It is our birthright as biological systems designed for self-replication, the baseline condition of our existence, at the macro level of the organism and the micro level of its cells.
But the self which we serve admits of vast variations occasioned by individual differences in capacities and temperaments and by societal differences in cultures, some acquired by birth, some acquired by choice.
Culture acquired by choice can be a renunciation of one’s culture by birth, accessories to it (as are the subcultures of occupation, profession, vocation or hobby interest), or adornments of it (as are the subcultures of dress and lingo, association and lifestyle).
Selves to be served also differ in the degree to which they are anchored in needs and desires that are asocial and atomistic, social and group-oriented, or idealistic, that is, expressing an allegiance to a code of conduct purer than any real society, a higher law.
One can think of this third, most abstract, ideological category as a self defined by a virtual community (e.g. the community of the saints, men of science, voices in the dialogue of thought). One can also think of this as a community of two, the moral agent and their ultimate all-seeing and all-knowing judge (whether that judge is conceived of as a personal God or as the judgment of History).
So, of these three most fundamental kinds of selves, the first is a selfin the individual context, the second in the social context and the third in a virtual social context.
In each case, self-determination, also known as freedom, would mean the subjection of the needs and desires of that self to no external force or authority (autonomy, in Kant’s terminology).
In the first case, we would call the person selfish.
In the second case we would call the person either fair-minded, just or righteous (accountable to more than their own self-interest) or socially conformist or opportunistically amoral, depending on our evaluation of the moral worth of the community to which it adheres.
In the third case we would call the person selfless, meaning that their ultimate loyalty is to a creed or code of ethics, above any real-world community, all of which are likely to be flawed.
Only the third case are fully realized moral agents in the strictest sense of the word, assuming, of course, the moral worth of the virtual community to which they aspire.
Presumably, everyone who sacrifices for either a real or virtual community assumes that that community has moral worth.
But real communities are inevitably flawed because they include many flawed moral agents and some defective ones — often in positions of authority, for authority and the consequent power over others draws ambitious souls.
Only virtual communities can be perfectly moral (think of them as composed of the all-stars of the league of moral agents).
But that is not to say that anyone claiming — or indeed, thinking — themselves to be perfectly moral is so. Fanatics assume their own infallibility, yet fanaticism comes from a weakness of character resulting in a need to dominate those around them.
The first case produces persons characterized by vices (bad actors, defective moral agents) and possibly even lawlessness (criminals).
The second case produces heroes, that is, persons willing to make sacrifices for their society, up to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. Honored by all in their society, imitated by few.
The third case produces martyrs, that is, persons willing to sacrifice not only life itself, but also their social standing in their real-world community, even to the extreme of being mocked and derided as criminals. Some obvious examples of this are Jesus Christ and Alexei Navalny, alongside such fictional characters as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or movies like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Hello, who is this?
What’s In Your Self?
The me I want to be?
The self is a fun-house hall of mirrors.
Every aspect of the self, each of the big three, and all of the subordinate facets, is its own mirror with its own distortions.
What’s in your self?
Which of these many mirrors reflects you as you really are, in all your complexity and your changeable moods, in the limitations of your present, the baggage of your past, and the dreams of your future?
And is the self you think you are the same as the self you really are? Is it the same as the one you appear to be to others, friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, the perceptive and the oblivious?
And, if you have a God, does your God — who alone sees into the hearts of men — see you as you would wish Him to? or does he see through a whited sepulcher to the corruption inside? or maybe just to a boastful, harmless phoney, a pretend do-gooder, faking it until they make it, but never quite making it, salvageable after a stint in Purgatory.
Alternatively, taking the secular perspective, does your image of yourself — the star of the show in your own inner moral telenovela— play a real and constructive role in the world at large? Or are you in a siloed theater, you and your tribe, playing to the home crowd but no closer to a goal than when the play started, and no more in search of a common ground with the fellow citizens sharing your Constitution than are your bitterest political foes?
And sectarian red voters are doing the same thing, while thinking of themselves as marching in the vanguard of God’s earthly army, which just may be a contradiction in terms — if Jesus is the model of God meant for imitation by man.
For what weak mortal vessel has the presumption to model himself on God the Avenger, a God full of wrath, looking down scornfully on lesser beings, the smiter of the Old Testament? (And how very attractive to a certain turn of mind!)
For those who march in the Vanguard, whether millenarian Christians or loyal cadres of the Communist Party, see themselves as so immersed in a life-and-death struggle of Good against Evil that none of the usual rules apply to them.
All is permitted in a cause so absolutely just. None of the constraints and compromises of little r republican government — with its tedious separation of powers, its painfully slow consensual procedures for establishing facts and vote count and verdicts, its universal franchise and one-man one-vote districting — none of that can be allowed to slow them in their righteous advance toward goals that leave no room for any other authority, any other voice!
Extremists and fanatics are the enemies of republics — which live by compromise between distinct parts permitted to flourish as best they can, each in their own way, and by the shared constitutional consensus that holds them together as a nation and a people.
In our time, the ultimate alternative to fractious but stable and united republics, and federations of republics (like NATO and the EU), are tyrannies of the nationalist Russian type, the Communist Chinese type, or the theocratic Iranian type.
Whatever kind of self you decide yourself to be, which of these delightful paradises would like like to park that self in?
And what, fellow citizen and voter, do you intend to do about it?
Identity is bipolar, and its chicken-and-egg poles are culture and self, reflecting each other back into infinity, like the facing mirrors in a barber shop.
mini me, many me
Afterword, whether Ill-advised or Not
From this perspective, the culture wars begin to look like a pissing match between two kinds of selves, each disrespectful and dismissive of the other, when not busy demonizing them.
That kind of crap should stay in bars — and by that I mean dives. It has no place in the politics of a republic and anchor of the Free World, which for the moment looks like it’s on the ropes.
Speaking of which, someone’s been playing Rope-a-dope with the West, reform KGB officer, now prince of peace — if J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are to be believed.
And that would be forgetting about the GOAT cheapshot artist, Donald Trump, who would happily address your kind inquiries, if he were not busy stumping up funds (and converting political donations into payments for legal fees) to placate judges and juries who are now being heard from as the slow wheels of justice (precede by investigation, evidence, testimony and unbiased reflection by jury and judge, after the caterwauling of advocates on either side ceases)grind to a conclusion.
Too bad elections are held with just time enough for viral cheapshots to hit home, eh. I mean, who needs evidence? We know what we know, right? And who has the patience, or the stamina, to wait for careful, considered deliberation? Why, it would make politics a dead bore!
Sorry for that outburst, but it’s hard to watch the possible sinking of the Republic without a twinge of emotion.
We as a nation have spent too much blood and treasure in the making of the republic to see its degradation and decline without the occasional outburst. And I just finished watching Band of Brothers, all about how we made that golden era that the MAGA crowd of America Firsters celebrates by undermining its chief and underlying basis.
But, there I go again!
What I really meant to say after apologizing for going all soapbox on you was that the original Thought was intended as a psychological and social insight, not a partisan jibe.
So, if you prefer your insights straight with no chaser, kindly disregard my subsequent lamentations.
We are all broken machines, until the moment when we choose to fix ourselves, to rise to our full potential.
Moral agents are not born, they develop under influences from without and from within.
They make themselves out of the materials they were given, and these vary with upbringing, with the society they find themselves in and with their personal experiences of those around them.
The moldable clay of infancy is shaped by many influences.
Even when given a helpful start, we must own the good in that legacy as we grow into adulthood.
It is always a choice, whether by accepting a legacy, improving or reforming it or rejecting it, whether slow and gradual or sudden and cathartic.
The need for self-repair may be a gradual acceptance of the responsibilities that come with our better self, or it may come as an epiphany, or even as the perhaps overdramatized conversion of Saul to Paul on his way to Damascus.
But such moments of passage are dangerous as well as hopeful.
Out of such moments can be born fanatics, whose crystalline vision of a new world and of their place within it is brittle and full of sharp edges — in short, the newly-forged self-image of a fanatic has no room for doubt, or for others who doubt.
These twisted creations of fire, hammer and anvil view outsiders as objects and obstacles to their self-redemption, adopting a scorched-earth policy towards them.
This forming of a new self-image, this reformation, this rebirth, falls along the same bell curve as all other human traits and actions.
There is a small leading edge of well-formed rebirths, designed with thought and skill, with grace and integrity, whose subjects really are what they purport to be.
There is also a trailing edge of impostors and monstrosities who so pervert the vision in their heads that it serves only their own bottomless egos and thinly-disguised lust for power.
These badly broken machines of self-infatuation are eager to convert the attention they draw — their fame or notoriety — into the power and authority to move masses in accordance with their will.
This is nothing but the will to power disguised as a call to redemption.
Then there is the much larger center, the fat middle of the bell curve, the mixed blessing of the great middle ground — neither prominently good nor irredeemably evil, no better or worse than the next one over — that becomes the battleground across which surge the truly good and the truly evil.
Always the likelier outcome
The Sad Cycles of History
Caesar at his Rubicon: should he or shouldn’t he? will he or won’t he?
So spin the cycles of history, in their brazenly repeating cycles of hope and despair.
This, our earthly purgatory — unlike the classical Purgatory, which issues, after varying terms of penance, into the single issue of Paradise — issues with equal ease into widespread reformation or widespread retrogression.
The more there is of raw emotions and tribal sympathies, the more likely is this rebirth to take a wrong turn into culture-wide evil and tyranny by the strongest faction, hijacked by false prophets, demagogues and others craving power (or the crumbs of power due the lackeys and mouthpieces of the Big Men, and, occasionally, Big Women).
The more reasoning, knowledge and understanding, the more openness to evidence and dialogue, the more likely is this rebirth to widen and deepen both moral agency and the capacity to engineer a well-constructed life, culminating in self-realization worthy of the name.
Rebirths that become politicized inevitably become polarizing, with opportunists exploiting concentrations of wealth and power, and exploiting media that spread widely but thinly across masses of people– whether state-controlled media or the Wild West social media guided by algorithms that prioritize viral messages of unknown provenance and dubious content over thoughtfulness, credibility or evidence.
We live in an era of accelerating change and disruptive innovation.
Always the likelier outcome
Land of Liberty, Where the Buck Stops
America has led the world into this New World and, being at its cutting edge, is the first to suffer its pervasive technological, economic, demographic and cultural disruptions.
No good comes without fundamental change to this tired old world of entrenched unfairness and inequality, of undeserved privileges and unmerited oppressions.
But every such change triggers crises of self-image and of self-interest. These two crises combine to make all such passages fraught and frenzied.
But, as in all of life, great advances entail great risks. Without risk come no rewards.
America and the rest of the Free World have pulled through before and will, I believe, pull through again.
We have nothing to fear but failure of nerve in the leading edge, and loss of moral backbone and thought for the long-term in the great middle.
This new contest is ours to win — and ours to lose.
We will have to own the success or failure of this latest experiment in human agency, this latest leap on the path to realizing the best potentials of the human being.
Fundamental Definitions, Conceptual Frameworks & Paradigms
It’s an old game in philosophy to define human nature.
It can be done in many ways, depending on what the author wants to emphasize. As a general rule, complex composites can be viewed from multiple vantage points because they aren’t single, simple things.
When positing or defining the fundamental nature of something, one is choosing the framework of assumptions (i.e., the paradigm) within which one proposes to examine the matter.
In effect, all such framings and fundamental definitions are hypotheses, whether acknowledged openly or veiled and buried in assertions.
Hypothesis: a 3-Level Human Nature
Level atop level
Human nature has three components. each newer one built atop the prior ones.
Human beings were initially Darwinian survival-machines, like any other organism.
They belonged to the animal kingdom, composed of organisms with motor and sensory capacities. These allow and enable the two later levels.
Our earliest ancestors branched from the social apes, adding further capacities crucial for our later development, including social signaling and hierarchies, opposable thumbs, and more developed brains, especially the frontal and prefrontal cortices, epicenters of such critical human capacities as memory, attention and thought.
I define human nature, then, as having 3 levels. We are rational beings, but also social apes, and Darwinian survival-machines.
Each level is present in all of us, but different levels dominate in different personalities, varying also with the group context: family, workplace, market or forum.
Old School
This is not altogether different from the Platonic three-part definition of the soul as the rational, the spirited, and the desiring parts.
Aristotle’s subtler (to my mind) and more naturalistic account divides what I call the survival-machine into a vegetative soul (autonomous physiological functions) and the animate soul (defined by its motor-sensory reactive capacity, driven by survival needs and sense-triggered desires).
Aristotle’s 2nd level skips straight to modernity’s speech-enabled social ape, man the political animal, identifying speech as the capacity that lifts man from what I call a social animal to a political one. For only with language can man formulate laws, justify actions or judge them worthy of punishment.
Put differently, social animals with speech inevitably grapple with at least customary ideas of justice — shared verbal justifications of actions that meet group approval.
So, we’ve arrived at politics.
Adam Smith, Kant, Darwin, Weber & Co.
Global South to Global North: We want what you have
In modernity — and even post-modernity, to the extent that this is more than a fashionable variant within modernity — human beings have so altered their environment, superimposing their social, mechanized, and now digital environments atop their natural environment (somewhat to its peril), that the way one explores this roughly similar 3-part definition of human nature differs dramatically from how Plato and Aristotle could explore it.
We live in a commercial world, a world that will be committed to economic growth until the global South joins the global North in prosperity.
We live in a world where justice will be always seen from two perspectives — balancing one another when in relative equilibrium, opposing one another when balances of power shift, turning the advancing classes more demanding and the entrenched classes more defensive. Riots and backlashes may follow.
More dangerous than society-wide decline is when outsiders’ rising expectations meet insiders’ fear of decline — culture wars.
This view of history as progressing by sudden revolutions punctuating gradual reforms means there will always be at least two political perspectives/ideologies, the change-welcoming liberal perspective and the tradition-defending conservative perspective.
Unsurprisingly, demographics and self-interest dictate that those whose interests flourished under the arrangements in place generally adopt conservatism, while those whose prospects look to flourish with coming changes generally adopt liberalism.
That’s the red-blue voter story in a nutshell.
(That a portion of the old elite drives and prospers with the new ways is merely the more general truth behind Marx’s more partisan half-truth of a vanguard party splintering off of the old ruling class. It’s a half-truth because neither group is without a class interest of its own. This elite aligned with the knowledge economy is what Trumpists call the “deep state” or the “bi-coastal elite”. Ironic self-parody, as the Trumpists leaders, including Trump himself, are overwhelmingly Ivy Leaguers.)
(This simple picture is admittedly complicated by geopolitical and demographic divisions and the coalitions of convenience those divisions produce.)
Thus, relatively affluent urban populations, benefitting from the transition to a digital age and knowledge economy will be comfortable with more liberal and global perspectives, while less affluent and rural populations, whose traditional economic livelihoods are threatened by the shift to a digital knowledge economy and by modern problems and their solutions (e.g., climate change and the greening of economies, declining labor forces in aging populations and immigration), will become more conservative (out of desperation) and will be easy prey for demagogues and opportunists who see increased power for themselves by exploiting and widening social divisions.
And when social divisions deepen, and domestic parties polarize, the rational being is overcome by the social ape, whose primary need is to identify with their fellow partisans in whom they can take comfort as difficult changes and social conflict loom.
The only real remedy is demographics and generational change.
I do not mean that the children of red voters will all become blue voters.
That won’t happen.
I mean that the older generation of red voters, having invested most of their careers, wealth and self-image in yesterday’s economy, will cling to their ideology-dictated positions, despite evidence. Their current wealth will suffice to last their lifetimes, so they will feel no need to change or adapt.
But the upcoming generation — though likely not abandoning all of their family traditions — will adapt to emerging economic realities. Self-interest will see to that.
They will move to where the jobs are.
They will gradually distance themselves from beliefs that hinder their gaining useful credentials and experience.
As their prospects become tied to the newly emerging economy, their interests will gradually align with realities of that economy and the world it is in the process of remaking.
It’s a story as old as history, and — even though we are the species with a capacity for pragmatic rationality and moral agency — it will be driven by narrowly-defined self-interest, the strongest motive force of history and human nature.
An interesting collage (get the metaphor?) drawn from the Net (Management not responsible for any acronyms or words in collage with non-standard meanings unknown to said management)
How could something that evolves through a series of accidental circumstances — in both its genetic heritage and its personal history — produce a self that was not a pretty buggy bit of software?
Is that a Holmesian deer-stalker? or just a plaid baseball cap?
This consideration, and my own reflections on the difficulties of talking across the “culture wars” divide, led me to draft an essay of about 1600 words entitled “The Apolitical Politics of the Extremes,” my planned post for Saturday (I am myself a bit of buggy software set loose among accidental circumstances).
It seems to me any answer has to consider culture, education, and biological nature. But if you see something else, go for it!
Comments welcome and more than welcome.
For as long as I have produced this blog, I have been disappointed in its inability to generate much in the way of dialogue.
I know I’m largely to blame for that. I don’t post casual musings. I work hard to bulletproof anything I put out there.
I edit obsessively.
I strengthen or cut weaker arguments.
I try to do adequate research (without creating a whole, new job description — I am a one-man shop).
I tone down or cut any weak links that I can detect in my argument.
This minimizes reader response. If you want to get response, ya gotta flame, provoke, fly over the top, get nasty, insult people.
Which is exactly what’s wrong with the Net as it stands.
Invective, outrage, overhyped slogans, oversimplified interpretations, negligible fact-checking, these are what bring mass followings.
No wonder our politics is a shit show!
So, I’m trying a new strategy.
I’m posting a provocative question to ponder, but not one that is inflammatory or derogatory.
It’s open-ended.
It could cut either way.
I’d love to get some reactions. Anything:
from Comments that express reactions to today’s thought-provoking query that manage to be thoughtful and civil without necessarily being bland (OMG, if thoughtful civility has become “bland,” then we are well and truly screwed, as an acronym: WATS)
to guest Posts that rebut my post, planned for this Saturday, the 14th of January, in the year of our Lord 2023 (intoned with heavy Charlton Heston overtones).
(We’ll figure out how to do this, if the need arises. Those of you who had me as a teacher know I am happy to hear respectful criticisms, rebuttals, and alternate views, although I would have to do due diligence as a moderator — the very problem social media platforms are struggling with, for which I have no magical solution.)
So, by putting up a provocative thought for you to ponder, I’m hoping to stimulate a response.
Human beings are ruled by fear, like all mortal creatures.
But as the thinking animal, our fear has another dimension.
For human beings know, deep down, that we do not know the deepest things we claim to know, the things we most rely on.
For those deepest and dearest things, we rely on something outside ourselves and beyond our power: our social group and its leading authorities.
And, of course, the personification of social authority as well as absolute authority, our God — or, depending on the particular religion, our gods or God’s prophets or the impersonal ultimate reality beyond the ego.
With imperfect knowledge comes a fear known only to reasoning animals.
For our sense of self-worth, our standing in our social group and the hope of life beyondthe grave all depend on a power beyond our own.
Whose Authority?
Nonetheless, however much we may attribute the authority we follow, in the abstract, to an absolute and infallible being, in the real-world experience of our own biography and of the history of our fellows, we actually rely on the authority of real-world intermediaries, whether charismatic leaders, proselytizers, inspiring examples, anointed or self-identified teachers, or personal experiences of awakening.
And, of course, all of us rely on our own implicit authority to correctly judge all of the above, to choose the correct authorities, even if we ourselves lack any discernible authority.
If, on the one hand, our faith in our authorities is an act of submission to something beyond ourselves, on the other hand, it is an affirmation of the judgment and will we exercise in choosing and supporting our authorities.
In other words, faith is at one and the same time an act of submission and a manifestation of our own personal will. (And false prophets and would-be dictators know and exploit this.)
In souls of the greatest integrity, faith so offered results in true submission to a discipline which stands above their self-regarding motives, but in souls of the lesser integrity, faith so offered clothes self-regarding motives with absolute authority.
How glorious to break norms, laws and constitutions as the avenging sword of God! What soul craving to impose its own will on the world could resist?
Yet not all the voices in someone’s head are divine in origin.
But what about those higher souls in closer contact with the divine? the prophets, the founders of religions, and especially those who found a political authority, equipped with coercive powers in this world?
Some certainly believed in the revelations they brought; others cynically exploited the credulity of the multitudes.
And since cynical manipulators could only succeed by posing believably as believers in their own visions, telling the two apart is a matter of art ringed round with uncertainty. (You place your bets, and you get what you get.)
Thinkers from Plato to Machiavelli to Rousseau to Hegel to Weber to Huntington have examined the role of religion (and, ideology, its secular equivalent) in political life. They come to various conclusions, but all acknowledge a powerful linkage between the two, whether real or manipulative or both.
For example, many Bolsheviks had a faith and devotion to their principles that paralleled that of Christian martyrs and Christian inquisitors. In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, an ex-Communist disillusioned by Stalin’s crimes, paints a fictional portrait of one such, Comrade Nikolai Rubashov — a man of good intentions, but hardened by his responsibility for using ruthless means in pursuit of what he believed were justifying ends, who lets himself fall by the same sword with which he felled others, even as he realizes that the system he had believed in has degenerated. His self-sacrifice is not a sign of hope but an act of atonement.
Part 2
Shake My Beliefs, Shake My Foundations
But let us set aside the question of whether — and under what circumstances — our faith is well-founded.
Let us set aside the question of how our faith is tested.
Let us instead look at how vulnerable our imperfect knowledge makes us, a vulnerability we do not share with the lesser animals.
That vulnerability, and its accompanying fear, is the root of a strange set of thoroughly human behaviors: turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of our champions, denying facts and evidence contrary to our beliefs, willfully preferring hearsay and conspiracy theories to evidence.
And then there’s demonizing opponents, designating them as enemies and lashing out with ugly words and uglier deeds.
Extremists & Alternate Truths = Power Unchecked & Unbalanced
Defenseless in feeling, dangerous in action
I am not suggesting that only America’s Trumpists or Russia’s Putinists do this.
It’s typical of extremists of all sorts at all times, for extremists want wholesale change. Their answer to any evidence that contradicts their beliefs, to any arguments that the solutions their ideology proposes are unworkable — or will have unforeseen consequences offsetting the expected benefits — is that no procedures or institutions of the old order are to be trusted. They must tear down the old foundations and build anew.
Right-wing or left-wing, they’re asking for a blank check. No one who reveres democracy, no one with good judgment, common sense or self-respect should write any kind of extremists the blank check they’re asking for.
But the blank check is the currency of dictators and despots — and the death rattle of democracies.
They ask us to believe them, and only them, and to believe them on faith, without evidence and without processes except those controlled entirely by their own partisans — because if you’re not them, you’re corrupt, by definition.
This is where fascists and communists — and forms of extremism yet to be given names — show their similarity. However different their slogans and their 25-cent words, their tactics converge. Because no one who is not one of their own has rights or a voice or credibility; they are unpersons and treated as such.
No experts or procedures, methods or protocols will be reliable, they tell us, until we have adopted wholesale their new order.
That’s why extremists turn so quickly to conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories justify the unjustifiable, that is, they justify what cannot be justified under any existing neutral or consensual procedures or methods for presenting and examining evidence and evaluating conflicting claims.
Conspiracy theories are the natural defense of those who know they do not know. Unable to defend their own views, they reject the expertise of any who can defend their views, and of any institutions that provide documentary evidence — as the January 6 Hearings have done, as court cases and state investigations have done after examining claims of a stolen election, as epidemiologists and climatologists have done.
Conspiracy theories neatly divide the world into friends and foes — those like the conspiracy theorists who are wise to the conspiracy and those who are either its perpetrators or its dupes.
At bottom, this worldview is the worldview of those for whom loyalty to their social group trumps any wider loyalties or responsibilities — and even truth itself.
It is a worldview permeated by fear — fear of being ostracized from one’s primary social group, fear of being devoid of external support, fear of being wrong in one’s deepest beliefs.
Anger and rage displace observing and reasoning, replacing the search for procedurally verifiable evidence or common ground of any kind.
Beliefs that fear being scrutinized and critically examined, beliefs that fear being tested against facts and evidence, are not genuine attempts to understand the world.
They are hollow dreams of pretended knowledge, facades erected to hide doubts and fears, immersion tanks of comforting and self-congratulatory myths, designed to lull those who will not think for themselves, those who need legends-in-the-flesh (and thus is born the personality cult so typical of these movements), beyond challenge or judgment — and thus beyond good and evil — to utter pronouncements, oracles and prophecies that they need only believe and obey.
They are not the best that America has to offer.
They are not what made it great.
They have no power to restore — their only power, the power to belittle their enemies and to destroy us all.
Conclusion: Hope, but with Open Eyes
It is good to hope for a bulwark against one’s deepest fears.
To be a human being is to know that, as a living organism, you must die.
We spend our lives building up the powers with which we protect ourselves from all that we fear, only to have age and death inevitably strip every last power from us.
We are finite, limited in both power and understanding. But, differently from lesser animals, we know our powers are limited, we know our understanding is limited.
We know there is a world greater than our powers of understanding.
We know that our powers are insufficient to protect us from all that we can foresee, never mind what we cannot foresee.
Why not hope that something beyond our powers and beyond the limits of our understanding cherishes us and all that we cherish, and stands ready to help us if only we will help ourselves?
To hope so is good, so long as it does not enfeeble us, leaving to it the work of looking after ourselves.
And so longas it does not lead us to divorce ourselves from reality, from that part of reality which we can understand.
The urge to deny truths we find unpleasant, the need to listen only to those who echo what we want to believe is not a sign of God’s blessing. It is a sign of weakness, corruption and ultimately of evil, as we fight blindly in our own perceived interest, lashing out indiscriminately at the good and the bad, because we cannot tell the difference, having undermined and squandered our own powers of understanding.
All we really know is our experience of the world.
True, that experience can include specialized training in a craft, skill, trade, or discipline, all with some combination of calculable rules and judgmental rules-of-thumb.
These rules are shared. It’s what rules are for.
Even strictly internal rules, personal rules, are for sharing across time, present, past, and future. Personal rules are for maintaining a constant identity across time, expertise if we’re talking about skills, character if we’re talking about values and motives.
But then we are bound by the rules and procedures learned in our training, adjusted by intuition and judgment where theory meets practice in where else but our experience of the world.
If we live within the silo of our own experience, then how do we know others like ourselves?
There is a foolishly abstract and dogmatic answer to this question called solipsism, which maintains that we can’t ever really know, that there may be no others, or, in its most recent and trendy form, that we are all just avatars in some superior being’s video game.
I mean nothing like that.
The purpose of theory is to explain and anticipate experience, not to undermine it or devalue it.
How To Succeed in the Game of Language
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
What I mean comes much closer to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that a private language is a contradiction in terms.
Wittgenstein’s point is that there is no magical direct communication between minds, there is only communication by shared experience.
And this shared experience can only be outward or public experience, because anything purely private — Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box visible only to oneself (Philosophical Investigations, #293) — can have no public meaning, and thus cannot enter into any public language.
And public language is the only kind that communicates anything.
Wittgenstein’s term for such shared experience is language-game. He means a social practice in which speakers perform speech acts following rules understood by their listeners (Philosophical Investigations, #43, 199, 202, 241, 340 ).
For example, to set up a shared meaning for “red”, one picks out red objects from a collection of variously colored objects, leaving it to the observers to consult their own experience to pick out the shared quality (Philosophical Investigations, #272-78).
Of course, this wouldn’t work for someone who is color blind, because they have no distinct experience that corresponds to red and red only. So, even with the public performance, with the color-blind there is no matching internal experience with which to make “red” communicable. Don’t even try.
Joan Miro, Les Agulles del Pastor (The Hands of the Shepherd)
So, Who Is this Other?
So, if we can only know categories of things, qualities or motions when we have a shared experience of them, how do we ever get to know a distinct but separate center of its own universe of consciousness (i.e., another conscious being like ourselves)?
For that distinct and separate consciousness is entirely independent of us, as we are of them. If it ceases (i.e., dies), we may continue, and vice-versa.
We can only know that other either by direct experience, that is, by observing it as an object among objects, or by inferring its subjective experience as a projection of our own subjective experience.
For example, if we see it chasing food, we infer it feels hunger, whether it’s an exact match for us (a human being) or a near match (an animal).
But, even if it is an exact biological match (a human being), it may or may not be a cultural match.
Language-games are a part of culture, but not the only part. Culture also includes non-verbal games, that is, social practices regarding how we forage and collaborate together, how we divide tasks and resources, how we mate and compete, how we signal affiliations through dress, cosmetics and adornment.
So, again, we infer about others in the same two ways: by direct experience or by whether they follow the same set of rules that we follow.
Where Rules End and Direct Experience Begins
Rules do not apply themselves.
That takes judgment.
And judgment, as we all know, improves with experience.
But here we must distinguish between those who rely on their own judgments, giving it as much weight as their experience and expertise merits, and those who rely on the judgment of others.
Children, of course, must rely on the judgment of others.
But full-grown adults should rely on their own judgment, if good, except where specialized forms of expertise are required.
Sadly, not all adults are full-grown. A fringe few turn their judgment over to a cult leader, and pay for their mistake down the road.
A much more wide-ranging and damaging form of this is when a strong man of politics, whether dictator or demagogue, develops a personality cult.
We all pay for their mistakes.
A personality cult exists when a large, politically potent following yields up their independent judgment to a leader who claims to be their voice, suspending their critical judgment to the point that they believe in disputed narratives or outright lies.
Dictators, like Xi Jiping, rely on:
their raw power to impose their will, and on
increases in national wealth and power under their tutelage.
Demagogues, like Donald Trump (and his many current models and imitators, both domestic and foreign) appeal to resentments, first, and once these are in play, to prejudices born of resentment.
Two potent sources of resentment:
income inequalities between the more educated and the less educated (set to grow in a knowledge-based digital economy);
the shift from a rural extractive economy (mining, hydrocarbons, farming and ranching) to an urban knowledge-based digital economy, where software, big data and human capital (in the form of college degrees and beyond) matter more than expanses of land (and thus where key economic agents converge in centers of trade and research).
The two trends obviously reinforce one another.
Power Players
Rules, Meta/Rules & Empathy
So, how do we judge others?
By how well their inferred values and motives match ours.
By how well their rules of expertise and rules of culture match ours.
And by how they present themselves in language (whose full use requires a self like ours), and how we judge the truthfulness of their self-presentation.
And when we contact others across cultural divides, we must look beyond our own provincial and insular rules and values to meta-rules and meta-values.
The only meta-rules and meta-values that can bridge the cultural divides that separate us are universal rules and values.
These cannot be legacy of any particular ethnic group.
They can only be the universal values formulated through the Enlightenment, because only they were formulated so as to be universal.
This is most evident in such contractarian thinkers as Rousseau (the social contract), Kant (the categorical imperative) and Rawls (the veil of ignorance), for their iconic formulas are simply universality formulated as a political principle, a moral principle, and a perceptual principle (in which the self-perception of one’s own identifying features are filtered out by the veil of ignorance).
Yet elements of universality appear in other contractarians, as well, like Hobbes, Locke, and Nozick.
Viewed this way, Enlightenment universals are not a peculiarly Western phenomena, although they reached their fullest expression there.
But, even in the most pedigreed Western nations, they have never been fully realized nor fully lived up to.
Our task is not yet done. Much lies ahead.
It will not be easy or painless nor embraced by all without resistance.
Predictably, every group which stands to lose special privileges will resist. This applies to interest groups and parties, by definition, to ethnic groups, religious sects and social cate by historical accident.
Sadly, many will resist even when that loss is merely comparative and not absolute.
We are all still, after all, social primates, deeply concerned about our standing within the troop.
What will he think of me if…
Such emotions are inborn by nature and inbred by culture. Only the capacity for reasoning can rise above them, but that, in most, is more a selectively used capacity for calculating and pursuing benefits (as Hume, described it) than a motive force (as Kant and Aristotle would have it).
Whatever troop you identify yourself with — whichever side of these divides you stand on — have a little empathy.
Listening to reason — the agent-defining capacity we all share, whose rules are common to all who embrace them — is the first step on that path.
Human interactions range between two extremes, that of soulmates with perfect mutual understanding and that of aliens with insular misunderstandings of one another, and even of themselves.
Some can never see themselves as others see them. They are trapped within the walls of themselves, hostage to their own projections!
Is some degree of self-absorbed autism built into human nature? passing undetected so long as we function among our peers well enough to be accepted as normal?
Self-deception is an art mastered by many, from hypocrites to narcissists, from manipulative leaders to drug addicts, from the pretentious and ostentatious to the followers of cult leaders and demagogues.
Much of literature hinges on reveals, sudden epiphanies in which a siloed characters abruptly appears in their true colors to others, more rarely to themselves.
And all this is compounded by the near universal human tendency to project an image of ourselves somewhat shinier than the everyday reality.
As social primates, our social standing is nearly as important as our inner reality. For some of us, it is more important.
“We are the hollow men,” intones T.S. Eliot, a man not without inner contradictions and foibles. Listen sometime to him reading his own work.
“For with much wisdom comes much sorrow” (Ecclesiastes, 1:18).
Living an examined life is possible, but it’s a lifetime project, with no obvious external rewards of money or status, so, many of us think to get by without it.
Social prominence (whether serious or frivolous) comes to those who project well, a power all-too-evident in today’s social media.
Those who live well-examined, honorable lives are easily overlooked in the rush for fame.
Fame is a market value which turns the well-lived life into a commodity for mass consumption, cheapening it as it does so.
We need a new word, Facebook-happy, meaning the kind of outward-projected appearance of happiness that can be captured or memed as a Facebook picture-post.
Today, anyone can achieve their 15 minutes of fame — a phrase styled by Andy Warhol, whose fame lasted interminably beyond 15 minutes — by doing something stupid in a video posted online.
What comes easy doesn’t weather well.
Fame is a deeply-doctored façade that hides a real human being behind the golden statue beloved of dictators and other impostors.
AugustusCaesar died in A.D. 14, his empire secured and at peace. His reported last words: to his subjects he said, “I found Rome of clay; I leave it to you of marble,” but to the friends who had stayed with him in his rise to power he added, “Have I played the part well?”
Weak in build and stamina, but cunning and ruthless, he outlasted Caesar by eliminating those who had opposed him, with none of Caesar’s mercy.
He bested one great warrior, Marc Antony, by using another, Marcus Agrippa.
Once firmly in power, he played the role of benevolent dictator, hollowing out the power of his rival, the Senate, while carefully preserving its forms and outward traditions (a tactic used also by Louis XIV at Versailles).
Augustus Octavianus, the man and the myth
Communing with One Another
Partners to an interaction often see and remember it differently.
Lovers’ quarrels often rise from expectations shared in prospect but divergently understood when the bill comes due.
Revolutionary allies no sooner succeed than they are at one another’s throats.
Diplomacy rests on the ability of partners in negotiation to read different nuances into the same text.
Happily married couples often remember shared events differently, each viewing it somewhat more flatteringly to themselves.
Picture every personal interaction as a tube within a tube, the inner tube being how we think of the action, the outer how it is perceived by our partners. And our partners have the same duality in reverse.
It’s not simply that we project ourselves in ways that flatter our inner reality.
We also fill in the blanks in what our partner actually shows us.
Sometimes we infer correctly, but sometimes we read into their actions what we want to believe in place of what they have unambiguously shown.
And ambiguity and innuendo are widely practiced techniques for suggesting without committing to things we wish for but do not feel confident asking for outright.
The silver lining to this dark cloud is that this gray zone gives birth to the exploration of character in novels and to the connotations and hinted expectations of poetry.
The Depth of the Inner
Inner depth of character is inferred from a distance. It can only be known surely when tested openly within the scope of one’s own experience, for second-hand narratives are generally embellished to serve the needs of those who convey them.
In that way, heroic narratives are little different from conspiracy theories: they are tools used by the manipulative to control the weak-minded.
The alluring stranger, seems a portal to escape the routine and the familiar. But, mostly backlit by romance in the absence of knowledge, they usually turn out to be bounded by the constants of human nature, the standard set of motives and the ordinary constraints imposed by reality and economics.
The most resourceful of us draw on inner depths, remaining unbroken through harsh mistreatment, the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Alexei Navalny.
If one avoids self-deception, the depth of one’s perception reflects the richness of one’s interior.
Hollow and superficial men see a world around them of the same.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” says the man who wants to act the wolf.
But if one sees depth and richness in the best people one knows and in the aspiring young, that reflects one’s own faith in the better angels of humani nature and the responsiveness of one’s own depths to perceived depth in others.
The Virtual Community
There is a virtual community in which the best of humanity flourishes.
We can always look to the standard-bearers of culture and of virtue.
We may find them in experience, when we see someone step up in a crisis, standing by their word, doing their duty, doing the right thing despite the personal cost, or when we see the strong protect the weak from exploitation without that contemptuous quid pro quo that strips those so protected of independence and dignity (all too many “leaders” are happy to protect those who become their unquestioning followers).
I think there is some virtual choir of those who live by what is right, even if only in the respect and admiration of those who aspire to the same.
This, I think, is what Kant means by the kingdom of heaven, whether or not it has a metaphysical prop supporting a place beyond time. Christ, too, meant something like that, as opposed to an instituted church; it was the instituted church of his time that persecuted him for, like all prophets, his very existence was a challenge to the established order.
Or perhaps we are like Harry Haller, protagonist of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, a lonely dissident in Weimar Germany in the interwar years. Then, as we strive to uphold standards when they threaten to collapse all about us, we too can hear “the laughter of the immortals” as they view the Divine Comedy in which we are entangled, but with eyes that are not the eyes of gods.
Psychological mollusks, our selves are slow accretions of habits deposited by nature and nurture, by upbringing, social customs and our own unique, if fumbling, experiences of the world around us.
So far, that’s mostly stuff that happens to us: we start off more shaped than shaping.
And then comes adolescence, that awkward passage where we become self-aware.
At first, it’s a passive thing. If we’re not happy or content, who do we blame? How do we escape our boring life? How do we survive our depressive episodes and their inner consequences? How do we survive our manic episodes and their outer consequences?
I think we’re all manic-depressive (what is now officially bipolar disorder, in its more extreme and disabling forms) to some degree.
But for the luckiest, somewhere in that rollercoaster ride and pivot-point called adolescence, we discover the power of agency — we discover that, by making choices for which we accept full responsibility, we can become more shaping than shaped.
We never entirely lose our shapedness. We just gradually and incrementally replace implanted habits with self-made choices, the way cities replace old cast iron water mains with safer PVC ones.
In our teenage years, then, we are like someone becoming slowly aware that they’re hurtling down an expressway, and coming to realize that it’s their own hands on the steering wheel. They’re flying through a vortex of hurtling objects, which follow some rough order, but not always and not predictably, and they’re ringed by sounds and voices, some from outside, but the most forceful and commanding voices pulsing out from the radio on the inside.
How Not to Adapt
Is it any wonder, then, that many of those embedded in a comforting, cocoonlike culture choose to stay inside the silken threads that whiten and homogenize their immediate surroundings, their Umwelt, the one fixed and comforting, familiar and palpable, all-embracing womb in a world that seems to them on the verge of disintegration?
That makes it neither right nor realistic, neither morally praiseworthy nor pragmatic, but it does make it understandable, especially if you’ve been straining for much of your adult life to become flexible enough to adapt to the ever more rapidly changing world around us — a world changing rapidly in both its social aspects (e.g., digitalization, multiculturalism, globalization) and physical aspects (e.g., global warming, rising Asia, the growing acknowledgement by affluent, mostly Western, cultures of historical inequities intertwined with their rise to power and wealth)?
Lest you think I’m just another anti-colonialist, postmodernist, West-basher, hear this: The past depredations of Western civilization mirror what every dominant group has done throughout recorded history (not to mention unrecorded history).
And history is just how the tool-making animal — the one that began making physical tools of stone and bone using its primal tool of language — plays and wins the defining biological game of survival.
(OK, maybe cockroaches or tardigrades (Google them) will outlast us.)
Every beleaguered native population, every discriminated-against minority, is already a divisional champion of historical leagues further down the pyramid.
Let us hope:
that cultural survival is not a single-elimination knockout tournament,
that humanity has grown up just enough to make cultural cohabitation a viable possibility, if not a lead pipe certainty.
Cultural cocooning, as long as you do it on your own time in the privacy of your own inner life, is fine.
I meself play at being Irish. Sure, I own me a pair of Guinness boxers. And I can affect an Ulster accent — care of Patrick Wallace, where’re he be now, last seen in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany — and regularly reinvigorated by watching Sean Bean on the big screen (even in Winterfell, you can catch a trace of the flat, low-to-the-ground rhythm of it).
But when cultural cocooning overtakes real life, as in the many denialisms — Creationism, anti-vax, hoax and conspiracy talk, the disavowal of connections between 1/6 and Trump’s barefaced lies — then, Houston, we have a problem.
Houston, by the way, is blue (Google it, if you don’t believe me).
“Rural is red, urban is blue; 2/14 was Valentines, and I love you.”
When your habits deform your choices, you have stepped away from the winding and protean (it’s anything but straight and narrow) path of a moral agent; you have become a living fossil, vestige of a condemned home, fighting to preserve what’s yours without regard to anyone else’s home, life or prospects.
If all you can do is blindly insist on the prerogatives of your kind, and if in so doing you must deny emerging realities, that is not good and neither are you.
Everyone deserves a chance and a place, when earned, but no one automatically deserves all that they once effortlessly inherited (the legacy of those who earned it, using methods sometimes honorable and lawful and sometimes not, as with every other culture).
If there’s anything special about America’s dominant culture — and I’d say there is — predominantly British, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but suffused with other cultures from its beginnings ( Dutch and French, English Catholic, English Quakers and Unitarians, German Pietists, native Americans, the African-Americans brought unwillingly and wrongfully in slave ships, and wave after wave of immigrants (whenever cheap labor was desirable to the dominant majorities) — it’s not blood or race or religion.
It’s English common law, the organically and historically developed rights of Englishmen, and the Enlightenment ideas (not least the Scottish Enlightenment, peaking around the time of our founding) of constitutional orders protective of human rights.
These were not instituted completely, fairly, or equally across all Americans, as no real world implementation of ideals ever has been.
But it was a start, to whose natural and necessary completion we are now moving, despite the predictable resistance of all those who figure to do better under the old dispensation than under the coming one.
And for a variety of reasons — economic, demographic, technological, and cultural, those who will lose unearned advantages, privileges, and punching-above-their-weight social status — those whose fortunes will decline (unless they adapt more robustly and proactively to the coming age than they have yet done, aided and abetted by their political protectors) are heavily concentrated in rural areas with extractive economies and among older, whiter, male Boomers with less-than-average education and career adaptability.
Their peak time has passed, but their only acknowledgement of this is in a host of denialisms that veer farther and farther from reality as their fears and resentments grow. For fear and resentment are the emotional forms in which an adverse reality announces itself to those who rely on emotion over reason.
Cultures embody both reason and emotion, America’s no less than any other. But when cultural loyalty trumps observation and reasoning, it’s the emotional residue of a fading culture that speaks loudest.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thought on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes
Language: Man’s Tool of Conquest
Hypocrisy is as old as morality.
They are siblings, like Cain and Abel, the firstborn of Adam and Eve.
Morality and hypocrisy, Abel and Cain, are the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Knowledge, moral or otherwise, can only come through language.
Before language, there is only raw experience, from which one draws a blurred and inconstant shadow of knowledge, in the same way that animals do.
Language brings knowledge by creating a symbolic framework , a social construct of distinctions and definitions, by means of which a proprietary language community navigates the physical and social worlds they inhabit.
This gives them a decisive survival advantage over the other creatures, leaving them speechless, without defense against the onslaught of man.
Hand signals used by the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari
American troops calling in a drone strike
Language: the Double-Edged Sword
But falsehoods and beliefs biased in favor of their owner, whether a community or an individual, can be advantages, too, in the right circumstances.
Communities protect themselves from the falsehoods of individual members by social rituals that canvas and assess the testimony of witnesses within the community, and the testimony of the senses as regards physical evidence (the physical residue of human acts).
This communal defense against false witness, however, is not infallible, especially when the accused individual is disliked, deviant, dissident or discriminated against.
Two further failings:
Its judgments reflect the bias of the judging community, so individuals and communities outside the judging community receive biased judgments. Outsiders routinely include foreigners, immigrants and minorities.
That part of the community most active in rendering and executing judgments, the ruling class, grants itself a degree of immunity from judgment, due both to its own bias in its own interests and to the discretionary prerogative inseparable from wielding power.
The foregoing has spoken mostly of the failure of judgments to reflect and recognize justice, that is, unwitting self-deception. Yet there is also much room for deliberate and willful deception.
For advantage is found in using outward spoken language as a veil and cover for inward unspoken language — one’s own innermost thoughts.
Hypocrisy straddles the chasm between deliberate deception of others and unwitting self-deception.
Indeed, the culture of hypocrisy makes artful use of the chasm, invading the public realms with deliberate deceptions and then retreating into self-deception, as needed.
Truth as a Calling
Truly, as Nietzsche said: “truth has no survival-value“.
Truth is a calling, and like all callings, few are called and fewer answer.
Truth is a discipline.
It is not lucrative, and one pays for its in one’s own blood.
The pursuit of truth absorbs time and effort like a near bottomless pit whose depths it takes generations to sound.
No wonder it is the rarest and most precious thing on Earth!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Alexei Navalny
Addenda
Alexei Navalny is dying now of the truth in Putin’s Russia.
(I can’t find the reference for the Nietzsche, but I swear I read it somewhere in Nietzsche, and it’s been stuck in my craw ever since.)
When All Is Said and Dunn 