Tag: Anti-Enlightenment

Democracy: The Idiot’s Opiate, The Sequel Nobody Asked For

Posted in identity, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Yesterday, I suggested democracy is a mediocre theatre production where the audience gets to choose which mediocre understudy performs. Some readers thought I was being harsh. I wasn’t.

A mate recently argued that humans will always be superior to AI because of emergence, the miraculous process by which complexity gives rise to intelligence, creativity, and emotion. Lovely sentiment. But here’s the rub: emergence is also how we got this political system, the one no one really controls anymore.

Like the human body being mostly non-human microbes, our so-called participatory government is mostly non-participatory components: lobbyists, donors, bureaucrats, corporate media, careerists, opportunists, the ecosystem that is the actual organism. We built it, but it now has its own metabolism. And thanks to the law of large numbers, multiplied by the sheer number of political, economic, and social dimensions in play, even the human element is diluted into statistical irrelevance. At any rate, what remains of it has lost control – like the sorcerer’s apprentice.

People like to imagine they can “tame” this beast, the way a lucid dreamer thinks they can bend the dream to their will. But you’re still dreaming. The narrative still runs on the dream’s logic, not yours. The best you can do is nudge it; a policy tweak here, a symbolic vote there, before the system digests your effort and excretes more of itself.

a bad system beats a good person every time

W Edwards Deming

This is why Deming’s line hits so hard: a bad system beats a good person every time. Even if you could somehow elect the Platonic ideal of leadership, the organism would absorb them, neutralise them, or spit them out. It’s not personal; it’s structural.

And yet we fear AI “taking over,” as if that would be a radical departure from the status quo. Newsflash: you’ve already been living under an autonomous system for generations. AI would just be a remodel of the control room, new paint, same prison.

So yes, emergence makes humans “special.” It also makes them the architects of their own inescapable political microbiome. Congratulations, you’ve evolved the ability to build a machine that can’t be turned off.

The Enlightenment: A Postmortem

Posted in economics, equality, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, psychology, quote, science, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Or: How the Brightest Ideas in Europe Got Us into This Bloody Mess

Disclaimer: This output is entirely ChatGPT 4o from a conversation on the failure and anachronism of Enlightenment promises. I’m trying to finish editing my next novel, so I can’t justify taking much more time to share what are ultimately my thoughts as expounded upon by generative AI. I may comment personally in future. Until then, this is what I have to share.

AI Haters, leave now or perish ye all hope.

The Enlightenment promised us emancipation from superstition, authority, and ignorance. What we got instead was bureaucracy, colonialism, and TED Talks. We replaced divine right with data dashboards and called it progress. And like any good inheritance, the will was contested, and most of us ended up with bugger-all.

Below, I take each Enlightenment virtue, pair it with its contemporary vice, and offer a detractor who saw through the Enlightenment’s powder-wigged charade. Because if we’re going down with this ship, we might as well point out the dry rot in the hull.

1. Rationalism

The Ideal: Reason shall lead us out of darkness.
The Reality: Reason led us straight into the gas chambers—with bureaucratic precision.

Detractor: Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno

“Enlightenment is totalitarian.”
—Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Horkheimer and Adorno saw what reason looks like when it slips off its leash. Instrumental rationality, they warned, doesn’t ask why—it only asks how efficiently. The result? A world where extermination is scheduled, costs are optimised, and ethics are politely filed under “subjective.”

2. Empiricism

The Ideal: Observation and experience will uncover truth.
The Reality: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be real. (Love? Not statistically significant.)

Detractor: Michel Foucault

“Truth isn’t outside power… truth is a thing of this world.”
—Power/Knowledge (1977)

Foucault dismantled the whole edifice. Knowledge isn’t neutral; it’s an instrument of power. Empiricism becomes just another way of disciplining the body—measuring skulls, classifying deviants, and diagnosing women with “hysteria” for having opinions.

3. Individualism

The Ideal: The sovereign subject, free and self-determining.
The Reality: The atomised consumer, trapped in a feedback loop of self-optimisation.

Detractor: Jean Baudrillard

“The individual is no longer an autonomous subject but a terminal of multiple networks.”
—Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

You wanted autonomy? You got algorithms. Baudrillard reminds us that the modern “individual” is a brand in search of market validation. You are free to be whoever you want, provided it fits within platform guidelines and doesn’t disrupt ad revenue.

4. Secularism

The Ideal: Liberation from superstition.
The Reality: We swapped saints for STEMlords and called it even.

Detractor: Charles Taylor

“We are now living in a spiritual wasteland.”
—A Secular Age (2007)

Taylor—perhaps the most polite Canadian apocalypse-whisperer—reminds us that secularism didn’t replace religion with reason; it replaced mystery with malaise. We’re no longer awed, just “motivated.” Everything is explainable, and yet somehow nothing means anything.

5. Progress

The Ideal: History is a forward march toward utopia.
The Reality: History is a meat grinder in a lab coat.

Detractor: Walter Benjamin

“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.”
—Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Benjamin’s “angel of history” watches helplessly as the wreckage piles up—colonialism, genocide, climate collapse—all in the name of progress. Every step forward has a cost, but we keep marching, noses in the spreadsheet, ignoring the bodies behind us.

6. Universalism

The Ideal: One humanity, under Reason.
The Reality: Enlightenment values, brought to you by cannon fire and Christian missionaries.

Detractor: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“White men are saving brown women from brown men.”
—Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)

Universalism was always a bit… French, wasn’t it? Spivak unmasks it as imperialism in drag—exporting “rights” and “freedom” to people who never asked for them, while ignoring the structural violence built into the Enlightenment’s own Enlightened societies.

7. Tolerance

The Ideal: Let a thousand opinions bloom.
The Reality: Tolerance, but only for those who don’t threaten the status quo.

Detractor: Karl Popper

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
—The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Popper, bless him, thought tolerance needed a firewall. But in practice, “tolerance” has become a smug liberal virtue signalling its own superiority while deplatforming anyone who makes the dinner party uncomfortable. We tolerate all views—except the unseemly ones.

8. Scientific Method

The Ideal: Observe, hypothesise, repeat. Truth shall emerge.
The Reality: Publish or perish. Fund or flounder.

Detractor: Paul Feyerabend

“Science is not one thing, it is many things.”
—Against Method (1975)

Feyerabend called the whole thing a farce. There is no single “method,” just a bureaucratic orthodoxy masquerading as objectivity. Today, science bends to industry, cherry-picks for grants, and buries null results in the backyard. Peer review? More like peer pressure.

9. Anti-Authoritarianism

The Ideal: Smash the throne! Burn the mitre!
The Reality: Bow to the data analytics team.

Detractor: Herbert Marcuse

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
—One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Marcuse skewered the liberal illusion of choice. We may vote, but we do so within a system that already wrote the script. Authority didn’t vanish; it just became procedural, faceless, algorithmic. Bureaucracy is the new monarchy—only with more forms.

10. Education and Encyclopaedism

The Ideal: All knowledge, accessible to all minds.
The Reality: Behind a paywall. Written in impenetrable prose. Moderated by white men with tenure.

Detractor: Ivan Illich

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
—Deschooling Society (1971)

Illich pulls the curtain: education isn’t emancipatory; it’s indoctrinatory. The modern university produces not thinkers but credentialed employees. Encyclopaedias are replaced by Wikipedia, curated by anonymous pedants and revision wars. Truth is editable.

Postscript: Picking through the Rubble

So—has the Enlightenment failed?

Not exactly. It succeeded too literally. It was taken at its word. Its principles, once radical, were rendered banal. It’s not that reason, progress, or rights are inherently doomed—it’s that they were never as pure as advertised. They were always products of their time: male, white, bourgeois, and utterly convinced of their own benevolence.

If there’s a path forward, it’s not to restore Enlightenment values, but to interrogate them—mercilessly, with irony and eyes open.

After all, the problem was never darkness. It was the people with torches who thought they’d found the only path.

Natural Causes

Posted in language, nature, philosophy, sexualityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–4 minutes

Some of us are concerned with the metanarratives underlying society, but and given society is apt to have many competing metanarratives. Logical Positivists tapped into the narrative of science, which is a primary theme of Enlightenment thinking. This was supposed to have supplanted the narrative of superstition, except it didn’t. And a sort of empirical, scientific Nature was supposed to have supplanted the metaphysical gods, except it didn’t.

Illuminati Eye Symbol

Apart from the problem that a supernatural God was replaced with a sort of animated Nature, some people just didn’t buy into the new narrative. Today, in the 21st Century Western world, some people still subscribe to these pre-Enlightenment notions, but that’s not the root of the issue. Neither is necessarily right or wrong. And in a Hegelian synthesis, some people assuage the ensuing cognitive dissonance by merging the two and cherry-picking the ones that work for them. These people usually have little difficulty finding people who believe that the earth is 4.5 billion or 6 thousand years old, that Ayurvedic medicine is superior or inferior to Allopathic medicine, that vaccines cause or don’t cause autism, that homeopathy is effective or ineffective, that the Illuminati are some secret society that rules the world or not.

Many people still can’t get past an appeal to nature, whence the Organic and traditional medicine movements. This is not to say that some or all of these claims might have validity; it’s just to say that ‘because it’s natural’ is not a suitable defence. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day—unless it’s set to a 24-hour display, in which case it’s only right once a day.

Without rehashing the argument whole hog, we know that poison ivy and uranium, arsenic, and cyanide are all natural. Not many attempt to defend this with an appeal to nature, so this suffers from selection bias from the start. 

you cannot go against nature
because if you do
go against nature
it's part of nature, too

                — Love and Rockets, No New Tale to Tell

The larger issue is about how we define nature. I don’t recall if this was Lyotard or Lacan (and I don’t feel like looking for the cross-reference at the moment), but by definition everything observed is natural, whether physical or behaviour.

Love and Rockets – No New Tell to Tell

Some humans—notably the Enlightened ones—like to view themselves as somehow above nature, but the veneer is nanometers thin and threadbare at that. And these people extend this concept to behaviour. As the song goes, you can’t go against nature because when you do, when you observe it, it is by definition part of nature, too.

Oftentimes, this becomes a moral argument: this or that is unnatural. Certain sexual activities are usually held up as examples, and yet many of these activities are not only practised by many humans, they are also practised by members of other species. The argument is that we need to elevate about nature, an so they are making some appeal to meta-nature or some such.

In any case, the complaint shouldn’t be whether it’s natural anyway. It might rather be couched in some instances as not ‘naturally occurring’, so plastics would not happen save for manufacture, but neither would asphalt or telephones or televisions or processed foods, so I find it to be disingenuous to rail against some items that do not occur naturally whilst ignoring the ones you happen to find useful.

Rorty on Truth

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–4 minutes

To a comment on Death of the Metanarrative, I responded about the notion of truth relative to the map and the terrain. Although my rambling response was lengthy, I thought I’d share Richard Rorty’s view on this from his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. According to Rorty, rationalists and empiricists turn claims about the world into the world—convincing others that a map of the world is the world.


We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there.

—Richard Rorty

“We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.


Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.

Richard Rorty

“Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world in its own—unaided by the describing activities of human beings—cannot…

“The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak…

“It was Nietzsche who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth’. But in abandoning the traditional notion of truth, Nietzsche did not abandon the idea of discovering the causes of our being what we are … In his view, in achieving this sort of self-knowledge we are not coming to know a truth which was out there (or in here) all the time. Rather, he saw self-knowledge as self-creation. The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language … So the only way to trace home the causes of one’s being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language…

“[O]ne can—fruitlessly, in my view—come at [the question of knowledge] by way of anthropology and the question of whether there are ‘cultural universals’, or by way of psychology and the question of whether there are psychological universals. [There is an] indefinite plurality of standpoints, [a] vast number of ways of coming at the issue sideways … It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes. This openmindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open counter. It should be fostered for its own sake. A liberal society is one which is content to call ‘true’ whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be.”

Husky Meme – According to this book, I can’t read.

Death of the Metanarrative

Posted in language, philosophy, politicsTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments
3–4 minutes

Until I recently read Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge I never quite understood why Moderns accused Post-moderns of being anti-science. I’d heard Jordan Peterson complaining, and I’d read forum and blog posts with the same attacks.

As it happens, postmodernism eschews the meta-narrative or is leery of it. This includes the meta-narratives underlying science and the Enlightenment more generally. If you’ve read my posts over the years, you’ll see that this is a common complaint of mine, that everything is a human construct. Although Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition, I only read it this week.

To be fair, I sought it out. I have been attempting to find some other philosophers who have asserted that Truth (and other notions like Justice and Progress) are nothing more than the result of a rhetorical victory. And although Lyotard does not come out and say this (at least not in this book), I feel that he would not disagree with the notion. I may have to read some more of his work.

The least one can do is find the underlying narrative. Feel free to operate day to day as per usual, but be aware. The inscription at Delphi was not exactly right. There is no self to know, and narratives change, but to ‘know’ the prevailing narrative of the day seems it might at least allow one to better assess what’s happening above ground. The Matrix trope may be overplayed, but it’s a fitting metaphor for seeing what underlies. There is no Truth, but for what it’s worth, there’s another data point.

We live on the map, but the terrain is inaccessible. The postmodern doesn’t hate science or progress. We merely question the veracity. One cannot assess progress without a vector, without velocity and direction, so we contrive stories to serve as a foundation.

The founding of these stories don’t need to be sinister or nefarious. They can grow organically. But the ones who understand the rules, Wittgenstein’s language game, can wrest power, and s/he who can bend the rules through convincing rhetoric, perhaps as Locke and Rousseau, can change to course of history. But this course can be changed again. When Marx tried to change the narrative, it threatened the status quo, so they try to delegitimatise it at every turn—primarily through the dissemination of disinformation in a sort of corrupt meme machine. Marx tried to embrace and then co-opt Capitalism, but the Capitalists were not ready to cede power. One hundred and fifty-odd years later, they still aren’t. And it might be that a different narrative is adopted before Marx’s vision is even able to take root.

I was a bit confused by Lyotard’s quip about utility being the arbiter under modern Capitalism in lieu of Truth, as I am not sure how many postmodernists embrace the notion of some objective Truth. To be clear, I don’t.

Lego Blocks

In the end, I feel it is better to deconstruct the concept of a knowable reality. The trick is not to try to reconstruct something from the pieces. It’s like deconstructing a Lego model and rebuilding a different model from the pieces whilst making the claim that this reconstitution is the true manifestation when in fact any construct is as ‘good’ as the next, but good cannot be determined until you’ve defined a context. Such is the role of the metanarrative. Once you define an end, you can then evaluate utility in light of it, but there is nothing to assess the choice of one end versus some other ends save by preference. And of course preference can be manipulated by rhetoric.

What John Stuart Mill Got Wrong About Freedom

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Graham Tomlin wrote a piece for Prospect, upon which I comment and whence comes the title of this post. Always the deconstructivist curmudgeon, it seems, I agree with Tomlin’s assertion that Mill was wrong, but so is Tomlin.

In a nutshell, Tomlin makes the argument that the Ancients had it right, and the Enlightenment derailed it. Tomlin wants to return to the days of yore when the artifice of character and virtue ruled the day, a time when men were men and women were women. A return to the good ole days.

Tomlin waxes poetic, nostalgiac to a time that never was, a time that the prescription was to chase windmills of virtue and amass the currency of character. But character as currency is more unstable than Bitcoin.

Don Quixote Tilting Windmills

Is there anything more capricious than the held perception of character? Is there anything more futile than chasing the vicious cycle of virtue, always searching for that deserving true Scotsman?

Character is a term especially bandied about by political Conservatives, although Progressives tend to play the #MeToo game because it’s a game of appearances. It doesn’t matter what you do; it only matters what it looks like you do.

And even this is a game. Time and again politicians ‘slip’ (read: get caught), they apologise for the temporary lapse, and ask for forgiveness. Whether or not they keep their position, they are still forgiven and may return to their position learning their lesson (read: don’t get caught again). Let’s just dispense with the formalities.

Perception is reality

In Plato’s day, he holds out four moral virtues to pursue: courage, temperance, justice, and prudence.

Courage: the resolve to act virtuously, especially when it is most difficult

Temperance: moderation in all things; the middle path

Justice: to render every man what’s due

Prudence: application of practical wisdom

Courage seems to be caught in an infinite loop, as it essentially says to exercise temperance, justice, and prudence in the face of danger. Typically, courage is associated with heroic acts, though I fail to see the connection to rescuing a baby from a burning building with any of these other virtues. Perhaps the definition has morphed over the years. Everyone needs a hero. Only Zeus needs a Hera.

Temperance is to find the middle ground: eat but not too much; drink but not too much; rape but not too much; kill but not too much. Is there really a middle ground for all things? In traversing a canyon, shouldn’t one stay close to the edge—or what about sidewalks? Is it temperance that led US President Donald Trump to declare that Nazis and white supremacists. are ‘some very fine people‘, or does he just lack prudence?

Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due.

Justinian — Institutes 1.1

Justice I’ve written about at some length so I won’t spend any additional time here.

Common sense is not so common.

Voltaire

Prudence, which advises one to use common sense, relies on a rare jewel. As Voltaire wrote, « le sens commun est fort rare ».

Perhaps I’m just too hard on people, but I find that most people are pretty dimwitted outside of some small area of focus, and I have to agree with Voltaire’s position on common sense. This is why as an economist, I find it so difficult to accept the homo economicus assertion so key for modern microeconomic theory and why behavioural economics has become a bigger deal in the past 30 years as more and more social scientists realise that people are predictably irrational.

Thanks but no thanks. There’s got to be a better way.

A New Decalogue

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

Bertrand Russell published a New York Times piece in 1951 outlining his own 10 commandments.

1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9: Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Although I don’t agree with all of these, I won’t challenge them here. On balance, they are words to live by.

Meaningless

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
4–6 minutes

Whether in English or in French, I don’t believe Foucault ever uttered the words, ‘It is meaningless to speak in the name of – or against – Reason, Truth, or Knowledge‘*, but I don’t think he’d disagree with the sentiment.


“All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.”

Michel Foucault

Foucault was a postmodernist, and on balance, political Conservatives (Rightists?) dislike the notion of postmodernism. Evidently, a lot of Postmodernists are also Leftists (Progressives or Liberals in the US), so somehow critics such as Jordan Peterson conflate the two clearly distinct concepts.

A basis for Conservatism is the notion of an objective truth, and despite recent sociopolitical trends, they at least say they are guardians or truth and purveyors of knowledge. Conservatives (OK, so I am broad-brushing here) are staunch individualists who believe strongly in possession and property, of material, of an objective reality. Fundamentally, the are aligned to a monotheistic god or at least some discernible (and objective) moral compass.

On the Left, especially post-Enlightenment, they’ve substituted God with some anthropomorphic Nature. In fact, they find comfort in natural laws and human nature. Science is often their respite because science is objective. Isn’t it? Leftists are friends or Reason, and one can’t acquire enough knowledge. Moderation need not apply here; the more the merrier.

This being said, evidently, many on the Left seem to have abandoned this comfort zone. Of course, this may be because the Left-Right dichotomy doesn’t capture the inherent nuance, and so they were miscategorised—perhaps, much in the same manner as persons are miscategorised in a binary gender system. No. It must be something else.

In any case, both side claim to the parties of knowledge, reason, and truth because the opposing parties are clearly abject morons. There is no hint of irony in the situation where each side claims some objective notion of truth—whether divinely granted or self-evidently reasoned—, yet they can’t resolve what the true truth is. If only the other side were more rational.

By now, we are well aware of the demise of homo economicus, the hyper-rational actor foundational to modern economic theory. In reality, humans are only rational given the loosest definitions, say, to (in most cases) know enough to get in the shade on a 37.2°C day. However, as behavioural economist Dan Ariely noted by the title of his book, people are Predictably Irrational. Ariely is just standing on the shoulders of Kahneman and Tversky and Richard Thaler. My point is that humans are only marginally rational.

As I’ve written elsewhere, truth is nothing more than a rhetorical endpoint. It is hardly objective. It’s a matter of opinion. Unfortunately, systems of government and jurisprudence require this objective truth. In truth—see what I did there?—, social fabric requires a shared notion of truth.

A shared notion doesn’t imply that this notion is objective, but if it’s not objective, how does one resolve differences of opinion as to which is the better truth. Without establishing a frame and a lens, this is impossible. The problem is that frames and lenses are also relative. Whether the members accept a given frame or lens is also a matter of rhetoric. It’s turtles all the way down.

Turtles all the way down

Even if all members agree on all parameters of truth at day 0, there is nothing to prevent opinion changes or from new members not to share these parameters. Such is always the problem with social contract theory. [How does one commit to a contract s/he is born into with little recourse to rescind the contract, renegotiate terms, or choose a different contract option. The world is already carved up, and the best one can do is to jump from the frying pan into the fire.]

In the end, the notion of truth is necessary, but it doesn’t exist. Playing Devil’s advocate, let’s say that there is a single purveyor of Truth; let’s just say that it’s the monotheistic Abrahamic God of Judeo-Christian beliefs. There is no (known) way to ascertain that a human would have the privilege to know such a truth nor, if s/he were to encounter, say, a burning bush of some sort, that this entity would be conveying truth; so, we aren’t really in a better place. Of course, we could exercise faith and just believe, but this is a subjective action. We could also take Descarte’s line of logic and declare that a good God would not deceive us—sidestepping that this ethereal being was good, as advertised. I’m afraid it’s all dead ends here, too.

And so, we are back to where we started: no objective truth, limited ability to reason, and some fleeting notion of knowledge. We are still left with nothing.

Enter the likes of Jordan Peterson, he with his fanciful notion of metaphysics and morality—a channeller of Carl Jung. His tactic is to loud dog the listener and outshout them indignantly. His followers, already primed with a shared worldview, are adept (or inept) cheerleaders ready to uncritically echo his refrain. To them, his virtue-ethical base, steeped in consequentialism awash in deontology, Peterson speaks the truth.

He also potentiates the selfish anti-collective germ and rage of the declining white man. He’s sort of a less entertaining Howard Stern for the cleverer by half crowd. He gives a voice to the voiceless—or perhaps the thoughtless. He uses ‘reason’ to back his emotional pleas. He finds a voice in the wilderness where white Western males are the oppressed. If only they hadn’t been born centuries earlier—albeit with iPhones and microwaves.

Those would be the days.

* I believe this phrase attributed to Foucault was a paraphrase by philosopher Todd May.

The Rhetoric of Truth

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

I’ve shared a new video on YouTube discussing the rhetorical nature of truth.

Before the Classical Hellenes, Mesopotamians recognised the power of rhetoric as the art of using language to convince or persuade.
The term itself derives from the Greek ῥητορικός, rhētorikós.

As with any human construct such as language, truth and rhetoric are confined by limitations of the system and its logical structure.

In “Gorgias”, one of his Socratic Dialogues, Plato defines rhetoric as the persuasion of ignorant masses within the courts and assemblies.

Rhetoric, in Plato’s opinion, is merely a form of flattery and functions similarly to cookery, which masks the undesirability of unhealthy food by making it taste good.

Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle’s three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos.

But it’s more insidious than all of this. The notion of truth—or whatever we believe to be true—is nothing more than rhetoric.

If one is aptly convinced that something is true, it is. The physical world—the world of objects—contains facts—attributes of these objects, but these facts are tautological descriptors: a red car, une voiture rouge, ou quelque chose. In the conceptual domain of abstractions such as truth, justice, gods, and love, all bets are off.

As Geuss aptly suggests, most of society and civilisation don’t care about philosophical thought at this level. This is privileged activity. It’s not about level of intellect, per se; rather, it’s the privilege of free time to devote to abstract thinking.

Most people are more concerned with getting to the next day to earn a paycheque, and they accept sloganeering for any deeper meaning.

Humans are said to be rational beings. In fact, this predicates entire disciplines such as economics…

…and jurisprudence. Legal systems are founded on the concept that humans are at least rational enough to make fundamental decisions about right and wrong—and this, of course, presumes that the notions of right and wrong in and of themselves are meaningful.

For the sake of argument, let’s presume that humans are at least rational enough for our purposes, and whilst right and wrong may not be objectively validated, that within the context of a society—presuming that not to be mired in its own identity problem—, it can be defined in the manner of a social compact envisaged by the likes of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, et alii. As the saying goes, ‘if it’s good enough for the government… well.

Language is a human construct, yet it’s an apparition. Like a physical object, it appears solid, but there’s more space than not. What’s there is exiguous. Echoing Heisenberg’s observations at the atomic level, one cannot be fully certain of a particular meaning. This is what Derrida (via Barthes) meant by ‘the death of the author’, though there is nothing to guarantee that the author could fully articulate the meaning or intent even if they were present to defend it.

About the same time, Saussure was finding promise in the structure of language, Russell was creating a new language of logic to obviate its deficiencies. Structuralists and logical positivists were a natural extension of the scientism of the 20th Century, the prevailing wave since the Enlightenment, but as with the demise of gods, religious belief, and other things metaphysical, this faith in structure was also specious.

Historically speaking, there is progress (another illusion), and there are paradigm shifts. When a paradigm shifts, an old truth is replaced by a new one. This is typically credited to a progression of knowledge, but it’s actually just that, on balance, people have accepted a new frame, chalking it up to scientific method rather than some rhetorical sleight of hand.

Even so, scientific discovery is different to archetypal notions such as truth or justice. At least we can empirically test and verify a scientific notion, even if what we are observing is later revised because of some previously unknown factor or removed constraint. For example, until Einstein’s day, Newton would not have known that his theory of gravity would break down as it approached the speed of light. But truth is just an opinion—even if widely held. Enter the ‘appeal to tradition’ flavour of logical fallacy—I’ll not dwell on the fact that systems of government are based on this quaint notion of precedents. #JustSaying

“Truth is simply a culmination of the rhetorical power to persuade the ignorant masses.”

Plato

I’ve arrived at my philosophical position as an autodidact. I am not a conventional scholar, and my exposure to philosophy derives from books, videos, and online sources including Wikipedia, blogs, Reddit, and the such.

I consider myself to be a non-cognitivist in the realm of Ayers’ Emotivism, and I fully realise that society as we know it relies on some notion of ascertainable truth. Of course, Nietzsche was vilified for observing that ‘God is dead’ and unceremoniously subjected to the ad hominem attacks afforded to the likes of Marx.

I’ve got a certain amount of respect for Existentialists (and Absurdists), but I find the teleological component a bit at odds with the central tenet. To that extent, I am more of a Nihilist.

I am more comfortable with what’s been called ‘Post-Modernism’, despite admiring the effort of some Structuralists and Logical Positivists. Where this love affair ends is where the permeation of science fetishists begin. Scientific Method and Logic are the gods of the New Age.

As a post-Enlightenment child, I’ve been steeped in all of its unfound glory, and it’s harder still for me to escape the pull of my Western indoctrination. So, to argue, one is forced to comply with the rules of logic within the limitations of human language—even the limitations of Russell’s language of Logic. And like arguing with a proponent of religion who points out that you can’t disprove his Ethereal Unicorn, one is forced into positions of arguing against Quixotic figments introduced as metaphysical elements.

Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

Posted in philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment