Hobbes: Authority

legitimate rule

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.>

Since Rufus and Jason have covered Hobbes in such excellent detail thus far, my contribution to this discussion will be more about tying up loose ends.

As a student, I read Hobbes four different times in four different contexts for four different unrelated courses, and that's how I feel Hobbes is best approached: through a plurality of heterodox methodologies and interpretive structures. We'll attempt to do that below.

Claim 1: "Hobbesian" is a relative term.

A question at the center of any discussion on Hobbes is often: what does the eponym "Hobbesian" mean, essentially? Jason made reference to Wittgenstein in his most recent post on the topic. Rufus asked the question non-rhetorically. I'll expand on the discussion of semantics and claim that the best definitions of "Hobbesian" stand in contrast to other prevailing ideas of the period.

Hobbes is usually studied in relation to the positions of Locke and Rousseau. Regarding Hobbes and Locke, Hobbes felt that universal surrender to an absolute sovereign is the only way to secure civil society, while Locke's political thought went on to serve as a primary influence for the American democracy. In contrast to Rousseau's optimism about human nature - that men are inherently good - Hobbes argued that men are inherently weak; in contrast to Rousseau's belief in the noble savage and the morally-cancerous influence of civil society, Hobbes believed that the state of nature was a state of perpetual suffering and that only the stability of civil society could foster human flourishing.

These two ideas: (1) the Hobbesian positive (commonly called pessimism about human nature); and (2) the Hobbesian normative (the necessity of a strong, central authority) comprise an internally-consistent school of thought that stands with Lockeanism and Rousseauvianism as one of the three pillars of social contract theory. The debates hashed out centuries ago between these three thinkers still rage strong today.

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The Continual Reinvention of the Wheel

I haven't really been watching TV for some time now. The few things I actually desire to watch have become quite available on a computer. But, today I was put in front of the “boob tube” because it was the only venue where I could observe my beloved St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff game, and this got me thinking. I was glad to be able to watch without having to go to a sports bar or buy the game on my satellite service and pay a veritable fortune; given the current state of my pocketbook, this just wouldn't be acceptable.

So I surrendered to the inevitable exposure to the device that for so long has given us only something to be told and see but not an ability to inquire. I watched my ball game, and - besides the loss I observed - I was glad for what I witnessed. But what kept hitting me was the continual advertisements for the release of old DVDs in new “Blue Ray” technology. What got in my head was how information - TV-wise - is being made “better” for our consumption through continuing advancements in visual technology. Now, I'm very cool with that, as long as it's on a device that lets you ask a question in response to the tripe of the light-lit screen that comes into your house every night.

I've been here for the advancement of this technology, and it is pretty awesome; but I'm thinking that it is advancing to some point that many folks might consider close to Woody Allen's Orgasmatron in his famous work Sleeper: having an advanced piece of technology - no matter how advanced - such as a high-definition television will never replace actual, physical experience of any event it may be designed to mimic, especially if there is no way to "talk back". Yet, sales must continue, money must be made.

When is it that we will come to the realization that the flat screen in front of us, and whatever color content is being played on it, will never be three-dimensional no matter what name that technology has hung on it? Maybe it's just me: I welcome the advent of technology when it enhances learning or makes learning easier, but I'm not sure I come away any different after experiencing the History Channel on a “Liquid Crystal” screen than I do after watching it on my nine-year-old RCA, cathode ray tube-powered television.

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More Farms, Smaller Farms

Now made with real fruit!I'd like to respond to Josh's last post by modeling what I see as the obverse. Economies of scale in agriculture are desireable when the alternative is crippling poverty. Nevertheless, in developed economies where starvation remains of secondary concern to self-inflicted overeating, more food of less homogeneous nutritional composition and higher quality even at higher costs is sorely necessary for the public welfare. Looming over all of this, the Mathusian insight that gave birth to both modern agriculture and modern economics remains true - the human population will always increase at a greater rate than food production efficiency. (My theory is that the Mathusian condition is an emergent consequence of the tendency for humans to be unrealistically optimistic about the future.) 

For this reason, in developing economies, it remains prudent to hedge against economies of scale in agriculture and some of the evils born of placing ourselves too far from the source of our sustenance via extreme and unnatural occupational specialization. (Indeed, it's possible that all of culture comes from food. And "you are what you eat" is wise on several levels.) The Summer 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly does a good job of balancing and weighing all the complex considerations at the intersection of development, agriculture, poverty, and nutrition.

The short version of my counterpoint to Josh is that what we need in America is different than what we need for countries that can't feed themselves. It might even be that there's a natural developmental arch that all civilizations must follow, and the stage that a particular civilization is in determines what course of action that country should take to maximize welfare: first (1) there's a community wrought of nature based on equality and living harmoniously, where everyone is a subsistence farmer or hunter/gatherer and everyone lives and dies at the whims of the seasons; then (2) primitive accumulation goes down and a primitive capitalist society develops - whether this is a result of contact with other capitalist societies or natural forces, it's safe to say this is where Africa is; next (3) capitalism matures until it can mature no more - intra-industry national power emerges concentrated in few hands, and these hands - instead of toiling honestly to coordinate supply and demand for the well-being of all - begin to build walls and moats around their citadels (see regulatory capture, patent over-filing, health insurance tethered to corporate employment, credentialing and licensing, etc.); (4) diminishing returns compel a premium to be placed on solving social problems or coerced egalitarianism - this is the stage where the United States and other mature social democracies find themselves; Marx went on to speculate that societies after this stage advance to (5) perfect, blissful communism as the profit motive is grdually removed from aspects of socety where it is (deemed) detrimental to the general welfare. Many others (generally social democrats) think (4) is as far as we can and should go. I think these intellectual frameworks are dangerously naïve and/or cowardly; we can combine lessons learned from (3) and (4) in a self-similar federalist/libertarian/anarchist structure that allows for unfettered individual expression and positive-sum cooperation while minimizing the effects of individual recklessness and coercive association.

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Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

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A New Political Dialectic

<cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

Jackson Lears has a riveting piece up at the Nation which soundly routs the new parapositivism taking the popular and newspaper science cultures by storm.  The piece is called "Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris".  It's a takedown of Harris couched within a takedown of the New Atheist conceptual framework couched within a takedown of a positivism which oversteps its bounds.  Freddie deBoer recently praised the piece:

I think that absolutely everyone should read this profoundly necessary evisceration of Sam Harris, the Moe of the New Atheist Three Stooges, written by Jackson Lears and published by the Nation. It may be my favorite essay published this year; it goes well beyond the usual stalking horses of New Atheism and speaks to some of the fundamental analytical and ethical issues confronting our species, particularly when it comes to progress and the limits of knowledge. Read the whole thing, seriously.

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A Friend Indeed

What a wonderful thing it is when you feel that things couldn’t seem worse a soul (or more) comes from out of nowhere and at the last minute and miraculously snatches you from the jaws of perceived doom.  Many will never know this salvation.  Plenty call this sensation “God”; but I’d like to focus on the flesh and give adoration to a human man and his spirit.

   

Today more than ever we are so acutely aware of all the tragedies that are enveloping the world - war, famine, poverty, personal loss - and the list is longer than I care to write about here.  We are force fed with a language of fear through the media because that’s what sells and we are always seduced by what is wrong.  But tragedy has always been with us, and it won’t be going away as long as we’re around (a human condition).  Maybe it’s me.  We see the bad in the world through the camera and computer eye, and many of us withdraw and just carry on surrendering to the "I can’t make a difference” feeling and even feeling like we might be in as bad a position as the other folks we feel bad for.

   

I’m carrying on about this because a recent interaction and external experience got me thinking about the microscopic aspects of pitching in. We are bombarded with trouble these days it seems en masse by the light-lit screens that are in our faces most of the time.  But I think the things underneath are what I would like to bring attention to and try and beat down the doom and gloom that can be so easy to fall into these days.  Our great country (and world for that matter) is in dire need of a positive jolt of who we really are.  Humans are such a wonderful creature when they care about their brothers and sisters: a truly unstoppable force of good.  But so many of us give in to the ethic of helplessness bequeathed by the all-seeing eye of modernity because that’s what comes easy.

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Formalisms and Formalities

[I'd like to use this post to introduce a new feature on this website: Apture.  You may notice that there are no links at all in this post.  That is because Apture allows easy lookup of words and phrases: simply highlight any word or phrase on this page and move the cursor over to "learn more".  A pop-up window from Wikipedia or Google or some other source should appear...]

The Japanese are often stereotyped as being excessively formal.  This stereotype I think is true for the Japanese (although necessarily oversimplified and commonly misused); but America is full of formalism too.  Our formalism is qualitatively different than that of the Japanese, but in my experience formalism has a quantitatively equal role in each country.  In Japan, formalism is often associated with the most mature expressions of traditional arts: kata in karate; shodo; even the infamous Japanese bureaucracy has its roots in the formal rigors codified in Confucianism.  Formalism lies at the received base of the culture (especially with Shinto), and this is difficult for the American in Japan to grasp.

American formalism on the other hand is a modern invention, unrefined, and even wild: Taylorism and scientific management; organizational theory and Edward Bernays; the elaborate dance sequences associated with modern finance and commercial banking security protocols; outsourcing and automated customer services; the grand and complex American healthcare system; and finally (corporate) job applications.  This kind of formalism is as American as apple pie.

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Modern Visionaries Part I - Daniel Quinn

But such simple answers aren’t enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everyone is looking down, and it is obvious that the ground is rushing up towards, you-and rushing up faster every year. - Daniel QuinnIn a world where a pedigree in academia has been the de facto standard of acceptance for information provided to the world, a few remarkable un-credentialed people have come to the forefront of our social collective to provide earthshaking philosophical, technological, sociological, and just plain humanistic revelations that could very well have a major impact on the future of mankind.  

These people often come from backgrounds that have nothing to do with the insights and predictions for which they are well-known.  These people have been incredibly accurate in their predictions and in the application of many of their theories. They have been disregarded by their academic counterparts and brushed off as fantastical by much of academia.

One of these people is Daniel Quinn.  For this post, I would like to investigate the question: Is Daniel Quinn a sociologist?

Sociology is defined as:

the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships; specifically: the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of organized groups of human beings.

A person who is in the academic discipline of sociology is referred to as a sociologist or often a “social scientist”. Princeton’s online definition search provides this description for a social scientist:

someone who is an expert in the study of human society and its personal relationships.  

Concerning the non-academic Daniel Quinn, digging deeper into what really defines a sociologist becomes a little more complex than a simple yes or no answer

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A Raga for April 26th

raga of spring - Vasant Ragini, Ragamala, Rajput, Kota, Rajasthan. 1770.Krishna dances with maidens1.  As someone who aspires to rationality, I find the irrationality of ritual endlessly fascinating (whether this irrationality is of the exotic, hardcore, or wimpy varieties).  While specific rituals are always irrational to the outsider, count on ritual as ostensibly purposeless fixed-action pattern to slither its way into even the most consciously rational of life-models.  

2.  The familiar algorithms of ritual provide soothing punctuation to the unmanageable run-on sentences of modern life.  Like a defrag program, their regular employment serves as an anchor to help everything else run smoothly.

3.  The role of strictly observed ritual in my life in Fukushima was to allow me to wake up everyday and play with my children until the early afternoon, ride my bike to work while listening to science lectures, teach classes until evening, ride my bike home, and write for three or four hours everyday.

4.  Through this deliberate existence, I managed to fit full-time employment, active parenting, an hour and a half of moderate exercise, an hour and a half of study, and an article into each day.  This was only possible by making small yet compounding improvements in ritual efficiency over the course of almost two years of the complete systemic control provided by strict observance.

5.  Since coming to America exactly a month ago, I've had no sustainable ritual presence in my life.  Without ritual and its anchored associative permutations, time disappears into the void.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (in Education)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" refers to embryological parallelism, the idea that the development of any individual organism strongly parallels that organism's evolutionary history.  For example, in mammalian embryos, the backbone appears very early, followed by other neural developments in the order that they first appeared in mammalian macro-evolution.  The cerebrum is the last brain structure to develop in the individual human, as it is the newest structure in macro-evolutionary terms.  

If we look at whale embryos, legs begin to develop before retracting back into the body cavity.  Hair also develops briefly, but whale embryos lose this hair at further stages.  Birds have fingers at early stages of development, but these eventually fuse to form wings.  Birds also possess the genes for teeth, but these genes have been "turned off", and teeth never develop in birds.  Both human and monkey embryos briefly have tails to reflect our be-tailed common ancestor, but this tail disappears abruptly in humans, whereas it continues growing in monkeys.  This all correlates strongly with both genetic, mathematical models and the fossil record.

I find the parallelism between macro-evolutionary history, individual organismic development, and mathematically modelable genetic histories endlessly fascinating, and I am obsessed with reconciling and systematizing these phenomena.  But, I do not know enough about the subject right now; it is something that I would like to explore in depth in the future.  

For now, I'd like to see how such a model could be applied to education: that is, the educational development of the individual student recapitulates the macro-history of human knowledge.

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Transcendent Indwelling

To continue my rambling series on personificationism, the way we typically discuss "God" makes no sense at all.  (Out of simple curiosity, I have chosen to ignore the obtrusive irony of committing these thoughts to words.)  For a long time, I have been averse to both Evangelical Christians like all the usual culprits and New Atheists like all the usual culprits.  It seems there is a dearth of surly, self-appointed team captains willing to speak for the radical withholding of judgment.

Perhaps at least part of my aversion to both factions is rooted in their tendency to debate the nature of a representation, which just doesn't make any sense at all.  Mr. Hand says "Romanticism is green".  Mr. Book says it is not green.  I have more antipathy towards the New Atheists because as scientists they are presumably not proceeding from first principles; this - and a history of science full of arrogant fuck-ups - compels more cooperative metacognition.  But then again, conceptualization has never been the scientist's strong suit.

A typical argument used by the New Atheists comes from Betrand Russell's teapot.  The positivist Russell parodied the claims of the religious by postulating that a teapot exists in orbit around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  One cannot disprove the existence of that teapot, therefore Russell's claim that the teapot exists is just as invalid a claim as "God exists".  At first glance, this seems like a fair attack on the existence of God; yet upon closer examination, we realize that Russell's claim involves the physical object of a "teapot", whereas "God" is a received linguistic artifact.  Russell and the New Atheists commit an egregious category error in compelling a falsifiable conception of the divine.

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Computers are Tools for Humans

Watson competes on Jeopardy.I'd like to introduce a new theme that I will explore over the coming weeks: personificationism.  This first post will relate to personificationism in discussions of artifical intelligence; future posts will discuss notions of personificationism in theology, ecology, economics, and astrobiology.  

This idea grows from the Shinto wedding I attended two weekends ago.  I divided my discussion of the wedding into three posts: the first part was a brief analysis of Shinto; the second was a description of the procedural details of the traditional wedding ceremony; and the third discussed the very different procedure of the reception.  

As a rule, I try to avoid constructing meta-narratives of my own arguments as this can only limit what I hope is a broad and personally diverse set of interpretations, but the general theme of the first part is the nature and history of the received practices that we call Shinto.  The second part follows from this by describing a ritual that readers of this magazine should find utterly foreign and inexplicable but with which Japanese are intimately familiar (increasingly less so, but, as Kevin pointed out in the comments to the part one, Shinto being the wide base of Japanese culture explains a lot of what the outside observer might find uncanny about Japan).  The third part compares this foreign and inexplicable ritual to a more familiar one.  

When read in this light, the overall effect of the series should be to make the reader deeply self-conscious of elements of his own culture that he takes as true and objective properties of the world: these "true and objective" properties may seem just as uncanny to a Japanese person as a Shinto wedding would to a Westerner.

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Searching for Oskar Schindler

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

I considered titling this post a more academic "Rejoinders to a Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion" but thought better when I realized how many lines that would take up.  

First, I'd like to say thank you to Erik Kain at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen for agreeing to guest-post my recent offerings on abortion to that excellent blog and allowing me to receive excellent feedback from its excellent commentariat (167 responses as of press time).  

I'd also like to thank Jeremy Stangroom for setting up a forum to examine this and other difficult ethical dilemmas with some philosophical rigor and for engaging my argument and providing the kind of feedback that allowed me to refine it for publication.  Now on to the rejoinders:

1.  The first concern, raised by many many commenters, which I would like to address here is that the pro-life movement is generally dastardly and underhanded and engages in rhetorical bait-and-switch, moving of goalposts, demonizing their opponents, and all sorts of other trickery and tomfoolery.

This is true.  Some of them do, and these elements usually command a disproportionate amount of media attention, just as some in the pro-choice camp debate dishonestly as well and are well-publicized for it.  One of the many fundamental problems with the abortion issue in the United States is in the way it is construed: one side hates life, the other side hates choice.  This leads to one side arguing as if life is the only consideration when de facto it isn't and one side arguing that choice is the only consideration when de facto it isn't.  I constructed my matrix under the assumption that both positions were valid (by virtue of being widely held) and that any thoughtful, democratic examination of the issue required weighing the concerns of each party against each other.

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A Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion

<This post is cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.>

Jeremy Stangroom is a British author, philosopher, co-founder of The Philosopher's Magazine Online - one of the premiere philosophy publications on the Internet - and the director of Philosophy Experiments - where users can participate in a variety of interactive thought experiments.  One of the more popular experiments is called Whose Body Is It Anyway; it is about the taboo taboo, touchy touchy subject of abortion.   

I strongly recommend completing the experiment before continuing to read this blog post.

The Whose Body Is It Anyway experiment thus far has had two particularly interesting results: the first is that opposition to abortion tends to come disproportionately from the religious:

(B)y far the biggest predictor of whether a person is going to be opposed to abortion is religious belief. So, for instance, 83% of people with no religion support the right of a woman to have an abortion, compared to only 37% of Christians.  

The second interesting result - a significant result indeed - is that people opposed to abortion tended to be generally inconsistent in their attitudes towards the medical seriousness of miscarriage:

Near the beginning of Whose Body Is It Anyway?...you’re asked to rank the following medical issues in order of seriousness (focusing only on numbers of deaths): cancer, multiple sclerosis, miscarriage, stroke, heart disease and housemaid’s knee. Then, if it turns out that you’re against abortion, the activity complains if you haven’t ranked miscarriage as being a serious medical problem (since, for example, in the United States alone there are estimated to be more than a million miscarriages each year).

I have many problems with this interpretation, but let's focus on only the most substantial ones - those related not to the particulars of the way in which Mr. Stangroom framed his experiment but to the issue itself: first, miscarriage is a natural phenomenon, similar to death by old age, whereas abortion is the direct and predictable result of human action, such as euthanasia. 

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Memory, Memory, Mnemonics, Metacognition, Systemization, Learning, Postmodernism, and Memory

Appropriately, this is the second time for me to write this post.  I don't know whether to blame my mother-in-law's computer or Squarespace (or myself) for ironically erasing a post about memory.  I'll try to fight back impatience and frustration and craft a cogent argument.

I often play Memory in my kids classes.  This is the game where players turn over cards and try to match them from memory.  I usually play with a set of cards depicting colors and shapes (such as yellow octagon) or a set of cards depicting letters and animals (such as G, Goat).  When I first started playing Memory in my classes, I used only twenty cards arranged in a four by five matrix.  I found that such games typically lasted between five and ten minutes, and students very seldom forgot the positions and identities of any of the cards.  If there were four players, the final score would be something like 4-2-2-2.  Whoever went first or whoever was lucky enough to be last when there was only a few pairs left would often be the winner.  This unfairness usually didn't bother me, since the primary goal of the activity was to memorize English objects, and the beneficiary of structural unfairness - that is to say the winner - seemed to rotate each class in random, egalitarian fashion.

Nevertheless, my class of seven-year-olds soon insisted that we use all the cards.  As a decidedly non-micromanaging, hippy teacher, I complied and began to arrange fifty-four cards in a six by nine matrix.  I found that this bigger version of Memory took anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes to complete and changed the nature of the game completely.  The advantage of going first or last was relatively minimized, and so was the egalitarian distribution of winners.  The same students won every time we played.

In the fifty-four card version of the game, winning seemed to be a function of not raw memory skill but how fundamentally-limited memory capacity was employed.  Of course, in terms of raw memory, some students were superior to others; but for the most part this difference was marginal: Susy could remember eleven cards; Nancy could remember thirteen; Jimmy could remember ten; Johnny could remember twelve.  It couldn't have been this small difference in raw ability that was driving the emergence of lopsided final scores like 15-6-3-2. 

Instead, winning seemed to be based on the approach students took to the game.  Students with no strategy - who drew at random - were at an extreme disadvantage in the fifty-four card array, whereas students who made and followed some sort of rule - whatever it was - always seemed to win.  This rule could be, for example, always drawing new cards from the bottom left of the board, always drawing cards in clockwise order around holes, or always drawing in a counterclockwise spiral from the middle of the array. 

Students who employed some sort of general rule for drawing new cards only had to memorize the rule, the card, and the order - one constant and two variables; students who drew at random had to memorize card, x-position, y-position, and order - four variables.  Efficiency gains resulted in overwhelming victories for rule-following students, since these rules effectively reduced a game played in two-dimensional space to a game played in one neural dimension.

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