Tag: tversky

« Je pense, donc j’ai raison ! »

Posted in intelligence, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, religion, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

The Enlightenment promised a universal Reason; what we got was a carnival mirror that flatters philosophers and fools the rest of us. MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnosed the corpse with precision, but then tried to resurrect it with Aristotelian or theological magic tricks. I’m less charitable: you can’t will petrol into an empty tank. In my latest essay, I put ‘Reason’ on the slab, call in Kahneman, Hume, Nietzsche, and others as expert witnesses, and deliver the verdict: morality is a house rule, not a cosmic law. This piece is part of a larger project that includes my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and Against Dumocracy. The Enlightenment isn’t dying – it’s already dead. We’re just cataloguing the remains.

The Enlightenment was many things: a bonfire of superstition, a hymn to autonomy, a fever dream of “Reason” enthroned. Its philosophers fancied themselves heirs to Aristotle and midwives to a new humanity. And to be fair, they were clever enough to trick even themselves. Too clever by half.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, plays the role of forensic pathologist with admirable precision. He shows us how the Enlightenment dynamited the teleological scaffolding of Aristotle, then tried to keep the vocabulary of virtue, duty, and rights standing in mid-air. The result: what he calls a “moral Babel,” a chorus of shrill assertions dressed up as rational law. Elizabeth Anscombe had already filed the death certificate back in 1958 with Modern Moral Philosophy, where she pointed out that our talk of “moral obligation” is just a Christian relic without a deity to enforce it. And Nietzsche, that perennial party-crasher, cheerfully declared the whole project bankrupt: once the gods are dead, “ought” is nothing but resentment pretending to be metaphysics.

And yet, when MacIntyre reaches the heart of the matter, he can’t quite let the body stay buried. He wants to reattach a soul by importing an Aristotelian telos, even summoning a “new St Benedict” to shepherd us through the ruins. It plays beautifully with those still tethered by a golden string to Aquinas and the premodern, but let’s be honest: this is just hypnosis with a Latin chorus. Descartes told us je pense, donc je suis; MacIntyre updates it to je pense, donc j’ai raison. The trouble is that thinking doesn’t guarantee rightness any more than an empty petrol tank guarantees motion. You can will fuel into existence all you like; the car still isn’t going anywhere.

The behavioral economists – Kahneman, Tversky, Ariely, Gigerenzer – have already demonstrated that human reason is less compass than carnival mirror. Jonathan Haidt has shown that our “moral reasoning” usually lags behind our gut feelings like a PR department scrambling after a scandal. Meanwhile, political practice reduces “just war” to a matter of who gets to publish the rule book. Progressℱ is declared, rights are invoked, but the verdict is always written by the most powerful litigant in the room.

So yes, MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnose the corpse with impressive clarity. But then they can’t resist playing resurrectionist, insisting that if we only chant the right metaphysical formula, the Enlightenment’s heart will start beating again. My own wager is bleaker – or maybe just more honest. There is no golden thread back to Aristotle, no metaphysical petrol station in the desert. Morality is not a universal constant; it’s a set of rules as contingent as the offside law. Killing becomes “murder” only when the tribe – or the state – says so. “Life is sacred” is not a discovery but a spell, a linguistic sleight of hand that lets us kill in one context while weeping in another.

The Enlightenment wanted to enthrone Reason as our common oracle. Instead, it handed us a corpse and told us to pretend it was still breathing. My contribution is simply to keep the coroner’s mask on and say: The magic tricks aren’t working anymore. Stop looking for a metaphysical anchor that isn’t there. If there’s to be an “after,” it won’t come from another Saint Benedict. It will come from admitting that the Enlightenment died of believing its own hype – and that language itself was never built to carry the weight of gods.

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Meaningless

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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.