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.
My answer to the provocative query I posted last Saturday answers the query from a political perspective (not surprising, given my teaching background).
Modern free societies seem always to split politically into two parties, one that looks back fondly to a past they’re losing (conservatives), the other looks forward expectantly to a future they hope for (liberals).
I think both are necessary and essential for prudent experiments in improving society.
I think the two should balance.
I think that when the balance is lost the pendulum needs to swing back the other way.
I am a centrist and a moderate, a swing voter when the system is functioning well, as it has not been doing for some time now.
I distrust both extremes, and I wonder about the selves who gravitate toward them.
All our selves are pretty buggy bits of software, and the buggy parts are accidents of personal history, upbringing, experiences, choices made and identities formed.
Politics, then, is about how buggy bits of software can live together.
This is the background you need to get my take on the question posted here last Saturday:
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?
Left-wing utopian idealists and right-wing cultural traditionalists seek to solve the problem of politics by escaping from politics. For the problem of politics (at its core an ethical problem complicated by the problem of power) is that a political community is always, on the one hand, united by a shared destiny requiring the joint exertion of their collective power and, on the other hand, divided by diverse perspectives on how to interpret that shared destiny and which policies to adopt to attain it.
Shared destiny abstracted from political divisions and changing times is called the common good. Evoked in a partisan way, as it usually is in party politics, this easily slides into partisan appeals to partisan advantages — divisiveness dressed up as unity.
The solutions offered by utopian idealists and cultural traditionalists is the same in structure — invest final authority in the righteous — differing only in its content, with each extreme claiming to be the model of righteousness.
But since each feels entitled to the final say, by right of their self-proclaimed righteousness, they must have authority over all under their power, with or without their consent. When your solution to the political problem is “if only everyone thought like me,” politics shifts from reconciling diverging perspectives to enforcing right by authoritative decree.
This applies equally to cancel culture and election denial conspiracy thinking. Both are deeply ugly, repellent to the thoughtful and open-minded, but only the latter is a direct threat to constitutional republicanism and the rule of law.
Cancel culture is a kind of inappropriate pressure used by progressive extremists to intimidate and silence their targets. It can be dealt with under the rule of law by a combination of legal recourse (i.e., lawsuits, lengthy legal proceedings, and juridical rulings) and by countervailing pressures.
But election denial with no evidential basis is corrosive to constitutionalism, limited government, and the rule of law. It is the equivalent of vigilante justice — alleged justice delivered without benefit of law and constitutional due process, and with the actual or implied threat of violence.
It is also stock-in-trade of tinpot dictators and 3rd World military juntas across the globe and throughout history. It is a tactic as old as the hills and the lust for power. I suspect it’s the truly oldest profession.
It is the impulse to tyranny of the self-proclaimed righteous, the basis of one-party rule, a claim raised from outside of republican or constitutional politics.
We Won, But Don’t Ask for Proof
The claim to have won an election, in disregard of every attempt at an evidence-examining process — first, 64 court cases, then several government recounts in closely contested races, and then in the January 6th Committee hearing — amounts to saying we know we’re right so we don’t have to prove anythinig.
The majority of judges contributing to Trump’s 64 losses and 1 minor win were affiliated Republican, many of them Trump-appointed (I know this is true of the first 41 cases, the only data I could find).
State recounts were conducted by sitting Republicans (most of whom had supported Trump),
The House Committee on January 6th had only 2 Republicans among 9 Democrats, for 2 reasons
Because sitting on the committee meant electoral death in Republican primaries, where extremist, Trump-backed candidates won, who then lost in the general elections for being too extreme.
Because Minority leader McCarthy nominated for the 5 Republican seats on the committee, 3 who had voted against certifying the election, despite the absence of evidence that could stand up to very public court and administrative reviews. In a jury trial (which this was not) those 3 would have been dismissed form jury duty with cause, meaning they lacked impartiality on legally-recognized grounds.
These 3 venues were as decisive as any judicial or executive examinations can be. To ask for more is to put aside any kind of constitutional or juridical procedures acceptable to a diversity of parties or perspectives in favor of the unitary judgment of a single party. And that can only be institutionalized in a one-party state.
One Authority to Rule Them All: Ours
So, as a supposedly “political” doctrine, such uncompromisingly extreme ideologies contradict themselves, achieving their “higher law” by the suspension of law between the disputing parties. Political unity is achieved by disregarding the weaker party and suppressing them if they resist. This may be all but inescapable between distinct and sovereign nations in times of crisis, but should be avoided if at all possible between parties within one nation. Revolutions, as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson both say, should be a last resort after long trains of abuses clearly establishing a government intent on tyranny.
But if that is the apolitical and amoral element in how ideologically purified regimes come to power, there is a parallel element in how they use power. For no sooner does a band of revolutionaries (or a junta of reactionaries) come to power than it splinters into factions seeking power at one another’s expense. Under the kind of charismatic leader and founder that Machiavelli christens “the new prince,” that splintering may be delayed until the founder’s death (e.g., Lenin, Franco, Mao).
This happens because such states are based on sovereign wills based not on political compromise and consent, but upon the raw strength of those sharing in the power of the new regime. Put differently, power based on will — whether justified in ideological/religious belief or not — reduces to power simply, without a constitution. By contrast, a constitution is a shared legal framework which limits powers and defines procedures to be legally exercised in the pursuit of the power necessary for converting the abstract notion of the common good into concrete national policy.
But the very means by which one-party ideological power is established subvert whatever political constitution had previously bound citizens together as friends rather than as enemies yoked together.
The only ideology able to escape this dilemma is classical liberalism, whose dogma is formal — the preservation of the constitutional order of rights, distinct and separate powers, each with limits, and legal procedures for making and enforcing national policy.
Liberalism aims for neutrality on those substantial values that do not directly harm others (J.S. Mill’s no-harm principle), the cultural values that anchor communities and the lives and identities of their members. Examples of this include traditions of religion and worship, family structures, occupational ways of life, the norms of social interactions, gender roles, cultural embellishments to daily life like cuisine, dress and decor, and social activities like song and dance, sports, courtship and community associations. In short, all of the issues that, when disputed, turn into “culture wars.”
Classical liberalism’s neutrality on these matters means leaving some large and controversial policy areas perpetually unresolved and in dispute. To those who revere the rights of diversity, this seems a tolerable price to pay. To those more deeply committed to their own cultural identities (apart from that of citizens of a liberal constitutional republic), this seems a neglectful affront to their deeply held values.
Those crossing a certain level of cultural commitment to their own substantial values want to use government power to impose their values on the rest of society. This creates political conflict.
This always goes on in the background to one degree or another. In the organic history of any national culture (by this I mean the unreflective continuation of the practices and policies from which originated the nation or culture, whether national, sub-national, or trans-national), a cultural majority forms a nation, essentially an organized government of some kind serving the domestic end of preserving its culture and the international end of preserving itself as an independent nation, capable of preserving both its culture in its domestic sphere and its liberty and sovereignty in the international sphere.
From the preceding it follows that every culture begins with a majority-dominated cultural monopoly on authority. This will be expressed in its political institutions, its religion, and its social norms of peer pressure and the like. Nations formed by foreign conquest (like England with its Norman overlay on Anglo-Saxon culture) or revolutionary rebirth (Like the United States or China) will be more complex hybrid cases but following the same general developmental principles.
Those nations that progress toward classical liberalism will go through a series of unavoidably painful adjustments as the native culture expands to embrace those diverse cultural elements able to flourish within its classically liberal constitutional order. Such adjustments are painful because: 1) no one likes to give up their preferred habits, customs, and ways of life or ancestral privileges and advantages, and 2) nativist culture is always more entrenched than its rivals for authority in social, economic, and political power, and quite naturally uses those advantages to defend its position and undermine rival advances it cannot accept.
Both parties feel entitled to final authority in resolving these disputes. This is the womb of politics. No politics can wholly escape it. The conflict can play out within the bounds of a shared constitution or not, and that is determined by the interplay of all of the involved factors.
The “culture wars” and how to resolve them, or how they will resolve themselves, should be viewed against this background.
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.
The context of mathematics is one of abstract definitions generated by iterating operations (numbers and arithmetic), which make measurement possible, and by dividing space into abstract figures and measurable units of extension (length, distance, volume, proportion) and by dividing time into measurable units of extension (duration, sequence, simultaneity, periodicity and proportion).
Music draws on the mathematical context but adds sound (timbre, intensity, pitch) which combined with sequence and periodicity produces melody, harmonic chords, and rhythm, while adding the very non-mathematical aspects of taste, culture, and emotional resonance.
Physics adds matter (that which occupies space) and energy (that which gives motion to matter) to its ultimate context of space and time, making its ultimate context mathematics. This is what gives it its certainty.
Chemistry is about how matter combines into structures. It is mathematical to the extent that matter and energy define or limit its possible configurations.
For example, electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus repel one another, so they can only tolerate one another in orbital shells accommodating fixed maximums of electrons. This yields different kinds of atoms with different properties — the elements, along with their kin, isotopes and ions.
Why is life carbon-based? Because carbon ( atomic number 6) has slots in its outermost shell for 4 electrons, sufficient to allow for the variety of bonds needed to build complex polymer chains (like DNA and proteins) critical to organic chemistry and life.
Elements have differing measurable qualities and differing capacities for combining with other elements, yielding differing combinatorial possibilities — molecules.
Biology is about complex molecules (organic chemistry) which have the additional characteristic of exhibiting functionality when certain rare combinatorial structures emerge from random aggregations resulting from lower-level chemical and physical properties without regard to the resultant accidental functionality.
Because such biological products are in the above sense accidental, their origin and continuance can only be assessed in the context of their entire localized (and, thus, peculiar and non-universal) history, that is, their local evolution within their local environment.
Thus, the unique lineages that define biological species are the first instance in which locality trumps universality — the accidental sequence yielding the configuration tells us more about the species than any universally applicable laws can.
Biological lineages are the first context in which individuals matter, and they matter initially only insofar as they carry mutations that weaken or strengthen the lineage.
If a mutation works, it survives, breeding variant mutations, which, in turn, survive if they work.
Every day is a twisting road…
The Individual Self in the Social Context
The next stage in the development of individuality must wait for the characteristically accidental biological evolution of consciousness sufficient to support behavior localized not simply by the internal (genetic) and external (habitat) physical environments but also by the internalized behavioral environments of societies and selves.
In other words, only once behavioral characteristics can be carried by something other than physical genes can a truly social environment arise, and only within a truly social environment can a self arise.
The term memes is used to refer to this non-gene carrier of behavioral attributes, passed by imitation and communication, social rather than strictly physical events.
Conscious memory makes learning from experience possible, and learned behavior can be passed on by bottom-up mimicking, by top-down training, and ultimately by linguistic instruction. But all of these require, at a minimum, the society of the family unit with parental care.
And parental care is a noteworthy feature of birds and mammals, the two most intelligent classes of animals, with the most complex brains and behavioral patterns.
Culture likely came first, for culture is typical behavior copied throughout a social group, transmitted by parents and often enforced by the social group or by similar responses of the group’s members to individual behavior.
Selves likely emerged when individuals experienced themselves as split between an outward face presented to the group and an inward reserve aware of its own distinct interests, even when they diverged from those of the group.
Psychology and the social sciences are about the relations of selves and societies.
Because of their localized historical (thus, accidental) evolution, both genetic and cultural lineages are not determined by universal laws but by localized genealogies.
So, genealogies cannot be understood universally but only historically. Historical sequences routinely have gaps, which detract from certainty, and, even when intact, require interpretive hypotheses about why the history developed as it did and how its components — both inert objects and agent subjects — reacted to one another as they did.
Selves and societies interact with other selves and other societies in many ways ranging from friendly to hostile, from affection and kinship to trade and transfer (economic exchange and cultural imitation) to force and fraud (whether criminal or geopolitical).
Cultural complications
Certainty & Context
Mathematics attains certainty because its ultimate context is one of definitions imposed upon the uniform extensions of space and time.
Logic attains certainty because its ultimate context is that of the identity, mutual exclusion or partial overlap of abstract definitions. (A logical map of concepts would look like a massive and intricate fabric of Venn diagrams. )
Physics attains certainty because its ultimate context is mathematics. To the extent that any non-mathematical properties of matter or energy (including their convertibility, origin, or variants like “anti-” or “dark” matter) are not derived from the context of mathematics, they must remain hypotheses and guesswork.
Inorganic chemistry attains certainty only where it draws on the context of mathematics. For example, filled outer electron shells of noble gases make bonding and forming compounds difficult. The math might not be enough to predict all the chemical properties of a new compound, but if those properties are consistent, statistical analysis will reveal such consistent properties after repeated observations, assuming that underlying conditions remain constant.
Organic chemistry will always remain incompletely certain, as so much depends on functionality within accidentally organized systems of functions. For example, food for one species may be toxic or indigestible for another. Yet how proteins fold can apparently be partially predicted by deep AI.
Biological species will always be uncertain and non-universal because: 1) species and their environments are continuously evolving, 2) the form a lineage takes is an accidental historical emergence of functionalities adequate for survival in its changing local habitat, and 3) individuals themselves are accidental products of random mutation, while their survivability is determined by their altered functionality within their local habitat.
Cultures and human nature and character types (the social sciences equivalent of species and socio-cultural categories, e.g., extroverted Russian ballerina) will be yet more uncertain and non-universal than species because: 1) cultures change faster than physical habitats, 2) the more complex the culture, the greater the division of labor and of distinctions, 3) information, memes, and cultural attitudes change and spread faster than genes, and 4) reasoned foresight and rationalized social organizations and technology accelerate purposeful change with top-down guidance (for human agents deliberately target and accelerate intended transformations more purposefully than random physical events (whose outcomes are aimless, accidental to any end), while agents’ conflicting purposes can trigger unintended consequences, whether beneficial (Adam Smith’s invisible hand) or devastating (war), whether immediately (peace treaties, nuclear holocaust) or cumulatively so (scientific progress or climate change).
The sciences of life (including the social sciences) may be uncertain, but for all that, they are the sciences of us. And since value is in the eye of the beholder, what knowledge we can glean from them is of most value to us.
And be warned that technical knowledge and know-how devoid of self-knowledge is as dangerous as a loose cannon on deck.
Life, in short, is where the action is, in all its unpredictable splendor and potential desolation. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!
Whatever one assumes as the starting-point of existence, and human existence in particular, the history of man is that of predictable self-seeking, whether as individuals or as groups or societies, brightened by social networks within which empathy and fairness prevail to some degree, and the gradual enlargement of those networks to include more people and more social diversity.
It is what one would expect if Darwinian survival-machines developed a sense of self.
Such a self would be largely determined by how that self is viewed within its surrounding society, that is, by seeking social status or reputation within the social network upon which that status depends.
In that case, unvarnished self-seeking morphs into self-seeking within the limits of what is socially acceptable, for to stray too far beyond those limits is to forfeit the resources of one’s primary social networks.
By calling this the behavior of a Darwinian survival-machine, I am not reducing human beings to mindless mechanisms nor am I being nihilistic. For we have minds, which give us reasons and reasoning to resist the influence of the naked urge to survive.
So we can visualize two paths, one guided by unreasoned, survival-driven impulses and another by reasons that take into account society and its reasons along with the insular self.
This results in the same behavioral tensions underlying all conceptions of good and evil. in this sense, the locus of sin (whether original or merely pervasive) is the survival-machine, the earthen foundation of any evolved moral agent.
So, the survival-seeking machine becomes an advantage-seeking machine conditioned by what is socially acceptable.
It’s an improvement in moral terms because it recognizes limits to self-advancement and the many ways of doing unto others as we would not have others do unto us.
But this is at first mostly based on affection or the long-term advantage of the self and the social network upon which it depends.
The person now must be formed, and form themselves, as a self acceptable to society and especially to those networks controlling resources crucial to the acceptance and advancement of the self in those networks.
Social virtues sprout to meet the requirements of social acceptance and productive skills and economic virtues sprout to meet the requirements of a working career.
Different networks require different things, but all require something.
Call it utility, call it reciprocity, there is always a quid pro quo in what is acceptable to a network and what its members must embody or provide.
This is where things stand until reasons and principles, consensual laws and rights, protected by political and judicial systems that look to ideals of justice beyond enforcing the privileges exacted by those with the power to do so.
Networks that control resources are always pyramidal, with those most astute and adept in jockeying for position within the network tending to rise to the top of the pyramid. This applies across all hierarchies, whether openly political or religious, social, educational, commercial or industrial.
It applies equally to hierarchies notionally committed to equality, such as communist parties and charitable organizations, for group control of resources implies a uniformity of decision-making at the topmost level, with more circumscribed decision-making delegated to lower and lower organizational levels, while whatever discretion is allowed rank-and-file members (which varies greatly between organizations) occurs within the confines of rules descending from above.
Liberal organizations allow the most individual autonomy, surveillance states the least, with tradition-based liberal states leaning towards autonomy and culture-based traditional states leaning towards authoritarianism.
But such an organizational hierarchy is a social network within a social network with power over the broader social network. And, just as each individual has an interest in self-advancement (and those that do advance will mostly be those who act most determinedly on that interest), so every organizational level has an interest in maintaining what power it has and advancing as far as it can.
And liberal organizations are no less subject to the ambitions of their members and levels than others. They do, however, disseminate power more broadly, allowing lower levels — and especially the rank-and-file — to resist and remove them, should they fall out of favor.
Hierarchy is tempered, to varying degrees in varying persons and societies, by intimacy and affection.
The more intimate the society, the more hierarchy and self-seeking may be relaxed, for face-to-face encounters allow empathy and a sense of fairness, though these are hedged about by whatever standing the parties (especially the dominant ones) need to maintain their own standing in the wider society.
How Societies Come Apart
Common ground is the first casualty of a shifting balance of power. The reigning power fears the aspirations of the rising power, while the rising power fears preemptive strikes from the reigning power that fears its loss of power.
Common ground has two senses: 1) fairness or what each is owed under the established traditions, and 2) truth, as socially determined through consensus-generating practices, that is, methods employed under expert supervision, establishing evidentiary requirements for credible factual claims and argumentative requirements for credible interpretations and evaluations of established facts.
The more self-seeking the social network authority, the more its advocates insist on control of what is socially accepted as credible.
In general, this distinguishes autocratic powers from democracies. It’s not so much that absolute power corrupts absolutely as that exclusive power is blind to the difference between self-interest and national interest.
This is why democracies rely upon a free press and independent institutional sanctuaries for various forms of expertise.
The Internet has muddied this because the pyramids controlling social networks are no longer simply reflections of government or civil society, but of new networks including government-sponsored censors and troll farms, corporations using algorithms and monitors, and criminal organizations (both profiteering and government-sponsored).
The grassroots expression of views that the Internet once was is now deformed by top-down and malevolent or reckless guidance from attention-seeking algorithms to troll farms.
Any upsurge in the elimination of independent voices (media, judiciary, party factions), the denigration of credible expertise (scientific, economic, medical, journalistic, academic, procedural or constitutional) is almost always an indicator of social, economic or political changes that threaten the standing and power of entrenched social networks (or the expectations and way of life of the broader social networks who form their power base).
Groups accustomed to comfortable social, economic and political dominance see their traditional practices and past earnings and social standing as ahistorical entitlements, not as the variable fortunes of different sectors of economies and societies continuously changing and developing over time.
Remember, severe social polarization is not a local or an American phenomenon — it is a tremor running throughout the cultural West.
It’s manifest as an apparent loss of self-confidence and weakening of the more liberal civilizations of Europe and North America, with the rising hopes of Chinese, Indian, Turkish and Persian civilizational core states.
Russia’s Ukraine adventure looks like an overextension confirming its decline as a great power, its subsidence into the status of a nuclear-armed rogue state lacking the economic basis to support its pretensions, but no less dangerous for that.
History is at a turning-point, but like most such turning-points, the final outcome will only seem clear in retrospect.
The world as seen by Samuel Huntington in his 1996 classic The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land…
Choice, Competition, Agency & Prudence
Choice and agency emerge at the intersection of two things:
A world of objects determined by the past, a kind of inertial continuation of what has already happened, and
The intentions of a sentient subject that feels its condition in that world of objects, feels it as pain or pleasure, as desirable or undesirable, and tries to direct the future to its own advantage.
Choice reacts and adapts to the recalcitrance and indifference of the world of objects to our intentions.
Choice in agents is the attempt to design our own future, within the limits of an indifferent objective world (although one in which we may enjoy the helpful fellowship of other agents, or their occasional or determined hostility).
Choice always occurs under conditions of uncertainty, for the world moves by its own laws, which are not the laws of intention.
Immersed in uncertainty, agents strive to fulfill their intended aims by improvising the means to the idealized futures they aspire to.
The uncertainties of agency are strategic, unlike the statistical uncertainties of theoretical quantum physics, because agents compete against one another for resources; for only by deploying and consuming resources can agents change their world to achieve their ends.
This is true at every level, from the microcosm of the cell through the organism to the macrocosm of the community.
In short, the powers of agency play out in the arena of strategic uncertainty, an arena that does not exist for objects, and only in a crude and primitive way for animals with minimal foresight.
But this new arena, in which choice and strategy, policy and cunning and morality play out, is not a negation or violation of the determination of objects. But the certainties of objects — which follow those unvarying and predictable laws that science measures and formulates — are simply the inert playing field upon which agent competitions of strategic uncertainty play out.
Available resources and obstacles to our intentions are objective and often measurable; strategy and innovation are not.
The chess grandmaster has no special powers that the novice lacks. The novice feels able to make more moves than the grandmaster, for the grandmaster’s knowledge amounts to a knowledge of limits, a knowledge of which moves lead to failure, of which countermoves are necessitated by an opponent’s gambit.
But within the rules of chess, a mere convention with no physical basis, the grandmaster has an overwhelming power in that virtual world ruled by laws that only exist for those who acknowledge them.
Virtual as that world may be, the benefits of chess are the preserve of those who acknowledge the rules of chess. The benefits its players derive from their engagement in chess are a strategic choice of those who join that fellowship to harvest its benefits.
That is the pattern for moral laws: they are not constraints upon the lawless, who recognize no laws, but only the physical reality of being punished or “getting away with it”.
And that is why one cannot render unto God what is God’s without rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, not so long as one lives and dies in the physical world.
Morality can only exist perfectly within a community composed only of fully moral agents — heaven, if it exists.
Prematurely perfect morality, like that of Christ or Socrates, means departing from the physical world.
While we yet live, prudence — balancing the interests of self and community against strictest morality — is how agents function and endure. That calls for judgment, experience, flexibility and improvisational ability.
And there are few absolutely right answers, only better and worse, sufficient and insufficient ones.
How to do what I need to do with what I have…
Choice Is Innovation & Self-Invention
Habits may be the shell of the snail, but choice is the snail itself.
Agency is innovation. It is the power to invent a self.
But since agents emerge from within a world that they are born into as conditioned creatures, agent innovation re-conditions itself by instilling habits of choice that with time define the character of the choosing agent.
We become what we have chosen to be, not in wish or name, but in the traces and texture of our actions.
And, since agents want to gain greater control of the conditioning process which made them without asking their permission, they create laws and institutions to form the habits of their successors.
Ethics is about the self-defining activity of agents, while politics is about the society-defining activity of leaders and their followers in a community of agents.
This is what Aristotle means when he says that man is a political animal.
Parents and societies educate their offspring and successors. As mortal creatures, it’s the only way to continue what they were able to create of value in their own lives.
And as long as agents innovate, generations will grind somewhat against one another (hopefully with a degree of forbearance), the older generation feeling its habits the last safeguard against decay from a golden era embodied in their own habits, the newer generation feeling its habits the needful washing away of the remnants of residual prejudices and privileges.
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.
When All Is Said and Dunn 