Author: Philosophics

Philosopher of language and author of speculative fiction

Your Morals

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I was commenting elsewhere on morals and was directed to Jonathan Haidt and his work. Notably, the questionnaire at YourMorals.org, where you can get your own assessment and contribute data points to the body of work.

Full disclosure: I am not a fan of this type of survey, as I’ve mentioned previously. Still, I made an attempt. Better still, I’ve copied the questions to critique. There are 36 all tolled. Perhaps, I’ll respond to a dozen at a time. The next dozen responses are here. Generally speaking, they present each question and provide a Likert scale as follows:

  1. Does not describe me at all
  2. Slightly describes me
  3. Moderately describes me
  4. Describes me fairly well
  5. Describes me extremely well

Standard fare. It starts off bad:

1. Caring for people who have suffered is an important virtue.

Why include an abstract concept like virtue? I don’t ascribe to the notion of virtue, so it’s an empty set. Given that, my response would be a 1. If I ignore the offensive nomenclature and assume it translates idiomatically into ‘beneficial for some target society’, then I still have to question what is meant by suffering, and how far does caring extend. Is it enough to feel bad about the homeless person, or does one have to care enough to provide sustenance and shelter? Talk is cheap.

2. The effort a worker puts into a job ought to be reflected in the size of a raise they receive.

This is fraught with all sorts of problems. In fact, it’s a reason why I consider myself to be a Postmodern. The inherent metanarrative is that societies are effectively money-based. I don’t happen to believe that, so I am again faced with responding to an empty set. Even if I attempt to abstract the ‘raise’ aspect to mean that effort represents input and output is a direct and (perhaps) proportional function, I am still left to wrestle with how this effort is measured and what could have been achieved had the others not been present.

Using a sports analogy—always a dangerous domain for me to play in—, what if LeBron James was to play an opposing team by himself? He needs the other team members. Of course, his teammates are compensated, too. But in his case, his salary is not only based on his athletic talent but on his celebrity power—rent in economic parlance. Perhaps LeBron makes a lot of baskets, but without the assists, he’d have fewer. And because he is the go-to guy, some other teammates might be sacrificing baskets as part of their winning strategy.

Finally, how do you measure the effort of an accountant, a janitor, and an executive? The question is fundamentally bollox.

3. I think people who are more hard-working should end up with more money.

On a related note, I can abbreviate my commentary here. Again, what is harder? Are we asking if construction workers should earn more than CEOs? More bollox.

4. Everyone should feel proud when a person in their community wins in an international competition.

Yet, again, an empty set and a sort of mixed metaphor. I don’t agree with the notion of identity and even less at scale—states, countries, and nationalities. Putting that aside, why should I derive pride (that cometh before the fall) because someone succeeds at some event anywhere? It’s facile. If the question was focused on whether I would be happy for that person, the answer might shift up the scale, but where would I have derived pride for that person’s achievements?

5. I think it is important for societies to cherish their traditional values.

First off, why? What values? Not to beat a dead horse, but what if my tradition is slavery? Should I cherish that? This is really asking should I cherish the traditions of my society. Clearly, it’s not asking if other societies should enjoy the privilege of cherishing theirs? From the standard Western vantage, many want to cherish their own, but not Eastern values of eating dogs or Middle Eastern values of burqaed women and turbans. Is this asking should the world subscribe to my society’s values? I’m not sure.

6. I feel that most traditions serve a valuable function in keeping society orderly

Speaking of tradition… We are not only dealing with the vague notion of tradition, we are discussing another vague concept, order, and elevating order over (presumably) disorder. Order connotes a status quo. And why is the superlative most present? Has someone inventoried traditions? I believe I am supposed to translate this as ‘I feel that the traditions I am familiar with and agree with help to create a society that I am content with’. Again, this betrays the privileged perspective of the observers. Perhaps those disenfranchised would prefer traditions like Capitalism and private property to be relics of the past–or traditions of two-party rule, partisan high court judges, or money-influenced politics, or politicians serving themselves and their donors over the people or Christmas.

7. We all need to learn from our elders

Learn what exactly from our elders? Which elders? The bloke down the block? That elderly Christian woman at the grocery mart? The cat who fought in some illegal and immoral war? The dude who hordes houses, cars, and cash at the expense of the rest of society? Or the guy who tried to blow up Parliament. I believe this is asking should we learn how to remain in place as taught by the privileged wishing to maintain their places.

8. Everyone should try to comfort people who are going through something hard

Define hard, and define comfort? This harkens back to the first question. Enough said. As far as lying is concerned, we should by now all be familiar with the adage trying is lying. Or as Yoda would restate it, do or do not, there is no try.

9. I think the human body should be treated like a temple, housing something sacred within

Obviously, this one is total rubbish. Here, I don’t have a structure that makes it difficult to answer. I may have sprained my eye rolling it, though. This said, what is a temple treated like?

10. I get upset when some people have a lot more money than others in my country

This one is interesting. Whilst I don’t believe that countries or money should exist. In practice, they do. So on its face, I can say that I get upset when we are thrown into a bordered region and told we need to exchange paper, metal, plastic, and bits for goods and services–that some people have more and others have less primarily through chance.

11. I feel good when I see cheaters get caught and punished

Which cheaters? Cheating requires perspective and a cultural code. It can privilege the individualist over the communalist. This reminds me of the cultures that are more interested in ensuring that all of their members finish a contest than having any one win.

Academically, it is considered to be cheating to work together on an exam because the individual is being tested. Of course, the exam is on certain content rather than on the contribution of the human being.

Again, the question feels targeted at cheaters getting caught circumventing something we value. If someone cheats becoming assimilated into some military-industrial society, I will encourage and support them. If they get caught and punished, my ire would more likely be directed toward the power structure that created the need to cheat.

12. When people work together toward a common goal, they should share the rewards equally, even if some worked harder on it

I’ll end this segment here on another question of meritocracy. I think it’s fair to judge the authors as defenders of meritocracy, though I could be wrong. This feels very similar to some other questions already addressed. The extension here is about sharing the rewards, whatever that means. Are we baking a cake? Did we build a house for a new couple? Did we plant trees in a public park? Did we clean up litter on a parkway? Did we volunteer to feed the homeless? And what was the work? Again, how are we measuring disparate work? Did the chicken farmer work harder than the cow farmer? Did the carpenter work harder than the organiser?

If the remainder of these questions is different enough, I’ll comment on them as well. Meantime, at least know you know more why I have little faith in the field of morals. This does nothing to change my opinion that morals are nothing more than emotional reactions and subsequent prescriptions. I don’t mean to diminish emotions, and perhaps that might be a good central pillar to a vibrant society. I’ll need more convincing.

Anarchy at Scale

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Anarchy exists in the world today. It always has. Macroscopically, one needs only step back to see the forest for the trees—or zoom in for microcosms. The only place it’s rare is in the middle.

As far as scaling, political states are anarchy at scale. They hide behind sovereignty and do as they please. United Nations and such try (meagerly) to herd the cats—say, the US—, but the Big Cats still do as they please. So when you hear that anarchy is untenable, remember that it is more prevalent than not.

In the domain of physics, we hear the quaint Aristolenian adage that nature abhors a vacuum, but in fact, it doesn’t. Without engaging in a quantum debate, the universe is more vacuum than not. This belief is a projection centred on human narcissism, viewing itself as the centre of the universe: some humans seem to abhor a vacuum—as do many dogs abhor vacuums, but that’s a horse of a different colour.

Nature abhors a vacuum

And when you hear that anarchy doesn’t scale, remember that it can be seen on both micro and macro scales. The question is: what happens in the middle?

To be fair, there are many small-scale human endeavours where power structures still decimate the ‘natural’ anarchy, but this is imposed—whereby I use the term natural to mean without intervention.

To be continued…

Moral Tribes

Posted in modernism, morality, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Aside from the political realm, in my quest to gain more perspective on Anarchism in 2022, I am interested in behavioural aspects of the human condition. It seems to me that political constructs as dynamic systems are inherently unstable. Whilst I am predisposed to Anarchy versus the alternatives to which I’ve been exposed, it too is fraught will deficiencies. The question is which system has the fewest deficiencies at any given time. More on this later.

On my journey, I’ve come across Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene, a book recommended in Behave by Robert Sapolsky—perhaps my favourite non-fiction book of the trailing decade, which is also to say my favourite book over this period. Professor Greene summarises his concepts on YouTube.

But

Of course, there’s a but. Joshua Greene seems to come from the same mould as Stephen Pinker. Two Pollyanna defenders of the Enlightenment and Humanism. As such, they are Moderns in the pejorative sense. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. They both buy into the Classical Western narrative.

What interested me in Greene’s work was the conflict management aspect. I don’t believe in inherent morality, but I do believe in constructed morality, perhaps better known as ethics. I believe that these are self-serving, whereby self represents any entity at some point or limited expanse of time. They never derive from some neutral place without benefiting some at the expense of others.

The axe I have to grid with Greene in Moral Tribes is his belief in facile notions such as loyalty and some sense of definitive goodness and badness. These things, he believes are instinctual. If we can tap into them and manipulate those with broken instincts—or marginalise them—, all will be milk and honey—or wine and roses. Take your pick.

Deep Pragmatism

Greene is effectively a utilitarian as descended from Jeremy Betham and John Stuart Mill, and he views pragmatism as a sort of panacea. Although I operate as a pragmatist as a fallback position from my more existential nihilistic core, I don’t feel that his recharacterising utilitarianism as Deep Pragmatism™ is a viable solution. Presuming that one could actually dimensionalise a society in a manner to measure this utility is a fool’s errand at the start. And, as I’ve gathered from other sources, he not only believes that there is a best morality, and he’s found it—because of course he has. In my book this is a red flag—a flaming red flag signalling a rubbish claim. In some circles, they’d straight up call it bollox.

Given this foundation, I am not sure how much more I’ll be able to maintain my interest. But for now, I’m not optimistic that he’s relying on anything more than hoping to convert ises from oughts with his magic Modern wand. I’ll give it as least a few more pages, but I won’t promise not to skim through to the end.

It’s People

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No, this is not some riff on Soylent Green. At the end of each year, like Janus, I tend to reflect to then look ahead to the next year. My interest at this juncture is anarchism. This is not a new interest. As I’ve written, I consider myself to be an anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-communist, save for a few fundamental problems, each of which might just distil down to the same root cause.

My issue with syndicalism is that it centres on the worker. And whilst some workers remain relevant and pivotal to the system, it seems that workers may become less and less critical in the operation of the economy and of the society at large. As I work in a place where I can witness the immaturity and incompetency that sees this further in the future than some, I can still interpolate some speculative future where the vast majority of humans are no longer necessary cogs in the machine. This obviates anarcho-syndicalism in favour of anarcho-socialism.

Whilst anarcho-syndicalism centres on the worker, anarcho-communism is focused on the person without regard to their state of employment. This sounds even more equitable. So what’s my problem? It’s people.

These days, many people whitter on about democracy. Many are disappointed by republican apparatus and seek something closer to direct democracy. This is not the exclusive flavours we’ve witnessed in history—where the landed gentry get a vote. It’s a full-on participative democratic free-for-all—save for children and animals and non-sentient beings, it goes without saying.

The core problem is the same, whether archy or anarchy: people are the weak link. Arguments have been made that bringing decisions close to the source of the problem yields a better solution, if one defines better are more equitable, but this doesn’t translate into something universally or categorically better outside of this particular dimension. If equity is your sole goal—and I’m neither sure that it’s the right goal to optimise nor a particularly interesting goal in the first place, as it feels that this is merely a local solution to a global challenge; so equitably distributing deck chairs on the sinking titanic or sharing the wealth as the climate tips well beyond any hope of recovery.

Moreover, if each social unit—however that’s defined—is sovereign and autonomous, then this might operate OK on an intrasocial level, but how are intersocial conflicts resolved? What if a predacious 100-count society encounters a 50-count society over access to some local finite resource? It seems that numbers will prevail—the tyranny of the majority.

The other challenge I have with democracy and anarchy is that political interests will coalesce and power systems will emerge. To prevent such eventualities could be considered fascistic or authoritarian, so how is this resolved. Returning to the 100- versus 50-count societies, what if the 100-count wished to install a leader, so they vote for their leader to rule over the 150? This seems all but an inevitability.

I don’t have an answer. And though I am familiar with governmental and societal structures as well as with anarchy, I’ve not seen this addressed beyond hopes and wishes, attempting to move an ought to an is.

We’re All Conservatives These Days

Posted in identity, language, philosophy, politicsTagged , , , 2 Comments

I’ve always taken the Libertarian Political Compass to be a bit interesting, like fortune cookies and tarot readings. Along with other tests like MBTI and IQ tests, it feels like it might be useful. In fact, it is. It facilitates signals tribal affiliation. Whenever I take the test, I always trend to the lower-left corner, so I can smugly reaffirm my Leftist leanings—if you interpret leanings as up against the wall and on the floor.

When I commented on a forum that I felt that (presuming the X-Y axes of this scale without even mentioning it) Liberals and Conservatives in the United States are each Right of Centre and Conservative—they just want to Conserve different things, someone replied with a link to this video by Halim Alrah. Whilst I won’t comment on his class materialism claim—at least not now—, I do feel it makes me not only double down on my claim but to toss more into the Conservative bucket list.

Besides noting that each aspect is defined in the abstract, he tacitly makes a point with which I agree: all professional and most amateur politics are Conservative: Conservatives want to conserve the 1950s; Liberals want to conserve the 1960s and some of the 1930s and ’40s; Leftist Marxists want to conserve the missed opportunities of the 19-teens, and I suppose the Progressives want to conserve the 19-teens as well. Bully!

all professional and most amateur politics are Conservative

Politics are inherently backwards-looking and fraught with appeals to tradition, each cherry-picking which traditional narrative fits their bill whilst suffering from selective blindness in areas that didn’t quite work out or fit the narrative. Or they want to cash in a mulligan and try again. Or they feel with 20/20 hindsight, they can Groundhog Day the hell out of it. In some hundreds of generations, we’ll be bound to get it right. Even Libertarians and Anarchists cling to ideas of the past. As I’ve mentioned before, I am an anarchosyndicalist, and though that has never been instantiated to scale, it is nonetheless an idea almost two hundred years old. Hardly novel.

I am not a traditionalist, but neither I am not claiming that every tradition is rubbish. But what worked in the past may not actually work in the present or in the future. As the title of a book that I am fond of reminds us, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, so these political armchair quarterbacks are operating on bad assumptions. All are operating on nostalgia and historical reconstructions of what might have been. Perhaps they excel at Risk or Sid Meyer’s Civilisation. Whatever the mindset, it’s taking a rearview mirrored approach.

So, what’s in a name anyway? If Conservatism doesn’t denote anything and only connotes a bunch of old white guys as a synonym for Tories in the UK and Republicans in the US; and where the Republicans and Democrats could both merge into a single Oligarchy Party (or Kleptocratic Party depending on one’s mood)?

In the end, we need a new way to describe the political sphere if we wish to promote discussion and build alliances, but perhaps that’s never been the goal.

Day in a Life

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“They found Gary.”

That was the response to my question regarding the police presence yesterday.

EDIT: Some in the community have arranged a memorial for Gary.

In Memorium

I live in an economically depressed community. Swathes of addicted streetwalkers to the south and crack and smack street dealers to the north. Between these bookends are some dozen or more churches and me. Adjacent to me is an abandoned church, a haven for the doubly disenfranchised homeless in the community.

Gary didn’t make it to Christmas. Perhaps I saw him around the neighbourhood, but I didn’t know Gary by name.

“It doesn’t sound like it ended well,” said I. “I think it was frostbite,” he continued.

I find it difficult to believe it was frostbite, but I’m no expert. It barely gets below freezing in this part of the country, but it did last night. Does anyone remember the Valley Forge of American history?

“He had no place to go. They wouldn’t let him in the shelter because he drinks.”

This is Tough Love™ in action. Hate the sin. Fuck the sinner. Another victim of the system and of morality vis-à-vis Virtue Signalling.

In the words from the first Home Alone instalment: Merry Christmas, you filthy animal.

Bah Humbug

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Besides being neither a Christian nor a consumerist, I’ve never been a fan of Christmas. The spirit of joy and selfless giving are welcome memes, but they are slogans and platitudes. As an exercise in altruism, giving is rarely selfless. It’s more often tit for tat. Don’t reciprocate giving something to someone who’s given to you, and you’ll see my point. I won’t deny that I witness people in greater joy in the season—some people; neither will I deny the offsetting despair and malaise—the stress of maintaining face and keeping up with the Joneses. The higher rates of seasonal suicides might be a sign.

Christmas is a marketing scheme. If you need something, or if you have kids and they need something or want something that you’d like them to have and can afford it, just get it. Why wait? Why make them wait? It seems pointless and cruel. And this doesn’t even take into account the parents who manipulate their children but threaten withholding at Christmas if they don’t comply with whatever family or societal edicts you are trying to impose upon them.

Economically, gift-giving is what’s known as a deadweight loss. In most cases, the gift of cash allows the recipient to spend it in a manner optimal to their own situation. If they happen to buy the same jumper you would have purchased, then you can feel comforted by your knowing that you would have given the same thing. Perhaps you found the perfect item on some distant shore that they wouldn’t have visited. This is an exception. But a gift from Amazon or Best Buy doesn’t fit that bill.

If I want to give a gift, I will. If it’s coincident with a birthday or a holiday, so be it. But if it’s not, that’s fine, too. As humans in the West, we are already so indentured to too many things to count that we don’t need another fetter. Put up a tree. Put up a menorah. Put up a flag. Put up an Anubis statuette. Unfortunately, the lines are blurred between wanting to and having to.

In the end, Christmas is one performance I’d like to opt out of. Whilst I find that most people are hypocrites, the hypocrisy is trebled during the holidays. ‘Tis the season.

Post Truth?

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Foucault should be a reminder that the culture wars are not new and post-truth can’t exist because there was never a truth at the start. This is similar to Latour’s question asking if we’ve ever been modern. And the answer remains ‘no’. There is no post-truth as there is no post-modern as each of these is predicated on a fantastical claim. Many humans defend the notion of truth, but they are fighting windmills.

“We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary.”

— Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

In these culture wars, each side is fighting for its version of the truth. The truth of rights and freedoms and the correct construct of societies. But there is not one culture war. There are myriad culture wars, and there are few opportunities to be allied across all of these dimensions with another person. For the congruent dimensions, one needs to operate in the mode of the enemy of my enemy is my friend whilst deciding how to ally on other disagreed dimensions later.

But never forget that the wars are intentional. They are a feature of the system of normalisation, not a bug. More importantly, don’t think for a moment that your truth is the truth. The same goes for your adversary.

Fast Car

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I enjoy listening to music reaction videos on YouTube. The other day, I came across Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. I’ve loved this song since it first came out. Musically, it’s a simple repetitive chord progression—finger-picked D, A, F#m, E. In a manner, repetition is a metaphor for the lyrical narrative. In this live performance version, the treatment is more simplified than the original album version—until the last bar.

Tracy Chapman – Fast Car

The protagonist is in a place where any place is better, and she’s got a fast car she can use to get away. The situation she finds herself in is a family relationship where alcoholism is a problem; her father is an alcoholic. Her old man’s got a problem. He lives with the bottle, that’s the way it is. But she’s got a friend, and she’s got hope. She tells her friend, ‘maybe we make a deal. Maybe together we can get somewhere. They are starting from zero and have got nothing to lose. They can follow her ‘plan to get us out of here‘.

And so she left to create a new life, but in this new place, she recreated her prior experience with her friend proxying her father. Like her dad, she loved her friend, but she knew that the relationship wouldn’t work out.

And so she left to create a new life. Rather, she remains in place and asks her friend to make a decision, to take a fast car and keep on driving, to leave tonight or live and die this way.

Perhaps this new life would be better without the remnant from the previous life. Did she learn from her experience, or would she seek the same type of partner? Would she fall into the same pattern because it was her comfort zone? The song doesn’t tell us, but the underlying music hasn’t changed. It’s easy to imagine the next verse to be the same as the first—although one could argue that it does end on the G, not repeating the Em and D they run out the phrase. That’s for you to decide.

Returning to the song, there is the chorus. She’s retelling this story. She’s looking back—remembering. She had wanted to belong. She wanted to be something. In the end, we don’t know where she ended up. It seems to me that she’s in a place where she can reflect. Perhaps it’s the calm before the storm, or perhaps this challenge has been resolved, and the chain has been broken. Perhaps, that’s the effect of the added notes in the final bars.

A powerful song.

Justice Prevails

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If anything showcases how nonsensical the concept of justice is, just look at the Rittenhouse trial in the United States. Ultimately, justice is about perception. In a textbook, a bad person does something bad, and a process ritual is performed by judges and juries to divine the otherwise obvious badness, and the bad person is brought to justice. In the extended version, they learn the error of their ways and reintegrate into society and live happily ever after.

In reality, this is all bollox. Good and bad are subjective and contextual. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the charade of justice. In the case of the Rittenhouse trial-slash-debacle, Kyle Rittenhouse shot some people and killed them. Whilst he is being charged with murder, some people view him as a hero—the good man with a gun rather than a vigilante.

Given these perspectives, whether justice is served is a matter of your starting perspective. People in the United States are generally divided on some fundamental political stands, and this predictably colours individual perspectives.

In the Bible, Christians are taught the story of King Solomon, wherein two women each claim a child as their own. Solomon suggests that they cut the child in half and by doing so, he reveals the true mother by judging their responses.

Spoiler Alert: I am only pretty sure that Solomon wouldn’t have followed through on his twisted joke.

This Bible story is part of the Western legal canon and teaches the impartiality of judges and some practical wisdom, but then we remember that it’s just a story.

Returning to Rittenhouse, irrespective of whether justice ends up being served is basically a coin toss. If you have been following the proceedings, you’ll notice that the pack is being stacked in his favour and the dice are weighted and the coin is biased.

Personally, I think the guy is an ass-hat. I feel that anyone who carries a weapon has anger and compensation issues. And if he wasn’t there in the first place, none of this would have unfolded as it did. I am a conscientious objector and believe this is precisely why the Second Amendment of the US Constitution relates to a well-regulated militia and not some pizza-faced wanker.

If he is judged not guilty, people like me will viscerally feel that justice is a sham. Obviously, I already maintain that opinion, but other people still believe in justice and Santa Claus. If he is judged guilty and gets a suitable sentence—another subjective constituent of justice—, then the other cohort feels that justice was not served.

One could argue, as Christians do, that God is the final arbiter of justice. Someone has to be, right? It also reminds us not to judge—probably because we’re not very good at it—, so there’s that, too.

I hold my original stance: justice is just another vapid weasel word.