Category Archives: Humanism
A Talk on the Wind From the East
A Book Chat with Richard Wolin on Wind from the East, on the French Moaists and their original hostility to May 1968, and the merger between the anarchists and Maoists after the first botched 1968. The tensions within Maoism and Post-Maoism seem to be encapsulated in this, to use an ironic work, “problematic.” So the Maoist point of reference is moved away from 1974 afterwards for “cultural revolution,” sort of merges in cultural politics one sees in the Foucault-inspired left in both France and America. One sees a rightward shift after 1968 in France for many of the Maoists who shifted towards the nouvelle philosophie, and while one sees Alain Badiou as a development of the period, there is a highly problematic tendency of the Post-Maoists in France to resemble the Post-Trotstkyists in the US.
I wish Wolin would have gone into more detail about the influence of the Alhusserian strain other than Foucault particularly given the popularity of Ranciere these days, but we can’t always get what we want.
Marginalia on Skeptical Thinking: A Dialogue with Jamie McAfee, part 2
This is the second part of an interview series. I strongly suggest you read the first part prior to this.
Skepoet: So moving you away from epistemology or avoiding it: Do you think the skeptical movement is just naive about both the philosophy and the sociology of science, or is there something more generally problematic going on? I am particularly interested in the assumption of sort of center-left or libertarian liberalism as a default assumption, and also roblematics around gender relations within the movement.
Jamie McAfee: Ha. More or less, yeah.
I’ve been persuaded that epistemology is a bit of a tarpit that isn’t productive to get into. One thing about all of the sociological approaches I’m referring to is that they tend to be really emphatic about rolling their eyes at epistemological debating in favor of evaluating science, to paraphrase the bible, based on the fruit it produces. Collins and Evans and Latour are in very different camps withing sociology, but they both make the emphatic move of tossing epistemology aside. (I mean that they explicitly say “we think epistemology isn’t helpful.) Scientists are good at doing stuff, so lets talk about it as people doing stuff. They can make arguments based on the stuff they did (like making matter behave in particular ways), which is where rhetoric, in the diminished, conservative sense of “arguing,” comes in. You could, I guess, use argumentation theory, which is a lot more like philosophy than the “rhetoric” that I do, to talk modestly about epistemological issues if you wanted. I’d go along with that. Epistemology is always creeping up, and I think we have to be careful when claiming not to imply claims about epistemology, since we might be doing so. I guess the length of my last answer is what “boundary policing” might look like in my subfield. I’d like to keep myself away from epistemology, or to manage it so I can do other things. I don’t really want to make claims about it.
It’s naivete, but hubris as well. Not to get too meta, but the problem in the Skeptic movement is, I think, a lack of respect for the disciplining that takes place in the humanities. When I see Dawkins, Harris, or an internet troll straying into philosophical debate, the word “precocious” comes to mind. I don’t expect public intellectuals, or anybody not writing in a scholarly journal, to perform scholarly literature reviews in their writing, but I do expect them to approach conversations with either some familiarity with what people who have expertise in a topic have said or with modesty. I’m not saying you have to be a professional philosopher to talk about philosophy. I’m saying you probably shouldn’t write books about it or start a movement about it. Skeptic folks dive right into debates without doing the work required to become expert. They certainly have some expertise in what they are talking about, since they are generally speaking to broad questions that relate to anyone. Since Collins and Evans are on the table, we can call the experience they have “ubiquitous” experience. But ubiquitous experience doesn’t make you a philosopher.
Modernism is a hegemony, which is, I think, why a naive celebration of reason and science allows people to charge ahead confidently and wrongly. As I discussed a bit in my last answer, science is a very institutional thing that is obviously well articulated to power. I’m not claiming that because people have respect for (or participate in) institutions, their ideas will be predetermined. I am, however, claiming that that kind of critical, in the “capital C” sense that cultural studies people mean it, work is deliberate and requires some real engagement with power and culture (when I say “culture” here I don’t mean something that is apart from materialism). That is work that Skeptics seem unwilling to do.
When you charge into debates demanding that everything behave like “science,” and you are unwilling to do the work to understand how other people think about the world, you are going to end up in some of our default small “c” conservative categories. I’d say that center left or libertarian liberalism are those. I’d say that being suspicious of people who want to interrogate gender is one of those. These are “commonsensical” ways of seeing the world. To make matters somewhat worse, Skeptics embrace and ethos of commonsense (in opposition to superstition, etc.) and they embrace the idea that reason is unproblematic. Political radicals and feminists are in violation of that common sense, and for people who define themselves as primarily “rational,” that stuff is just not to be taken seriously. (Coincidentally, or not, perhaps, a lot of conservative rhetoric is based around some form of common sense. “Conservative prudence” for example. Were American conservatism not so overly inane, I’d guess there’d be more Skeptics over there. Oh, and the religion thing, of course.)
So, for example, when feminists are concerned about privilege or objectification, that’s a step too far for common sense.”Equality” (of. . .something?) is fine, but asking people to question the power that comes with gender is out of bounds. So you end up with Richard Dawkins finding it preposterous that someone might be (mildly, originally) offended by an inappropriate proposition, or to use a more extreme example, you end up with the Amazing Atheist ridiculing rape victims. (Yeah, yeah, conversations about those issues can be problematic on the feminist end too, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a “there” there.) The way Shermer reifies capitalism is, in my mind, the same thing.
One more thought:
Since I’m talking about rhetoric, I’ll throw out the analogy sometiemes called “Burke’s parlor,” after Kenneth Burke. Burke wrote:
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
That’s how scholarship, or any kind of serious intellectual work, happens. The trouble, for me, with the Skeptic movement is an unwilliness to “listen for a while” and “catch the tenor of the argument” when they talk about things that other people are talking about. Their movement is, because it doesn’t have the patience to become serious, remakably shallow and remarkably beholden to a liberal status quo.
trying to say “We’re bracketing that it” and “it’s impossible” at the same time. The later is a philosophically substantive claim; the former is not. However, I am going to charitable read you as saying the former for now.
I, however, really do like your other points here: One) since the demarcation lines of science are under-developed at best and philosophically impossible at worse, it does seem problematic to ignore it. Two) There is a hubristic problem of completely ignoring non-scientific expertise, which given the problematic standing of the demarcation line is science right now can’t work. Three) This leads to all sorts of ideological and psychological heuristics being presumed as a sort of baseline of truth. Ironically, the last bit would be an anti-scientific move itself.
You made an assertion about modernity I find interesting: would you like to go into how you see the Skeptic’s movement as a philosophically modernist project? Also I think there has been, to defend the “Skeptic’s movement” for a moment, some push back on this political assumptions. For example, there were many within the movement who started agreeing with me on Sam Harris with his last book, and there were many who took Rebecca Watson’s side in the Watson/Dawkin dispute. What do you see going on there? Do you think there could be a skeptic’s movement that learned from the sociology of science and dealing with the philosophy of science seriously? Massimo Pigliucci, for example, has definitely taken on the problem of ”scientism” within the skeptic’s community.
I’ll start with some clarification about the epistemology thing, since that is related to the modernism thing. While I insist on being disinterested in epistemology, getting away from it is an important “move” in a lot of the literature from which I’m drawing my ideas about science, so it’s important. That move is, as I think we’ve made clear, important for justifying a sociological/rhetorical approach for discussing what science is. I do mean to bracket it, and I do not to say it’s impossible. I also mean to bracket it deliberately, not so skip it as Harris skips stuff. (Although I generally don’t dwell on it as we’ve done here.)
I would, however, say that trying to work out “epistemology” seems to lead to endless debate and discussions of problems that don’t seem to be useful to think about. Rorty’s prolonged explication of that stuff in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” or Latour’s various efforts to contrast a more modest epistemology (if you want to call it that) with Cartesian problems or Collins’s and Evans’s deference to “expertise,” or various efforts by rhetoricians to reclaim parts of some kind of Aristotelian or Roman worldview are all various ways of trying to get some traction that epistemology doesn’t offer. Some of the “thin” theory that is rhetoric is similar.
The comparison to Sam Harris’s meta ethics (or lack thereof) I can see, but I think there’s a huge difference between trying to carefully (and recursively, by the way) bracket something because it’s not useful and plowing through without acknowledging your assumptions. To borrow a metaphor from actor network theory (since we’re talking about that), you have to blackbox things. You can’t have everything in play all the time. But you should be able to justify the choices you make, and to, when problems arise, go back into those blackboxes and do work there. There’s a parallel between what I’m doing and what Harris does, but the people who’ve persuaded me to make that move are a whole lot more conscientious than he is. I hope I’ve satisfactorily explained why I’m don’t think epistemology “is impossible” but, rather “it’s a useful a point of departure and not a thing to be solved.” It’s down in the weeds, but it does matter since I’m complaining about scientism.
And that point of departure is pretty closely related to this “modernism” business. “Modernism,” of course, is a messy, term that can mean a lot of different things. In the context of talking about science, I mean “Modernism” in, more or less, in Latour’s way, which is filled with odd paradoxes, some of which explain how scientistism ends up being at odds with itself. Latour’s shtick is that Modernism is the division of the cultural from the physical from the discursive, and those divisions are what enables science. He bashes this division for creating unnecessary philosophical problems, and he makes fun of Cartesian dualism a lot. He has a lot of bad things to say about “discourse” as a category, for example, although he has come back around to celebrating “rhetoric” in recent years, which he understands as something other than postmodern “discourse.” He also points out that science, when you trace what it does, is good at bending those Modernist categories and then discursively and through practice purifying them.
Modernism is a hegemony, not a “real” thing. Nobody behaves as if they actually believe in the divisions of Modernity, but they talk as though they do. A departure I make from him (although he says this, it’s not his point) is that people who can ground their arguments in some kind of physicalist language can gather a lot of ethos for themselves, because the modern. (Before the latter stages of the Modern that we call post-modernism, but Latour insists is late modernism. . . .my interest in synthesizing Latour with rhetoric is a pretty serious departure from the “pomostrawman,” and the fact that Latour has been often lumped into the “pomo” side of the “science wars” speaks to the light/heat ratio of the science wars.)
I would argue that the Modernist, in the Latour sense, way of talking is the problem. Modernism has empowered science, but as a way of talking about knowledge, it’s a mess. The Skeptics I’m complaining about talk that way.
You are right that there is pushback. The Skeptic thing isn’t monolithic, and their core goals of arguing with fundamentalism and superstition are fine by me. I’d like to see a skeptic movement that was more feminist, that contained expertise in thinking about philosophical problems, and that was more interested in rhetoric (not the discipline, necessarily, but persuasion). I’m aware that there are participants in the movement who are tying to do that.
The question “do I think there could be a skeptic movement that took philosophy of science seriously” however, is trickier. I’d say “yes, there COULD be, but I think it’s unlikely.” Why do I think that? I think that because it’s hard to imagine a well articulated skeptic “movement” that wasn’t rooted in that problematic commonsense stuff discussed earlier. I obviously (I hope it’s obvious) think that a pro-science, pro-skepticism position does not mean one accepts scientism, etc. However, it’s hard for me to imagine a “movement” based on that kind of a position. What’s it in opposition to? What are it’s boundaries?
Now were kinda talking about politics. Here’s an analogous issue. . . “Christian” movements have been all over the political spectrum over the years, but more recently, “Christian” culture is really right wing Evangelicalism. That narrower, activist group has claimed the word, even though there are more Christians who are not conservative Evangelicals than who are. (I’m thinking about this because there was a flap about it yesterday.) While I’d be happy to see more pushback against that appropriation of the word “Christian,” until there is some other movement that’s articulated out of some exigency and has some clear idea “what it’s not,” I think we’re gonna keep having to remind people that not all Christians are Republicans. Christianity, as a political movement, is defined by oppositions and tensions. Skepticism is the same way. It’s hard for me to imagine a nuanced, non-scientistic Skeptic movement coming out of the U.S. right now. There are plenty of us who are, nominally, skeptics who do not embrace skepticism as a part of our identity of who have any need for a movement. The attitudes that have pushed people to embrace skepticism as a “cause” seem increasingly foreign to me.
Like, even if everybody in the Skeptic decided to embrace Massimo Pigliucci and Rebecca Watson, I’m not sure what it would be that they would do with themselves. It’s hard for me to imagine.Why people who are dissidents from scientism and anti-feminism stick around in the skeptic movement? I dunno. Sometimes people define their ideas through smart dissident positions. That’s valid. Some of those folks are probably really interested in science and like participating in the community of other people who are as well. There might be people who, like me, were attracted to the idea when it was (or seemed, anyway) more narrowly focused on pushing back against the religious right but who have invested more than I did. I’m an apprentice academic. I have plenty of outlets for talking about philosophy. Not everybody has that, and the Skeptic movement is, for all of it’s problems, one of the places in American mass culture where people have those conversations. (Libertarianism, oddly enough, is another.) They’ve created a sort of weird counterculture that looks sorta like academia in some ways. It’s oddly like the religious right, actually, in that way.
One thing that hasn’t been brought up is the overlap between the Skeptic thing and pop culture subculture like sci-fi or gamer communities. In my completely undisciplined observations, there is a lot of overlap, and some of the hostility toward the humanities and problems with gender can be an issue in those communities. I don’t mean to suggest that those are monolithically sexist communities, but there are quite a few blogs by female “geeks” and quite a bit of scholarship that suggests there are problems there. That’s about all I have to say about that, really, but it’s worth bringing up.
Althusser or Foucault, that historical “epochs” have structural practices that are real but not evenly distributed among society. So I wouldn’t reject Latour’s way of thinking outright, but I wouldn’t accept it’s conclusion either.
My point in being critical of you here is not political, but that I think there is still a problem of naturalization of practices that the empirical approach, of which bracketing out questions of philosophy necessitate, do lead to certain conceptual limitations.
That said, I think I we should talk about two key events that can be seen as points of tension in the skeptic movement: the “Sokal Hoax” as the beginning of the hostility towards to the humanities and the Watson/Dawkin’s break as beginning of re-politicization in movement. What do you think about the Sokal hoax?
I might be missing you, but he’s pretty emphatically not making those mistakes. Now, then, you might argue that he’s implicitly making those mistakes regardless of what he claims. If there’s a good explication of that position around, it’d be interesting to read, but Latour claims rather emphatically that he’s not doing those things.
He wants us to talk differently about science and technology by insisting on them as networks, and he thinks that that move is a way out of the Cartesian trap. That’s another way to paraphrase him. The parts that rhetoric people are interested in are things like unpacking the processes of transcription or re-inscription that create data or the way that writing helps to articulate networks together. Also, his blurring of human and non human is something that some folks look at as a way to try to recover materialism in rhetoric.
The problem with historical demarcations is a problem though, as it always is when people talk that way. I’d go along with “structural practices that are real but not evenly distributed among society.”
I’m leaning on Latour here as a way to talk about modernist discourse because it’s the way that I know because that’s most informed by concern for how scientist work. It’s compatible with more narrowly rhetorical ways to do that, but I don’t want to give you impression that Latour is THE guy for us, or for even for a booster like me. He’s pretty good though. This is one part of an ongoing conversation that involves different syntheses of Latour that I’m sharing. Plenty of rhetoric folks dislike Latour. My advisor is sorta one of them, actually. I think over-focusing on him might distort my position, which is a lot more in flux than it seems, even in this response, by making it seem like I’ve put all the eggs in the Latour basket. We are having a conversation that people have withing rhetoric.
(While I’m thinking about it Pandora’s Hope has some chapters from which you might extrapolate some implicit argument about Latour’s epistemology. He works overtime to be a realist, if one who’s modest about knowledge but who glosses over many of the problems that philosophers might worry about. The Sam Harris analogy might fit at some moments there.)
I agree. Affordances and constraints are intertwined. I think Latour is useful, but when I slip into Latour mode I sacrificed the ability to make other kinds of arguments. Although I have taken issue with the specifics of what you say Latour sacrifices, I suspect you’re kinda in the ballpark. I wouldn’t know quite how to articulate Latour’s problems without re-reading it with that in mind, but yeah. When I defend him, I don’t mean to say that you aren’t getting at something important. I just don’t think you’ve put it together in a way I agree with.
“Naturalization” is actually my biggest concern with Latour. Donna Harraway is, in my view, Latour on radical and feminist steroids (and they have been in contact with each other). She’s really dense and difficult to haul around though. When I’m doing academic writing, I always try to stick here in there. I’d like to move toward here as I keep doing this stuff.
I’d be quick to note that Latour is not a philosopher by training, and I’d be happy to concede that he’s probably not put the Enlightenment to bed. Let’s leave the poor guy alone. He’s had a long day.
As for “What do I think about the Sokal hoax?” I think it makes a lot of people look very bad.
My understanding of the Sokal hoax is that it has been, in part, misrepresented. I might be incorrect, but my understanding is that the Sokal piece was not blind reviewed in the usual way, but published, in part, out of excitement that an actual scientist was trying to participate. Given the nature of the performative writing that was going around at the time, I have no idea the degree to which Sokal actually “fooled” people and the degree to which people regarded his piece as whimsey. I am certain that he put in a lot of jokes that Social Text readers didn’t understand. So I don’t quite “buy” the conventional account of the story. It’s cheap and kinda dumb.
Having said that, you couldn’t pay me to read an issue of Social Text from that period. I tend to be something of a defender of the Social Text side as they were doing experimental, avant guard stuff. It was also trendy and not particularly robust of good. I think Sokal killed some of the faddish postmodernism of the time, so it wasn’t all bad.
The follow up stuff Sokal wrote (and Dawkins talked up) was silly. I actually kinda sympathize with some of the points he was trying to make, both politically and about philosophy, but sheesh. The lessons that people took from the whole fiasco are wrong though. The legacy of the Sokal Hoax is to embolden people who want to embrace scientism.
This, by the way, popped up on facebook while I was typing this out, and it serves as a convenient artifact. Ug. I am holding fire on about Dawkins and Watson.
I wanted to go into one of the first assumptions of Sokal and Bricmont text: It literally asserted that all philosophy of science was silly including Popper and Kuhn, not just the sociological and po-mo critiques of the science wars. I found this fascinating because it was defending the idea that science is just rigorous common sense. What do you think that assertion?
It is a very interesting problem. We keep trying to get out of epistemology and keep getting sucked back in. I think that trying to get out is a good move, but I’ll acknowledge that those of us who think that was are going to keep having to perform variations of that move that over and over. Pretty much every philosopher I’ve mentioned has made versions of that move multiple times. I do, actually, appreciate being made to wrestle with it a bit. Its something that’s easy, in my field, to gloss over. That phenomenon, repeating the move of “departing” from some problem (incommensurability was a popular one for a while), is common in rhetoric, so I’m comfortable with it. I dunno how it looks to other people. Seems like something anybody with a toe in philosophy will spend time doing.
I think I agree with the assertion that science can be understood as rigorous common sense. The techne/episteme thing from Rorty I was talking about somewhere earlier is a way to say that. I think most of the people I’m drawing influence from would agree. One of the really fascinating things about the science wars (once I get past being annoyed, and once I manage to forget how they helped to empower scientism) is that there was a lot of people talking past each other. Once you take the Lacan brigade off the table (some of the complaints about them were substantive differences, and the science people had a point there), I think everybody who was arguing with each other agrees that science is rigorous common sense.
I’ve never encountered, by the way, anything with a whiff of Lacan in rhetorical science studies. We have spent a lot of time theorizing the word “practical,” so that stuff is a little far out for us to even read. I’ve seen Lacan elsewhere in rhetoric, of course, but never in science stuff. One of our saving graces, when it comes to that stuff, if that we came to science studies, in part, through technical communication. We had an inside/outside relationship to science and technology that Social Text did not. Digression over.
BUT. . . there’s the trick. . . both “rigor” and “common sense” deserve very serious interrogation.
When Latour spends months following scientists around and watches them transfer data from one place to another, isn’t that an interrogation of what counts as “rigor”? Can’t “rigor” be interrogated? When Feyeraband or Kuhn did there early work discussing communsurability, isn’t that also a discussion of rigor? I once sat through a presentation/workshop by a college dean trying to describe what “rigor” looked like in teaching. (It was a shitty presentation, as most presentations of that nature are, but it was a good topic.) I’ll go along with rigor. It seems to be a useful place to start if you want to defend science studies.
And I’ve already pointed out, and you’ve pushed me to more carefully explain, that “common sense” is an extremely loaded phrase. My dissertation research, which is why Laclau and Mouffe keep coming up, is all about “common sense” in therapeutic rhetoric that is used in politics (James Dobson). “It’s common sense” says to me that “it” needs to be unpacked and that we need to trace what “it” is, does, and where it comes from. Calling something “common sense” is putting a post it note saying “study me.” (Let’s be careful though, and say that “study me” does not mean “debunk me.” “Redescribe me” might be better)
I think, to offer some benefit of the doubt to Sokal and Bricmont, that that assertion might have been a response to some of the bolder claims of avant guardians who were trying to stake territory. Even the more modest science studies people in rhetoric were doing a lot of sloppy colonizing. That’s what early work can look like sometimes. So there’s an opening for some benefit of the doubt for them.
One counter argument I’d make against the claim that philosophy of science is silly is to point out that before Kuhn and Feyeraband, we understood science through a highly edited, retrospective point of view. “Oxygen was discovered in such and such, and that was some more science, and then somebody did and experiment using cowpox, and then. . . .” The process of the community that is science was erased. Kuhn’s breakthrough was to imperfectly introduce that process to the discussion.
One last thought. . . . I have a former professor who does rhetoric stuff with science who is very skeptical of postmodernism, science studies, Marxian theory, etc. His argument with that stuff was that it was just too mundane, and the thought the “action” was in taking more traditionally about persuasion and public policy. I disagree with him about the value of that kind of interrogation, but his point is well taken. Meaningful science studies does more than say “THAT IS LANGUAGE” or “THAT IS HEGEMONIC.” Those are really obvious things to say, and even Sokal agrees. I think, though, that using those claims as a starting point can be useful. William Keith argues that “redescription” is a key step in scholarly work. I think that it’s a STEP, but to make that step and start spouting radical claims is silly. That premise does not mean that humanities studies of science isn’t potentially valuable.
Abstraction, Academia, and Analogy: The politics of abstraction and the abstraction of politics
On theory, theories exist. In practice, they do not. — Bruno Latour
I have just come back from the market after walking my fiancee to her teaching job: my students are doing independent work for the mid-term, so I have only had to be available by consultation, which I have been by phone, e-mail, and skype. There is something to being an academic and a teacher, even one is not phoning things in, that makes for time to reflect, plan, critique, and study. In other words, to propose knowledge for students as oppose to merely replicating prior knowledge. Or, at least, that is the hope. There are moments in my more cynical periods where this seems far from clear to me: particularly given the staggering number of papers and projects that either don’t go anywhere or don’t do anything.
Anyway, being in Academia, particularly in the social science and humanities region thereof, I often linger in philosophical abstractions, and there is a good reason for this, as I am trying to deal with conceptual frameworks for handling and speaking about highly, highly complex issues, but I find myself more and more finding a certain level of philosophical abstraction completely not only alienating, but itself obfuscating issues. I have been critical of the way math is used in economics in a way that often hides important qualitative information, such as behavioral cues, which the Austrian economists were right to critique (there are to this is a set of apriori rationalistic arguments, however, is worse than the disease). I also critical of methodologies being given as an answer without specifics or context.
In a sense, this seems to serve two functions: to avoid symbolic violence and to distance oneself for failures of theory in action. I feel that when I read hyper-abstract theories of meta-history and teleology, which one sees in most Marxist writings and, frankly, most Anarchist writings. Why? In Marx and even in Lenin, one sees all sorts of specifics being dealt with in addition to a Hegelian dialectic. After Adorno (in one tradition) and Althusser (in an opposed one), the critique you get is either not theoretical at all in “actually existing socialist” societies or it is highly abstract dialectics or structuralists analysis in which the analysis seems to be subject of politics. There the lack of abstraction and the hyper-abstraction seem like moves of avoidance.
I am speaking know of Marxism and anarchism because that is what I write about here. I also despite appeals to simplicity and absolute concreteness as somehow proof of deep thought: such clarity can be profoundly muddling and obfucatory, but when abstraction is not backed with something concrete other than form immediately, I am beginning to think that this is an abstraction of politics. It is a form of obfuscation and avoidance.
My belief, the “new” atheism, and philosophy: partially examined life podcast.
I have written on Sam Harris before in both his claims about Buddhism, which Meera Nanda has covered better than I, and his claims about objective morality, which Rationally Speaking has covered better than I, his arrogance at avoiding meta-ethics, and his veiled advocacy of pre-emptive violence in The End of Faith, which I have written about at length. On the later, I have been told time and again that Harris doesn’t believe this, but here’s the quote: “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. . . . There is, in fact, no talking to some people. … We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” (Sam Harris, The End of Faith). Notice how Harris keeps plausible deniability by the use of “may,” which is rhetorically cowardly to boot.
But, before I can called a theist or a religious apologist or some such nonsense, my problems with Harris are largely that I see him as dangerous to science and philosophy. Philosophy because, while he has an Undergraduate Degree in it from Stanford, he seems to not truly understand a quite a bit of the history of philosophy nor does he seem to be able to make a logical argument. What most of my “skeptical” friends say about Harris is that he “sounds” reasonable, and always speaks calmly. They also dislike relativists and post-modernists. I often, however, get the distinct feeling they actually have never read the philosophers they are arguing against. It is almost always a straw-man argument. Few of the words are quoted or addressed directly, which is telling. Why I see Harris as dangerous to science is that he doesn’t seem to respect most accepted notions of a demarcation line. In many ways, I think Harris is making category errors and also trying to more morality into a scientific category: this seems like a slapdash move to confuse correlation/causation on Harris’s part and to confuse descriptive/normative. To put this in logical terms: this is two category errors. Or, to put in my cultural Marxist language, he is trying to committing trying in a process of rectification to support an ideological complex.
So I have been following what Partially Examined Life guys have said on Harris (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and I was excited that they finally did their New Atheist Episode.
This episode is excellent, but not so much when they deal with Sam Harris who they can barely find a philosophical argument in to actually reject. Points where the Partially Examined Life Crew point out that there are philosophical errors in Dawkin’s, particularly a equivocation on different forms of the antropic principle and pointing out that the “Tea Pot” argument which has always seem to me be flippant actually also contains an error. Furthermore, it seems like the “principle of sufficient reason” is a problem for physics in either a theistic or an atheistic frame work. It may be that the “principle of sufficient reason” itself is not applicable to things that happen before motion in our universe gave us some sense of time. This seems like a major problem in physics right now, but it has major philosophical implications.
Still, I wish they have discussed Dennett more and maybe a more philosophically inclined New Atheist like Victor Stinger instead of Christopher Hitchens, who is admittedly a charming and robust polemicist. Dennett’s concept of memes has been problematic to me. I am not the only one who finds problematic either on the skeptical/atheist spectrum. Rationally Speaking has been exploring the problems of the concept for a while (here and here). The problems with meme and memeplexes is that even as an analogy they are incredibly imperfect: they have no physical or material implantation mechanism, they seem to treat ideas has have no sociological or material context, and almost seems like a (pseudo-)biological dualism as it treats ideas as almost self-existing.
Anyway, I am going to quote Julian Baggini, one of my favorite professional atheists:
This is most evident when you consider the poverty of the new atheism’s “error theory”, which is needed to explain why, if atheism is indeed the view evidence and reason demands, so many very bright people are still religious. The usual answers given to this are not good enough. They tend to stress psychological blind-spots and wishful thinking. For instance, Dawkins says “the meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
But if very intelligent people are so easily led astray by such things, then shouldn’t the new atheists themselves be more sceptical about the role reason plays in their own belief formation? You cannot, on the one hand, put forward a view that says great intelligence is easily over-ridden by psychological delusions and, on the other, claim that one unique group of people can see clearly what reason demands and free themselves from such grips. Either many religious people are not as irrational as they seem, or atheists are not entitled to assume they are as rational as they seem to themselves.
I also think the new atheism tends to get religion wrong. The focus is always on the out-dated metaphysics of religion, its belief in personal creator gods, miracles, souls and so forth. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the religious do indeed believe in such things. Indeed, I’m on the record as accusing liberal theologians of hiding behind their less literalist interpretations, and pretending that matters of creed don’t really matter at all.
However, there is much more to religion to the metaphysics. To give a non-exhaustive list, religion is also about trying to live sub specie aeternitatis; orienting oneself to the transcendent rather than the immanent; living in a moral community of shared practice or as part of a valuable tradition; cultivating certain attitudes, such as gratitude and humility; and so on. To say, as Sam Harris does, that “religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time” misses all this. The practices of religion may be more important then the narratives, even if people believe those narratives to be true.
The new atheism has also, I think, created an unhelpful climate for atheism to flourish. When people think of atheists now, they think about men who look only to science for answers, are dismissive of religion and over-confident in their own rightness.
Harm, Desirism, and my relationship to the “objectivity” of ethics (or ethics at all)
Recently I have a blog debate with Alsono Fyfe, the Atheist Ethicist, in which I took issue with his framing of the Occupy Wallstreet (or more specifically Anonymous’s threat) in a post he made in which he equated the implied physical harm–read violent suppression and murder–and property violence through Anonymous deletion of the stock assets.
Now, let me say, that morally, I am a pluralist, but a radically different kind of pluralist that a simple relativist or even a liberal pluralist like Isaiah Berlin. I am a believer that ideologies are largely, but not consistently, generated from material conditions and individual biases. Note that here I am actually in both a tradition of thought in sociology that really begins with Marx and Weber while reconciling it with modern individual psychology on cognitive biases and rationalization. In other words, one looks at cultural and political ideologies and sees them manifest in individuals according to preconditions: the differences in manifestation are, largely, based on individual experience, but the supra-structure of the ideology itself is often totally environmental (cultural and class based). Like Fyfe, I actually sort think the entire nature/nurture debate is irrelevant here.
What this has let me to, however, is radically different from most skeptics: I do not treat all ideologies as equal because ideologies have different affects, but I do see that if one takes the values directed from such ideologies and their material conditions. Ethics becomes something akin to virtue ethics. The idea there there are several premises that could bring about human flourishing and these can be “objectively” mimicked, but the values themselves are not and cannot be objective in any real sense of the term. Furthermore, I see most of what passes for “objective” ethics as a way to mask ideologies in a cloud of either neurology, evolutionary psychology, or logic.
This was the first thing that really pushed me away from the “Skeptic’s movement” was an insistence morality was objective as was claimed by Sam Harris. Now, I have critiqued Harris’s claim from the beginning before his recent book on the subject for basically assuming his premises. P.Z. Meyers run down of the debates between Sean Carroll and Sam Harris get to this. This rejection of the naturalistic fallacy and the attempt to bridge is ought is not new. Harris’s book doesn’t prove its premises and doesn’t even attempt to in actuality as many have noted.
But Harris’s neurological bait-and-switch to justify what is essentially a naive scientism and a meta-ethical utilitarianism in a bunch of studies isn’t the only way to try to make a totalizing system of ethic’s objective. (Before you accuse me of being a left post-modernist, let me say what I mean by scientism. I mean expanding the language of science into areas that are NOT clearly on a demarcation of what can be scientific. It’s the use of scientific concepts and language in areas that are not falsifiable, not experimental, and not even truly comparative such as the privileging of one set of values over another). While Fyfe’s desirism is not as popularly parroted on the internet sites by new atheist comment trolls as Sam Harris, Fyfe’s theory is far more sophisticated philosophically and more honest. Still it’s goal is to end a line between normative ethics and descriptive ethics.
So when I rejected to Fyfe’s framing of the issue with “To equate property violence to physical violence is laughable, Alonso. The implicit threats of the tea party were against persons, not property. The actions are not the same. Well, it may be morally questionable to commit acts of property violence–although this is debatable even under desirism in political debates. Framing the question in terms of equivocalness is misleading.”
I got a whole post on my supposed error.
Now, I don’t thing Fyfe’s position hold EVEN IF I accepted desirism per my original critique. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first you need to know what Desirism, or Desire Utilitarianism is. In its most basic form, Fyfe states that Desirism is ”the idea that morality involves using praise and condemnation to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and to inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.” This is premised to end the naturalistic fallacy because the naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy and to give one a way to bridge the is/ought gap. (Note: But the man-masked fallacy that supposedly refutes the naturalistic fallacy and the naturalistic fallacy are informal fallacies. They have nothing to do with the structure of an argument and do not invalidate an argument automatically. They are merely heuristic guides to thinking).
Before we go one while desire utilitarianism is not ethical egoism, part of the reason I reject it is that it seems solely concerned with atomized individuals and their interaction. It does not take into account groups as whole, but only as an aggregate. (You might say that this sounds like four-cent word commie talk, Skepoet. Speak English). It also assumes that desires are both know and knowable because they would have to be for the theory to be objective.
But let’s assume desirism premises for a minute. To my original comment, which admittedly was hastily worded, Fyfe gave me this dilemma:
Let’s say I give you a choice. Your options are, (1) I make a small, clean cut on the side if your hand, or (2) destroy your home and everything in it.
Or (1) I yank out three of your hairs, or (2) I take the whole of your savings.
Which do you choose?
Notice that Fyfe admits the problem of scale, which even if I assumed desirism premises, would have made his original moral equation laughable. Fyfe equated a death threat to property violence and then uses the fact that both are violent–in the sense that they thwart others desires. But the original scale doesn’t hold and Fyfe’s analogy actually admits this: The Tea Parties implied threat was a gun, which in common parlance is death threat. That does not only thwart immediate desires, it thwarts ALL desires forever. Even if I take away every bit of a person’s property, I have not ultimately thwarted their desires. It is laughable to compare the two by framing them as equivocal.
My next objection to Fyfe is that the reason–the descriptive reason, why most people realize that property damage is indirect physical harm, particularly to those who have marginal incomes. Fyfe accuses me of psychological minimization which I actually think he is also guilty of as well but for different reasons. Fyfe was minimizing the implied threat of the Tea Party to make it sound like left and right were equivocal. A tactic I have seen from the “ethical center” for a while now. One can remember John Stewart’s milquetoast’s rally for sanity last year.
But let’s go back to Fyfe’s argument:
This pretense that there is a difference between the two is simply a rationalization that some people use to give themselves permission to cause harms of a particular type. It is a technique called “minimization – the pretense that one us not doing harm to avoid the psychological costs if doing home.
The position does not have any legitimacy. Yet, some people find the belief in certain fictions to be useful or comfortable.
This is interesting since I think Fyfe’s use of an extreme example to draw them as equal sets of violence was itself a belief in a certain fiction. I have to accept that Fyfe’s premise for it hold: if I start looking at the moral of this based even on just damage done to the individual: direct physical damage does more lasting harm than just the thwarting of desires. I have crippled a person in ways that not only thwarts their desires but shortens their lives. Desirism can’t address that. Fyfe wouldn’t claim it good. But saying that my moral frame is illegitimate and a form of minimization is either circular, in that it assumes I accept Fyfe’s initial premise or its special pleading, in the since that Fyfe has exempted the need for acceptance for his framework but requires it of mine.
While I do actually respect Fyfe, this is my issue with most liberal frameworks for “objective” or “naturalistic” ethics, they almost always are circular and hollow out their positions to maintain (I am using liberal, by the way, in more than just a political sense, but in a sense of in the liberal tradition of philosophy of the Enlightenment).
So to recap: Why do I think Fyfe’s logic circular, like most naturalistic meta-ethics, one has to agree with Fyfe’s premises–one that desires are the roots of all human ethics because they are the roots of all human action and, two, one must accept primacy of the individual for it whole. These postulates are not objective in the normal sense: these principles are not obvious to all in all societies even secular ones and two confuse normative and descriptive distinctions. Or, another way of putting it, it sneaks it both its value premise and its ontology as given and then says that its framework proves itself through application. Since it is objective if one concedes desire is the focus of ethics, and if through consistent application of this premise I have proven it’s objectivity. But perhaps I missed something as Desire Utilitarianism doesn’t use language in the ordinary sense as it is a technical argument from Utilitarian origins.
Let’s look at some of Fyfe’s distinctions in Desire Utilitarianism: ”A desire is an attitude that a certain proposition (e.g. “I am having sex with Sam”) is to be made or kept true.” Fyfe there rules out desires that can’t be made true and the holder of them accepts that. This technical use of the term is interesting. Fyfe MUST do this so his binary logic holds: As he states, “beliefs can be either true or false. A desires can be either thwarted or fulfilled.” Now Fyfe says that knowledge of the desires don’t have to be known–in the sense that it is thwarted or not regardless of knowledge of the holder–but it would have to conscious for a attitudinal part of Fyfe’s definition to hold.
Notice, however, that we are moving further and further away from the every sense of the term desire and the way it is used in most of the scientific fields. In fact, this doesn’t even sound like a theory of ethics in the standard sense.
Desirism has nothing to say to a moral agent at the moment of decision. Any theory that claims that it DOES have something truthful to say to an agent at the moment of decision can be thrown out because what it has to say is false. -Alonzo Fyfe, Short List Theories of Morality, September 3, 2010
So this doesn’t have anything to say about moral agency at the moment of decision. Odd? That doesn’t even seem like what is used meant by ethics in the everyday use. So desirism has a definition of the generic good, which goes like this:
Desire utilitarianism holds that an object, event, or state of affairs is ‘good’ to the degree that ‘reasons for action exist for bringing about that object, event, or state of affairs’. Similarly, an object, event, or state of affairs is ‘bad’ to the degree that ‘reasons for action exist for avoiding or ending that object, event, or state.’
So distinction of good and bad are predicated on their “reasons existing”–now from a formal linguistic analysis, this too is circular. It’s similar to the way Neo-classical economicists define rationality to mean an actor with always act in accordance with his/her desires, desires being defined as what causes one to act. As rubric it doesn’t really lend judgment.
Also, as others have pointed out, wouldn’t use expect a meta-ethical theory that is objective to avoid having to make judgments to justify it since the meta-ethical theory goal is to give a guideline to make judgments in the first place?
So remember, I am an ethical pluralist: this means that I reject the idea of a unified meta-ethics predicated on unified notion of what good is because I think all singular notions are circular. Furthermore, I wonder if ethics is even useful as a category as it is something a bit apart from morality as we use it. After reading Badiou’s Ethics, I developed a philosophical hostility towards the concept. As Sam Gillespie’s review and critique of Badiou’s Ethics points out:
Badiou' s strike against ethics is two-fold. On the one hand, he argues that ethics simply presumes a vague foundation on which judgements concerning singular situations are to be made. Since it always operates at an indeterminate distance from the situation, ethics can only ever be limiting or restrictive.
Or in even simpler terms: Because ethical discourse only deals with individuals in singular situations, ethical decision making always favors the status quo. For me, Desirism does this even more so since it does not take into account, in fact cannot take into account the legitimacy of any desires other than the way the individual desire interacts or thwarts other desires.
Now this may sound like I am paint Fyfe with a brush like he is an arch-conservative against all change: He’s not. He more or less supports the “moral legitimacy” of Occupy Everything movement. But his framing of desires means that any desire to keep things the same must be seen as legitimate unless weighted against other people’s desires. This effectively makes any radical critique of the legitimacy of those desires irrelevant. Badiou looks right in this case, and so far most other ones too.
Note: While I write this Occupy Movements have been facing police violence in several cities, the severest of which appears to be in Boston and other protest movements in the Arab World are spreading. There has been little violence on the part of the protesters so far, but arrests have been mounting. While this is an abstract blog battle about morality in some severely academic contexts, I have not forgotten that very real actions are going on in a very real world, that I hope, will have very real consequences beyond merely shifting electoral politics.
Thanks to Ed Brayton for this one
So in news of the weird: Feds can seize Dinosaur Adventure Land:
A ruling this week says the nine properties that make up Dinosaur Adventure Land, and two bank accounts associated with the park will be used to satisfy $430,400 in restitution owed to the federal government.
Kent Hovind, who founded the park and his ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, is serving 10 years in federal prison as a result of a tax-fraud conviction for failing to pay more than $470,000 in employee taxes in a long-running dispute with the Internal Revenue Service.
Kent Hovind was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.
The East Peoria, Ill. native sparred with the IRS for 17 years before his conviction. He claimed no income or property since he was employed by God and said that his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes.
Hovind is incarcerated at the Edgefield Federal Correction Institution in South Carolina.
So evolution denier’s “Dinosaur” theme part will be up for public auction, more than likely.
An Observation
If, on walking past the “New Age” section of the local chain book store to get to the philosophy section, I see another “Raven [insert last name or made-up name here]” I think I may errupt into massive fits of vomitting. If I were a pagan writer, I would pick a more interesting bird name, such Magpie, Bee Hummingbird, Ostrich, Emau, or maybe Cuckoo or Loon.
If you want to understand the development of the modern neo-pagan movements, read Ronald Hutton anyway. I find the neo-pagan movement fascinating and have since I dated a Wiccan in high school and married a former neo-pagan. Yet the are trends of popular expression here that I find completely banal, and primarily of the marketing to the 13-17 crowd.
My relationship to various religions and a suggested reading list for critical scholarship on buddhism
File under useless wastes of mental energy and time, what I would like to call myself: for example, I have been somewhat forlorn that I can’t drop large amounts of Buddhist inspired thinking, yet I can’t really adopt traditional Buddhist teachings because at some level I think that a) the so-called “western” rule of non-contradiction does apply to reality (thus refuting some foundations of the otherwise brilliant Nagarjuna) and b) the history of Buddhism is just as steeped in same weirdness, sectarianism, and dogma as any other religion, and c) there are certain Buddhist principles that explain everything in such as way that they explain nothing at all (karma and shunyata).
Pardon the mixing of metaphors, however, I do derive a large portion of my coping mechanisms and ethics from a Buddhist framework in a secular context with large twists of Jewish and Christian influence in that particularly surreal drink. I have also become highly pragmatist in my approach to the way others deal with truth–”an absolute standard is only necessary when you are dealing with scientific facts or killing humans and, probably, most animals with similar cognition levels to a small child.”
Buddhist ethical relations DO seem to be human-centric in a bad way, but any good ethic should still human centric enough that you aren’t trying to make Utilitarian arguments about equlivancy with any organism while not thinking that humans are the center of the universe.
So after years of studying all sorts of religion and then reading so many sutras my eyes bleed. Trying to learn Pali. Taking novice monk vows in the Theravada tradition for a little while. Studying with an ajahn for two years. Then losing my mind and experimenting with every religion that pasted by while never really believing in most “spiritual” things. Taking both a practice approach and an analytic approach–and yes, I have kept prayer vigils and rituals and almost retreat intensity meditation regimes–I formally just don’t care. I am not a Buddhist in that I don’t “believe” as a Buddhist and I don’t keep all or even most the Buddhist practices, but I am cultural tied to Buddhism and I still like meditating and reading sutras and controlling my urges.
I would say I was an “ethnic” Buddhist, but that would be confusing because while I do have a Buddhist background going back into childhood, I am not Asian. My family is ethnically Irish Catholic, Eastern European, and Jewish.
Like Dogen, I don’t think “enlightenment” is something you find or you become. If such a thing exists, it exists in merely knowing your limitations, knowing that attachment to ideas can make those limitations MUCH more painful, and enjoying your life as it is. You can take this far, become fatalistic, be resistent to change or social welfare or innovation. I guard against that and I guard against complete contentment because I think it is akin to death.
But I do think that the process of “Being” is a process, not a state. I don’t think “I” am anything but a narrative of events and feels and reactions of a collection of things that seems to feel that it has consciousness and thus needs to define itself against other things. I do think that non-harm is an ideal and as an ideal, it is impossible to achieve. And given that I don’t know what consciousness and will really are, at least, on an experience level in ways that can be communicated in language–I definitely don’t really know what death means or even what the clearest demarcation of life is.
I still meditate as a means of detangling my mind and centering myself.
This last year has taught me to quit tying myself in knots over things. It only makes me an asshole, so I am giving this question up. I don’t care if people view me as a card-carrying atheist-humanist or as a mystic or as a fool. I care if they respect me enough to listen to the important things I have to say DESPITE those beliefs. I don’t believe in G-d or gods or celestial Buddhas. I doubt that rebirth or reincarnation has any meaning outside of the metaphorical. I think that when your dead–and by that I mean that you do not have anything that can be called consciousness–you’re probably going to stay dead.
I don’t like being called an “atheist” because it defends me by my lack of the belief in something that I don’t even think most people have a coherent enough definition of to reject. I consider myself an ignostic, but people mistake that for agnostic and I get called wishy-washy. The label isn’t important. The values system that it is underneath it is.
Anyway, I have critiqued Buddhism harshly before and I have been an apologist for it. At this point in myself, I don’t feel the urge to do either. I think people tend to take it uncritically or criticize it ahistorically: I don’t think either approaches are wise. Buddhism is a “Western” word–a word largely invented by British colonial scholars about 150 years ago. The Buddha Dharma is much more complex than the watered down Zen, pop Tibetan, or austere Theravada you mostly get here. It’s not historically the evangelical religion that is represented by Sokka Gakkai or Nichiren or the religion of “no religion” as Alan Watts would have you believe.
If you’re going to historically understand what Buddhism is, what is was, and why I am ambivalent about the whole concept. you need to read some real good books on the subject to understand its history.
Here’s my recommended reading, you won’t see the normal pop Buddhists authors on here:
For core of what many may call “Buddhism” that I still basically accept as a ethical guideline and a tool for psychological framing:
Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner
Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor
Money Sex War Karma by David Loy*
The New Social Face of Buddhism by Ken Jones
Ten Zen Questions by Susan Blackmoore
Zen and the Brain by James Austin
*I disagree with Loy on the supposed “failure of secular modernism” but I agree with most his moral arguments.
For an fairly objective history and view of the historical development of Buddhism (and why in most forms IT IS a religion) you need to read the following scholarly work (you will notice that I favor things from academic presses not Buddhist presses like Shambhala or Wisdom):
Buddhist Scriptures by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed by Donald R. Lopez jr
Buddhism in Practice by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
The Story of Buddhism by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
Curators of the Buddha edited by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
Prisoners of Shangrila by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David L. McMahan
The Buddha by John S. Strong
The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations by John S. Strong
Buddhist Religions: A Historical Introduction by John S. Strong
Unmasking Buddhism by Bernard Faure
Chan Insights and Oversights by Bernard Faure
Seeing Through Zen by John R. McRae
Did Dogen Go to China by Steven Heine
Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up by Steven Heine
Also ACTUALLY read the Sutta and Sutras (Thomas Cleary translations are easy to find for the Zen ones and www.accesstoinsight.com provides the Pali cannon in its entirety for free).
When you done read into the above and kept a skeptical outlook, you’ll probably see why I think Buddhism as a whole IS a religion, but it can be secularized and naturalized in ways that many other religions can’t. I suppose if there are Humanistic Jews, then there can be Humanistic and Naturalistic Buddhists.
If you think that’s too complicated, you can think of me as an old-fashioned secular humanist. It doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that if people are going to make decisions on Buddhism or make blanket judgments on Buddhism (which tend to be either totally positive or totally negative), they need to subject Buddhist scripture and Buddhist history to the same scholarship and criticism which they place on Abrahamic religions.
