John G. Messerly's Blog, page 12

Applying John Rawls’ Principles to the Israel-Hamas War

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by Laurence Houlgate
(Emeritus professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University)

Part 1 – Preface

On August 6, 1945, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima instantly killed 80,000 Japanese people.  Tens of thousands more died of radiation exposure. Three days later (August 9) another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000.  Most of those who died in these blasts were non-combatants and most of the non-combatants were children and women.

In 1995, one year before his death, the renowned American philosopher John Rawls wrote an article titled “50 Years After Hiroshima.” (Dissent Magazine). Rawls invited his readers to reflect on the question, “Was the bombing of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki really a great wrong, as many thought then, or is it perhaps justified after all?

College students today are reflecting and debating about a similar question:  “Is the bombing of Gaza City and other parts of the Gaza Strip orchestrated by the Israeli government really a great wrong, as some have recently said, or is it perhaps justified after all?”

For many protesting students, reflection and debate is useless.  They think that they know what is right and what is wrong.  There have been hundreds if not thousands of reports of emotional university students loudly taking sides on the justice of the current Israeli-Hamas conflict, but they do so without giving any explanation at all as to what the words “just war” mean.  They have been barraged with photos and videos of death and destruction.   Emotions of retaliation and revenge take hold and moral judgments are made before the protesting students know anything more about the war than what the photos show on social media.

The Rawls article provides a template for rational reflection.  He answers the Hiroshima question (above) by setting out six moral principles that govern the conduct of war – jus in bello — of democratic peoples. Rawls assumes that the conduct of war by non-democratic dictatorial governments such as those in Japan and Germany were not guided by any principles that would qualify as ‘moral’.  Their end was “the domination and exploitation of subjected peoples, and in Germany’s case, their enslavement if not extermination.”

In what follows, students should apply Rawls’ principles of just war only to the conduct of the Israeli government, not to the conduct of Hamas leaders.  The Hamas government of the people of the Gaza Strip, like the WW2 governments of Japan and Germany is totalitarian. It is not a democracy “of the people, by the people and for the people” (Lincoln). The goal of Hamas’ leaders is the destruction of Israel through Jihad (Holy War).  There are no moral limits to jihadist acts of war so long as the acts achieve this goal.

Before applying Rawls’ principles to the conduct of the Israeli government (Part IV), students should come to agreement about the facts relevant to the ongoing war with Hamas (Part II), and the nature of the principles of a just war (Part III).  Principles without agreed-upon facts and/or facts without agreed-upon principles will leave students unable to come to mutual agreement about how to answer questions about the justice of the Israel-Hamas War.

Part II – Facts about the Israel-Hamas War

A. The war between Israel and Hamas started on October 7, 2023, when “scores of Hamas gunmen swept into Israeli towns and military bases near the border with Gaza, opening fire on people in their homes, on the streets, and at a music festival attackers fatally shot the elderly, women and young children, according to survivors; others were burned after attackers set their homes ablaze.”

B.  Hamas has said the aim of the attack was “to free Palestinian prisoners, stop Israeli aggression on al-Aqsa Mosque, and to break the siege on Gaza.” (Washington Post)  Other supporters of Hamas said that the October 7 attack was a continuation of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) of Israel’s displacement of Palestinian Arabs (Al Jazeera).

C.  The vast majority of those killed in the Oct. 7 assault — around 70 percent — have been identified as civilians, not soldiers, by Israeli authorities. According to Israeli police, health officials have identified at least 846 civilians killed in the fighting.  Israel’s official estimate of the final death toll of the Oct. 7 attacks is about 1,400 people (including civilians, soldiers, police and foreign nationals).

D.  Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks was almost immediate, starting with the bombing of sites in Gaza where they believed Hamas fighters and their leaders might be hiding.  At this writing (27 November), the bombing has killed over 14,000 people in Gaza City and the Gaza Strip.  Of the 14,000 killed, 69 percent, or 10,000 are women and children (Lauren Leatherby, New York Times).

E.  Israel’s foreign minister Eli Cohen said, “We reject outright the UN General Assembly despicable call for a ceasefire. Israel intends to eliminate Hamas just as the world dealt with the Nazis and ISIS (Times of Israel).

Part III – Six Principles

Rawls announces at the beginning of his article that the bombings of Japanese cities were “very great wrongs.” He sets out six principles that guided him to this conclusion. Here is a brief summary of each principle. [Rawls gives a longer more detailed statement of the principles in the 1995 article: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/50-years-after-hiroshima-2/ ]

1.      The aim of a just war waged by a decent democratic society is a just and lasting peace between peoples, especially with its present enemy.

2.      A decent democratic society fights only against nondemocratic societies that caused the war and whose aims threaten the security and free institutions of democratic societies.

3.      A decent democratic society will defend itself only against those who are responsible for organizing and bringing on the war (the principle of responsibility).  Civilians are not responsible and thus will not be attacked.  Except for the upper ranks of the officer class, soldiers are also not responsible for the war because they are conscripted. But “the grounds on which they may be attacked directly are not that they are responsible for the war but that a democratic people cannot defend itself in any other way.”

4.      A decent democratic society must respect the human rights of the members of the other side. Every human (by definition) has these rights, including enemy soldiers and civilians.  “In the case of human rights in war, civilians…can never be attacked directly except in times of extreme crisis.”  An extreme crisis exists only when the democratic society is on the verge of losing the war and will have “enormous and uncalculated moral and political evil” imposed on it by the enemy.

5.      Democratic peoples should foretell during war the kind of peace they aim for and the kind of relations they seek between nations.  This will show the public the nature of their aims and the kind of people they are.

6.      Practical means-end reasoning in judging the appropriateness of an action or policy for achieving the aim of war or for not causing more harm than good should always be framed within and strictly limited by the preceding principles (1-5).  War plans and strategies, and the conduct of battle must lie within their limits, except in times of extreme crisis.

Part IV – Applying Rawls’ Principles of Just War

What follows are six questions for thought and discussion. Each question is about an application of the principles in Part III to the facts set out in Part II.

a. Does Israel aim to achieve a “just and lasting peace” with the Hamas government of Gaza?  (Principle 1).  If not the Hamas government, then with whom does Israel aim to achieve a just and lasting peace?

b. Is the Hamas leadership threatening the security and free institutions of a democratic society? (P 2).

c. Is Israel’s bombing of Gaza consistent with the Principle of Responsibility, that is, is Israel defending itself only against those who are responsible for organizing and bringing on the war in a way that does not harm those who are not responsible for organizing and bringing on the war (P3)?

d. Is Israel respecting the human rights of all the people of Gaza, including enemy soldiers and civilians?  Or is this a war of extreme crisis in which the human right to life can be ignored (P4)?

e. Has Israel announced or foretold the kind of peace they are aiming for and the kind of relations they seek between themselves and the enemy (Hamas) and/or the people in the Gaza Strip? (P5)

f. Is Israel using means-end reasoning in a way that is consistent with P1 – P5, assuming that defending themselves against Hamas is not an extreme crisis?

Part V – Conclusion and a final question

John Rawls wrote, “It is the task of the student of philosophy to look to the permanent conditions and the real interests of a just and good democratic society.” He finds it “hard to understand” why it was thought at the time by many Americans that questioning the morality of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “an insult to the American troops who fought the war.”

Rawls responded that “it can’t be that we think we waged the war without moral error!”  Just and decent civilized societies “depend absolutely on making significant moral and political distinctions in all situations,” including especially the atomic bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the two cities of Japan.

I leave students of philosophy with a final question. What do you think?  Is the Israel-Hamas War being conducted without moral error?  Are there any significant moral and political distinctions on both sides that have not been made in declaring whether this is or is not a just war?  If so, what are these distinctions?

— Laurence Houlgate

 References

Leatherby, Lauren. 25 November 2023. “Israel Gaza Death Toll.” New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html

Live Blog. Times of Israel. “Cohen Slams Despicable UN Resolution Urging Ceasefire.” 27 October 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/fm-eli-cohen-slams-despicable-un-resolution-urging-ceasefire/

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Harvard U.P.

Rawls, John.  Summer 1995.  “50 Years After Hiroshima.” Dissent Magazine https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/50-years-after-hiroshima-2/

Suleiman, Ali Haj. 12 November 2023. “For displaced Palestinians in Syria, Israel war evokes Nakba and solidarity.” Al Jazeera.  https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/12/for-displaced-palestinians-in-syria-israel-war-evokes-nakba-and-solidarity

Washington Post. October 17, 2023. “The Israel-Hamas War Reasons Explained.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/17/israel-hamas-war-reason-explained-gaza/

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The Religion of the Engineers; and Hayek Its True Prophet

[image error]This essay appeared on the blog “Crooked Timber,” November 13, 2023
by Henry Farrell

Marc Andreessen’s recent “tech optimist manifesto” is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words “we believe” appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms.

The core precept of this secular religion is faith in technology. From Andreessen’s opening section: “We believe growth is progress … the only perpetual source of growth is technology … this is why we are not still living in mud huts … this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.”

Andreessen invokes the right wing economist, Friedrich von Hayek, as one of the “patron saints” of this dogma. That might seem like a surprising assertion. Hayek was ferociously critical of what he described as the “religion of the engineers” – the efforts of Saint-Simon’s followers to create a quasi-messianic faith applying engineering insights to society. Their fervid belief in the inevitable benefits of progress purportedly justified the efforts of an elite to remake society along better and more rational lines.

Hayek quotes an early Saint-Simonian journal as describing a program to “develop and expand the principles of a philosophy of human nature based on the recognition that the destiny of our race is to exploit and modify external nature to its greatest advantage.” Compare to Andreessen: “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

The obvious difference is that the earlier religion of the engineers glorified the state, while the new one glorifies markets (that’s why Hayek is one of its patron saints). But the similarities are at least as important. Both the old time religion and the new one invoke grand visions to wave away the mess, disagreements and complexities of the present. They depict those who oppose the actions of a tiny self-elected elite as champions of ignorance and enemies of progress. If we only just let the engineers run things, we could be sure that our descendants will have the universe for their inheritance.

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I’ve been trying to work out my thoughts about the relationship between the old and the new religions of the engineers for years. Hayek plays an interesting and complicated role, as erstwhile CT contributor, Corey Robin has pointed out. His suggestion that rich elites will and should play a crucial role in guiding the progress of an apparently decentralized and pluralistic system helps justify the world-shaping ambitions of founders. So too, does Schumpeter’s theory of the entrepreneur and of the general benefits of monopoly. But my sense of what is going on was really crystallized by Daron Acemoglu’s and Simon Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress.

This book gets Andreessen’s shtick down cold, in a book that was published well before the manifesto (Andreessen is expressing the collective wisdom of those around him as much as his own thoughts). Acemoglu and Johnson describe a standard optimistic mythology, according to which we are “heading relentlessly toward a better world, thanks to unprecedented advances in technology.” Whatever problems we experience are the birth pangs of a better world that is just around the corner. In their description, “[p]eople understand that not everything promised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Steve Jobs will likely come to pass. But, as a world, we have become infused by their techno-optimism. Everyone everywhere should innovate as much as they can, figure out what works, and iron out the rough edges later.”

More specifically, the book explains exactly how claims about the awesome freedoms of the markets are interwoven with practical restrictions on people’s liberties. It emphasizes the importance of Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about the general benefits of surveillance for economy and politics: “before the panopticon was a prison, it was a factory.” These ideas paved the way for factories that turned workers into “mere cogs” and the later notions of Frederick Taylor and others who looked to use new technologies of surveillance to squeeze as much productivity out of workers. The standard response is that everyone benefits from this in the long run, but Acemoglu and Johnson stress that this is hardly a given. How the benefits are distributed depends on politics, and specifically on whether those who are on the receiving end are able to organize and ally with others, to create “countervailing power” that ensures that the benefits of new technologies are evenly distributed, and to avoid technological trajectories that maximize on exploitation rather than general benefits.

These historical lessons have relevance today. I’ve heard it said (correctly or incorrectly) that Andreessen’s tirade was largely motivated by his anger at AI skeptics. Certainly, one of his proposed articles of faith is that “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” Acemoglu and Johnson point out that AI is regularly being used to replace workers or to surveil them. They stress that this is a political decision, rather than an inevitable consequence of technology. We can choose differently, and we ought to.

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Like other religions – like Marxism too for that matter – the religion of the engineers is centered on a myth about the world to come.  A lot of people talk about the influence of science fiction on Silicon Valley, and how people like Peter Thiel and the Paypal Mafia were inspired by Neal Stephenson’s ideas about money. Stephenson is an important part of the story that Silicon Valley tells itself about its present – the Metaverse, Google Earth and so on. But I can’t help wondering if the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks (cited for example by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as core texts) are more important to the stories that Silicon Valley tells itself about the future.

Banks’ future is one where humanity (I simplify here – the Culture’s relationship to actual Earth-humans is complicated, and much happens in our past, Elsewhere in the Galaxy) has figured out how to produce universal abundance. Within very broad reason, the people of the Culture can have whatever they want, traveling the universe in massive starships, constructing vast Orbitals, glanding drugs, having lots of sex, changing gender at a whim (Musk may have changed his mind on that bit) and throwing wild parties, all overseen by more-or-less benign AIs. It’s a very attractive future, where socialism and libertarianism blur into each other.

I can’t say whether Andreessen’s manifesto is directly influenced by Banks’ novels, but its imagined trajectory at the least adjacent, with AI as “our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone” and a future in which:

We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets. We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest dreams. We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars.

In contrast, I am reasonably sure that Banks would have absolutely fucking hated the tech optimist manifesto and the project behind it. His books have plenty to say about people who promise paradise tomorrow to justify purgatory and hell today. None of it is complimentary. His books are all about the complexities and the tragedies of politics.

There isn’t any room for complexity in Andreessen’s vision. The politics are all stripped out. There is only a struggle between the Good who embrace technological progress, and the Enemies of Progress.

The religion of the engineers is the hopium of Silicon Valley elites. It’s less a complex theology than an eschatological soporific, a prosperity gospel for venture capitalists, founders and wannabes. It tells its votaries that profits and progress point in exactly the same direction, and that by doing well they will most certainly do good. It should barely need pointing out that the actual problems and promise of technology lie in the current political struggles that this vision of the future waves away.

The Fall of Homo Sapiens

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from Erasmatazz by Chris Crawford

In this essay, Crawford discusses the implications of technology’s exponential growth paired with the exceedingly slow (if any) progress of society and culture. In his view the implications of this disparity are frightening.

Homo Sapiens changes its environment. Humans clear forests to make farms; they dam rivers to control floods; they cover land with their homes and cities; they dig up the ground to obtain mineral resources. Up until just recently, the species was too sparse and too weak to make substantial changes to their environment. But now the impact of Homo Sapiens on its environment is growing rapidly. They are changing their environment faster and faster.

It is an iron law of evolution that every species must adapt to a changing environment or go extinct. Homo Sapiens has demonstrated a remarkable ability to change its culture to adapt to new environments. Indeed, one of its greatest advantages over other species is that, while other species require perhaps 10,000 generations to genetically adjust to a big change in the environment, Homo Sapiens can adjust to a new environment in just a few generations. Nevertheless, human culture is not instantly adaptable; social mores tend to resist change, limiting the rate of change to a few generations.

Happy changes can take place rapidly: Grandpa and Grandma may reject those newfangled smartphones, but the grandkids have made smartphones an important part of their lives. The immediate existential threat of nuclear weapons has made traditional warfare obsolete, and knowledgeable people quickly adapted, but the human population as a whole is still unable to purge itself of its militaristic fantasies. The abolition of warfare remains several generations in the future, in the most optimistic assessment. In like fashion, the response to environmental pollution was fairly quick when its costs were immediate and obvious.

Unhappy changes, however, take longer. Abortion, for example, became medically reliable perhaps 80 years ago. Society has been unable to adjust to the new medical reality and so the policies controlling the use of this medical technology remain highly controversial.

The greatest failure of the species lies in its inability to cope with subtle long-term changes to the environment. The obvious example of this is the response to anthropogenic climate change. Scientists have made it quite clear that carbon emissions will cause great damage in future decades. Yet 30 years after they first became aware of the problem, Homo Sapiens still resists taking the actions necessary to fend off the impending disaster.

Part of the problem arises from the fact that the complexity of current technologies exceeds the intellectual capacity of most humans. Climate change is an immensely complex subject that few people grasp, yet a lot of people, for reasons of primitive tribalism, oppose taking action to avert or reduce its impact.

Economics is another area that has long surpassed the comprehension of most humans. Almost every economist in the world will tell you that free trade is a desirable ideal, something to be limited only in special situations and only temporarily. Yet a wave of anti-globalisation threatens to increase trade restrictions, to the detriment of all.

Another example is provided by nuclear power, which has long offered humans an excellent source of energy. Yet, the terrible power of nuclear weapons is somehow illogically transferred to nuclear power plants, and the fear of radioactivity only adds to the resistance. There is simply no rational case against developing nuclear power, yet humans remain reluctant to take advantage of this resource.

Homo Sapiens is a species best adapted to operate in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Yet the cultural and technological difference between a modern office worker and a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer is almost impossible to fathom. That office worker’s mind is no different from the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer’s. It is still dominated by tribalism, emphasis on social reasoning over logical reasoning, and emotionalism.

It all boils down to this simple graph:

When the blue line crosses the red line, the extinction of Homo Sapiens begins. With great effort, humans could conceivably push the red line upwards, but this will be opposed by humans who resist change (normally called “conservatives”). Humans really can’t do anything about the blue curve; if one country refuses to advance technology, another one will.

Thus, the extinction of Homo Sapiens is inevitable. However, there is a fine point to add to this. Once the blue line crosses the red line, the inability of Homo Sapiens to adapt to its environment will lead to various disasters that will sharply reduce its population. That, in turn will reverse the upward direction of the blue line. Unfortunately for Homo Sapiens, the same virtuous circle that enables ever-advancing technology becomes a vicious circle when it starts to reverse. Reduce the population, and there will be insufficient specialization to maintain the current technology. As the technological level of civilization declines, it will drag down population, which will reduce specialization even further, which will cause more reductions in population. This process will continue until Homo Sapiens reverts to the condition for which it is optimally adapted: a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The Mechanics of Collapse

How, exactly, will civilization collapse? The obvious endpoint is a nuclear war, and this is certainly a real possibility. For example, it is entirely possible that a confrontation in the South China Sea could trigger a nuclear war. China is dead set on establishing its sovereignty over the entire area. While its claims are illegal, the intensity of Chinese nationalism is so great that it is entirely feasible that they would use nuclear weapons to assert themselves. The catastrophic scenario runs as follows:

The USA decides to prevent further Chinese incursions into the South China Sea, using force if necessary. It sends a carrier group into the region to enforce a blockade against military facilities in the South China Sea. The USA rightly figures that the Chinese cannot defeat an entire carrier group — one of the most powerful military units in existence — using conventional forces. What the USA does not anticipate is that the Chinese would use a ballistic nuclear missile against the carrier group. This would annihilate the carrier group. China asserts that it used the nuclear weapon on its own territory, and therefore was not an act of nuclear war. The USA is now in an impossible position. Either it retaliates against China, expanding the war and risking a catastrophic nuclear exchange, or it backs down and accepts defeat. The American public is just stupid enough to prefer a nuclear exchange over an admission of defeat.

However, this scenario remains unlikely, as I doubt that the US would be stupid enough to militarily challenge China in the South China Sea. The only factor that makes this even plausible is the presidency of Mr. Trump.

It is more likely that a nuclear war will be the last act in a long degradation of international relationships. The steady progress of Homo Sapiens towards a peaceful planet has been halted by increasing nationalism in many countries. The sudden jump in progress in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by the global recognition that the USA was clearly the world leader and would strive for policies beneficial to humanity as a whole. However, the American invasion of Iraq shattered the image of the United States as a positive force in international relations. Confidence in American leadership was further damaged by the use of torture and the abandonment of the rule of law symbolized by Guantanamo and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Even more destructive was the worldwide near-depression caused by failures in American regulation of its financial regulation. The destabilization of the Middle East by the USA triggered the Arab Spring, which led mostly to more repression and civil war in Syria. The financial crisis that America started led to serious economic crises in a number of European countries, further eroding confidence not just in American leadership, but in the European Union.

The rapid collapse of American prestige triggered a rise in nationalism worldwide. If countries could not rely upon the USA to preserve the global order, they would have to fall back upon their own resources. Eventually the wave of nationalism swept into America as well, leading to the election of Mr. Trump, a disastrous development that destroyed all semblance of world leadership by the USA.

The resulting scramble of “every man for himself” among nations will wipe out the power of international institutions to dampen crises the world over, accelerating the collapse of global comity. Minor disagreements will mushroom into military confrontations. Military spending the world over will increase dramatically as nations seek to prepare themselves for the war that now seems inevitable.

Climate change adds pressure to the situation. Millions of people will be displaced by rising sea levels; the USA will of course refuse to accept any of the refugees. That will trigger bitter resentment among the countries who did take in climate change refugees. Terrorism will find a new driving force in the sufferings of climate change refugees. Americans will respond to that terrorism with even stronger nationalism and increased military spending. Their overwhelming military strength will give them a false sense of invulnerability. Owners of American debt the world over will begin dumping their American assets, causing American interest rates to rapidly climb and driving the economy into a deep depression. All of this will only prod the Americans in even greater fury and the use of its vast military resources to take what they consider theirs by right. China might well organize economic sanctions against the USA, at which point everything will spiral out of control.

That is only one scenario that would lead Homo Sapiens to destroy its civilization. However, nuclear war is not necessary to destroy civilization; that could just as easily be triggered by nonviolent developments, climate change being the most obvious. Climate change has a long lag time between causes and their effects, roughly 30 years. The climate changes that take place today are the consequence of carbon emissions up to the late 1980s. The full effect of current carbon emissions will not be felt for another 30 years. Any politically feasible suite of policies to reduce carbon emissions will come far too late to deflect economically catastrophic consequences of climate change. Already climate change is wreaking something on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars of damages each year, and those costs will be rising dramatically in future decades.

The global economic output just now amounts to about $75 trillion. During the latter half of the 20th century the global economy grew by perhaps 3% per year. At that rate of growth, the world economy should grow by about $2.5 trillion per year. But the rising costs of climate change will eat into that number. When those costs reach $3 trillion per year, they will cancel all economic growth; humanity will no longer be growing wealthier each year.

One of the most fundamental rules of politics is that economic privation drives political unrest. Homo Sapiens expects economic growth over the long run. When humans realize that their situation is worsening, they resort to desperate measures — which always make matters worse. Even without war, economies around the world will collapse under the increasing strains of climate change. Economic collapse will kill not with bullets but by the collapse of the complex logistical systems necessary to keep billions of people alive. Civilization will regress until tiny self-sufficient groups stabilize the situation. At first they’ll take advantage of remaining technology, but as the technology wears out, their output will fall, further reducing the population. Once all the technology has worn out, the only way people will survive is through the means that cannot wear out: human bodies. The population will stabilize at Pleistocene levels with a few million hunter-gatherers populating the planet.

Thus will end the meteoric career of Homo Sapiens.

The End of America?

[image error]Benito Mussolini in the March on Rome that installed him as dictator in Italy

I’m sure by now most of my regular readers are aware that Trump and his allies are plotting (violent) revenge against all those trying to hold them accountable for their many crimes. Democracies can die and be replaced by dictatorships.

Here are the reflections of some sophisticated political observers:Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post “Trump says the quiet part out loud: He’ll destroy democracy”

Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the New York Times “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans”

Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times  “Trump Wants Us to Know He Will Stop at Nothing in 2025”

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post “Trump doesn’t just want to win. He wants revenge”

Heather Digby Parton in Salon “Trump’s big payback: The plot for MAGA’s revenge should scare voters straight”

Areeba Shah in Salon “Nightmare scenario: Legal scholars alarmed over Trump’s “plot to abuse his power” for revenge”

No doubt you can find other links. It is hard to express how frightening this is for all of us including Trump supporters. Haven’t his sycophants in politics ever heard of a purge? Are any of us safe when ruthlessness and lawlessness prevail? Don’t the wealthy and powerful know that they benefit most from social stability? Don’t the poor and powerless know that the rich and powerful care nothing for them? Don’t anti-government fanatics know that the fulfillment of their wishes leads to a Hobbesian state of nature?

Going Back To First and Fifth Grade

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I went back to first and fifth grade today as the special friend of two of my grandchildren. I was struck by the innocence of the children and their youthful enthusiasm; and I wondered what they were experiencing, what dreams they had, and, unfortunately, about the evil they would inevitably encounter.

Upon reflection, they seemed devoid of pride, envy, and fear of others and full of compassion. Perhaps Rousseau was right after all. Maybe growing up really does corrupt us. In the end, though, I sensed the beauty of selves not yet corrupted by a tawdry world.

Then again maybe my romantic sensibilities were being activated, blinding me to the mixed human nature within these young minds that would, as it did for the rest of us, eventually assert itself. I don’t know.

I just know that for a brief hour, the world held promise.

Fermi Paradox

[image error]Enrico Fermi (1901–1954)

Our universe is vast beyond imagination. Really, you cannot imagine how vast it is. If you look into the night sky in perfect conditions you might be able to see about 2,500 stars, but that is only 0.000001 of the stars in the Milky Way. There are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy and about the same number of galaxies in the observable universe. Thus there are about 1023 total stars or 100000000000000000000000 stars in the observable universe. For every grain of sand on earth, there are 10,000 stars out there! If you don’t think that is a lot go to the beach, play in the sand, and look around.

And these numbers are just stars. If our star, the Sun, is typical in having 8 planets then our galaxy alone contains something like 2 trillion planets! Now we don’t know what percentage of those stars are sunlike but if we go with a conservative estimate of 5% and the lower end for the number of stars, 1022 , then there are about 500 quintillion or 500 billion billion sun-like stars!

Now if we go with the most recent conservative estimate of how many of those sun-like stars are orbited by Earth-like planets, around 22%, that leaves us with 100 billion billion Earth-like planets! A hundred Earth-like planets for every grain of sand on earth. Now if only 1% of those Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars developed life and if only 1% of those planets developed intelligent life then there would be 10 quadrillion or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe! In our galaxy alone there would be 100,000 intelligent civilizations.

All of which caused the physicist Enrico Fermi to ask, why haven’t we encountered beings from other worlds? 

The fact is that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has never picked up a single radio wave or any other form of contact. If you don’t think this is surprising to consider that there are older stars with far older Earth-like planets on which more advanced civilizations could have developed. They could be civilizations that have harnessed all the energy of their planet or the star or their entire galaxy if they were sufficiently advanced.  If so they would have seemingly colonized the entire galaxy. Some scientists have hypothesized that civilizations could create self-replicating machinery that colonizes the entire galaxy in around 4 million years.

Source: Scientific American: “Where Are They”

And if only 1% of intelligent life survives long enough to become a potentially galaxy-colonizing civilization, there would still be 1,000 of those types of civilizations in our galaxy alone. So again, why haven’t we seen or heard from them? Where is everybody? This is the Fermi Paradox.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE FERMI PARADOX

Here are a few of the explanations proposed to explain the paradox:

1) Higher civilizations are rare. Maybe something dooms them as they advance. Perhaps only a few of them have managed to surpass whatever it is that dooms civilizations and they have not spread out through the galaxy.

2) Higher civilizations don’t exist. We are the only civilization that has avoided destruction so far and may soon destroy ourselves too.

3)  Higher civilizations visited earth before we were here or before we had ways to record the visit.

4) Higher civilizations have colonized the galaxy but not our part of it.

5) Higher civilizations are not interested in colonization.

6) Higher civilizations know better than to broadcast their existence since there are predator civilizations out there.

7) There is one higher predator civilization that has exterminated all other civilizations.

8) Higher civilizations are out there but we don’t know how to perceive them.

9) Higher civilizations are observing us now but don’t want us to know. Perhaps they abide by the “Prime Directive” of Star Trek’s Federation.

10) We are wrong about reality; the universe is not vast in space and time.

I have no idea which if any of these hypotheses are true. What I do know is that our ignorance humbles me. The universe is not only bigger than we can imagine but probably stranger than we can imagine as well. As Xenophanes said long ago, “All we have is but a woven web of guesses.” And for those who cannot tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, there is always fanatical ideology. As for me I’ll accept uncertainty and reject fanaticism, thereby living with integrity.

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Note – This post relies heavily on and was inspired by an article published here at the website “Wait But Why?“

“Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space”

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George Johnson is a prolific science writer—the author of nine books and hundreds of articles. He has written 14 articles for the New York Times in 2014 alone. Here is a brief summary of his  “Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space.”

Humans may have been demoted from their central place in the heavens by modern science, writes Johnson, but we still believe that we will eventually figure out how the universe works. It is generally believed we will do this by utilizing four basic concepts: matter and energy interacting in space and time. But there are some skeptics who think we might need a few more concepts, notes Johnson.

The first is the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He thinks there is more to the universe than physical forces, and that evolutionary laws need to be expanded to explain sentient life. Needless to say, Nagel’s views have caused consternation. The psychologist Steven Pinker denounced Nagel’s latest book as “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Nagel, for his part, is an atheist who is not promoting non-scientific ideas like intelligent design. Instead, he argues that science must continue to expand to find more complete answers. Nagel writes: “Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning … but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that the tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.” (Any thoughtful scientist would agree.) 

The discovery or invention of a mathematics so in tune with reality also amazes Nagel. (Many evolutionary epistemologists are not surprised that brains, which evolve from nature, are thus in tune with nature.) Even neuroscientists cannot yet explain how mind emerges from the electronic circuitry of the brain. (That “they can’t explain that” posits some as yet unknown explanation. It is one thing to say this explanation is supernatural and by definition such explanations are outside the purview of science. It is another to say that further explanation is needed, and no scientist would disagree with that.)

To fully explain mind, Nagel argues, requires another scientific revolution. Such a revolution posits mind as fundamental and a universe primed “to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” This would require directional, possibly even purposeful evolution, and would expand on the model of random mutations and environmental selection. “Above all,” Nagel writes, “I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” (Again few scientists would disagree. Thus Nagel’s views are not as revolutionary as they appear.)

In addition, notes Johnson, the biologist Stuart Kauffman also suggests that Darwinian theory must be expanded to explain the emergence of intelligent creatures like ourselves. (There is nothing surprising about this. My article on “Piaget’s Biology” in The Cambridge Companion to Piaget (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)[image error] notes multiple biologists who argue similarly.) And David Chalmers, an important philosopher of mind, has seriously considered panpsychism–the idea that rudimentary consciousness pervades everything in the universe. (However, Chalmers does not say that panpsychism and the physicalism underlying contemporary biology conflict, although he does say, in this interview, that panpsychism “is a radical form of physicalism precisely because it introduces mental properties as fundamental.” So Chalmer’s views are not as revolutionary as they appear. It seems to me that panpsychism might even be expected given the evolution of higher intelligence from lower ones. It also seems, on briefest reflection, that this does not mean mind is more fundamental than matter, but rather that it is an emergent property in evolution. My basic point is that the reference to panpsychism doesn’t clearly challenge scientific orthodoxy.)

Johnson also notes that the renowned physicist Max Tegmark argues that mathematics is an irreducible part of nature–perhaps the most fundamental part. Johnson marvels at mathematics’ effectiveness in describing reality. (Piaget wrote extensively about how children’s reflective abstractions largely explain how the mind evolves, as well as the correspondence of mathematics and reality. And there are Platonic, evolutionary, and other explanations of this correspondence.) Tegmark argues the universe is a mathematical structure from which matter, energy, space, and time emerge. Other mathematicians note that most mathematics doesn’t describe reality at all. But for Johnson, Tegmark provides another example of a challenge to scientific orthodoxy.

Johnson’s conclusion from all this is mixed. On the one hand, we’ve come a long way in understanding our universe in the 5,000 years or so of civilization. On the other hand, from the vantage point of 5,000 years hence, our science today will be primitive. So Johnson is not sure of the extent to which challenges to the orthodoxy are substantive.

My conclusion is that Johnson is correct about the former claim—we have come a long way since the dawn of civilization, but I’m not sure about his latter claim—that today’s science will be primitive in retrospect. In some ways this is true, but in others, it may not be. There is a good chance that evolutionary, quantum, relativity, gravitational, and atomic theories will survive almost intact. Why? Because while revolutionary disruptions occasionally happen in science, as Kuhn suggested, more often change is slow. Change is mostly gradual, evolutionary change, not radical, revolutionary change. Newton’s theory of gravity is not wrong—it works fine at speeds much slower than light—although Einstein’s theory of gravity is more complete.  The ancient atomists were correct that atoms are small indeed even though they didn’t have a modern atomic theory. And Euclidean geometry is not invalid because of non-Euclidean geometry–parallel lines still don’t meet in Euclidean space! In the far future, we may find out we know a lot more than we thought we knew.

As for new ideas that challenge scientific orthodoxy I think Carl Sagan said it best: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

What’s The Point of Writing?

The two most important books that influenced my writing are Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. I have also been influenced by reading wonderful prose stylists like Bertrand Russell and Will Durant, as well as by a graduate school mentor William Charron, who forced me to rewrite my master’s thesis about ten times. I sometimes think he overdid it—seeking perfection in one’s writing causes paralysis—but he taught me the invaluable lesson of rewriting, which is the single best secret to good writing that I know of.

Unfortunately, the time constraints of researching and writing a blog make it impossible to continuously rewrite. I certainly reread my posts and make quick changes before publication, but I don’t have the time for the five or ten rewrites that are necessary for really good prose. So it’s a tradeoff. I substitute quantity for quality, but I think there is value in not over-analyzing a topic too. Stream-of-consciousness writing, being less constrained than obsessive rewriting, allows one to proceed without undue delay and is more revelatory of one’s true feelings.

Recently I read the interview about writing with psychologist Steven Pinker at edge.org. Pinker reasons that writing is a psychological phenomenon, “a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind.” But writing is also “cognitively unnatural,” according to Pinker. For almost the entire time there have been modern human beings, no one wrote anything until the last few millennia. In fact, it is an odd way to communicate. You don’t see your audience, you don’t know who they are or what they know, and they don’t ask you questions. It is so different from face-to-face conversation.

Pinker thinks we write to draw another’s attention to something. “When you write … you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.” This may seem obvious but consider how much writing is done to impress others or to protect oneself. So while we write for ourselves—to learn and understand—we write for our audience too. Not to impress them, protect ourselves, or shove dogma down their throat—but to see new things with them. To point out things that both the writer and the reader may have missed.

Leaving a small part of myself after I am gone—a legacy of the best of me—motivates my writing. It’s not as good as real immortality, and I may still get a cryonics policy, but it is something. To leave a small part of yourself in this electronic cloud. To leave your soft whisper in the air that someone might hear.

How to Find Fulfilling Work

How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life)

My Previous Advice – One of the most difficult tasks for most of us is finding fulfilling (paid) work in our modern economic system. (If you don’t have this problem fine, but many people do.) I addressed this topic previously in one of my most viewed blog posts, “Should You Do What You Love?” (It had over 10,000 views in the first few weeks, generating many comments on my site and on Reddit. Evidently, it is a topic of interest.) Here was my conclusion:

I agree with Marino that doing our duty, even if it doesn’t make us happy, is admirable. And I agree with Tokumitsu and Hanson that elitists, who often do the most interesting work, fail to value more mundane work. But I think that Linsenmayer makes the most important point. We need a new economic system–one where we can develop our talents and actualize our potential. Most of us are too good for the work we do, not because we are better than others, but because the work available in our current system is not good enough for any of us. (I have written about this previously.)

Still, we do not live in an ideal world. So what practical counsel do we give others, in our current time and place? Unfortunately, my advice is dull and unremarkable, like so much of the available work. For now, the best recommendation is something like: do the least objectionable/most satisfying work available given your options. That we can’t say more reveals the gap between the real and the ideal; it is symptomatic of a flawed society. Perhaps working to change the world so that people can engage in satisfying work is the most meaningful work of all.

More Thoughts – First a disclaimer. I am not an expert on the topic of satisfying work and I lack the time for a thorough investigation of the topic. But social science research must have been done on what work people generally find fulfilling, on the difference between work and leisure activities; on work and its compatibility with personality profiles like the Big 5, and related topics. Those interested should consult this research.  With these caveats in place, here are a few reflections.

What is work? – It is an activity, usually engaged in for the money which buys the things we need to survive. We typically contrast work with leisure, which is activity or inactivity usually engaged in, not for money, but for enjoyment. Of course, what we call work activity or leisure activity might conflict or coincide. We might engage in activities we enjoy and make money in the process—our work and our leisure activities may coincide. Yet they might conflict too. We might enjoy playing golf and hate being a lawyer—engaging in the latter for the sole purpose of making money to engage in the former. But surely most of us in the first world, when confronted with a countless variety of activities in which to engage, can find something we (somewhat) enjoy that also makes money.

Are We Lucky to Have a Job? – This is a tough question. For those in the world who subsist on less than $2 a day—about half the world’s population—any work that paid almost anything would seem to be a blessing. Desperate people might consider themselves lucky to make a few thousand dollars a year picking fruit all day in the hot sun. From the perspective of those in poverty, those who would reject a $100,000-a-year job (in US dollars) in good working conditions because it wasn’t satisfying enough, would elicit no sympathy. (They might even consider such individuals entitled.) Nor would those who insist on satisfying work elicit sympathy from full-time workers making the USA minimum wage, which typically involves unfulfilling work. Still, it is hard to tell someone they should be satisfied with work they don’t find satisfying. By all means, if the opportunity presents itself, and you would not hurt yourself or others, accept more fulfilling work.

Is the World Economic System Immoral? – One might advance a stronger argument against working at all—that participating in the world’s economic system is intrinsically immoral. If participating in an economic system they deem unjust violates one’s conscience, then perhaps they shouldn’t do that work. Of course, they have to ask themselves whether they really believe this or whether it is an excuse to avoid doing something they don’t like. But if it is the former, then possibly they shouldn’t violate their conscience.

I say possibly because there are all sorts of reasons to do what you don’t want to do, or even do what you think is immoral. As for doing what you don’t want to, the idea of duty has a long history as a significant concept in moral philosophy that dates back at least to the Stoics. And even if you think the economic system is immoral you might still want to participate in it to feed your family. Surely there is also something immoral about allowing your family to starve, not have adequate nutrition, not live in a good neighborhood or get a good education. Especially when you have the ability to avoid such outcomes.

Moreover, you really don’t know that participating in an imperfect world economic system is immoral. There is substance to the counterargument that participation in the world’s economic system, despite its flaws, has merit. Surely something about that system has contributed positively to the world we now live in. And what kind of world is that? It is one in which more people live longer and more fulfilling lives while doing reasonably satisfying work than at any time in human history. (If you don’t believe this, take your family back to Europe in the Middle Ages or ancient Greece or Rome or the plains of Africa where the average lifespan was vanishingly short, where mothers died in childbirth, children died en masse of disease, and there was little time for high cultural achievements like art, literature, music, philosophy, and science.)

Now the extent to which these positive transformations were caused by economic systems is debatable—perhaps science and technology played a more important role in driving human history. (I think they did.) But economics, technology, and other elements of culture interact. It is hard to disentangle which has played the most important role in leading to the better world we now live in. But our long journey—from the agricultural revolution, which produced the excess food that allowed for priests, philosophers, artisans, and scientists; to the industrial revolution, which mass-produced the technology that transformed the world; to the current technological revolution, which will transform reality in ways as yet unimaginable—together have produced a better world. And some part of that transformation must have been played by commerce, business, lending, and money. I don’t possess the wherewithal to defend this argument in detail, but these comments should at least plant doubt in the minds of those who assume that the modern economic system is intrinsically immoral. It is easy to be influenced by half-true memes.

Now I am not an apologist for predatory capitalism, the profit motive, or the genocide and slavery with which it was and still is associated. I don’t know on balance if it is a good or bad thing. I just know that the truth about such issues is complex. What part does our evolutionary biology play and what part do the various elements of culture play in our imperfect world? Again, I don’t know. But given the complexity of the issue, it would be foolish to not participate in the system as best we can. (There are many ways to do this which I’ll describe below.) In fact, other than opting out of life entirely, it isn’t possible to live disentangled from the world’s economy.  Even Thoreau determined to live according to his conscience and often far from the world said, “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” He wanted to change the world but had to make peace with it too. 

What work is fulfilling? – In my own life reading, writing, thinking, and teaching philosophy were activities that, for the most part, I enjoyed. Of course, nothing is perfect. I had students over the years that I strongly disliked, department chairs who were tyrants, and I’ve read books and taken classes that I wasn’t thrilled about. (Oh, those mandatory medieval philosophy classes—how little I remember you, St. Bonaventure!) Surely many feel similarly about being a physician, nurse, biologist, economist, public policy expert, or psychologist—not perfect jobs in a perfect world, but satisfying nonetheless. And I’m not prejudiced toward white-collar jobs either. There are plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and others who feel the same way—they may not have perfect jobs, but they find satisfaction in the honest work that feeds their families. (One of my graduate student friends who was good at fixing things said he found working with his hands as satisfying as philosophy—and he was the best grad student in our program.) I also found raising my children to be some of the most satisfying work I did. I enjoyed every moment of taking them to gymnastics and football games, playing softball and basketball with them, and of course, discussing philosophy with them.

What work is fulfilling for me? – Obviously, this depends on one’s personality traits, talents, psychology, opportunities, culture, history, genes, and more. I mentioned the Big 5 personality test earlier and I’m sure there is information about one’s personality profile and fulfilling work. (There are multiple books about the connection between one’s Myers-Briggs profile and job satisfaction, but as I understand it, the Big 5 is the more scientific test.)

Again for most of us, if we are reasonably intelligent, physically healthy, and lucky enough to live in a thriving economy and not have to work for minimum (virtual slave) wages in those economies, then there are a plethora of choices. (Of course, overchoice does make choosing tougher.) In the end, all we can do is look at the available choices—assuming we are lucky enough to have them—and choose. It probably doesn’t matter much what we choose, as long as it is something that contributes ever so slightly to keeping civilization going. (We might experience existential guilt by working, thinking that we are denying others the opportunity, but we must value ourselves too. We must avoid what the Dalai Lama calls “sloppy sympathy,” feeling bad for others. Such sentiments are worthless. Much better to use your skill, go out in the world, and help someone.)

Playing Our Small Role – In the end, we are small creatures and the universe is big. We can’t change the whole world but we can influence it through our interaction with those closest to us, finding joy in the process. We may not change the world by administering to the sick as doctors or nurses or psychologists, or by installing someone’s dishwasher or cleaning their teeth or keeping their internet running. We may not even change it by caring lovingly for our children. But the recipients of such labor may find your work significant indeed. For they received medical care or had someone to talk to or had their teeth cleaned. Or they met an old friend on the internet. Or they don’t have to go to the laundromat anymore. Or they grew up to be the kind of functioning adult this world so desperately needs because of that loving parental care. These may all be small things, but if they are not important, nothing is.

Perhaps then it is the sum total of our labors that makes us large. Our labors are not always sexy, but they are necessary to bring about a better future. All those mothers who cared for children and fathers who worked to support them, all those plumbers and doctors and nurses and teachers and firefighters doing their little part in the cosmic dance. All of them recognize what Victor Frankl taught, that productive work is a constitutive element of a meaningful life.

Summary of Seneca’s “Peace of Mind”

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What follows is a very brief summary of Seneca’s letter titled “Piece of Mind.” The letter’s purpose was to provide guidance on how to achieve serenity—the ideal state of the Stoic sage. The letter’s recipient was his good friend Serenus, who had asked how he might better control his vices in order to experience greater tranquility.

Seneca begins by affirming that tranquility is the most important thing in life. People don’t achieve it for various reasons but the solution resides within our own minds not by fleeing from oneself.

To promote tranquility Seneca makes numerous suggestions including

Live in the service of othersEngage in philosophyBe aware of your limitationsChose your pursuits and associates carefullyDon’t be too attached to or have excess material goodsAccept that you will lose many precious things in lifeAccept that disease and death will eventually comeAccept that tragedy that good people will sufferEnjoy both solitude with socializing, work, and leisurePlay with children, dance, and enjoy games.

Note – This is obviously just a few bullet points from reading the essay. For more click on the link above which will take you to the letter itself. What I can say is that peace of mind is a wonderful state if you can achieve it. It is something I strive for although I often miss the mark.