I agree with you. But don’t you think that experts are the minority of any tribe? Perhaps on this blog it is experts who are the majority, but I believed the writer and the blog to be trying to improve our society, our tribe. In that sense, I see group rationality as contrarianism, because it is advocating for an incredibly specialized set of skills held by a minority group to become the basis of society. I am accepting the fact that the majority is irrational in the traditional sense, and thus trying to think of a way to further progress our tribe given that fact. Whereas, by trying to progress a tribe/society through democratizing group rationality, you are attempting something that is radically opposed to the majority.
Boyi
Ah, my bad. I am somewhat embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that the characterization I had prescribed to members of this website was so strong that it led me to vilify your response into an attack. I really apologize.
Yup, your initial post is a a summary of my point.
As to your follow up questions:
I am not sure if by ” a group of expert group rationalists” you mean
a group that is majorly proficient in empathetic intelligence (the rationality of groups).
Or a group that promotes everyone to actualize themselves in their own group expertise (type of multiple intelligence), still aiming for an expert group, but one of diverse capacities.
Actually now that i think about it, the answer is the same for both cases. I do not think that this is possible. In my opinion any type of expert is a minority demographic of the larger population.
I am supporting the later idea of having an elite that guides the masses, despite the huge potential for damage/corruption such an idea carries. My defense of such a totalitarian idea would be that humans cannot escape such a hierarchy. Even if we delude ourselves into thinking that we have removed a class elite from our current production of society, the truth is that we have merely chosen an elite that is a hidden class. What I mean by hidden class is that certain aspects of our current episteme hide the totalitarian aspects of our society. For example, I would see deep seeded ideologies of individualism, democracy, and cartesian dualism, and universal human rights, make most people hostile to the idea that cognition is as physical a capacity as running. And as with any physical capacity, there is both natural and nurtured disparity between individuals.
Before I continue I feel I need to further explain myself, because all the ideologies I have listed above are laden with such heavy positive connotations in our culture I fear that my words will be vilified if I do not partially explain them. With for example the idea of universal human rights, you exclude the potential that there are fundamentally different types of people. Again, this idea seems evil and oppressive in light of the dominance of democratic equality in our culture, but I cannot help that. There number of people who can play professional basketball is not the majority. In the same sense the number of people who can rationally think on a professional level is not the majority.
I don’t think everyone is born with what we consider proficient rationality. Perhaps a majority could be taught to be rational, I am not denying this possibility, but I do not think that it is economically feasible. At least not in our current system of education. But then again, there are many essential facets of society that do not require world class logical skills. In my opinion the existing emphasis our power structure places on rationality has skewed the pretending-doing balance of a large demographic.
I would suggest having a elite of empathetic rationalists who guide the masses to more humane and potentially more rational living.
I am of the same opinion of you. I chose rhetorically to emit this argument because it is more radical and I was not sure exactly of my bearings on the open sea of values. But seeing that you are of the same type as me, I would agree with you. I do not think it is feasible in any sense of the word as of now.
When I first read this article the imagery of corrupt hardware cause a certain memory to pop into my head. The memory is of an interaction with my college roommate about computers. Due to various discourses I had been exposed to at the time I was under the impression that computers were designed to have a life-expectancy of about 5 years. I am not immersed the world of computers, and this statement seemed feasible to me from a economic perspective of producer rationale within a capitalistic society. So I accepted it. I accepted that computers were designed to break, crash, or die within 4-5 years, if I could keep one that long. One day I got to talking to my roommate about this, and he shocked me by saying “not if you take care of them the way you should.” How many people take their computers for regular checkups as they do their teeth, their cars, their children? How many people read the manuals that come with their computers to be best informed how to take care of them?
I am sure there are people that do, but I realized I was not one of them. I had assumed an intentional deficiency in the hardware, instead of grappling with the much more likely possibility that there was a deficiency in my usage/knowledge of the hardware.
I now return to your premise that “humans run on corrupted hardware.” It is a new way to phrase an old idea: that humans are by nature evil. It is an idea I disagree with. I do not disagree with the beginning of your reasoning process, but I believe a lack of necessary knowledge about certain variables in the equation leads you down a faulty path. Therefore I will ignore the thought experiment that takes up the later portion of the essay, and instead focus on the variables in this statement:
-In some cases, human beings have evolved in such fashion as to think that they are doing X for prosocial reason Y, but when human beings actually do X, other adaptations execute to promote self-benefiting consequence Z.
The assumption that you make is that self-interest has to be selfish/ individualistic. That variable Z (self-interest) makes individual benefit unquestionably precedent over group benefit. The assumption being that the individual self is not only real, but the foundation of human consciousness.
I would argue (along with a long list of social scientists in the fields of sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, economics, literature, theology, philosophy, and probably several more) that humans contain a social self. Meaning that the self is not individual cognition, but a networked entity constituted by a plurality of bodies, minds, and territories. Under my premise the fact that people must be self-interested is not so fatalistic. There is after all a difference between self-interest and selfishness. What is needed is for people to be taught to understand their self as a network not an individual, and be taught methods of self-extension.I agree with you that humans cannot escape doing things out of self-interest, but surely you agree that some types of self-interest are more positive than others, and that the farther the notion of self is extended the greater the benefits for humanistic goals?
How can you say the hardware is corrupt before testing all the dispositions for action that it contains to the fullest?
No actually english is my first language. Though I have spent the past 6 years deeply immersed in the study of Chinese linguistics and scholarship. So I apologize in advance for comma splicing or other somewhat awkward rhetorical strategies that I may use. I try to think in chinese as much as I can and I guess it messes me up at points.
That said, I do not see a causal correlation between the quality of my ideas and my mastery of the english language. I know very well that on a scale of 1-10 it would be generous to call my writing a 7. But I do not think that defines the nature of my thoughts, especially since you do not know what stage of the writing process my responses are in. I will go ahead and tell you anything I write on this site is done in a single draft. I am writing not to meet the rhetorical standards of whatever game you are playing. I am writing because of the potential to see what emerges from me when I mix with interesting materials such as Mr./Mrs MixedNuts. Personally I do not see the point in attacking rhetoric, especially if the idea is conveyed. It seems as insecure as my own initial vilifying of Mr./Mrs. MixedNuts. In fact it fulfills the stereotype I was expecting to meet in posting on this website! However, if I can have my insecurities, then I cannot hold your insecurities against you. So I forgive you, and I hope we can keep talking.
Then I do not understand what is meant by corrupted. Perhaps it is because of my limited knowledge of the computer science lexicon, but to me the word corrupted means damaged, imperfect, made inferior. To imply something is damaged/ inferior makes a value-judgment about what is well/superior. But if you are saying that doing something out of self-interest is an inferior state, then what is the superior state? Altruism? By what rational basis can you say that people should be completely altruistic? Then we would not be people, we would be ants ,or bees, or some other social creature. Self-interest is part of what makes human sociality so powerful. I do not see it as corrupted hardware, but rather misused hardware (as I state in my original post). The self can be extended to a family, a community, a nation, even to humanity itself, so that even though a person acts out of self-intrest their interest extends beyond an atomized body or singular lineage. Basically I am agreeing with your deception of human nature, but not your interpretation of it.
What I get out of the analogy “corrupted hardware” is that self-interest is a detrimental capacity of human nature. If this is not what is meant, then please explain to me what is meant by corrupted hardware. If it is what is meant, then I stand by my assertion that it is not self-interest that is detrimental but cultural conceptions of the self; making it the software, not the hardware that is corrupted.
Thanks for the clarification of the corrupted hardware analogy. It was a poor choice of words to compare the argument to human nature being evil. The point I am trying to make is that I do not agree with the statement t hat human nature is flawed. What you are calling flawed I was calling evil. But from this point on I will switch to your language because it is better. I still do not see the logic
-In some cases, human beings have evolved in such fashion as to think that they are doing X for prosocial reason Y, but when human beings actually do X, other adaptations execute to promote self-benefiting consequence.
As proving that human nature is flawed, because it makes the assumption that self-interest is a flaw. I would ask you two questions if I could. First, do you believe self-interest to be a flaw of human nature, if not what is the flaw that is talked about in corrupt hardware? Second, do you believe it is possible to posses a conscious without self-interest?
I would add that just because I support self-interest, does not mean I support selfishness. Please respond!
So you are saying the hardware of genes that has fueled the movement of life, and must embryologically exist within the human structure, is a hinderance to the structure of the social animal?
I don’t think morality should be segregated from desire. I realize that Freud’s concept of drives is at this point in time obsolete, but if there were “drives” it would not be a sex, aggression, or hunger drive that dominated the human animal, but a belonging drive. In my opinion it does not matter where the hardware comes from, what is important is an intimacy with its function. I think for too long there has been a false dichotomy constructed between morals and desires.
as to the question of meta-ethics, I would apply the works of E. O Wilson or Joseph Tainter to the construction of a more humane humanity.
I agree with the idea that efficiency should be taken into account when considering charitable actions, but I do not know if I agree with your conclusion of what is most efficient. Alleviating a problem does not cure it. While paying for malaria nets, cleaning up the beach, donating to charities alleviates real social issues, it does not address the issue of their causation. In my opinion, what is most efficient is not concentrating on recuperation, but attacking the sickness. Without changing the causal conditions the disease will continue to grow endlessly no matter how much you suppress it. This is why even after going through successful rehab, addicts will experience relapse if reintroduced into their original environments because nothing has changed to prevent the same symptoms from arising again.
What then is the cause of social travesties? I would argue a lack of high-level empathy. In my opinion the question then becomes does financial donation increase a person’s empathetic capacity? I do not think it does. It definitely increase the amount of pure capital being pushed at a problem, but i do not think that necessarily cures the problem. I know that some of the poorest schools in America have recently gotten state of the art equipment, smart rooms, i-pads, new schools, but their test scores are not changing. That is because the problem is the values being pushed into the kids not the amount of money. What does promote empathy? Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent sociologist who is best known for the idea of habitus. The general idea of habitus is that cognitive and emotional patterns are shaped by human physicality. Aristole’s virtue ethics represent the idea that morality is developed through habitus. Mencius, the second most famous confucian moralist, also had notions of empathy being like a muscle that must be strengthened within people. From this theoretical framework the type of charity proposed in the essay above would be inefficient. While I cannot for certain say what action/ environments cultivate empathy/morality; I think it is a safe bet to say that working to make more money and spending money does not. if that was the case, then the most successful business men and women would also be the most empathetic people. No, it seems more likely that empathy would be developed through committing time to people and places that are not readily identified with the actor’s self. Meaning that the lawyer taking an hour each day to work on the beach would increase his virtue/empathetic capacity, making that working more valuable than the thousands of dollars that he could have earned in that time seeing as there is no way to buy morals.I am not sure if my idea is correct. If the author of this essay writes from a fundamentally economic frame, I write from a fundamentally sociological/anthropological/confucian one. The correct answer is probably a mediation of the two depending on type of charity and circumstance. Thanks for your thoughtful writing.
Well said, but I would tweak your wording of my question to “now that I am a good person, how can maximize my impact?” What is the estimate of a good person? I would argue that a good person is one who produces meaningful relationships in the world. The model of efficiency above touches only on how to most impact the person-captial relationship, i.e what to do with the material and labor resources I have accumulated to most positively impact humanity. I agree that this is important, but add that the “good person” is defined by multiple relationships, not just of the one they have to capital. For example, I would argue a truly good person would be a good child, good parent, good friend, good older/younger (depending on the age of the opposing actor), good stranger, good citizen, good character, and potentially much more. To maximize the meaning and positivity of all critical relationships is not done through economic efficiency. And while I cannot make any absolute claims that the social impact a person makes is more beneficial than the way they use their capital, personally I believe it to be so.
Now if your original statement about already being charitable was meant to mean that you are already a very humane person (meaning your relational impact in your community is maximized) , then sure, I think maximizing charitable action is great. But I think to maximize your role within a social network is really hard, if not impossible to some extent. I also think that most people are not as empathetically developed as they would like to think. I would go as far to as to say that a perfect empathetic awareness is as unreachable as Truth with a capital T.
I apologize if I sound argumentative, I just was not sure if my question was already dealt with in your minds/blogs and this is a further point.
Hi, I really enjoyed your essay. I also enjoyed the first half of the comments. The question it brought me to was: whether or not there is no higher utilty than transformation? I was wondering if I could hear your opinion on this matter.
It seems to me if transformation of external reality is the primer assesment of utility, then humans should ratioanlity question their emotivism based on pratical solutions. But what if the abiilty to transform external reality was not teh primer assesement of utility? Recently I have been immersed in Confucian thinkinng, which places harmony as the pinnicale of importance. If you do not mind I would like to share some thoughts from this perspetive.
When faced with a problem it seems that as humasn our inital solution is to increase the complexity of our interaction with said aspect of the external world through expanding scale, organization, detail, of our involvement with that portion of reality in hopes of transforming that reality to our will. Is this logical? Yes, we have clearly demonstrated a potential to transform reality, but have any of our transformations justify the rationale that transformation will eventually lead to a uptoian plateau? Or to put it another way, does the transformation of one good/bad scenario ever completely deplete the nessecity for further transformation? If anything, it seems that our greatest acheivements of transformation have only created an even more dire need for transformation. The creation of nuclear power/weapons was supposed to end war and provide universal energy; now we are faced with the threat of nuclear waste and global anhilation. Genetically engineering food was supposed to feed the world; in ameriac we have created a obessity epidemic, and the modern agricultral practices of the world walk a fine line between explosive yeild and ecological destruction.
I was somewhat hesitant to say it because of a preceived emotivism of this blog, but what I am questioning is the discourse of progress. Transformation is progress. You say:
“In general, any debate about whether something is “good” or “bad” is sketchy, and can be changed to a more useful form by converting the thing to an action and applying utilitarianism.” But is that not soley based on a emotive value of progress?
From the harmonizing perspective emotivism in itself contains utilty because it is in our common irratioanlity that humans can truly relate. If we did institutionally preceed arbitrary value wtih a logic of transformational utility would this not marganilze a huge portion of humanity that is not properly equipped to rationalize action in such a way? It legitimizes intellectual dominace. In my opinion this is no different than if we were to say that whoever wins in an offical arm wrestle/ foot race has the correct values. That may seem completely absurd to you, but I would argue only because you are intellectually rather than physically dominate.
It should be noted that my argument is based on the premise that there are graduated levels of intellegence, and the level required to rationalize one potential transformation over another is sequesterd from the lower tiers.
I also write under the assumption that the discourse of progress (I think I called it utiltiy of transformation?) is emotive not rational in the sense that it is clearly the most effective cogntive paradigm for human evolution. Before my words come back to bite me, my concepts of “progress” and “evolution” are very different here. Progress is power to transform external reality (niche construction), evolution is transformation of the human structure (I will not comment on whether such orgnaic transformation is orthogenic or not)
Well given the way you word it, yes, it does seem suspicious. There are several things I would change about your retelling of my position.
1.) I advocate for proper and efficient relationships. This idea is local if you mean thinking of mechanical solidarity before organic solidarity, but in this day in age with telecommunication and a globally mobile workforce I would not call relationship cultivation “local” in the traditional sense. For example, my self-network spans multiple continents. The potential for impact is huge.
2.) Proper relationships are by no means “fuzzy,” I would say that the fact that you would describe relationship cultivation as fuzzy shows a serious lack of mental effort. Since it is something I think about a lot, I will give you an example. First let me say I am currently trying to define all core relationships of the social self. The social self is the idea that human identity, motivation, action, cognition, do not arise from autonomous agents, but from, a network of human, non-human, and cultural relationships. One such relationship is the relationship between child and parent/ child and guardian. It is possible to not have parents, or to not have a guardian, but it is not possible to avoid the consequences of this fact. The dynamics of the child to parent/ guardian relationship is fundamental to a person’s actions, thoughts, and feelings. If my mom or dad were to die, no matter how happy, satisfied, complete I felt immediately prior to this, it would completely rearrange my feelings and thoughts. I would eventually recover, but I would be a different person, one who had to figure out how to be happy, satisfied and complete knowing my mother was not alive.
So far I have been trying to show the impact of a core relationship. The point I originally wanted to make was that cultivating relationships is not “fuzzy.” Frankly speaking it is hard being a good son. If your parents are racist, religious zealots, unhealthy, insecure, it is not your job to fix that. You think it is your job, because your parents raised you, fixed you in a sense, and at some point to validate your own maturity you want to do the same. And honestly in a perfect world you should be able to. I have far more education than my parents about health, psychologically, and sociality. I am positive that if I know what my parents are doing wrong in certain aspects of their life, and that I could do better. There is nothing wrong with telling your parents you think they should change in some way; the problem arises when they do not want to. You cannot force your parents to change. You can cut them out of your life, but that is destroying a relationship not cultivating it. Now I am not talking about extremes here. There might be some cases where they choice comes between those two options, but the majority of the time it is not. The majority of the time, the choice is to either accept your parents for their imperfection, ignore it, or abandon them. The proper choice being the former. It is a hard thing to do.
Proper relationships are not fuzzy. If a relationship is fuzzy all the time, generally you are not maintaining it well.
3.) I see cultivating good people as making transformation change. Meaning that it is a transforming change that does not just stop at initial impact. It is perpetual. If you model proper relations in your social network, then the networks connected peripherally will be impacted. In the short run pouring money on the problem might help, but I do not see this as a solution.
A perfect example of this is Aristotle’s appeal for the need of practical wisdom to complement laws. You can make laws to regulate, but if people do not have an internal commitment to the spirit behind the laws then the laws will become perpetually less effective. How many thousands of pages of new laws does the United States produce each year? The byproduct of which is that normal people can no longer understand the law because it has become so complex. If normal people cannot understand it the result is two-fold. The masses do not internalize it, and the elite figure out how to take advantage of it. I would argue this problem of deficient practical wisdom is directly related to a lack of proper relationships and knowledge of how to cultivate them.
4.) I do not think you can save 10,000 people with any one action. Nor do I think just because your intention is to save people that is what you actually do. If you get 10,000 people malaria nets that does not save them from a. being able to get malaria, b.) living in an environment where malaria is prevalent, c.) the poor condition of their lives, d.) being able to sustain their lineage for multiple generations.
Dambisa Moyo has a book called “Dead Aid” the argument is that the millions of dollars in aid sent to africa is actually doing more damage than good. There are several reasons for this, if you are interested in hearing them I would be happy to share.
″ The argument is that transformational relationships have less payout per effort than other social improvement acts (like donating lots of money).”
I realize this is the argument, it is what I am disagreeing with.
Isn’t calling rhetoric “the dark arts” using the exact tactic you are advocating against?
I like your idea, but I think it is incomplete. First, I don’t like the way you demonize rhetoric. Before labeling rhetoric the “dark arts” I think it needs to be proven that it is truly fact and not rhetoric that convinces people of what is rational. Secondly, I do not think convincing someone that the universe can be moral without God is a a proper line of flight.
In regards to my first critique, I think there is a false dichotomy being draw between reason and value. I do not know how this idea will be received on a radically rationalist blog, but as far as I know no one has yet to prove that reasons can escape values. If you are aware of such an essay/ body of work, please let me know about it, though I do not see how you could ever remove rhetoric from communication. For example, the problem I have in your reasoning about the reassurance of a moral universe is one with your rhetoric.
Basic to the science of rhetoric is the idea that audience determines the nature of the argument. Audience can be interpreted as context. The context of the debate determines what is correct and what is false. You see convincing a theist of the morality of a non-theistic universe as leaving them a line of flight. The assumption that you are making, is that what is at stake for the theist is the issue of morality. The issue of existing in a moral vs. amoral universe is a transcendental one. Likewise, God is a transcendental topic. The problem with your reasoning is that just because God is a transcendental topic does not mean that a theists belief in God is for transcendental reasons. For example, a belief in God not only represents “God”, it represents a history, a culture, a family. How can you say that a person’s belief in God is the primarily of transcendental concern as opposed to filial concern (meaning believing in God because of a stronger belief in ones father or mother)?
As of now I cannot claim to have a perfect method of knowing the correct value base of a person’s belief, but I am certain that there are people who are theists not for transcendental reasons, but for cultural or personal ones. Let’s pretend that it is one of those people that your are trying to correct of their fundamentalist flaws.
If you convince a person that the universe is still moral without God is that going to give them a line of flight? No, it will not. They can either: A.) except that God exists or B.) Except that their parents and loved ones were stupid and wasted their lives believing in something stupid (which would imply that they were raised stupidly). How is this any less damaging to the ego than the alternative you proposed? It isn’t.
Please do not misinterpret my meaning. I am strongly in favor of rationalism. I just don’t find it rational to deny the irrationality of social existence. Rhetoric and solidarity are more fundamental to human existence that rationality. I am all for increasing rationality, but not in order to eliminate values.
I am not suggesting that we should tolerate everything. There are bad ideas out there, religious fundamentalism is one of them. I like your idea of leaving a line of flight. My suggestion would be that the line of flight must take into account a base level of irrationality. For example, rather than getting rid of God, I think we should redefine God. There are plenty of theologians who are working to do just this. Religion serves a purpose. That purpose is not to define the empirical world or provide a totalitarian mantra of action and thought. Nothing should do these things, not even science. What we need is not to eliminate religion, but to rectify what it means. The same is necessary for science and for logic. A scientific fundamentalist and a mathematical fundamentalist are just as dangerous as a religious fundamentalist.
Those seem to be a series of essays on morality, but can you point me to the essay that shows there are absolute moral facts that are not influenced by subjective values?
Don’t you think it would be easy to say your point, or the problem that you have with my point than cryptically telling me I am missing something. You ever think it is you who are missing something you are just not being open enough to let me figure out what it is. Same to the other 4 silent people.
In my opinion the Karma system is really stupid if you just criticize someone’s idea without stating what it is your criticizing or even who you are.
I never really thought of my posts as debates. I write them during my break at work as fast as possible. I would call them brainstorms more than anything. I can see how that makes understanding what I am saying complicated. I will try to be more considerate from this point on.
-Rhetoric is orthogonal to truth. I like truth. While rhetorical knowledge is not a valid way to discover truth about the true nature of reality, it does reflect truth about the nature of human psychology. There is truth about the human condition. The idea I am trying to convey is that humans are born with ways to evaluate knowledge. They are taught to evaluate it by the standard of facts, but their are other “logics” that we as human animals run on. You are right that purely deductive reasoning produces no new knowledge. It was for this very reason that philosophers and scientists wanted to delegitimize it. My point is that just because the science of rhetoric does not produce new facts about the external world, does not mean that it does not represent facts about how humans naturally interpret information.
-If the proposition is that there is a “transcendental” god, and all you have is non-transcendental evidence, then the best course of action is to reject the hypothesis. No amount of empirical evidence supports believing a hypothesis that is asserted to be beyond empiricism.
My use of the word transcendental here has nothing to do with a physical God. I do not believe in a literal God. Some philosophers and other scholars use the word transcendental to categorize issues dealing with meaning or abstract principle. The author of this article spoke of the morality of the universe. Regardless of whether you are talking about God or not, this would be categorized as a transcendental issue. My point was that some theists probably are not theists for transcendental reasons, but rather for social ones. Meaning that they do not really think about whether or not the universe is moral. The morality of the universe has nothing to do with their religious faith. They are loyal to a belief system because they are loyal to the social network that supports it. For people like this, convincing them that there is a morality without God is futile, because morality was never the issue. They are theists in the same way you root for your home team at the game regardless of who is better or worse.
-It is unpleasant to learn that your beliefs (of any kind) were false. I think it is still worth it to learn the truth. Not everyone here agrees.
When there is such a plurality of truth being developed how do you assess what truth is Truth. And even if you could how do you know that such truth is not contingent, or that it is more beneficial than detrimental to your life?
I probably did mis the humor I am really gullible, but you missed my point about the morality of the universe.
by transcendental I meant a value dealing with issues of the meaning of life. Anytime you talk about what is the purpose of life, what should people do, what is moral, is the universe moral, whether you are talking about a god or a godless universe, it is a transcendental question. There is a misconception on this blog that transcendental means christian or God.
I am not a theist. I am a transatheist.
The author of the article is arguing that a better way to convince theists of the atheist agenda is to not attack them socially, but to find some other critique in their argument. MY POINT, is that this is a good strategy BUT a flaw in the author’s example of how to initiate it is an assumption of the theists reasons for their values. The assumption the author makes is that theists believe in God because they need the universe to be moral. Or in other words, that the value of religious belief is dealing with a transcendental issue. I am saying that for some people this is not the case. Some people value their religious beliefs for social reasons (such as loyalty to an in-group). For people like this, the author’s tactic is just as cornering as what he is advocating against.
“I don’t believe in UFOs. I don’t believe in astrology. I don’t believe in homeopathy. I don’t believe in creationism. I don’t believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center. I don’t believe in haunted houses. I don’t believe in perpetual motion machines. I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.” (Emphasis added by me)
I am assuming that you are defining what is insane as what is irrational, because being irrational makes it impossible to achieve goals or reach desired outcomes. If this is not the case please correct me, but for now I will continue under this assumption. I agree with you that people who carry any of the above listed beliefs as ideology are insane. However, I would add to that list “I do not believe humans are innately rational in the traditional sense,” as well as, “ I do not believe that tribes are bonded through tradition rationality” as beliefs not only wrong but visibly insane. What does this mean? First it must be addressed what I mean by “traditionally-rational.” Tradition deals with the socio-historic practices that constitute a specific tribe’s solidarity. As a part of this solidarity, every tribe contains both a method and a methodology for the production of “Truth.” Truth is a desired state of knowledge, a way of filtering information. What I call traditional-rationality more specifically refers to the conception of Truth that has shaped the production of Western knowledge. Since the normative sciences have emerged out of Western culture they too exist as products of traditional-rationality.
What is the Traditional-rationality of the Western Tribe? That is a very complicated question, because what represents truth to our tribe has evolved. I will give a brief history of this evolution, but if you would like a more detailed discussion of it I can point you to some good academic work on the subject. The summary of said evolution is as follows:
1.) PRE- GREEK ENLIGHTENMENT: Truth is filtered through Mythos. (What is true is represented through Folklore or Myth, legitimized intelligentsia being storytellers)
2.) POST GREEK ENLIGHTENMENT: Conveyance of information is redefined and myth and rhetoric are excluded from what is considered legitimized Truth. Post-Aristotle Legitimized Truth emerges are what is related to Logic. Logic referring to deductive reasoning.
3.) SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION: Francis Bacon, Galileo, Robert Boyle, along with various other thinkers of their time attack pure deductive reasoning as mind games that ultimately lead to no new production of knowledge. Logic is redefined as primarily inductive. (Meaning the driving filter for whether or not information is legitimized, as truth is empirical evidence.) Which brings us to today. What most normatively defines legitimized knowledge in present society is without a doubt scientific knowledge, because the scientific method is the most powerful method of empirical investigation. This standard of knowledge is what I call traditional rationality.
Now returning to my original claims
-I do not believe that tribes are bonded through tradition rationality. -I do not believe humans are innately rational in the traditional sense.
Traditional rationality is not innate. The reason there are experts on a matter who we are taught to trust, is because without extensive education the average person is not scientific, even if they believe in science. Without extensive specialization in some sub-field the average person has no way of containing enough empirical knowledge to validate them as a source of truth. What this means is that the traditional western sense of logic/rationality is a product of privilege. Yet our culture for political reasons has exhaled traditional rationality as the cornerstone of human development. Such thinking is counterintuitive if you accept the fact that humans are irrevocably social creatures. If humans demand sociality to exist and thrive, then the cornerstone of human development must be linked to sociality. Now here is where it gets complicated because technically Traditional Western Rationality is a type of social bond. In attempting to rationalize and modernize the world, what the West is essentially doing is attempting to extend their tribe. However, the extension of a particular tribe cannot be confused with the axiom of tribal existence in general. What creates the tribe is not rationality-rationality (Western logic), but social harmony. What creates social harmony? The current management of Western society is attempting to make traditional rationality the bond that not only we share (we being the Western world), but also what the global world shares. What is the problem with this? People are not unanimously outfitted to be efficiently rational. Just as not every is unanimously outfitted to play baseball efficiently. Mathematic logic is just one of multiple human intelligences. Most people probably have some capacity to use every type of human intelligence, but being proficient in traditional-rationality is analogous to being able to be proficient enough in kinesthetic logic to be a professional athletic. Only a very small portion of the human population is able to be a professional athletic. A larger population is proficient enough to be able to understand the world of a professional athletic and navigate themselves through it. But there is an even larger population of people who are average or below average in kinesthetic knowledge and cannot comprehend that world accurately. I argue the same holds true for Traditional western rationality. This type of logical power dominates our society. Everyone wants to be a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, etc. But the harsh reality is that millions of people, who are taught to want this, lack the capacity to truly be it. There is sizable population that is proficient enough to “fake it,” but there is a larger population that is unable to even pretend they belong in that world. It is damaging to the tribe if prestige is solely placed on one type of organ within the tribal organism. Society needs rationality, but it also needs other type of reasoning that seem to the logician irrational. People are not completely irrational, but the conception of the rational man is fallacious. Increasingly social psychology and behavioral psychology are proving that people do not behave rationally in the way economic models assume, a fact that sociology and anthropology has long advocated. Now back to what you said.
You say “I don’t believe in UFOs. I don’t believe in astrology. I don’t believe in homeopathy. I don’t believe in creationism. I don’t believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center. I don’t believe in haunted houses. I don’t believe in perpetual motion machines. I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.” (Emphasis added by me) It is irrational to assume that the functioning of a tribe has ever been rational. So while those statements you list do not match up with what we know about empirical reality, they do serve as social bonds. Is it not rational to say that what best promotes human survival is human solidarity? Therefore making irrational social bonds rational.
Now do not get me wrong. The idea is to be moving towards a more rational society. Because even if a tribe is stable in its solidarity if its bonds are created through damaging practices (such as blood rituals) ultimately such practices will lead to its destruction. However, it must be accepted that the rational state of the human animal is a semi-irrational one. We are value-reason based creatures, not solely reason based, or solely value based. The ideal society is one that is irrational in a rational way. Meaning that its irrationality benefits continued survival and harmony. In my opinion, your quest to completely rationalize the human animal is irrational and potentially dangerous (also potentially marginally beneficial, but the danger potential seems greater).
Hope you enjoy thinking about this, and that I do not come off as too aggressive ^_%. The last thing I will say is this: One of the more interesting things Freud argued was that the opposite of psychosis was not rationality but culture. Psychosis defines a belief system held by an individual or a marginal population; whereas culture defines a belief system held by the majority. The difference between psychosis and culture is not a degree of truth, but a degree of a degree of quantity.
I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.
How do you convince someone of the superiority of your insanity? This is what I am currently working on. I have enjoyed reading some of your essays, I like several of your ideas. Have fun!
-Tom Mitchell