there, we’re still chained up and seeing the shadows, not the (dead) Forms that once caused them. Get it? Shadows of a Dead God, not even the Dead God in itself. We’re just using a vague remnant of it, something fun for the kids to gawk at.

IV

In other words: God is dead, but Platonic ideals stuck around to curse at us. Chief among them was truth. So why choose this value? What does it do for you?

Nietzsche took the term “nihilism” from a Russian movement that was kind-of-vaguely-left-wing-but-not-really-maybe. It’s hard to say with any precision, because their whole thing was not having set beliefs and terminal values. Assuming you aren’t Jonah Goldberg or a tankie, neither “violence” nor “caring about the people” is a left/right thing. In Nechayev’s words: “Our task is terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction.” The nihilists were professional revolutionaries, not idealists, and they wanted tear it all down first, build up later. The Nihilists grew moderately popular, the liberal press freaked out, one of their ringleaders killed a member for defecting, the liberal press really freaked out, Dostoyevsky wrote a book based on it, Nietzsche liked a theater adaptation of the book. The end.

Central to Dostoyevsky’s story is the way that, though it quibbled in the papers, bourgeois society enabled nihilists (and by extension all revolutionary movements) because doing so was fun and interesting, like a charade or a good summering or a public execution. Nice liberal society had no actual beliefs it was willing to sacrifice for, which is the same as saying it had no beliefs, but was too self-absorbed to recognize its pleasant, common-sense reasonableness as anything but a vague and arbitrary opinion. By contrast, the revolutionaries really just wanted power, an equally arbitrary opinion, but one that the petty provincial aristocracy could not understand. It was something not-them, and not-them things are not. Anyway, then the nihilists burn the town down in the process of destroying themselves and Whoops! now you have a nothing.

Note well: even if they recognized this, they could not respond. Most were humanists, so all they really had was common-sense and “high sentiments of the spirit”=no moral compass of any kind. If the highest value is “be reasonable, think a fact,” then what can you say to the guy who wants to tear it all down? “It’s mean.” God is dead, weren’t you dancing on his grave a second ago? Is [future fireman] factually wrong? What’s the best argument against him on our own terms, empathy from fucking mirror neurons? Tell that to the gladiators. You get that people enjoy making the enemy suffer, right? “How unreasonable.” Says who? It’s a fact, unsure why, I’m sure you can evopsych a reason for it. It’s probably tigers. “Nice people banged less. Also, fuck sports.” Look at me, I’m Geoffrey Miller.

Nietzsche liked Dostoyevsky, but Dostoyevsky was a committed Christian, and Nietzsche was not even close. He began applying the word “nihilism” to all of society – liberal press, sure, but also conservative autocrats, nationalists, romantics, scientists, etc. – differentiating between “active” nihilism (like Nechayev and the revolutionaries) and “passive” nihilism (everyone else) as a way to get at the following:

The Nihilists, in a sense, cared about the ideals of society much, much more than anyone else. They were basically lionizing Christian morality: care about the poor above all else, etc. Far more importantly, and why “active nihilism” came to include pessimistic philosophy (and Nietzsche himself, to some degree): they actually gave a shit about Truth-capital-T.

Once you rip out the metaphysical backing, but you keep insisting that we be reasonable and fastidious in our thinking – as in, “There is no God, because the truths of science.” – the whole relative-truth thing starts becoming inevitable. One can reasonably say “sure, it’s not Platonic absolute truth, but nothing is,” but note that this is what truth always meant, so saying that is roughly equivalent to saying, “Who cares about truth? This works for now.” Who cares about anything? Serious question, kind of the problem.

You’re going to start pattern-matching to modern days politics here, but I’d be careful with that. I can’t pass judgment without having read Peterson’s book, it’s more expensive than my interest, and mid-write update is that Jacob Falkovich might have convinced me otherwise. Either way, I don’t get Jung, so I judge by what I do know: for someone who lauds Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, Peterson fails to see Spooky Postmodernism on his own terms. It isn’t “cultural relativism” or “anti-Christianity,” it’s the opposite. They care about truth and Platonic moralism all too much. Only if you cared about truth would it be a problem for it to be relative, only with the Christian moral backing would “truth is relative, but let’s go get the oppressor” make sense. Otherwise you’d shrug. “Weird, that path failed. Whelp, time to switch majors to Finance.”

If you claim to take truth very seriously but discard inconvenient aspects because [reason], then how am I supposed to trust anything you say? The Platonic form of truth is out, it’s fried, and if you still care about your own values then that becomes a serious issue. You don’t get to avoid this because It’s Unreasonable, there are practical considerations here. The reason it comes up in debates like Krauss v. Fundamentalists, i.e. the practical matter of how to handle religion in a complex secular society, is that it leads to you overstepping your bounds, flailing through the metaphysical ether, undermining your own points. “So science disproved God because materialism, and you know this because there’s a pre-existent realm of Platonic objects shooting down equation beams? I’m sticking with Moses, you guys are nuts.” If you get called on it, pretending that actually you don’t care that much and it’s they who are just being assholes to you is not a response. Can’t stick it to the damn Christians, you’d have pulled it off if it wasn’t for these meddling philosophers. Krauss: “Philosophy is useless.” Then why do you keep trying to do it?

You’re skeptical, and what do I have against truth? “Sounds humanities.” You don’t know what I studied. Shit-talking aside, I genuinely like STEMlords even if I think the split is ridiculous. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t try to force you to have stronger arguments. “Uh, why give in to these scientismists?” There are a billion reasons, number one is that they do something besides find new ways for coal miners to be oppressing Harvard professors.

Anyway, [equally weakman humanities] does the same thing with [everything]. It’s not just metaphysical ideals that sneak in, it’s moral ones and political ones. Yeah, yeah, “I’m not a Christian ’cause Darwin but only from the neck down,” that’s easy, easy is the enemy. The problem is that they do not take themselves seriously, instead of reaching the point where philosophy ought to make you act a certain way, they pass the buck: “Truth is relative but not a binary, values exist in gradations that are determined by a complex interweaving of the others, the phenomenological experience of the world is a primary and must be investigated to understand how terminal values play into conscious experience, finding new values to judge is the task because otherwise you are stuck repeating archaic and unhelpful valuations, this will likely lead to a horrible future.” Sounds scary and important. Time to do absolutely nothing about it, I guess. Petty deipnosophists, chatting and zinging Krauss when he oversteps because that zinger feeds their own amour-propre. Besides that? “I gave $10 to the faculty union.” Excuse me, take a breather. You earned it buddy. “Yikes-” I know, buddy is a gendered term, which makes me a misogynist. Feel free to spend 30 years of the only life you have proving that in devastating detail.

Despite a modern reputation for romanticism, Nietzsche wasn’t anti-science. He just thought that neither group was willing to accept what the 19th century brought, e.g. how radically moral, scientific, and philosophical stances had to change after the death of god. Another way to put this is the divine irony that each side accuses the other of perpetual deepities and they are both right. Even better: they’re normally the very same deepity. Tear down the abstruse language of philosophy, and a whole lot of modern “meaning” is basically: “you’re free in the universe! Stardust! Wonder!” Science has either the courage or ineptitude to say this explicitly. I’m unsure which; probably depends on the wonderer.

This will not work, and it avoids the actual problem.

V

Nihilism is a period of decision, because people being the way people are we’re going to freak the fuck out eventually. Nietzsche gives you two: Last Man and Affirmation. Last Man first.

Supposing that life is shit and we want to avoid suffering: Lobotomy seems like a good option, a primitive form of wireheading that needs the wire but once. Wikipedia informs me, and I am indifferent enough to trust it, that icepick-prophet Walter Freeman described a successful case as a “smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster.” So there’s that. Less dire methods exist: astrology, MDMA, Jonathan Franzen. But, of course, you know deep down that lying to yourself won’t cut it, that seeking mindless pleasure isn’t what you’re here for. Even autotrepannation is sold as opening your third eye, not blinding yourself.

The problem is that choosing to be an oyster only makes you capable of certain things, there’s only one particular level you can reach, the best result is, “Meh.” But it probably will make you “Meh. Happy.” Plus you can measure it, so there’s that nice quant stuff.

Consider also that Buddha is basically right and life is suffering, “It’s great!” Everyone you know will die, it will be in agony and terror, you will not do anything because you cannot do anything. Even if you’re lucky and you die before everyone you know, unsatisfied wants overtake satisfaction, there’s a hedonic treadmill but the capacity to suffer is limitless. Mangia, my friends. Eventually avoiding suffering overrules all else, which eliminates most of the things we normally consider “important.” Say, love. You’ll think that I sound like a raging loon, and you will be wrong. Note that this is increasingly how we deal with children, where “children”=25 and younger. “Those are kids.” Will that not affect them later?

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.

‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.

Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

‘Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink.

One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion.

One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

The Last Man is, properly speaking, a response to nihilism, not an image of it, but properly-properly speaking the thing to be most afraid of in all earth. It comes when no values are left, when the only thing we judge anything by is –

In other words: it’s what happens naturally given the path we’re on. “No one wants to be an oyster.” A blatant falsity, but let’s allow it. No one has to want it. Multipolar trap, coordination problem, go back up and reread. How do you resolve a prisoner’s dilemma if no one can agree on what counts as a benefit? You get that it’s worse, right?

Values are subjective, and this is important because truth is the most important, so “it’s a little irrational to enforce yours on anyone.” You don’t really get a choice, you get Last Men, because the one thing we can all agree on is that pleasure is probably fine. At the very least, it’s real – we can poke at a nerve ending and get a good rush of material truth out of it. Enjoy the oyster farm.

The opposite is affirmation.

VI

“Is this where-” No, I have absolutely no answers. This is problematizing it, ha, I’m a hypocrite, does that make me wrong? I’m pointing out places for smarter people to apply smarter brains. Affirmation is exceptionally difficult and art is merely an image of it. It requires us to coordinate new values, which already sounds hard but is even harder than that.

Nietzsche’s infamous “irrationalism” doesn’t come from an attack on science but an embrace of science. When he says “Science is just another interpretation,” he doesn’t mean to discard it. He means that by its own standards, it is an interpretation from a conscious-but-not-objectively-knowledgeable-being, and thus defending it cannot possibly come from fist-fights over truth. This is for the obvious and hilarious reason that trying to defend truth would then necessitate lying about some aspect of that truth. “Whoops.”

The project of affirmation, then, is tied into the general problem of how one goes about affirming mere appearance when most of our valuations have some kind of true/false distinction behind them and a whole inherited sense of morality. It turns out this is a very, very hard problem, because life is kind of shit, and truth keeps cutting your feet out from under you/it.

Bear with me here: I want to live in a world that affirms, but you need to know what you’re affirming. Sure, science reason progress, why not, I’m a red-blooded American and I like equations and cool trinkets just like anyone. I would also like a world that cares deeply about intellectual problems and art, likely because I care deeply about intellectual problems and art, and so [bias].

This is rough, have some friction:

1) There’s the obvious fact that we use values to coordinate towards a goal, but not all goals are equal. Under the assumption that some societies are better to live in than others, no small part of the difference will be due to coordination towards some better goal. But it’s not exactly clear that the coordinating mechanisms are going to be “true” in any real sense, nor that the terminal value itself is actually real. The “benefits” might just be positive externalities, but point that out and lose all of it. Worse, values themselves lead into feedback loops, because new ideas tend to get predicated or argued for based on older values, e.g. Jesus says “I am the truth and the light,” which only means something if truth is important to you. Path-dependency. What now, what path are we on? Answer: the nihilism path, it started a long time ago, it has no conductor but insists you act as though one exists.

2) Humans do have a nature, and it’s much, much uglier than most earlier philosophers wanted to believe, the effect of which is that a whole lot of our moral philosophy is not designed to handle actual, existing humans. There’s a whole lot of condemnation for behaving in ways that you cannot not act. For example: notice that Robin Hanson’s work with signalling theory – regardless of what he personally thinks – is sold as “pessimistic.” Why? The only possible way it would be is if our standard of judgment was still dealing with older moral notions, “don’t lie” or “status-seeking is wrong” or [whatever]. Consider what it means for a society to base its morality on something that aggresively conflicts with its own view of human nature. Truth comes up in the following  way: one part of that nature is that things we find really important are, in truth, “not even wrong.” One way to put this: it’s very hard to use Truth to affirm meaning and pleasure found in lying.

Note that this is, more or less, the origin of social narcissism: conflicting signals that endorse certain behaviors while making you hate yourself forever for the very same behavior. Narcissism is not, “Appearance is the only important thing.” It’s the recognition that appearance is all of society coupled with the enduring value judgment “authenticity” or “truth”: “Everyone else is just appearance, and I wear a mask for them, but I am so much more.” But there is no authentic you, and now you have a city-state’s worth of complexes.

3) …Especially if certain human needs, from time to time, attack the foundations of truth itself, are based in mere appearance, perception, falsity. Affirmation, in other words, is affirmation of appearance rather than being. Qualia. Feels. Lies. As in: “pain” is bad because someone has the experience of pain. “Meaning” is important because of a subjective and flawed perception of meaning. For instance, we’re terrible at measuring happiness, and even worse at reporting on it, but we do (roughly) know a few things. It’s tied not to a country’s “freedom” but the percetion of freedom. Corruption does less than perceived corruption, etc. The relationship between income inequality and happiness is ridiculously complex, but the best accounts I’ve heard have to do not with absolute wealth but social rank.

“Sounds like more words for the same thing.” That’s only because they are, because trying to point out the problem means over and over attacking basic assumptions about how we’re tackling it. The point is that some phenomenal experiences we may not have adequate terms for. The Olds talk about them, maybe they’re lying, who knows. Are you sure the good life means what you think it means? The reason you must affirm this is that there is nothing else.

There’s another reason: I’m banging on the phenomenology of it and I want you to understand what I mean by that. If you forget that it’s experience, rather than whatever it is you’re measuring (and thus serves as proxy for) the experience, certain tradeoffs look… well, they look different, because the experience might have qualitative differences that are not grasped by a quantitative measurement. For instance: let’s pretend we actually have decent ordinal scales for happiness. What is a 5? A 6? Is 6 merely “the experience of 5happies plus a bit more?” What would that mean?

I’m going to use IQ, but that’s only an image, don’t get confused and don’t overinterpret my point. I think that “IQ as human worth” is an implicit aspect of our current society, that it’s about as close to “genuinely evil and an absolutely vicious skewering of the state of affairs” as you’ll find, and I’ve written about this before. Ok.

Numerically, 120 is merely 80*1.5. Does this mean that someone with IQ 80 simply has to spend half-again as long on their homework? (The answer is no.) Closer to the point: imagine that someone offered you all the benefits of [your IQ]+30, so wealth, longevity, etc. In exchange, they only have to drop your IQ by 15. Mind you, the offer guarantees associated goods that are not guaranteed by life. Would you take it? You’re half-way through a blogpost on the philosophical difficulties of quantifying progress and decline, my guess is no. There are qualitative experiential differences not captured by an off-hand calculation. But. Try and explain that as objective truth, rather than subjective truth.

Again, IQ is just an image. It’s more than likely we have no measurement for other experiences. We don’t even know what we’re measuring, which means we have no idea how they’re impacted. What if some come from things considered “bad”? Say: violence, malice, etc. Who knows! The ancients talk about those, but you know they lie. If the highest value you have for that is truth (here being objective truth), then all of it will be completely undercut. The things that are actually important to humans are not objective facts about the universe. They’re phenomena, and trying to transmit why they’re important becomes incredibly difficult. “Ugh, feels.” Yeah, unlike all those non-feels you have, right? Is ugh not a feel?

Of course, you have to do something, because there’s another problem: life is awful, and we use lies to get around that anyway. Which means this is about choosing how to lie, not whether or not we’ll base society on it.

Sorry, that’s disrespectful. “Stories” is kinder.

VII

Nihilism means: when we have forgotten that we have to lie, and we have forgotten that we have to affirm lies, and thus we lie badly. Affirmation means: relearning how to tell a good howler. You’re still skeptical. I sound like something between a raving traditionalist and a PoMo loon. I know, I understand.

I believe in truth, and I want a society with more of it in it, and Nietzsche’s point is that to retain that, we’re going to have to figure out how to lie. Harder than that: we’re  going to have to affirm those lies with new, stronger values than truth, in order to protect the truths we have.

In one of the best defenses of individualism out there, Sarah Constantin makes a few points well worth considering. I got tagged in it, didn’t respond at the time, and I hope she doesn’t mind me using these examples now. In response to my notes on gri-gri:

Is it then worth protecting gri-gri believers from the truth?  Or protecting religious believers from hearing about atheism?  Really? 

The choiceless mode depends on not being seriously aware that there are options outside the traditional one.  Maybe you’ve heard of other religions, but they’re not live options for you. Your thoughts come from inside the tradition.

See: I think we do this literally all the time, and we do not understand that, which is the point.

So your teenager gets vivisected by stardust-and-wonder in the form of a drunk driver, what then? “That’s an extreme example, most of our lives aren’t like that.”

A) Kind of the point. The “wonder and stardust” brand of spirituality is a brainfever that comes when you don’t have problems, a hollow sense of “the divine” that doesn’t conflict with a 9-5 and Tinder for the kids, which is why it won’t work for anything else, which is why it can’t actually address crisis. For something to have any value, you have to sacrifice for it, which sounds V Romantic but is actually just a statement about economics. Scarcity and all that.

B) Who do you go to? “Secularists will comfort you, you don’t need God.” Of course they will, which is a very good way to continue burying your head in the sand. We killed God because he’s untrue, but those secular friends are going to fill you with as many lies as a priest because that is what you need to hear. Try the opposite, discussing the mutilation with an extremely honest mortician: “Yeah, so – died in horrible agony. It was prolonged, like, wild. Upstairs said they’d never seen anything like it. So much blood loss and still conscious! Now I know you want to connect with your dead kid, so I’ve plugged their brain into the Teenager Simulation. Here are the last thoughts, in order: ‘I despise my parents, eating ass is actually pretty banging, I bet if they died I wouldn’t feel a thing, instead of a working I’ll build a tent out of avocado toast, oh god please somebody help me oh god please mom dad help, there is nothing.'”

This is monstrous. “Well, there are shades of truth, and better and worse lies.” Glad to see you’ve absorbed the Spooky Postmodernist canon, welcome to the Counter-Enlightenment, sxldier. Go see Judith in the armory for your Lacan and galouises blondes. On Tuesday we throw Mankiw to the ground and scream at it. Thursdays there’s performance art. Saturday you get cucked.

Nietzsche’s observation that untruth is a precondition of life is predicated on the obvious fact that we don’t want to hear our dead kid’s fetishes. It’s a positive statement, not a normative one. It’s not just a social observation, it’s a psychological principle transmuted into the social, i.e. if your kid goes by autoerotic-asphyxiation, the weakest scrap of counter-evidence shifts the priors to 150% that it was really [anything else]. This is for a simple reason: Being may be pure reason and wonder, but becoming likes to jerk it with a belt. It is hard to be a creature of becoming that knows about being. We need something that protects us, and the brain steps up to bat.

What this means is that we aren’t arguing over “truth” vs. “lies,” we’re arguing over when to lie and for what purpose. And that is when things get interesting. You might tell me, “Sure, in individual situations. But we don’t found socieites on that,” but that is just another bad lie. The choice in individualist society is there is no choice, traditionalists don’t get to escape Moloch, which is fine if you’re Nick Land but then you have to openly be Nick Land. Sarah admits all of this and more that we’ll just gloss as “liberalism is really the best system for people with high IQs, specific traits and time preferences, and everyone else has some issues,” which is why she instinctively pivots to a particularly literal reading of Nietzschean hierarchy and Great Man production affirms it all:

There’s also the fact that in the very long run, only existence proofs matter.  Does humanity survive? Do we spread to the stars?  These questions are really about “do at least some humans survive?”, “do at least some humans develop such-and-such technology?”, etc.  That means allowing enough diversity or escape valves or freedom so that somebody can accomplish the goal.  You care a lot about not restricting ceilings.  Sure, most entrepreneurs aren’t going to be Elon Musk or anywhere close, but if the question is “does anybody get to survive/go to Mars/etc”, then what you care about is whether at least one person makes the relevant innovation work.  Playing to “keep the game going”, to make sure we actually have descendants in the far future, inherently means prioritizing best-case wins over average-case wins.

Who volunteers to tell the commons that this why they get no choice?

Now, I don’t disagree with in the slightest, and I hope Sarah doesn’t misinterpret my snark. I have no moral issue with this, it’s a hard and true thing. She’s one of the brightest and bravest writers out there, so she’s willing to go for it. Good. The point is that how we actually, full-truth justify this society and what we openly say to Steven Pinker’s “progressophobics” (to wit: “You’re whining because you’re stupid. Here’s a pie chart that shows increasing pie chart production.”) is radically different. In short: a social lie.

Untruth is a condition of life. You realize what the inverse of that statement is, right? As a hypothetical, let’s say that blissful ignorance – one form or another – is what keeps us from destroying ourselves and society. If so, how did truth ever appear as a value? Shouldn’t it be the opposite way – that we ran as fast as possible from truth, as though it were a poison, because it is a poison then? The question isn’t “should we abandon truth” because it isn’t a question. It’s a positive statement: we did adopt truth as a social value, in one way or another, and this is seriously worthy of study. It is a non-obvious value from any standpoint but the most naive.

If I had to guess as to why Nietzsche takes are so bad, I’d be here all day. Short answer: we’re not very good readers. The better answer is that despite all the talk about Strength and Will, no one bothers to provide Nietzsche’s own definition of, you know, strength. It’s this:

Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified. – BG&E

In case you’re wondering: Nietzsche was fond of strength.

“Well, of course it’s good to tell some white lies.” How often do we lie to ourselves? We’re even lying to ourselves about truth! We’re creatures with a meager empirical understanding of the world, and a form of understanding that has absolutely no bearing on any metaphysical “truth,” and yes that’s actually important for the following reason:

I think there’s one last lie here to undermine, and it’s the one that we tell ourselves, and it’s the one I’m banging on. Sarah selects according to the very long run, which is a great argument, and I’ll do the same: in the very long run, there is no existence. Survival is no aim, it’s a space to fill a gap, the question is “how,” modified by the factors of time preference and manner, i.e. “how long?” and “in what way?”

At what point does “surviving” become merely surviving, when can we drop the charade that efficiency won’t cancel out “flourishing,” what does “flourishing” even look like? Would you know?  Moloch is survival and efficiency, but survival and efficiency hate you and everything you hold dear. Depending on those hows, picking Door Number 2: Individualism might lead to Door 3: Collectivist Dystopia of Puking Halfwits anyway, simply due to the fact that coordination of certain values with our current definitions of good might be impossible. The value “survival” is no-value, you’re not choosing the next few generations, you’re choosing a path which means path-dependence, choose well or hate what you find crawling at you and all that means you have to understand the choice you’re making.

In other words: judging from eternity is a bad plan for temporal creatures. You have to judge from becoming.

Nietzsche was not a traditionalist who hated modernity. Nietzsche was ecstatic about nihilism and modernity. He thought it was our ultimate triumph, the first and perhaps only time in we get to make a choice. It is, in his words, “the Great Noon.” The sky is empty of gods, and there are also no stars, as in no fate, no destiny, nothing. Just an imperious blue and the little creatures looking up:

O blessed hour of lightning! O secret before noon! I yet hope to turn them into galloping fires and heralds with fiery tongues—they shall yet proclaim with fiery tongues: It is coming, it is near—the great noon!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

The hours after that noon depend on valuations. These cannot be answered by truth, don’t even try. Any of them are going to depend on lies here or there, so the real question is: are there better forms of lying? If we’re going to go ahead and form them, why stardust and wonder? Is that really the best we can do?

Look: I use religion as a way to get at this a lot, because it’s the closest we have to a counterpoint for the modern worldview,  but I’m not saying we have to invent new gods (if only because I have no idea what that means in practice). The issue is deeper and harder than that.

So: Do you want to affirm life or not?

VIII

Retaining Platonic ideals is a bad plan.

I find in my own writing that the more abstract I get, the further tangled and confused and meaningless my own sentences become. They aren’t tied to anything but themselves anymore, they’re just there, statements that can exist in thirty different essays which means they’re not appropriate for any of them. I’m saying this mostly to set up a pun and partially to explain why I’m about to tear into Enlightenment Now.

Sarah’s is an honest argument, and she makes good points. I may have been too quick with it, but I’ll have a serious appraisal some other time. Pinker’s is not an honest argument, which is a shame because I liked Blank Slate a lot. Considering my readership there should be a few hundred hedges here, please pretend there are so I don’t have to write them. Thank you for the assist.

I may be skeptical of some progress-narrative trends, but that’s for another time and a different book. Pinker would probably call me a “progressophobic”, but I’ll stick up for him anyway: the world is absolutely getting materially better and we’d like to keep that going please. Not my bag of doom and gloom.

So when I say “it’s not an honest argument” I mean this: Things are getting materially better, and the reason they are is [static and wails], which is why you should endorse humanism. It completely fails to establish causality, h/t to Pseudoerasmus for the link:

How do we know that all this did not take place in spite of, rather than because of, the Enlightenment? In fact, he doesn’t even pretend to go to the trouble of establishing a causal connection between his contentious version of the Enlightenment and the various improvements that he imagines follow in its wake. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc seems to be the operative principle.

For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don’t be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers – just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club.

This book could not make its argument even if it wanted to: Pinker’s vision of the Enlightenment bears very little relation to the actual Enlightenment, which is no small point. Imagine that I wanted to prove that empiricism improved medicine. Seems reasonable. Then I defined “empiricism” as “hating Catholics.” This is obviously not what empiricism is, but I could easily find an empiricist who thinks that particular thought, e.g. Hobbes, and provide a quote. Now, despite getting confused by words, my thesis would not be “empiricism led to the flourishing of the medical sciences.” It would be “hating Catholics led to the flourishing of the medical sciences.” If I pointed at all the thinkers who called themselves “empiricists” it would be sleight-of-hand, even proving that empiricism improved the medical sciences could not prove my own thesis.

In other words: I have no idea what improved the world, Pinker doesn’t bother to make an argument for any of it, and even if he did, it wouldn’t prove that his version of humanism is helpful. What makes this annoying is that anyone who points this out will immediately be attacked as “[bad word] who just can’t handle the statistics.” No, man. I care about causality.

So, I’m going to ignore the charts, because they show nothing. Honestly, the middle section (basically just data) is actually pretty good. It just doesn’t prove anything besides “stuff happened, and an idea or two.” Then again, it’s hard to tell how seriously we’re supposed to take ideas anyway. In the middle of chastising [people], Pinker says the following:

In Decline in Western History, the historian Arthur Herman recounts two centuries of doomsayers who have sounded the alarm of racial, cultural, political, or ecological degeneration. Apparently the world has been coming to an end for a long time indeed.

He never bothers to reflect on the obvious corollary: if so, why is he writing this book? Apparently two centuries of declinism did nothing to stop pleasant trends in the data, nor did it stop Enlightenment ideals spreading (his claim, not mine). Why bother arguing against all the progressophobes?

Obvious answer we all know: there is no argument. It’s sold to comfort the elite and remind them that, actually, they’re great and nothing wrong has been or will happen. In my words: this book is how nihilism thinks about itself.

IX

Let’s be honest enough to admit this much: Most of the earlier declinists were dead right on their own terms. Drop a culturally conservative Christian from 1880 into modern America and ask yourself – will they perceive all this more-stuff-and-reason as progress or the confirmation of their worst jeremiads? 100% decay. All of those cultural chauvinists yelling about the death of art? I’m sure they’ll be perfectly satisfied with the dulcet tones of KidzBop 93.

No, I‘m fine with it, not the point: We have iPhones to sext with and bots to sext at, it’s great for people who want that. You’re crashing into a central problem of the book: Steven Pinker does not understand that some people want different things than Steven Pinker wants. He doesn’t even seem to consider this as a possibility, a genuine choice one can make, it’s just wrong somehow. I’m pretty sure this is what happens when you assume that pseudo-Christian-without-the-hard-parts-morality can be objectively proven via entropy, but then again I’m not a physicist.

I’m not trying to say that “some people don’t like it, must be wrong.” That’s a shit argument, truth is neither consensus nor lack thereof. I’m pointing it out because the closest that Pinker comes to mounting an actual defense is, in fact, consensus:

What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer.

Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.

Granted, not everyone would agree on the exact list. The values are avowedly humanistic, and leave out religious, romantic, and aristocratic virtues like salvation, grace, sacredness, heroism, honor, glory, and authenticity. It’s easy to extoll transcendent values in the abstract, but most people prioritize life, health, safety, literacy, sustenance, and stimulation for the obvious reason that these goods are a prerequisite to everything else. […]

As it happens, the world does agree on these values. In the year 2000, all 189 members of the United Nations, together with two dozen international organizations, agreed on eight Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015 that blend right into this list.

I know for a fact that the world does not agree on those. Those aren’t values, those are pleasant grunts we noise at one another with no content beneath them. The UN just put Saudi Arabia on the Women’s Rights Commission, do they mean the same thing by [any of those words]? Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a signatory, did he have a similar commitment to “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”? Sorry Kurds, we don’t consider you human enough for rights. That would explain a lot about our policies, actually, ignore that, moving on.

Abstracts can easily be agreed upon, it’s the specifics that are hard. Another way to put this: Hindus, Christians, Jains, and Muslims all believe in God. Do those mean the same thing? Do they have the same effect? “Minor variations here to there.” Oh, so it’s just a marginal change. Thankfully those don’t matter.

The issue with this list is not its content (literacy is great), it’s the fact that it’s completely inhuman. Pinker’s whole “transcendent values” thing – you mean the things that we’ve care about most, the virtues upon which we lavish the most praise? Those ones? You’re going to call me a romantic, but the point isn’t “heroism is good” – although heroism is good – it’s that you’re not selecting for the next generation. You’re selecting the path. Choosing “UN Values” is choosing nothing, and choosing nothing is Moloch. “Sounds unreasonable.” You mean inefficient, but we agree. Yeah, dedicated inefficiency is against Moloch, although I’ll grant you that “glory” is almost certainly not real. It’s a human thought, unlike those other real things we know that aren’t human thoughts.

This is not a  hypothetical: eventually, Pinker grounds his whole project in his own view of heroism, which makes me suspect that, in fact, these are quite important and he’s just trying to ignore that inconvenience.

This sounds like a romantic outlook, but I mean it in the most material way possible: supposing that “virtue” and “sacredness” are not real, why would we have adopted them as values in the first place? (cf. the question of truth) Since, operating under the assumption they are not real, no society actually ran into these ideals, why retain them? Why come up with them in the first place? They surely served some social purpose. Social cohesion, sense of purpose, informal institutions, all of the above? Alternately, everyone before the 21st century was just unbelievably stupid. We’re going with that one? Ok, great.

One of the things that happened over time – when values became traditions – is that their origin and purpose slowly faded from consciousness. That is to say, we began to fixate on the word (and associated ritual) rather than the purpose of it. In other words, Nietzsche’s cave and shadows metaphor from earlier. In turn, they began to adopt completely different definitions. Most of this is fine if they’re maintained, we don’t need to understand a thing to make it work, but if one of them disappears and you think it served for [reason] when actually it served for [reason] plus [a bunch of other reasons], then it’s going to be very hard to figure out what, exactly, happened. If you care about facts, this is one.

For instance: a whole lot of religiosity, and a whole lot of its associated “transcendent” things, may well have served many, many different purposes. Some of those were the transcendent, elevating ones, but others were more homely. No, we don’t understand all of them. If you’re interested, here’s an overview of the current economics of religion. But. If you misunderstand this and try to replace it with only the “meaning” part, then it’s highly likely you get absolutely nothing. It will be a bizarre, abstract form of the original that serves no purpose anywhere.

We know that “meaning” is important or whatever, and it’s vaguely related to religion because people love metaphysics, but all of those specifics of the church are ugly. I agree, what do we do?

Pinker, on spirituality:

What about a more abstract sense of “spirituality”? If it consists in gratitude for one’s existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy. But “spirituality” is often taken to mean something more: the conviction that the universe is somehow personal, that everything happens for a reason, that meaning is to be found in the happenstances of life.

This sense of spirituality is considered in a video sketch by the comedienne Amy Schumer called “The Universe.” It opens with the science popularizer Bill Nye standing against a backdrop of stars and galaxies:

NYE: The Universe. For centuries, humankind has strived to understand this vast expanse of energy, gas, and dust. In recent years, a stunning breakthrough has been made in our concept of what the universe is for.

[Zoom to the Earth’s surface, and then to a yogurt shop in which two young women are chatting.]

FIRST WOMAN: So, I was texting while I was driving? And I ended up taking a wrong turn that took me directly past a vitamin shop? And I was just like, this is totally the universe telling me I should be taking calcium.

If there’s one thing all Americans can agree on, it’s that the fucking plebs are the fucking worst, so that’s not really my problem here. “Hit the yokel with a logic stick” is a popular literary pastime, I assume they’ll write about it as a fascinating vision of 21st century life, our more peaceful age’s version of fox tossing. This one gets a 4/10.

A counterpoint: the only thing that matters is “meaning found in the happenstances of life.” Everything else is worthless.

A) One major benefit of religiosity can only come from such hick nonsense as “I matter” and “someone sees me,” as in:

A set of experimental studies also examine religion’s impact on health behaviors (both mental and physical), crime, and norms toward charitable giving (Lambarraa and Riener 2012). In this context, one interesting wide-ranging experimental study that amalgamates research from anthropology, experimental psychology, and economics, is that of Norenzayan and Shariff (2008), who examine the evolution of religion in the context of prosocial behavior, i.e., good behavior towards others that might engender a cost to the individual. They highlight the role of reputation and selection that reinforces the relationship between religion, prosociality, and cooperation in general. Their findings show that if religious thoughts are imbibed in experiments, then this increases trust as well as altruism toward strangers. The question is, why that might be the case, and they offer one suggestion: “However, supernatural monitoring, to the degree that it is genuinely believed and cognitively salient, offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring” (Norenzayan and Shariff 2008, p. 58). The effect on trust is that religious belief increases trust, decreases the cost of monitoring, and hence increases prosocial behavior.

B) I don’t doubt that Pinker finds science and philosophy meaningful – those are the things he practices – nor do I doubt his sincerity in feeling that as immense gratitude and awe. Note also, this is why humanities professors react to people like Pinker with violent disdain. Note thricely, this is why Pinker reacts to those professors with violent disdain. Everyone is correct in this situation.

While we talk a lot about man hunting for or creating meaning, I think it’s better to say that meaning comes to man. By doing a thing you begin thinking it has a purpose, and eventually that purpose overwhelms you, i.e. it creeps up to the conscious and makes itself known. I suspect this has a lot to do with our faculties for self-deception. Note well: another question I get asked is “how to write” and it’s the same answer. Most of your genuinely good thoughts are still subconscious, they are waiting to expose themselves, you need to provide them with something they care about before they’ll greet you.

A result of this is that you will get better at it as it becomes more meaningful, which makes you more confident and makes the act more meaningful. Suddenly people will begin to care, and you’ll see an improvement, and now it’s an improvement in an act you care about that other people have begun to care about. The opposite is also true, i.e. if you let a habit drop you’ll lose confidence, begin to hate it, and the ideas won’t come as quickly, as in a declining number of posts leads to a drop in post quality and author’s interest, which is not coincidentally how I’m rationalizing my writer’s block. Moving on.

Another result of this is that meaningful things may be far-mode, but they’re derived from humble origins. Meaning has a lot to do about the way it relates to self-expression and self-understanding over a lifetime, but all of those are related to the specific, independent things that went into and go into daily life. Another way to put this: when people are scared at night and [existential dread], they aren’t scared for humans in the abstract. They’re scared for themselves.

Practice of an action renders it meaningful and, like all human things, the way we express that is not normally rational. Sometimes that means [guy] with [pointless job] explains how it really keeps the entire company running. Other times that means we transmute human behavior to the gods, create entire pantheons of human labor, find some way to justify the things that we cannot not do.

Robin Hanson makes the following point, remember it forever:

The strong academic emphasis on happiness over meaning suggests that we tend to think of happiness as more what people really want; meaning is more what people pretend to want in far present-a-good-image mode. Of course the crusaders who talk the most about trying to increase the world’s happiness are mostly talking in far mode, and they mainly use that cause to create meaning, not happiness, in their own lives.

So there is a bit of a tension here between the meaning that crusaders choose for themselves and the happiness they try give to others. They might reasonably be accused of elitism, thinking that happiness is good for the masses, while meaning should be reserved for elites like them. Also, since such folks tend to embrace far mode thoughts more, and tend less to think that near mode desires say what we really want, such folks should also be conflicted about their overwhelming emphasis on happiness over meaning when giving policy advice.

Happiness is Pinker’s goal, no matter what’s being said. Meaning is assumed, unproblematic, just a thing that happens. Which it does! Just not in ways that can even vaguely fit this ideology, unless the ideology finds itself at war with them. Which it does!

X

This form of humanism will not replace God until it replaces humans. Let me explain.

Hanson: Meaning is Easy to Have, Hard to Justify. This is true. Note that much of what makes justifying it hard is social valuations. Truth is a problem because it undercuts any other values you might have, e.g. itself. Humans actually don’t have access to anything but phenomena, which means one can never be sure about anything, which means…

One of the reasons that people intuitively connect art to meaning is precisely because it is so specific. It may irrational to think there’s any grander narrative to your life, and it is definitely untrue, but it is important. I have no study for this, but there’s definitely a way that art is used to justify human existence, and there’s a reason that people turn to music and literature as a source of comfort when terrible things happen. We need to know it is worth it. Art affirms life, in other words. One of the other things about art is that it makes the world good to live in, by which I mean: it’s beautiful. I know, beauty is subjective, it’s merely a phenomenal experience, none of it is true. But it is important to us for whatever reason. So:

Bill Nye may get his kicks staring into a CGI nebula, but that doesn’t seem to work for most people. Humanity has more flaw than mass, but we know shit-tier art when we see it. Christianity produced Bach, Nye gives us Hip Science Raps, and a world of Hip Science Raps is worse than death. There are great atheist artists, but note that all of them wrote about how fucking awful it is. The happiest replace religion with passion and desperation – try Hemingway’s broken heroism – but those aren’t acceptable anymore. “Uh. Sounds a little sexist and, like, violent.” Those guys are hard to control, they don’t even like Rupi Kaur, nebulae unfaze them, they’re bad for business. I get that heroism is only real if you’re 12 or a politically expedient fireman, but you’ve got to give us something, right? “Try Thomas Kinkade but no God.” The peanut gallery would rather fillet itself, thanks.

Very, very few people can be expected to have meaningful careers in philosophy or the sciences, do they get something or no? “They share in the fruits, too.” Here’s a cool trick to make someone hate you and you hate them: provide everything for someone while giving them no meaningful say over it. “The survivalbox arrives Friday, it comes in two colors: choice or freedom. Take your pick.” Over time, they will become ungrateful, you will call them that, they will want a better life  because this one is meaningless, you will reply that they were already ungrateful so why should they. Congrats, you just created a ruthlessly hierarchical society wherein no one can actually discuss the hierarchy.

This isn’t a hypothetical, it already happened, which is why Pinker wrote the book. “Why is everyone so ungrateful if things are so good?” Either your theory of humans is flawed or you’re blinding yourself like Oedipus, sort of a proof-is-in-the-pudding kind of thing, right? No? “I bet the issue is that there aren’t enough colors. The next ones will come in Choice, Freedom or Decision.”

Since the 1960s, trust in the institutions of modernity has sunk, and the second decade of the 21st century saw the rise of populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment. They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future.

Fundies have a serious, material reason to not do any of that. “Secular spirituality” is watered down Christianity, rendered toothless and acceptable by whatever’s useful to those in power. At least with the Church, undesirables have a fight based on tradition and belief. “Science” as an ideology is constrained only by celebrity and the state, if you’re anything but 18th-century landed gentry prepare to get Catch-22’d: “You have an objection? Well, we believe in reason, and so we’d like to see the studies. Where’s your double blind? Lol @ ‘2 poor 4 lab equipment or a jstor.’ Settle down, rabble.”

I’m not praising fundie tribalism. Missing the point. The point is that to have meaning, and to justify it, you need power. This goes doubly when those in power are telling you: Yeah, your life is basically worthess. Have a popsicle.

Now: let’s say that people derive most of their higher-order meaning from politics. That it, is provides them a sense of identity, tribe, values, etc. It justifies the other aspects of their life in a way that [perfectly rational action] does not, which is one reason it brings out such irrational tendencies. None of these are things I think are good, but I think they’re bad for different reasons, I’ve already written about them. TLDR: happiness and meaning are only associated with institutions of modernity when people have power and competence and are allowed to make decisions. In other words, consider everything I just said about “meaning comes to you as a result of doing.” What happens if “doing” on any grand scale is closed off?

Now, consider what Pinker is arguing here: the phenomenon observed is one particularly negative aspect of trying to extract meaning from social institutions. If that seems weird, note that “meaning” is normally associated with anxiety. Since it’s false and hostile to the state’s rational function, we should do everything in our power to temper it. Note that “disruptive” means inefficient, i.e. less material pleasures or wealth or [whatever].

To understand why this is insane, note that “more material wealth” is supposed to accentuate and heighten human experience, not replace it. Moving it from Dock A to Dock B just for kicks might be cool for the stevedores, but it’s not why we think it’s important. We want meaning and happiness and whatever. Now, we know that Easterlin, so goods->happiness is at the very least confused. We also know that “meaning” tends to come from broader social participation, identity expression, and, yes, conflict navigation. Get it? Pinker is arguing that we should continue doing [whatever we’re doing], while trying to discount the things that people find meaningful, to better serve those people in order that they have meaningful lives.

He does not feel like he needs to make an argument as to why this makes sense, because it does not occur to him that it might not. It does not occur to him because he is not an impartial observer just checking out the data. He is part of a grander social movement that is slowly designing a world people do not want to live in for whatever reason, and then attacking those people for not wanting to live in it: “Why do the plebs hate us?” I dunno, maybe you should rap at them more.

XII

I’m not concerned with the anti-democracy. I have no political dog in this fight. Democracy is also just a pleasant sound, and I have no doubt in mind that 95% of the country would gulag 90% for “being undemocratic.” The issue is the Platonism, and the issue with the Platonism is that maintaining society requires blasting anyone who behaves “irrationally” and the issue with blasting anyone who behaves irrationally is that “anyone who behaves irrationally” is all of humanity.

See: I don’t think that Pinker is just being reasonable with the facts. I think he has an ideal, and a very specific one in mind.

The dream of humans as Enlightenment-rational creatures can only be maintained so long as one assumes that there is a “soul” or a, you know, “thing” independent of flesh. Lose that and by your own research you’re going to be dealing with a very different kind of animal, one that Pop-Enlightenment ideals do not and cannot apply to. The reason that so many Enlightenment thinkers were wildly religious is that it was the only way to make their views of human nature and reason make any sense at all.

So note that when I say we have to affirm life, I do mean “life,” not some vague abstraction of it, because vague abstractions are mostly words. So I will say this as bluntly as I can: reason, in the simple sense we think of it, is maintained by metaphysical ideals, not scientific ones. You’ll note that those are the same ideals that I said make affirming the world so incredibly difficult. And you’ll understand when I say: the reason to affirm the world is that if you do not affirm the real one, the stuff that will come at you is not something you will like.

When I say “You have to affirm the world,” I mean that if you do not, you make it one of two things: an oyster farm or a prison.

Pinker:

The forecasters who did the worst were the ones with Big Ideas—left-wing or right-wing, optimistic or pessimistic—which they held with an inspiring (but misguided) confidence.

A question: how much irrationality will Pinker allow for in his society? On a scale of 1-10, is it 3? 6? 1?

This is a very serious question if you’re making a choice for the future. From here until [far distance], you’re shooting an arrow: if the calculation is even a sliver off, what happens?

If your philosophy only allows for a 2 but we’re actually a 4 at peak capacity, then your philosophy will fall to pieces. Pinker’s rebuttal: “No Enlightenment thinker claimed man was all rational.” Pretending it’s a dichotomy is a fun trick to avoid the problem. How irrational? I’ve read Locke, Smith, Kant and co. I’m going with a median 4. Subsequent experimentation has yielded higher numbers. Pinker’s version looks like a 2.

Or: Imagine you can organize a perfectly humanist society by vigorously suppressing >level-2. What will be the point of such a society? Would you have made a reasonable society, or a torture-chamber? “This is romanticism.” This is a recent historical event, and by “historical” I mean ongoing.

The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism.

The definition that Pinker gives is not the thing Scott points to. Authoritarian High Modernism is a discrete ideology, but the issue is much deeper than one single ideology. What Scott thought was the problem is this:

The tendency to design society for abstract humans rather than real people.

Above, we have an ideology built around an idealized and abstracted version of human nature, in pursuit of abstract values, with an abstract spirituality, for which we may need to temper the concretely irrational plebs.

Oh.

“Nietzsche was a fanatic who believed people acted according Will to Power.” Yeah, but you proved him right. It’s this book. You get that when he talked about being “cold-blooded and inhuman” he meant building societies based on this same sentiment, right?

Let’s say that Pinker’s ideal world exists, it allows the most reasonable people to try and flourish. But what if “flourishing” requires things above level-2 irrationality? Even your elites won’t be worth anything, you’ll just have cut off a real human experience over a ridiculous and ancient ideal. Are people good? What if “the best human experience” requires a few unpleasant things in it? What about cruelty? Domination? Violence? Frivolousness? I’m not trying to be an edgelord here – you get that we’re animals, right?  If you build a society for non-animal humans, then you have built an ideal society for ideally no one. “This is a nice world.” Yeah, a nice world where everyone is miserable. “But at least they aren’t hot-tempered.” What the would you be affirming besides your own egotism?

Enlightenment Now makes a big deal out of Nietzsche’s amorality, but there’s a reason that Nietzsche was so absorbed by that fight. Depending on the moral standard applied, it’s not that it’s “harsh” nor that it’s “peaceful.” It’s that it’s cruel, and the most insane way to reach the desired goal, like forcing a carnivore to survive on broccoli to “better it.” You’re wondering what Nietzsche put beyond good and evil? Love.

“You’re saying to base society on irrationality?” Not even close, I don’t think anything Pinker describes is “irrational,” I’m using his vocabulary. I have no idea what it would mean for something to be “rational” in a way people are not. These things coordinate and solve problems, right? I’m just saying it’s pretty fucking weird to take out metaphysics for the purpose of science and then spin back around and judge that science from a Platonic standpoint. Of course, it’s slightly worse than that, because if you ask anyone about the metaphysics, they’re going to laugh at you:

“God is a fairy tale, we only have uproar and becoming, didn’t you chemistry as a kid? Now stop asking me silly questions, I’m busy hating people who failed at infinity.”

Different time and different system, but like the man sang: my destiny wants a rest.

XIII

One of the dangers with the whole “values as a path” thing, which I’ve talked about before, is that at a certain point arguing itself becomes difficult. The terminal values or moral values behind them begin to look so silly that you can’t even get the point across. The argument itself is predetermined, set in its ways, always surging forwards to a destiny it neither willed nor understands but demands nonetheless. But, well. Eventually it’s going to run out, and probably soon.

Affirmation of life is hard because we don’t have the ideals for it yet. There’s a non-trivial possibility that “flourishing” defined as “peak human experience” or fucking #whatever requires affirming things that our current values do not like. “Impossible.” Totally possible, you get that we evolved to enjoy certain experiences, right? “I’m fine with noble lies.” I’m not, but even ignoring that why do you default to the easiest, nicest thing you can? Scream at me about the naturalistic fallacy all you want, but that’s not how that works. “What do you mean we shouldn’t slice an arm off? Because we naturally have two? Take Logic 101.” To be fair, I don’t have a logical reason not to do this. It’s a prejudice, sue me.

We need to fight Moloch, because I do not want a world of last men, but I think it’s a little harder than most. It’s a possibility that most of what makes Moloch work is also something that has to be salvaged for life to be worth salvaging. In other words: coordinating values that will undermine themselves again, some time in the future, for fun. The only other option is that we become Moloch ourselves to avoid Moloch, last men to avoid the possibility of last men, oysters to avoid the possibility of people choosing to be oysters.

I would call this a noble but ultimately misguided plan.

You can call me a lot of things. A romantic or a bad writer or a lazy thinker or whatever. But I’m not a misanthrope. I have full faith and love in us, because there is nothing besides that. That’s not a moral statement, nor a declaration of intent, it’s just a fact. Human consciousness is the only one we have. The particular values we’ve inherited are not real. They are based on abstract humans. They’re lies, which is not bad, and who cares about them being a lie? The issue is that they’re bad lies, not that lies.

Nihilism is not about discarding metaphysical certainties, at least not in our time. It’s precisely the opposite. It’s using those to discount this very real world with its very real people, always bending it around in favor of some revealed truth as though there’s some non-human experience coming from beyond. It whines: “People are bad because [cruelty] and [irrationality] and [frivolity], art’s mostly just [signalling] and meaning is [biases] from evolution. Sure, there’s [nice thing], but it’s a chemical and mostly related to [egotism] and [genetic selfishness]. We will almost certainly destroy ourselves out of stupidity, malice, and lust for false ideals.”

Yes. That is all still true.

Thank God.

top: Transfiguration by Olivier De Sagazan