Whither Capital IV: Sabotage or Complicity, Research Time, 04/06/2018

So Cultural Studies – the academic revolutionaries – knew they had to battle for a kinder world on the field of culture. The question now was how you’d do it.

Well, they had a long-standing channel to communicate with the public. They were researchers, writers, regularly published in respected journals. So they would research, write, and reveal the hidden vectors of oppression and routes to liberation in the most unexpected places.

You probably know where I’m going with this. I know where I’m going with this. And I don’t want to condemn the discipline, I really, sincerely don’t. But the field’s focus on the analysis of pop cultural properties isn’t exactly the most effective form of cultural change.

Now, those analyses really do have the power to change minds. They can help illuminate how subtle moral conditioning and ideas worm themselves into what we typically think are innocuous entertainments. But there are two problems with that.

Is it responsible to rest with merely describing what is wrong with your
society, when you depend on those fundamental wrongnesses to make
your diagnoses? I don't know, actually.

First and most obviously, this can’t be the only technique in the toolbox for social change. Some folks specialize, and that’s great. I work for some other channels of social change right now, and plenty of channels are active. My first critique is an institutional one if nothing else.

You know what I mean. They may have trained themselves writing for paywalled research journals. But the most effective pop cultural criticism projects since the start of the discipline have been in streaming tv and blogging.

The blogging project was explicitly defined as a magical ritual, on top of that. It would have been seriously questionable to a tenure committee.

But Slavoj Zizek’s documentaries about how to understand cinema psychologically and philosophically reached huge numbers of people. Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum has become a leading edge in popular understanding of Doctor Who, and a gathering point for the global sci-fi trans and queer communities.

Cultural Studies as an academic discipline writes powerful critiques of exploitive institutions, institutions that have state, economic, and social components. These are complex institutions like global trade networks, the mining industry, state military colonialism to wipe out indigenous people and cultures. Institutions like universities that perpetuate the financial exploitation of students, and the class stratification of societies.

Now you see the problem, don’t you. Here’s an academic discipline based around developing multi-faceted critiques of exploitive institutions. But its home is in an increasingly exploitive institution – the post-secondary education system.

Culturally, universities foster cultural conservatism by elevating wealthy donors and families in their support networks. Universities force levels of indebtedness on more and more people to the point of macro-economic catastrophe.

Universities protect networks and organizations like nationwide fraternity houses, which foster gendered violence. Researchers who are elevated to high-status positions in universities rapidly become corrupt and hypocritical – imagine a global justice and anti-colonialism advocate who rewards young female scholars from South America with career opportunities in exchange for sex.

Wait, you don’t have to imagine that last one. It’s Thomas Pogge of Yale University.

Cultural Studies was complicit in the institutions it was critiquing, because it could only function in the network of those institutions. Now, this discipline grew from the generation of researchers who grew up in the first period of mass-level university education. For the first time, working class and minority researchers were joining the university sector.

But it was still a sector built for the wealthy, male, and mainstream culture. No matter how much you may criticize the elites, if you have to play by elite rules to do it, your critique will always be incomplete.

And We Could Move the Earth, Research Time, 03/11/2017

Archimedes is a part of the Western cultural imaginary about the nature of science, knowledge, and scientific power. Get me a lever long and strong enough, find me the right place to stand, and I can move the world. That’s the image.

Now, I’m about to take over as Digital Editor of Social Epistemology. So it’s not like I actually believe this is the way science and scientific knowledge actually works.

Human knowledge, technology, and power have definitely moved the world. It’s moved the world into a distinct geological epoch – the Holocene era, blip in the planet’s history that it is. It’s moved the world into remarkable extinction event as well, as we drown so much of the Earth’s creatures in our toxic waste.

But scientific knowledge doesn’t need to understand the world from some point of perfect objectivity to do its work. The view from nowhere not only doesn’t exist, but it was never necessary in the first place.

I write this so that I can draw out of Hannah Arendt’s writing about this idea something that I can use in my own philosophical work. She talks about an “Archimedean moment” in the history of Western science, from which we realized that view from nowhere.

Yet I think she also understands that this “Archimedes” image doesn’t refer to scientific practice itself. Scientific practice and technological development is far more complex than the popular image of it all.

That’s where I pick up Arendt’s thread on this image of Archimedes. The popular image of science remains this ludicrous, inaccurate one of the view from nowhere. The point of pure objectivity where our knowledge is pure in its truth.

Even that popular image misunderstands Archimedes’ words,* ignoring their directly practical character. Knowledge is how he moves and changes the world, not simply understanding it in some purely abstract sense.

* I doubt Archimedes himself ever said anything precisely like that. Same with the Eureka! moment. The idea, the image, the cartoon that appears in our popular culture is most important. 

No, what matters is the image of the Archimedean point or moment. The image that fixes our belief in human knowledge as aiming for pure objectivity is part of our popular culture. It isn’t true about the nature of knowledge, but it’s popularly believed to be true. We shouldn’t confuse the two.

Arendt writes about how that popular belief has informed popular attitudes about science and knowledge for centuries. She cites a philosophical explanation of Galileo’s experiments. But she could just as easily be talking about the public relations campaign of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society to keep their research from being swept up in the violence of England’s politics at the time.

I also want to keep an eye on Arendt’s explanation for what Galileo’s experiments actually did, her philosophical account of it. Copernicus’ sun-centric model of Earth’s system was conceived and used simply as a mathematical tool. It was a way to simplify planetary mathematics.

Only when Galileo made his telescopic observations of the planets did Copernicus’ model turn out to be so inconveniently true. He didn’t prove it true like a demonstration of logic. He discovered facts which established heliocentrism as a fact.

His telescopes were the long and strong levers that, in popular consciousness at least, moved the world. Which seems to be where it really counts.

The Utopia of the Mass Grave, Research Time, 19/10/2017

There’s a common right-wing argument against utopian thinking, which is rooted in the libertarian impulse for small government. The emotional ground of that argument is an appeal to the horrors of totalitarianism.

Stalinist* Russia and Nazi Germany are the real-life outcome of what the modern libertarian (and generally conservative) right-wing considers socialist utopias. Now, for my purpose at the moment, I don’t want to argue over the facts of whether secret police states are the logical, conscious, or unintentional end-points of socialism. I want to talk about the structure of the argument itself.

Rick Sanchez, hero to those who don't know that he's actually
there to be laughed at.

* That is, Russia when it was run by the NKVD in the 1930s-40s.

You can see the structure very clearly in a straightforward reading of Plato’s Republic. Put all the metafictional and metaphilosophical readings of Plato’s work to the side. They don’t matter for the sake of this argument.
• • •
The most straightforward reading of any book is usually the most popular, if only because it’s the easiest to make. Same reason why The Catcher in the Rye inspires so many jerks** – Holden Caulfield’s voice dominates the narrative. Literally, because he’s the first-person narrator of the whole thing.

** And at least one murderer.

The easiest way to read the book is to let the dominant, most charismatic perspective – and the perspective that’s always justifying his actions in his own moral terms – dominate your own thinking with its charisma.

I sympathize with pragmatic libertarians who are careful and complex
in their justified criticisms of state power. But the more dogmatic folks
– and yes, I'm mostly thinking of the Rand disciples – are surprisingly
dim planners of the most obvious failures.

Same reason why so many misogynist, immature jerks love Rick and Morty – you hear Rick justifying all your worst inclinations, but you don’t realize that his words are meant to indict themselves. You have to step back from the text – get metafictional about it – to get the point. But that’s a step beyond just going with the flow.

The same problem happens with The Republic. Going with the flow of the text, without getting meta about it, it’s Plato arguing for the ideal structure of a community and its institutions. Its content is absolutely horrifying – rigid caste system and community-wide family structures. Now think about the book as a model for your own political action.

How do you build a better society? Sit around with your friends and colleagues, figure out a hypothetical structure for society that you think would be perfectly harmonious. Then, when you control your state’s military, police, nationalized corporations, bureaucracy, tax authority, organize the entire society according to that exact plan.

Change the entire country – from law to culture to thought – in a generation.

What a paradise it was.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. You’ve conceived of politics as a craftsman or engineer conceives of a problem to be solved. Conceive of the best possible end state, and move your society toward that state using the quickest and most intense means.***

*** Of course, the quickest means is rarely the quickest possible means.

Thinking of politics that way – as a pre-planned organizational structure to which you want all of society to conform – enables massive state violence. Consider the end, and its perfection justifies all means to achieve it.

That was Pol Pot’s revolution. The plan was the purest communism, stripped even of basic identity, and the action was to impose that structure with brute force of arms.

You don’t keep the means-end calculation out of political thinking just by declaring a few methods – like mass murder, forced starvation – beyond the pale. You’ve just drawn a limit on the same sociopathic concept to mark where you start to feel nauseous.

If you want your audience to understand the actual ethics that you
threaded into your show, you have to make your most charismatic,
interesting character its voice.

The answer is to avoid means-end thinking in politics altogether, because to conceive of a balance between the virtue of goals and the force of methods is inherently unethical. It nudges us to believe in sacrifice or contribution to common goals as a burden – the limit marks what burdens we consider too much to bear.

The calculation itself of what goals justify which methods is totally perverse because it makes you think of your neighbours, friends, and community members as raw material to build a masterminded social machine.

Making resources of those you should respect.
• • •
Now, for this post, I’ve been following an argument Hannah Arendt makes in The Human Condition. Chapter 31, if you want me to be specific. When she's talking about Plato in this way, she isn’t talking about what Plato actually intended, or her genuine account of The Republic’s meaning.

She's talking about how most people received it. Students who read maybe a chapter in an elective survey course where they got a C+. Media provocateurs who take their straightforward or half-cocked reading way too seriously.

Arendt is talking about the popular reception of Plato – an example to give insight and structure to a popular concept that creating a perfect society is the same as creating a building. Make a plan, bend some resources into shape. To draw attention to how perverse this everyday way of thinking is.

To demonstrate the need for change in human thought itself.

Tangents From a Psychologist II: The Dangers of Jumping Disciplines, Research Time, 04/06/2015

Continued from last post . . . Since I made yesterday's post, I discovered that one of my friends who I knew when I was at McMaster now works for Dan Ariely's consultancy firm. She assures me that the hundreds of articles he's authored, co-authored, or otherwise shepherded to paywalled publication over the last couple of decades indeed back up all the conclusions of his books with all the technical know-how I thought would be there. Nonetheless, I'd still like to offer a critical perspective on something else of what I've read in Dishonesty, coming from my own place as a professional-level philosopher.

Here's an experiment that gave me pause when I read about it in Dishonesty. Ariely owns a vending machine that he uses for experimental purposes. He set up his machine so the listed price of each item was 75¢, but it would dispense items for free: You put your money in, made a selection, and it gave you your selection and all your money back.

One observed behaviour was that, when someone’s friend was nearby, they would call them over to have some free candy from the vending machine together. Ariely describes the experiment in a chapter where he talks about work he did to test a hypothesis that people will cheat more when they’re in a social context where many people are being dishonest.

So he interprets the vending machine experiment this way. Page 195: “If our friends cross the ethical line with us, won’t that make our action seem more socially acceptable in our own eyes?” He sees the student as knowing she’s doing something wrong, and the presence of her friend is a way to rationalize the wrong.

I see a different interpretation, though. Ariely doesn’t describe how his vending machine was branded, but most vending machines are owned by large companies, some of the largest in the world. Most vending machines, when broken such that they give their product away for free, are usually repaired within a day or two. The company doesn’t lose much, and they can afford to lose it. They usually budget some losses for times when their vending machines break.

Why wouldn't you want to share with your friend?
Friendship is for sharing.

A vending machine is part of such a large system that the actual harm of taking advantage of a few dollars worth of chocolate bars is no harm at all. Because it’s no harm, there’s nothing immoral about taking advantage of it. You understand this if you understand the economies of scale in which most vending machines exist. 

You call your friend over not because you need a social setting to make your dishonest behaviour seem more acceptable. You call your friend over because you had a lucky moment and found an opportunity for a couple of free Snickers, and you want to share your small largesse with a friend because friends are for sharing.

Ariely doesn’t mention this interpretation in his account of this experiment in Dishonesty, and I suspect that it’s because it’s outside the conceptual framework in which he’s developed his experiment in the first place. He literally wouldn’t have thought about it.

My interpretation has no role for dishonesty. It actually says that, because of the way someone may understand how vending machines are typically managed, they wouldn’t see their behaviour as dishonest because there’s nothing immoral to be dishonest about. Only someone with a very juvenile sense of cheating and stealing – as if I were taking money directly from the CEO’s pocket – would think of this scenario as theft.

Here’s the other reason why I may miss his point. I have expertise at an advanced level, but it’s in philosophy – qualitative and secondary research, with enough know-how for quantitative research that I can design a survey, but I still have to figure out how to work some of the computer programs to interpret quantitative data. I’m not a psychology researcher.

I’m a philosopher. That’s my discipline. It’s the genre of my non-fiction work, the field I trained in for several years, the field in whose academic journals I’ve been published. One of the most basic, widespread, and effective forms of philosophical criticism is to think of an interpretation or an angle that has escaped a writer’s notice. Giving some interpretation of his work that is outside his presumptions. Finding his blind spot.

I found a blind spot in how Ariely interprets his own experiments. Having framed his overall research problem as an exploration of human dishonesty, he isn’t able to interpret an experimental result as having nothing to do with dishonesty. 

Or maybe he’d interpret my interpretation of the vending machine experiment as an extended rationalization (that’s a little meta, as I’m writing about it in an extremely long sentence with a massive bracketed phrase) of my own tendency toward dishonesty in the situation.

We can learn so much from a vending machine. This is
probably my favourite thing to happen to Pete in all of
30 Rock.

Yet I can’t help but think that I’m on to something about Ariely’s research framework. He’s developed all these experiments to explore human dishonesty. So he’s going to interpret all the behaviour as expressions of dishonesty or ways we have to work around dishonesty. Some philosophy-trained writer asking him whether his conception of dishonesty is adequate to how people actually think is only going to complicate matters. 

In the discipline of philosophy, this kind of critique is legitimate. In the discipline of psychology, I’m frankly just not sure. How legitimate my critiques can be will affect the scope of all my non-fiction writing projects because I draw my sources from a lot of different disciplines into a philosophical framework.

So I don’t even know if my third interpretation of the vending machine experiment would even be appropriate. I can’t check my critique against the results because I don’t have the time or money or institutional access to get behind their paywalls. Because Dishonesty is a popular psychology book, I can’t be sure yet how much Ariely is genuinely representing the core of his work to a mass audience, and how much his presentation is influenced by slippery Gladwellism.

I’m just kind of scratching my head.

Tangents From a Psychologist I: Can a Former Academic Go Pop and Stay Sharp? Composing, 03/06/2015

A single article in a psychology journal is usually about a single experiment or set of related experiments, and interpreting those experiments. A book is different, especially one written with a popular audience in mind. Each chapter of Dan Ariely’s Dishonesty covers several related experiments, and the whole book covers years of research history. 

Each chapter presents the accumulated evidence of many different experiments. They all proliferate from his basic inquiry, which the book represents, to discover the motivations behind why people cheat. Now, the criticism that I’m about to make in this blog should be taken as the criticism of a man with a blog, not a professional experimental psychologist.

Every non-fiction writer for the mass market needs to
find ways to deliver their ideas simply without
stripping them of substance or spoon-feeding their
audience. TED Talks don't have the best reputation for
either. Pictured: Dan Ariely giving a 2009 TED Talk.

Because I could be off the base entirely here. I could be missing the point entirely when it comes to my interpretation of psychological studies, as presented in a popularly-aimed book. There are two reasons for that. One has to do with me, and the other has to do with the nature of popular books that synthesize years of disciplinary academic research.

Let’s consider the research first. I haven’t read the articles where Ariely first published his results from this years-long chain of experiments. But those articles are behind academic journal paywalls, probably the most prohibitively expensive in the world. They’re so expensive that only university libraries can afford them, and many libraries can’t any longer. 

This is something that I’ve run into, and discussed before, on the blog. It isn’t just that I’m still a writer who publishes non-fiction. I come from the academic world – teaching in universities was going to be my career until every job opportunity there that opened itself to me beyond a hair’s width over three years was either slammed shut on my fingers or was institutionally corrupt from the start. 

Publishing academic writing (distinct from non-fiction that aims for both critical and professional respect as well as a mass-market audience) requires access beyond those paywalls. It wasn’t just that the paywalls were enormous. It was that the hassle to access papers behind academic paywalls when you don’t personally have a role in university institutions is itself a barrier to being an independent scholar. 

It’s why I decided not to be an independent scholar, and pitch my work as non-fiction instead. However trippy the Utopias project will ultimately be, once it’s finished, I’ll be pitching it as a non-fiction work for the mass market. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity exists in a weird, kind of hybrid place: originally written as an academic book, but with the tone of trippy non-fiction. I don’t know how that will affect its impact, and I’m not sure what my editors at Palgrave will think of it.

Maybe I’ll have to tell them to read this post. 

Writing a work of non-fiction from outside a university setting means that you can’t always rely on research material that stays behind the paywalls. Writing non-fiction for an audience outside the university system means that relying too heavily on research material that’s stuck behind the paywalls might get in the way of connecting with your audience.

As I look for work in my communications career, one thing I’ve had to overcome is that fact that I do sometimes write like a nerd. I can craft a communications plan, an outreach strategy, write public relations products, and build relationships on social media. But when it comes to writing about myself, I’m still a big nerd. And that gets in the way sometimes when you’re looking for work in an industry where not everyone is a big nerd like you.

Writing non-fiction for a wide market, you have to write like a nerd, with conceptual rigour and depth. But you still have to be approachable. It’s a fine line. Too much approachability and a lot of academic work can sometimes be conceptually sloppy. As much as I like a lot of what Ariely writes in this book, and as fascinating as his subject matter is, I do find sometimes that he gets conceptually sloppy. . . . To be continued.

The Unnoticed Power of Pop Philosophy, Composing, 21/05/2015

Over my time in the university system, I’ve heard a lot of casual talk dismissing some books as less serious than others because they were written for a popular audience. It’s of no use saying who in particular, as I’m thinking of a general trend notable because of how frequently the same points recur over seven years of my experience in a particular system and culture, academia.

Pop philosophy and the pop versions of all the other disciplines have their problems. Most of them do revolve around a common academic complaint, and a genuine one: they oversimplify problems, and draw more of a conclusion than we’re really able from the selection of experiments and examples that often occur in the pop psychology of the Gladwell model. 

The owl shriek'd at thy birth,--an evil sign; 

The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; 

Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; 

The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, 

And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.

Yet there are advantages to Gladwellism, even though it’s so easy to write like a terrible Gladwellian. I’d say Gladwell himself writes like a poor Gladwellian more often than not. Reading Dan Ariely’s Dishonesty, I find some moments of very poor Gladwellianism. His brief use of the famous image of Schrödinger’s Cat as a metaphor to explain how people are more tempted to cheat about their performance when no one but them knows what really happened is a special mangle of both ideas. 

But the form of Gladwellism – discussing actually fundamental ideas of human life in a hyper-casual tone – is bigger than any one practitioner. I wonder how it works.

Let’s return to that quote from yesterday. 

“We would be unwilling to ask our neighbours to bring in our mail while we're on vacation, fearing that they would steal our belongings. We would watch our coworkers like hawks. There would be no value in shaking hands as a form of agreement; legal contracts would be necessary for any transaction . . . We might decide not to have kids because when they grew up, they, too, would try to steal everything we have, and living in our homes would give them plenty of opportunities to do so.”

It reads like over-the-top rhetorical language, utterly unsuitable to serious academic work. Its descriptions are cartoonish, and makes no real argument against a basic mathematical foundation to scientific models whose conclusions shape governments’ policies around the world. You don’t unsettle professional economists from the very presumptions of their fields with talk like this.

Yet it speaks to a profound human truth: There is more to human society than the question of “Can I get away with it?”. This is an essence question, a rhetorical formulation that nonetheless gets its readers thinking about fundamental matters of reality.

No respectable economist would ever be taken
seriously as a brilliant scientist again if he were to
start writing journalism.**
** I hope you get the irony in this caption.

Wondering about such questions is not the task of disciplinary economics. These aren’t the kinds of texts that economists are ever asked to write, until they begin to write journalism. That would make them less lofty than when they wrote in stern professional journals that were hidden from popular consumption by paywalls.

Writing in such a crass popular form means their thinking must be on the level of any old amateur. And we can take his words just as flippantly. The work and ideas you win Nobel Prizes for isn’t meant to be consumed by the popular press. Asking such a question would be almost philosophical, and we can’t have a psychologist talk like that.

Good philosophy can be understood by anyone who can follow a word in the context it’s written in, and think about what you just read. Anyone, with any background and of reasonable intelligence, can understand philosophical concepts. They’re the concepts we use to make sense of our world.

Sometimes, there can be good philosophy in popular philosophy.*

* Of course, not all the works of popular philosophy are good philosophy, just as good philosophy doesn’t come from every academic article in the discipline. 

Still Tearing Down the Myth of the Rational, Research Time, 20/05/2015

It happened to me again. Reading a book for fun has actually turned out to be philosophically informative for my next major non-fiction book, the Utopias project. In this case, it was Dan Ariely's book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, which my friend Dreamboat lent me a few weeks ago. 

Also, I find it comforting that a writer of Ariely's stance in the academy has no problem writing books that, while they contain some heady concepts, are written in a tone and style that appeals to an intelligent mass audience. The style of my own Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a little dorkier, but I think I’m heading along a similar trajectory of writing popular market philosophy that retains the tradition’s natural creativity and general trippiness. 

Not quite how the experiments look anymore.

Ariely became a source for the Utopias project because of his enemy in Dishonesty. He’s a psychologist, so he gives the psychologist’s name, the Simple Model of Rational Crime. SMORC. Because psychology loves its acronyms.

As a philosopher, though, acronyms drive me up the damn wall. So I’ll call it the cost-benefit model of reason, reason as the calculator of pure interest, or something similarly evocative. No major figure in Western philosophy has ever ran seriously with this concept. Normally, we’ve each in our own way argued against it or completely ignored it to build a much more interesting conception of human nature. 

But one field of human knowledge unfortunately has taken this simple concept too literally. The most influential models of human activity in economic science has defined the individual subject as deciding each choice through weighing potential costs and benefits of each outcome. More complex models, for the most part, only vary how much knowledge the subject has of his choice’s outcomes. There are no other motives for any choice a subject makes in most economic analyses.

Ariely quite easily points out the central flaw in this conception of human nature: if it were true, there would be no human communities because trust would be impossible. He expresses the idea with the same post-Gladwell rhetoric that all intellectual books with these marketing influences encourage:

“We would be unwilling to ask our neighbours to bring in our mail while we're on vacation, fearing that they would steal our belongings. We would watch our coworkers like hawks. There would be no value in shaking hands as a form of agreement; legal contracts would be necessary for any transaction . . . We might decide not to have kids because when they grew up, they, too, would try to steal everything we have, and living in our homes would give them plenty of opportunities to do so.”

This is the cartoonish pop-philosophy of the insane world Malcolm Gladwell has thrown us into. But it speaks to a fundamental truth about humanity, or rather, something inescapable about how human society can function. Society can’t persist among people who are only self-interested. 

Not intended to suggest anything at all. . . . 

The minimal self of most economics models is simpler than any functioning human in social life. Maybe this is why libertarians, and those politicians influenced by libertarian think tanks, persist in believing that human phenomena can have no social causes. Of course, it isn’t the only reason why, just a hidden presumption that reveals an interesting aspect of their worldview and their actions when in power. 

Ariely has written a pop-psychology book whose conceptual inventiveness touches on an aspect of the critique of libertarianism. This is the political philosophy of pure individualism that I've cast as my central target in Part Three of what will eventually be my Utopias manuscript.

Ariely’s book isn’t about altruism. It’s about the most banal kinds of immorality, and the process through which we rationalize it. But it’s in these commonplace banal moments of, for example, under-reporting your odometer reading to get a lower car insurance rate, where we find the threshold of our altruism. It’s the limit of our altruism at its weakest power. 

The threshold of our altruism reveals the minimal conditions of the harmonious society. Sounds like part of the strategy to understand Utopia.