Speak Ancestors III: We Believe Because We Discover It, Composing, 03/12/2015

Continued from previous . . . So where exactly are we in understanding this myth of the golden age. Yesterday, one of my commenters I the Scientist talked about an article where a sample of right-wing media pundits were asked about when they considered their society’s golden age to be.

It worked out that each of their golden ages was a rosy memory of their society at about age 10.

Was that poll scientific? I highly doubt it. Was it even an interview-based qualitative study of a representative sample of remarkable test cases? Maybe in overlong-name only.

The joke suggests that there's a little immaturity to
modern conservatism in North America. I wonder who
could possibly ever think such a thing.

But you see the truth in it, even though you admit that the whole phenomenon of nostalgia’s power over conservative politics is way more complicated than this. It’s a metaphor that reads almost as a joke, but it expresses just enough truth to compel you to think about it.

So what does that idea say?

At first glance, it says that today’s radical conservative, at least the one powered by nostalgia for a golden age, is at heart a scared little boy who wishes he could still live in a world without realistic concerns or problems. 

Where all you needed was a hug from mom or dad to resolve any issue or conflict. Life as Growing Pains. But that’s not what all utopian politics are about, even the utopias I might find abhorrent.*

* That’s going to be another aspect of my Utopias manuscript when I examine the ideas and concepts of modern conservatism. Even utopian frameworks I find destructive and terrifying – like hardcore libertarianism, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism – has its governing concept of the perfect society.

That idea, that conservative nostalgia is really for life as a 10-year-old kid, has more to it, something that’s linked to real political revolution. And it’s a point Leo Strauss makes, oddly enough, given his reputation. 

When you’re 10 years old, you don’t really have a strong drive for rebellion, at least not if you were raised in a stable, relatively secure home environment. The authority of your parents is usually enough for you to trust. 

In other words, when something puzzles you about a moral or ethical issue, you go to your parents as the expert authorities. And their answer is authoritative. You have no problem believing them, your immediate ancestors.

When a son is closer to the traditional beliefs of his father
than he would ever have admitted as a youth. Not that
this photo and caption constitute any speculation on the
real identity of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Kylo
Ren or Supreme Leader Snoke. Certainly not saying
something wildly implausible, like that one of them
turns out to be Luke Skywalker. I bet you one of them
turns out to be Luke Skywalker. I'd bet on it being Snoke.

Rebellion kicks in as a teenager when that ancestral authority isn’t enough. You probably won’t even end up straying far from your parents’ beliefs. Most people don’t. But their word isn’t enough to satisfy you. You look for something deeper.

This is what Strauss means when he talks about Socrates, and his role as an agitator in the culture of his Greece. Greek society was destabilized thanks to war. And at the same time, the culture was getting accustomed to regular peaceful interactions with many neighbours thanks to Mediterranean trade. 

They were meeting perfectly nice people who didn’t prescribe to any of the same myths or religions they did. Brotherhood and solidarity was building among people who would never have otherwise done so, as their ancestral traditions were too different.

Strauss writes about cultural collisions as engendering the first seeds of philosophy in a people. If people with different ancestral traditions and first principles about the nature of existence can also be decent people, then the traditions and their principles alone aren’t the necessary paths to truth and goodness.

This is the truth that would make a son kick the shit out of his father. The principles that mainstream culture believes to be true need a higher ground than the tradition of belief in them. Merely asking for that ground displaces and disrespects traditional authorities. 

Yet that role is necessary. We have to discover for ourselves the truths that our traditions (and all the different traditions) express in their peculiar, colloquial ways. We’d sound like total skeptics in the immediate term. 

But when we do discover them, they’ll have an even stronger foundation and a wider application than any other principle that’s come before them.

When It’s Okay That Everything Changes, A History Boy, 18/11/2015

As humans – hell, as organisms – we’re uncomfortable with change. It’s quite a paradox. Life itself requires fluctuation, dynamisms in tension at so many different levels: cellular, ecological, medical, personal, economic, social. But the uncertainty of flux is a main source of anxiety. 

We enjoy security. Sameness comforts us, because stability protects us. Change means risk. There can be gains with risk, but there can also be loss. Ambition and anxiety go hand in hand. It's an inevitable dynamism. 

I’ve suffered from the anxiety of economic instability, though I’m slowly digging my way to a reasonable position again after several years. But for a long time, I’ve at least had the comfort that I know change is inevitable and positive. 

Deleuze looked like an eccentric, but he was actually a
pretty normal guy. From age 27, he had only one lung,
thanks to tuberculosis. He smoked heavily all his life.
And he had peculiarly sensitive fingertips, such that he
grew his nails extra long to protect them. And holy
shit, that combover!

Probably my most important source of this knowledge was the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I recommended one of his books, What Is Philosophy?, to a new client.* We were talking about the importance of creativity in a company’s communications, getting beyond generic guidelines to develop a singular personality for a company and a brand.

* I seem to have clients now. This is a nice feeling.

I’ve long found it frustrating about corporate communications that guidelines for how to be creative are so often incredibly generic. I cited What Is Philosophy? as an important book for understanding how creativity works. 

Now, it's absolutely fucking weird. Trippy in all the best ways. I’m interested to see what he thinks of it because neither English nor French is his first language, and Deleuze’s writing can be a challenge to anyone. But the challenge is worth it.

I know because What Is Philosophy? was the first book of Deleuze’s I’d read in full. I was 22. I’d had his book on Kant as a supplementary book in an early undergrad class, but I never read much of it until years later. And I mostly discovered Deleuze’s work in reverse.

He’s such a complicated writer that a lot of the academics I’ve met who specialize in his work think that you can't understand him until you've read everything. And he was absurdly prolific, writing more than 20 books and a ton of essays. 

But I think Deleuze is easier to understand than his reputation insists. Deleuze is complicated to study and write about as an academic because he wrote about so many different topics and figures, and approached his core ideas in so many different ways. 

That's why you can dive in pretty much anywhere. He always explored the same fundamental ideas from a ton of different angles. Just find the angle you like best, and that becomes your favourite of his books, no matter how many you read. 

There can be as many Deleuzes as you want.

My favourite is probably What Is Philosophy?. I find A Thousand Plateaus the richest. I like how punk and prophetic Anti-Œdipus is. The Kafka book turned out to be really important to how I approach writing fiction and scripts. The Nietzsche book most fun. The Leibniz book most beautiful.

He was constantly experimenting, working through different approaches, seeing what they enabled and constrained. His collaborations with the often-underrated Félix Guattari pushed an especially experimental writing style. It was a result of Guattari’s dream of being able to write philosophy like James Joyce wrote fiction.

Yeah, it got weird.

Here’s just a few lists, off the top of my head, to show how diverse Deleuze's corpus is.

He wrote books that explicitly focussed on David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Marcel Proust, two on Benedict Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, Francis Bacon.

In those author-centric and his topic-focussed books, he referred substantively (in addition to the people on the last list) to Georg Hegel, René Descartes, the Marquis de Sade, Jakob von Uexküll, Lucretius, Gabriel Tarde, Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Duns Scotus, Georges Cuvier, Karl Marx.

His books also touched on scientific disciplines outside philosophy, like evolutionary biology (and its history), physics, differential mathematics, astronomy, war, sex, art, literature, embryology, sociology, music, psychology, anthropology, geology, ecology, psychoanalysis, and architecture.

But underlying all this complexity are simple ideas. All his works explore the implications, in all these different authors and disciplines, of what it means for change to be inevitable, the world to be process, and dynamism essential to life.

The LA Times ran a series of essays about Deleuze for the anniversary of his death. I may talk about them on the blog.

Truth Comes in Degrees, Research Time, 28/02/2014

It’s very common in philosophical writing to discuss the nature of an epoch, which is usually framed in terms of what kinds of thoughts were possible. Heidegger continually refers to the modern era as incapable of understanding existence as anything but a resource. Hegel, in his writings on history, described Indians and Africans as having no history because they had no institutions or style of discourse like the Western history book. 

Yesterday’s post ended with Bruno Latour caught in the same situation. He wrote in 1991 that Modernity was dead, a framework of understanding the world whose premises had been shattered. Then in 1992, a book drops from another leading French intellectual with nerdly glasses and wavy black hair defending humanist Modernity in its purest form, and denouncing all critics as anti-democratic fascists, communists, and religious fundamentalists. This situation shows how plural humanity really is. We’re so accustomed, especially in philosophy, to demarcating what was conceptually possible for a culture according to the chronology of its great philosophical works. But the presence of these works doesn’t simply cause a blanket social change even within the discipline of philosophy, let alone the wider culture.

Likewise, the entire fourth chapter of We Have Never Been Modern is all about dealing with accusations of relativism that would fly against Latour’s central thesis that social and political factors always play a role in the construction of scientific institutions, investigations, and discoveries. Despite the presence of books like Latour’s, and others from sectors of philosophy of science like Science and Technology Studies or the affiliated and slightly diverging acronyms, I haven’t seen an introductory philosophy class where introducing ideas like Latour’s don’t result in accusations of relativism from the audience.

In other words, Latour can write all he wants about how sensible it is for us to drop our cultural presumptions that contingency results in pure relativism, and that involvement in human processes for its generation results in pure relativism. I can too, because I haven’t believed in this facile separation of necessary, certain knowledge from contingent, relative opinion in nearly a decade. I can be criticized for making the separation in such blunt terms. But my point is that most people still believe this way.

A frequent reason given for why atheists are mistrusted in wider society (aside from the shrill anger of Dawkins and Hitchens, and Sam Harris’ denunciations of Muslims in Britain that border on outright racism), is that they’re held to be moral relativists. Many people still genuinely believe that you can’t be a good person without having a religion: without having a set of moral rules in whose correctness you believe absolutely, and without believing that a god will punish you for your sins. The discussion of scientific enterprises in these contingent terms often results in the same dichotomy. If you don’t believe in the certainty of scientific knowledge, then you permit the validity of beliefs we now know to be hogwash: racialized eugenics, phrenology, phlogistonic chemistry, Galenic medicine. If there is no God, everything is permitted. If there is no Science, everything is true.

However many times we defend ourselves, I think atheists
like me will always face pressure from people who believe
that you need to believe in a God delivering you
absolute truths to understand moral right and wrong.

The problem with these statements is that people’s moral systems converge, but differ, and if you consider the history of science, there is no straight progress of enlightenment over time. Good projects may flounder, worse ideas may come to prominence: enlightenment is no more inevitable than decay. Latour offers a much more sensible and politically productive way of dealing with this impasse. After all, decay is no more inevitable than enlightenment.

One conservative (and frequently still popular) idea about science is that what we call science is wholly right and true, and what we call pseudo-science, or what gets relegated to the dustbin of science’s history, is wholly wrong. All my intellectual colleagues will describe how crude and over-simplified this idea is. They all hear it from their first-year students — it’s still widely believed. It’s the kind of faith in science that New Atheists have been peddling for decades.

It’s far more accurate, when talking about the history of science, to treat some models of thought as being more true or more false than others. In other words, with complex systems of numbers, truth comes in degrees. Here’s an example. If you think about the history of evolution, the standard hardline evolutionist line is that Charles Darwin was right and more creationist perspectives wrong. But now contrast Darwin with other evolutionists. Denis Diderot postulated an evolutionary account of how life arose (according to some definitions, so did Aristotle). But because they had no empirical research backing up their claims, Darwin was more right than they were. But you can’t throw Diderot on the trash-heap of history, because at least he got it basically correct that life developed through evolutionary processes.

For example, Led Zeppelin's early
records synthesized musical influences
that had never come together before,
but their modern albums sound retro
because— Sorry, wrong Robert.

Now contrast Darwin with empirically-minded theorists of evolution who postulated methods other than natural selection, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His vision of the inheritance of acquired traits turned out to be untrue, but he no creationist, and certainly not of the idiotic Biblical literalist stripe with the highest influence today, which even frustrate theologians. But Darwin also wasn’t right either.

Darwin never had a solid idea about the mechanism of carrying the inherited traits. Gregor Mendel’s experiments that systematized how inheritance worked were popularized only after Darwin’s death. The discovery of DNA as the cellular carrier of traits made Darwin’s theory obsolete. Nonetheless, we don’t denounce Darwin as wrong. He was just less right than evolutionary theory that was able to account for inheritance through DNA. And the first theorists of DNA were less right than most evolutionary biologists today. DNA was first conceived as carrying traits simply: that there would be ‘a gene’ ‘for’ big ears, eye colour, or proclivity to heart disease. We have since discovered that our genetic code operates in a complex relationship with protein folding in developmental processes that unfold in terms of contingencies and tendencies. Nonetheless, Watson and Crick’s generation of biologists isn’t wrong; they just held hypotheses that never worked out, because the world turned out to be more complicated.

When it comes to science, the law of the excluded middle doesn’t hold. This is true for morality, history, and all of existence. Either/or is so outdated. I like to keep my logic fuzzy.

The Quest for Certainty Still Exists (Not a Post about the Dewey Book), Jamming, 02/08/2013

As I was looking back over yesterday’s post speculating on the possible causes of the controversies surrounding evolutionary biology’s public reception, a curious and dangerous idea occurred to me. Curious because it’s potentially very interesting. Dangerous because, like most vague hints and shiny instincts, it might not make any sense at first brush. But as it develops into a more detailed approach, this idea might become central to some of my projects. 

There seems to be a disconnect between how scientists and most philosophers of science understand what knowledge is, and how everyday people and epistemic philosophers understand what knowledge is. And it all revolves around the quest for certainty.* The first group tends to view knowledge as better when it is complex, subject to doubt, and open to revision. That revision can be a matter of small refinements, or it can be absolutely radical. This is a perspective on knowledge that had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Science doesn’t progress by preserving and adding to an established tradition. It progresses by continually seeking out new fields of study or new techniques to investigate the world, and letting those new discoveries add to, revise, or occasionally completely reorder established scientific models. 

John Dewey, author of The Quest for Certainty, at the time
of his most badass moustache.

* That is, the general search for certain knowledge, not the book by John Dewey called The Quest for Certainty. However, Dewey’s book might turn out to be rather important in working through this idea. I’ve gone through a reasonable chunk of Dewey’s massive output as part of my work — I have an article in volume 33 of the journal Environmental Ethics on how Dewey’s ontological concepts have innovative applications to environmental ethics. But I’ve mostly concentrated on his ontological works (esp. Experience and Nature) and his metaphilosophy (esp. Reconstruction in Philosophy) in detail, not his epistemological work. The Quest for Certainty, the book, may turn out to be quite important as I investigate this.

But the general public aren’t taught about science this way unless they go to university, and even at university, they’d have to study philosophy of science where the professor teaches them about Popper, Kuhn, and their intellectual descendants. The most common public insight about knowledge is that it must be certain, not in any circumstance subject to revision unless the world itself changes. So goes the intuitive popular account of what knowledge is: a scientific theory is a dogma like any other, and we either believe it wholesale or drop it all as a falsehood. If a fact doesn’t inspire absolute certainty, it isn’t real knowledge. 

It used to be a standard in epistemological philosophy that a belief was genuinely knowledge if it was true and you could justify why you believed it. Edmund Gettier wrote a short paper in 1963 consisting of a couple of hypothetical examples of instances of justified true beliefs whose truth and justification were arrived entirely coincidentally — so justified true belief isn’t necessarily a marker of genuine knowledge, because the believer may just have gotten lucky. Ever since Gettier’s paper dropped, a perennial cause in epistemology has been trying to find a standard for knowledge that was even more certain, more rock-solid, than justified true belief.

Now, the complete structure of a scientific theory is a far larger and more complicated beast than a single person’s belief. But they’re both ultimately about the nature of knowledge, and they’re both totally incompatible. Epistemologists and the general public consider certainty the bedrock standard of what we should call knowledge, and anything less than certain is not worth believing. Philosophers of science, scientists, and I consider the best knowledge to be flexible, functional, always open to revision, always hunting for new facts, new evidence, new reasons for the very revision that for the general public invalidates an institution as knowledge. 

Ultimately, I think what conception of knowledge you accept depends on what kind of person you are. If you fear a rudderless world, then certainty will be your standard for knowledge. If I can put it in terms of yesterday’s post, such a person is more amenable to swallowing the pat certainties of religious dogma: you accept these certainties, and you need never have a doubt or ask a question again. If you’re strong enough to live in a world of contingencies, uncertainties, where anything could be open to change, then you’ll understand how science and knowledge actually work.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this idea, but I think this weekend, I’ll take some long walks and try to figure it out.