John G. Messerly's Blog, page 55

Summary of Spinoza’s Philosophy

Stature of Spinoza in Amersterdam

© Darrell Arnold Ph.D.– (Reprinted with Permission)

https://darrellarnold.com/2019/08/13/...

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1637) is best known for identifying God with Nature. He does not see God as the transcendent creator of the world. Rather, he views him as the same as Nature itself. If the Axial Age philosophers and the religious thinkers who build on their work emphasize that the divine is separate from earth, Spinoza brings the divine back to earth. But his identification of God with nature cuts two ways. To some it appears to divinize a profane nature. To others it seems to degrade the divine nature.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam into a Portuguese Jewish family, which had fled Spain for the Netherlands during the Spanish Inquisition. He was given an early religious education. But he was influenced by not only Descartes and Leibniz but also by Machiavelli and Hobbes as well as Stoicism and various heterodox thinkers of his time. In 1656, at the age of 24, he was excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue in Amsterdam. Along with his rejection of the transcendent God, he rejected the immortality of the soul and any literalist understanding of the moral law having been imparted to Moses. These views, which would have been known to the synagogue, eventually appear in his writings.

Spinoza’s best-known work is his Ethics. Also influential is his pseudonymously published Theological-Political Treatise,  which one critic characterized as “a book forged in hell by the devil himself.” In the Treatise, Spinoza starkly criticizes the role of religion in politics and calls for a secular, democratic form of government.

The title of the work Ethics underlines the book’s main purpose. Spinoza wants to provide a view of ethics. However, his ethics and generally his system of thought has certain similarities to that of the Epicureans. Like the Epicureans, he thinks he must correct broad misunderstandings of God, nature, and the self.  On the basis of a correct understanding of metaphysics, he can then construct his ethics.

In the first sections of the Ethics, he begins his critical reconstruction. His argument that there is only one substance is conveyed in various forms. One is that if God is infinite, then there can be nothing outside of God. He can have no limits or boundaries. This means there cannot be a world external to Him. The world must be contained as part of the infinite substance that is God. He offers a version of the following argument.

1) No two substances can share the same attribute or essence.

2) God is a substance that has (or is comprised of) infinite attributes.

3) To exist separately from God, any other substance would have to possess attributes or an essence that is different from one of the infinite attributes or essences of God, which is impossible.

4) Therefore, no substance can exist separately from God

Admittedly, to understand the first premise of the argument takes a bit of intellectual lifting. Spinoza concludes that everything that exists is a part of God. In his terminology, what the Aristotelians take to be separate substances actually exist as modes of God. They all, in fact, rely on God, but they can do so in different ways.  Some modes are “infinite modes.” These include things like the laws of nature. Other modes are “finite.” These include the particular existences, that is individual people, animals, plants.

All things in nature, which are a part of God, are also necessary. As Spinoza states, “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists” (Part IV, Preface). The laws of nature are also mechanical. This God is not thought to act for purposes, not in sync with Aristotelian telos, but in accord with mechanical necessary laws.

Spinoza speaks of thought and matter as modes of existence. One of these does not cause the other mode. Rather, both are two different modes of one and the same thing. Perhaps we can view them as different sides of a coin. Spinoza is not a dualist. That is, he does not think thought and matter are two different substances. Rather, he argues there is one substance. It can be seen in one mode as thought and in another as matter. As he puts it, “a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing but expressed in two ways” (Ethics, II, p7s).

In reference to the mind-body problem of Descartes: We are simply to see the human mind as one mode, the body as another. Some thoughts, like meandering thoughts or thoughts arising from sense experience, are haphazard. Other thoughts–such as those based on deliberation and science–can be rational and well-ordered. Spinoza is quite optimistic about our capacities of deliberation and science. With these, we can know all the principles of nature, and hence all the principles of God.

In Spinoza’s view, both the modes of materiality and of thought are causally determined. He thus denies human freedom as it is traditionally understood. Yet in the Ethics he suggests that a sort of autonomy is possible, namely, if we can free ourselves from the passions or mitigate their influence over us. This frees us as much as is possible from those determinants that are outside of ourselves. By contrast, if we fail to achieve such autonomy, we live lives dominated by passions: “We are driven about in many ways by external causes, and … like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate” (Ethics, III, p59s).

Spinoza’s view, in the final analysis, has many similarities with the ancient Stoics and Epicureans. He thinks our ethical goal should be to control our attachment to passions and to cultivate virtue. This entails that we strive for knowledge. Ultimately all knowledge is of God or Nature.

Part of this process, as we have emphasized, first requires overcoming false beliefs. Spinoza’s criticism of the anthropomorphic views of God is meant to aid in this. He thinks such anthropocentric views are mere superstitions and give rise to childish passions and fears. Like the Epicureans, Spinoza sees such false metaphysical assumptions as leading to much human suffering. A major focus of his Ethics then echoes the traditional Epicurean view that once we disabuse ourselves of false superstitious beliefs, we can better free ourselves from irrational passions.

While Spinoza is often viewed as a Pantheist, one must keep in mind that his view that Nature is God does not awaken in him a thirst for prayer or rituals or of religious experience as typically understood. He thinks our goal should be to rationally understand the world and our place in it. This means rejecting the traditional views of religion and embracing rational reflection upon Nature. He does though refer to this as “the intellectual love of God.”

Useful links:

For a more detailed analysis, from which many ideas here were taken, see Steven Nadler’s article, “Baruch Spinoza” at the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Fragility of Civilization

Ancient Egypt is a canonical example of an early culture considered a civilization.

My last post summarized Paul Rosenberg’s article, “Impeachment as a struggle to save democracy — from the pathological cult of Donald Trump.” Here are my thoughts on it.

This is one of the most chilling pieces I’ve read recently. I’m unsure how accurately the map Rosenberg, Hughes, and Mika have drawn corresponds to our situation. Perhaps there are powerful forces that will successfully resist the growing fascism in America; perhaps the situation isn’t as grave as it appears. Still, the article expresses an educated, sophisticated view of our potentially deadly situation—we disregard at our peril.

Yes, our problems are systemic—vast inequality of wealth undermining democracy, a media landscape that systematically lies to a public who can’t differentiate fact from fiction, minority rule in Congress, a ridiculously bloated military budget, voter suppression, gerrymandering, greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and on and on.

But I can say this confidently. A society increasingly run by psychopaths and other disordered individuals, along with their supporters and enablers, cannot end well. Plato taught me long ago that a good life depends in large part on living in a good society, which in turn depends on having political power in the hands of the morally and intellectually virtuous. It is almost impossible for a person to live well if their government is bad. Power in the hands of the worst—kakistocracy—spells disaster.

It is easy to forget that civilization is extraordinarily fragile and that people can quickly revert to barbarism, as modern psychology reveals. Civilization is a high achievement. But when autocrats assume dictatorial power, when they ignore the foundations of democratic government, when they direct foreign and domestic policy on ignorant whim with cruelty and stupidity as defining features, when they enlist subordinates to do their bidding, and when they use propaganda to manipulate and control their supporters … then we are all in for sustained suffering.

As I have been arguing on this blog for the past 3 years, we now stand on a precipice.

“Impeachment as a struggle to save democracy — from the pathological cult of Donald Trump”

Rosenberg wrote one of the most frightening articles about the political situation in the USA that I’ve read recently, “Impeachment as a struggle to save democracy — from the pathological cult of Donald Trump.” Its main theme is that “History shows how democracy can give way to “pathocracy” ruled by disordered individuals.”

According to Rosenberg, we can think about the Trump impeachment process “as a part of struggle to preserve American democracy from destruction at the hands of predatory individuals utterly lacking in conscience.” Rosenberg references the 2015 paper, “Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars,” which cites multiple examples including Idi Amin in Uganda to Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, who were despots disguised as saviors. And these individuals surround themselves with other psychopaths who do their bidding. Elizabeth Mika M.D. and Ian Hughes Ph.D. are two scholars who have studied how this happens and how it explains much of what has been happening in America since 2016.

In “Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy,” Hughes emphasizes how people with “… psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder …  experience only a narrow range of emotions, are incapable of empathy and are utterly lacking in conscience.” These individuals play a crucial role in the destruction of democracy for, though they are only a small part of the population they can slowly coerce “many more ostensibly normal people can come to resemble them.” In short, they get others to do their bidding. As Hughes explained,

The Trump presidency is giving us an insight into the ongoing development of

pathocracy in America … a process whereby society comes to be dominated by pathological individuals and groups. During this process, society becomes segregated into a pathological minority that gradually gains control, and a psychologically healthy majority who find themselves subjugated to this violent minority. Initially the pathology is most visible at the level of a president and the party that brings him to power, but it eventually diffuses through every part of society …

In the U.S. this process is well underway. To my mind, one of the outcomes of the impeachment hearings has been to show just how far the Republican Party has come under the control of those who mirror Trump’s pathological mindset.

Mika’s contribution to the collection “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (available online here) explained the Trump phenomenon in terms of the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole. These three forces join in a “narcissistic collusion … driven by the latter’s need for revenge,” she wrote, “for the tyrant is always chosen to perform this psychically restorative function: to avenge the humiliations (narcissistic wounds) of his followers and punish those who inflicted them.” Mika continued:

The tyrant’s own narcissism hints at the level of woundedness of his supporters. The greater their narcissistic injury, the more grandiose a leader they require to repair it. While his grandiosity appears grotesque to non-narcissistic people who do not share his agenda, to his followers he represents all their denied and thwarted greatness which now, under his rule, will finally flourish.

While the bonds between Trump and his cult-like followers appear unbreakable this isn’t necessarily the case for his supporters who help him run the pathocracy. Some cabinet members, for instance, turned against Trump. But they have now been weened from the Republican party which, as Hughes states, is now dominated by those “who mirror Trump’s pathological mindset. This was not the case just three years ago when Trump was elected.”

During this time, individuals within the GOP who share Trump’s disordered mentality, as reflected in their beliefs in conspiracy theories, rejection of facts as the basis of their worldview, propensity to attack and demean opponents, and their sense of entitlement to power at any cost, have risen in stature within the party. Those who privately believe such views and actions to be destructive, immoral and deluded have either been silenced or have left the party. The Republicans’ behavior during the impeachment hearings illustrate to me that segregation in terms of pathology within the GOP is now virtually complete.

Mika argues that this developement follows naturally,

He surrounds himself with people who are similarly impaired, whose conscience is either nonexistent or so ‘flexible’ that it allows them to engage in immoral and criminal activities without an emotional penalty of guilt and shame.

The rise of full-blown p​athocracy shows us how easily so-called normal people can be co-opted for abnormal — psychopathic, immoral and criminal — ends. We can see that this applies to people from all walks of life, no matter their intelligence, education, social status.

Hughes argues that “the collapse of U.S. democracy was the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath,” was the main precondition that led to the rise of Trump and other would be tyrants as well as to social dysfunctions like the Brexit vote. “Those at the top of the major financial institutions were seen to have recklessly built an unstable financial system, based on highly unethical practices, profited enormously, and walked away with their fortunes when it all came tumbling down …” This led to great suffering for ordinary people and a loss of “confidence in elites in general and in politicians in particular …” Mika had a somewhat different take:

The preconditions that paved way to the Trumpist takeover of America are most of all, in my mind, the narcissism that pervades American culture, as well as the toxic materialism and greed, and the staggering and growing inequality and poverty they produced. 

As for returning to normal after Trump, Hughes is skeptical, “Donald Trump is a violent man,” he continued, who “incites violence and aggression against anyone who opposes him, identifies with and rewards those who are violent, and acts in ways that are gratuitously cruel.” This cruelty, Hughes believes, can be placed in a larger context:

Trump’s direct violence is enabled by another form of violence that is prevalent in America, namely structural violence. Structural violence refers to the conditions that society imposes on people that constrain them from meeting their essential needs and achieving basic levels of dignity and quality of life. The extreme level of inequality in the U.S. is a form of structural violence that is resulting in enormous levels of the so called diseases of despair — drug abuse, alcoholism, and suicide.

Hughes also points to “similar examples of pathocracy from other countries” such as Stalinism in Eastern Europe:

One of the clearest examples from history of the deliberate dismantling of democracy occurred once Stalin gained control of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. I think there are clear parallels between Stalin’s systematic destruction of the central pillars of democracy there and what is happening under Trump today.

Stalin’s first step was to install puppet leaders across Eastern Europe who would do his bidding — think [William] Barr and [Mike] Pompeo in the U.S. domestic context …

Stalin’s second step was the elimination of free and fair elections. Trump has been working on that since before his election in 2016.

Ending freedom of religion and replacing religion with the cult of Stalin was Stalin’s third objective. Again, Trump’s sycophants are working hard to realize this objective in the U.S. Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo and Sarah Sanders have all said that God chose Trump to be president. According to a 2017 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, close to half (45%) of Republicans agree.

The damage to European culture during this time was catastrophic, as the philosopher Roger Scruton noted:

If enough people are sufficiently determined, and if they are backed by adequate resources and force, then they can destroy ancient and apparently permanent legal, political, educational and religious institutions, sometimes for good. And if civil society could be so deeply damaged in nations as disparate, as historic and as culturally rich as those of Eastern Europe, then it can be similarly damaged anywhere. If nothing else, the history of post-war Stalinisation proves just how fragile ‘civilization’ can turn out to be.

And Mika note how “… many so-called normal people revert to primitive, quasi-psychopathic functioning when given the opportunity.” Furthermore, “The rule of a pathological leader and his similarly disordered coterie that defines pathocracy normalizes and champions the worst human impulses,” said Mika. “We saw this under communism in Eastern Europe, under fascism in Germany, in the former Yugoslavia where neighbors turned against each other. We see it everywhere when the pathological political leaders give people permission to act on their primitive instincts. We learn quickly how fragile our civilized norms and mores are.” Moreover, the seeds of pathocracy have long existed in the USA. Mika again:

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote about “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” describing the pervasive conspiratorial mindset of a large enough, dispossessed portion of American citizenry. This mindset is activated by ethnic, religious and class conflicts, and by times of upheaval and frustrations. It does not take much to foment it, especially when conditions are right, i.e., people become increasingly unable to cope with the difficulties of their daily life and look for scapegoats for their misery and pain. Trump’s untruths, big and small, have thus found a naturally receptive audience in America today.

Rosenberg also highlights examples of the autocrats appeal to thugs as enforcers “from Trump’s persistent defense of police abuse against black and brown people to the pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and the more recent pardons of accused or convicted war criminals, which led to the resignation of the Navy secretary.​​” Here’s Hughes take:

During my research for “Disordered Minds,” one of the common features that emerged from studying the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao was how violent thugs played a critical role at a local level in securing and maintaining each of these regime’s hold on power.

Historian Frank Dikotter, for example, quotes one village resident recalling how during Mao’s violent collectivization of agriculture in China: “All the scamps and the village bullies, who had not done a stroke of honest work in their life, suddenly blossomed forth as the accredited members of the Communist Party.” Historian Orlando Figes similarly recounts how the Communist youth organization in the Russian village of Obukhovo comprised a dozen teenage thugs with guns, led by 18-year-old Kolia Kuzmin, who had spent his childhood on the village streets begging on behalf of his alcoholic father …

And Mika notes how those without conscience gravitate toward each other and excuse their crimes, as Trump’s pardons of war criminals and others reveals.

Trump, like all leaders with his character defect, is enamored with brute force and violence. He identifies with and admires thugs, and given more power, he would fully demonstrate this aspect of his character …

Using open and officially sanctioned violence as a means of social control, as well as settling personal vendettas, is a natural progression in the development of tyrants and tyrannies. Tyrants are driven by an insatiable desire to gain and exercise deadly power in order to achieve personal glory … 

Rosenberg also worries about the media’s failure “to report on Trump accurately … reflecting both the pursuit of false balance, among other things, and a general failure to grasp the broader significance and true nature of the spreading pathocracy.” To this concern Hughes argues that to really cover the Trump phenomenon adequately requires accepting four unpleasant truths:

First, it is highly likely that Donald Trump has a dangerous narcissistic character disorder that makes him psychologically incapable of functioning within a rules-based democratic system. In fact, as we are seeing, his character disorder compels him to dismantle that system.

Second, the Republican Party is no longer a democratic party. It too has rejected the rules and values of democracy and is pursuing a power-at-all-costs authoritarian agenda.

Third, and most unpleasantly perhaps, a sizable fraction of the U.S. population would be happy to live within such an authoritarian system if those they despise are “put in their place.”

And finally, violence and aggression are increasingly an indispensable means for the alliance between Trump, the GOP and core Trump supporters to achieve their goals.

The problem here is that traditional media aren’t suited to reporting on this:

You can understand that this is a difficult framing for any mainstream media organization to adopt, but it is a scenario that has been repeated ad nauseam in so many countries, that the media really should recognize it by now.

I feel very strongly that we won’t be able to counter the threat we face unless and until we understand it. But the mainstream media doesn’t, or chooses not to, and so there is a complacency or a “behind the curve” quality to most of the coverage. As a result, the gravity of the situation is not accepted and communicated, and the lies and disinformation are allowed to continue without being contextualized.

Mika offers this juxtaposition: “We are now a country where war criminals are pardoned and celebrated while innocent children are kept in cages, and this is considered normal …” As CBS CEO Les Moonves said in February 2016: Trump’s candidacy might not be good for America, but it was “damn good for CBS.” This is partly why media fails to report on the spread of pathocracy, Mika argues. “The corporate ownership of the media, the purpose of which is to sell ads and generate profits, makes it a natural ally of the political powers that be, with a compromised regard for truth and morality.”

Neither Mika nor Hughes has much to offer as to how we fight back; the situation is extraordinarily grim. But what is Trump really after? Hughes says that “History shows that the dismantling of democracy by an autocrat is not an end in itself … Rather, it is the precondition that allows the tyrant to violently impose his narcissistic vision upon society.”

For Hitler that vision was German domination of, and ethnic cleansing of, Europe. For Stalin, it was to make the Soviet Union a world power, on the backs of the slave labor camps of the Gulag and the subjugation of the population through terror. For Mao, it was to enable the endless use of revolution and violence in pursuit of his vision for China, in which, as he said, “half of China may well have to die.”

Hughes issued a final warning: “If we allow him to continue his attacks on U.S. democracy and the rules based international order, we may find out, to our cost, what the narcissistic fantasy of Donald J Trump, really is.”

My brief reply

This is one of the most chilling pieces I’ve read recently and articulates many of my own concerns. Civilization is extraordinarily fragile and humans revert to barbarism easily, as modern psychology has shown us. When an autocrat is granted dictatorial power, when they can ignore the other branches of government, when they can direct foreign and domestic policy on ignorant whim with cruelty and stupidity as their defining features, we are all in for sustained suffering. Good night and good luck.

Conservatives & Higher Education

Stature of Spinoza in Amersterdam.

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.” ~ Baruch Spinoza

© Darrell Arnold Ph.D.– (Reprinted with Permission)

In “As Basic Science is Politicized, Conservatives Become Suspicious of Higher Ed,” Dr. Darrell Arnold recently shared his experience discussing basic scientific truths in his college philosophy classes. (I’ve had similar experiences.) Here is his essay.

A new study by the PEW research center on conservative attitudes toward higher education has indicated that the conservative suspicion of higher education has continued to rise: 59 percent of conservatives now think higher education is harming America. But the suspicion is higher among older conservatives than among college-age students. Among those in college, it is higher among “very conservative students” than others. I believe part of the reason for this suspicion is that many older conservatives and many “very conservative students” have politicized basic scientific facts. When such scientific facts become politicized, then institutions that teach these facts become politicized.

One of the indices for some discontent among the youth is that “very conservative students were 14 percentage points less likely than very liberal ones to say they were comfortable speaking up in class.” (See “Conservatives Say Professors’ Politics Ruin College” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) But here’s the dilemma I and other educators face. I, like many I know, try to contain my own views of politics, because I think it creates a better learning atmosphere in which students can share ideas and learn from one another in dialogue. But many “very conservative students” simply do not respect science. How is a professor to confront this situation?

Among the courses I have regularly taught are Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Logic, Critical Thinking, and classes in Philosophy and Religion. Sometimes in these classes, we discuss what good sources are, what peer review is. We talk about things like hasty generalizations and representative samples for statistics. Yet, these are largely introductory courses, so there is a learning curve.

About ten years ago, in one of my first Philosophy and Religion courses at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, four of the fifteen students in the class submitted papers that quoted articles reporting the finding of Noah’s Ark. I returned the papers and allowed the students to resubmit. I explained that the sources they used weren’t peer-reviewed. I discussed the problems of a literal belief in Noah’s ark. In doing this, was I making these students uncomfortable about sharing their views in class? Probably.

The thing is, that was a part of my job. It is simply indicative of really bad reasoning to conclude that the story of Noah’s arc is literally true in its details. How large would the arc have had to be to contain all the world’s animals? How would the Komodo dragon have gotten to the Middle East to get on the arc? How about the kangaroo? It too was very far away. In the class, I did anything but dismiss religion. But I had to show many problems with literalist interpretations of the Bible or the Koran. Was I teaching with a liberal agenda? Of course not. But that wouldn’t be the view of a lot of those in the Pew Survey.

Similar issues come up in Introduction to Philosophy or Ethics courses. In an Introduction to Philosophy course, I would find it irresponsible to have a formal debate on whether the earth was created in six days or in accord with evolution. In an Ethics course, I would also find it irresponsible to have a formal debate about whether climate change is occurring in part because of human activity. I tell students that we are to respect best practices of critical thinking and, for scientific questions, science. Science, of course, isn’t flawless or absolutely certain, and some areas and ideas of science are better supported than others. Science also has been used ideologically in history. That’s all open for discussion. But we also underline reasons that it is our best guide for certain kinds of questions.

We discuss whether a lack of belief in a literal creation narrative must lead down the path of agnosticism or atheism. We ask how a believer can read the bible as true metaphorically while rejecting literalism. We also look at what epistemological issues prevent us from saying that evolution or the human effect on climate change is absolutely certain.

But it’s bad reasoning to pretend that because we do not have absolute certainty on these issues that any alternative views from religion or mythology are just as good as the ones science provides to those questions. When it comes to the question of how the cosmos originated or present life forms came into existence, there simply is a lot of evidence pointing to the Big Bang and evolution, and–well–no evidence pointing to the literal truth of a six-day creation story or Hesiod’s theogony.

Of course, answering these questions of science does not answer the questions about whether a deity may be behind the Big Bang or evolution. But putting the physical explanations of the Bible or Greek mythology on equal footing with science for scientific questions is a non-starter. Is this stifling conservative voice? I fear many older conservatives and “very conservative students,” think so.

But if so, then doesn’t a conservative voice on these issues of science need to be stifled? To fail to challenge these views and to pretend that all answers to scientific questions are of equal value would abnegate our responsibilities as educators. However, I fear that given the anti-intellectual climate, especially among the very conservative in the U.S., this means that many conservatives will continue to think that higher education has a liberal slant.

Moral Enhancement and Moral Freedom

“Moral Enhancement and Moral Freedom: A Critical Analysis”

©John Danaher (Reprinted with Permission) 

John Danaher is currently an academic and senior lecturer at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway where he teaches in the School of Law.

He is the author of the extraordinarily erudite blog “Philosophical Disquisitions,” from which this essay is taken, and a new book Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work[image error] (Harvard University Press, 2019.)

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The debate about moral neuroenhancement has taken off in the past decade. Although the term admits of several definitions, the debate primarily focuses on the ways in which human enhancement technologies could be used to ensure greater moral conformity, i.e. the conformity of human behaviour with moral norms. Imagine you have just witnessed a road rage incident. An irate driver, stuck in a traffic jam, jumped out of his car and proceeded to abuse the driver in the car behind him. We could all agree that this contravenes a moral norm. And we may well agree that the proximate cause of his outburst was a particular pattern of activity in the rage circuit of his brain. What if we could intervene in that circuit and prevent him from abusing his fellow motorists? Should we do it?

Proponents of moral neuroenhancement think we should — though they typically focus on much higher stakes scenarios. A popular criticism of their project has emerged. This criticism holds that trying to ensure moral conformity comes at the price of moral freedom. If our brains are prodded, poked and tweaked so that we never do the wrong thing, then we lose the ‘freedom to fall’ — i.e. the freedom to do evil. That would be a great shame. The freedom to do the wrong thing is, in itself, an important human value. We would lose it in the pursuit of greater moral conformity.

I find this line of argument intriguing — not least because it shares so much with the arguments made by theists in response to the infamous problem of evil. In this post, I want to look at Michael Hauskeller’s analysis and defence of this ‘freedom to fall’ objection. I base my discussion on two of his papers. The first was published a few years ago in The Philosophers’ Magazine under the title ‘The Little Alex Problem’; the second is due to be published in the Cambridge Quarterly Review of Healthcare Ethics under the title ‘Is it desirable to be able to do the undesirable?‘. The second paper is largely an expanded and more up to date version of the first. It presents very similar arguments. Although I read it before writing this post, I’ll still base most of my comments on the first paper (which I read more carefully).

I’ll break the remainder of the discussion down into four sections. First, I’ll introduce Hauskeller’s formulation of the freedom to fall objection. Second, I’ll talk about the value of freedom, drawing in particular on lessons from the theism-atheism debate. Third, I’ll ask the question: would moral neuroenhancement really undermine our freedom to fall? And fourth, I’ll examine Hauskeller’s retreat to a quasi-political account of freedom in his defence of the objection. I’ll explain why I’m less persuaded by this retreat than he appears to be.

1. The Freedom to Fall and the Little Alex Problem

Hauskeller uses a story to illustrate the freedom to fall objection. The story is fictional. It comes from Anthony Burgess’s (in)famous novel A Clockwork Orange. The novel tells us the story of “Little” Alex, a young man prone to exuberant acts of ultraviolence. Captured by the authorities, Alex undergoes a form of aversion therapy. He is given medication that makes him feel nauseous and then repeatedly exposed to violent imagery. His eyes are held open in order to force him to view the imagery (a still from the film version provides the opening image to this post). The therapy works. Once he leaves captivity, he still feels violent urges but these are quickly accompanied by feelings of nausea. As a result, he no longer acts out in violent ways. He has achieved moral conformity through a form of moral enhancement.

The novel takes an ambivalent attitude towards this conformity. One of the characters (a prison chaplain) suggests that in order to be truly good, Alex would have to choose to do the good. But due to the aversion therapy, this choice is taken away from him. The induced nausea effectively compels him to do the good. Indeed, the chaplain goes further and suggests that Alex’s induced goodness is not really good at all. It is better if a person can choose to do the bad than be forced to do the good. This is what Hauskeller calls the ‘Little Alex’ problem. He describes it like this:

This is what I call the “Little Alex” problem… it invites us to share a certain moral intuition (namely that it is in some unspecified way bad or wrong or inhuman to force people into goodness) and thus to accept the ensuing paradox that under certain conditions the bad is better than the good — because it is not only suggested that it is wrong to force people to be good (which is fairly uncontroversial) but also that the resulting goodness is somehow tainted and devaluated by the way it has been produced.  (Hauskeller 2013, 75)

To put the argument in more formal terms, we could say the following:

(1) It is morally better, all things considered, to have the freedom to do the bad (and actually act on that freedom) than to be forced to do the good.


(2) Moral neuroenhancement takes away the freedom to do the bad.


(3) Therefore, moral neuroenhancement is, in some sense, a morally inferior way of ensuring moral conformity.

This formulation is far from being logically watertight, but I think it captures the gist of the freedom to fall objection. Let’s now consider the first two premises in some detail.

2. Is it Good to be Free to do Evil?

The first premise of the argument makes a contentious value claim. It states that the freedom to do bad is such an important good that a world without it is worse than a world with it. In his 2013 article LINK, Hauskeller suggests that the proponent of premise one must accept something like the following value hierarchy:

Best World: A world in which we are free to do bad but choose to do good (i.e. there is both moral conformity and moral freedom)

2nd Best World: A world in which we are free to do bad and (sometimes) choose to do bad (i.e. there is moral freedom but not, necessarily, moral conformity)

3rd Best World: A world in which we always do good but are not free to do bad (i.e. there is moral conformity but no moral freedom)

Worst World: A world in which we are not free and do bad (i.e. there is neither moral conformity nor moral freedom).

In his more recent paper, Hauskeller proposes a similar but more complex hierarchy featuring 6 different levels (the two extra levels capture differences between ‘sometimes’ and ‘always’ doing good/bad). In that paper he notes that although the proponent of the ‘freedom to fall’ argument must place a world in which there is moral freedom and some bad above a world in which there is no moral freedom, there is no watertight argument in favour of this hierarchy of value. It is really a matter of moral intuitions and weighing competing values.

This seems right to me and is one place where proponents of the ‘freedom to fall’ argument can learn from the debate about the problem of evil. As is well-known, the problem of evil is the most famous atheological argument. It claims that the existence of evil is incompatible (in varying degrees) with the existence of a perfectly good god. Theists have responded to this argument in a variety of ways. One of the most popular is to promote the so-called ‘free will’ theodicy. This is an argument claiming that moral freedom is a great good and that it is not possible for God to create a world in which there is both moral freedom and no evil. In other words, it promotes a similar value hierarchy to that suggested (but not defended) by Hauskeller.

There has been much back-and-forth between theists and atheists as to whether moral freedom is such a great good and whether it requires the existence of evil. Many of the points that have been made in that debate would seem to apply equally well here. I will mention just two.

First, I have always found myself attracted to a line of argument mooted by Derk Pereboom and Steve Maitzen. This may be because I and something of a free will sceptic. Pereboom and Maitzen argue that in many cases of moral evaluation, the freedom to do bad is a morally weightless consideration, not just a morally outweighed one. In other words, when we evaluate a violent criminal who has just savagely murdered ten people, we don’t think that the fact that he murdered them freely speaks in his favour. His act is very bad, pure and simple; it is not slightly good and very bad. Admittedly, this isn’t much of an argument. It is an appeal to the intuitive judgments we exercise when assessing another’s moral conduct. Proponents of moral freedom can respond with their own intuitive judgments. One way they might do this is by pointing to cases of positive moral responsibility and note how in those cases we tend to think it does speak in someone’s favour if they acted freely. Indeed, the Little Alex case is possibly one such case. The only thing I would say about that is that it highlights a curious asymmetry in the moral value of freedom: it’s good when you do good, but weightless when you do bad. Either way these considerations are much less persuasive if you don’t think there is any meaningful reconciliation of freedom with moral responsibility.

Second, and far more importantly, non-theists have pointed out that in many contexts the freedom to do bad is massively outweighed by the value of moral conformity. Take the case of a remorseless serial killer who tortures and rapes young innocent children. Are we to suppose that allowing the serial killer the freedom to do bad outweighs the child’s right to live a torture and rape-free life? Is the world in which the serial killer freely does bad really a better world than the one in which he is forced to conform? It seems pretty unlikely. This example highlights the fact that moral freedom might be valuable in a limited range of cases (and if it is exercised in a good way) but that in certain ‘high stakes’ cases its value is outweighed by the need for moral conformity. It is open to the defender of moral enhancement to argue that its application should be limited to those ‘high stakes’ cases. Then it will all depend on how high the stakes are and whether moral enhancement can be applied selectively to address those high stakes cases.* According to some proponents of moral enhancement — e.g. Savulescu and Persson — the stakes are very high indeed. They are unlikely to be persuaded by premise one.

(For more on the problems with viewing moral freedom as a great good, I highly recommend Wes Morriston’s paper ‘What’s so good about moral freedom?’)

3. Is Moral Enhancement Really Incompatible with Moral Freedom?

Even if we granted premise (1), we might not grant premise (2). This premise claims that moral freedom is incompatible with moral enhancement, i.e. that if we ensure someone’s conformity through a technological intervention, then they are not really free. But how persuasive is this? It all seems to depend on what you understand by moral freedom and how you think moral enhancement works.

Suppose we take moral freedom to be equivalent to the concept of ‘free will’ (I’ll consider an alternative possibility in the next section). There are many different accounts of free will. Libertarian accounts of free will hold that freedom is only possible in an indeterministic world. The ‘will’ is something that sits outside the causal order of the universe and only jumps into that causal order when the agent makes a decision to act. It’s difficult for me to see how a proponent of libertarian free will could accept premise (2). All forms of moral enhancement will, presumably, operate on the causal networks inside the human brain. If the will is something that sits outside those causal network then it’s not clear how it is compromised by interventions into them. That said, I accept that there are some sophisticated emergentist and event-causal theories of libertarianism that might be disturbed by neural interventions of this sort, but I think their reasons for disturbance can be addressed by considering other theories of free will.

Other theories of free will are compatibilist in nature. They claim that free will is something situated within the causal order. An agent acts freely when their actions are produced by the right kind of mental-neural mechanism. There are many different accounts of compatibilist free will. I have discussed most of them on this blog before. The leading ones argue that an agent can act freely if they are reasons-responsive and/or their actions are consistent with their character and higher order preferences.

Moral enhancement could undermine compatibilist free will so understood. But it all depends on the modality of the enhancement. In the Little Alex case, the aversion therapy causes him to feel nauseous whenever he entertains violent thoughts. This is inconsistent with some versions of compatibilism. From the description, it seems like Alex’s character is still a violent one and that he has higher-order preferences for doing bad things, it’s just that he is unable to express those aspects of his character thanks to his nausea. He is blocked from acting freely.

But aversion therapy is hardly the only game in town. Other modalities of moral enhancement might work by altering the agent’s desires and preferences such that they no longer wish to act violently. Still others might work by changing their ability to appreciate and process different reasons for action, thus improving their reasons-responsivity. Although not written with moral enhancement in mind, Maslen, Pugh and Savulescu’s paper on using DBS to treat Anorexia Nervosa highlights some of these possibilities. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that moral enhancement would work perfectly or would remove an agent’s ability to think about doing bad things. It might fail to ensure moral conformity in some instances and people might continue to entertain horrendous thoughts.

Finally, what if an agent freely chooses to undergo moral enhancement? In that case we might argue that he has also freely chosen all his resulting good behaviour. He has pre-committed to being good. To use the classic example, he is like Odysseseus tying himself to the mast of his ship: he is limiting his agency at future moments in time through an act of freedom at an earlier moment in time. The modality of enhancement doesn’t matter then: all that matters is that he isn’t forced into undergoing the enhancement. Hauskeller acknowledges this possibility in his papers, but goes on to suggest that they may involve a dubious form of self-enslavement. This is where the politics of freedom come into play.

4. Freedom, Domination and Self-Enslavement

Another way to defend premise (2) is to analyse it in terms of political, not metaphysical, freedom. Metaphysical freedom is about our moral agency and responsibility; political freedom is about how others relate to and express their wills over us. It is about protecting us from others so as to meet the conditions for a just and mutually prosperous political community — one that respects the fundamental moral equality of its citizens. Consequently, accounts of political freedom not so much about free will as they are about ensuring that people can develop and exercise their agency without being manipulated and dominated by others. So, for example, I might argue that I am politically unfree in exercising my vote, if the law requires me to vote for a particular party. In that case, others have chosen for me. Their will dominates my own. I am subordinate to them.

This political version of freedom provides a promising basis for a defence of premise (2). One problem with moral enhancement technology might be that others decide whether it should be used on us. Our parents could genetically manipulate us to be kinder. Our governments may insist on us taking a course of moral enhancement drugs to become safer citizens. It may become a conditional requirement for accessing key legal rights and entitlements, and so on. The morally enhanced person would be in a politically different position from the naturally good person:

The most conspicuous difference between the naturally good and the morally enhanced is that the latter have been engineered to fell, think, and behave in a certain way. Someone else has decided for them what is evil and what is not, and has programmed them accordingly, which undermines, as Jurgen Habermas has argued, their ability to see themselves as moral agents, equal to those who decided how they were going to be. The point is not so much that they have lost control over how they feel and think (perhaps we never had such control in the first place), but rather that others have gained control over them. They have changed…from something that has grown and come to be by nature, unpredictably, uncontrolled, and behind, as it were a veil of ignorance, into something that has been deliberately made, even manufactured, that is, a product. (Hauskeller 2013, 78-79)

There is a lot going on in this quote. But the gist of it is clear. The problem with moral enhancement is that it creates an asymmetry of power. We are supposed to live together as moral equals: no one individual is supposed to be morally superior to another. But moral enhancement allows one individual or group to shape the moral will of another.

But what if there is no other individual or group making these decisions for you? What if you voluntarily undergo moral enhancement? Hauskeller argues that the same inequality of power argument applies to this case:

…we can easily extend [this] argument to cases where we voluntarily choose to submit to a moral enhancement procedure whose ultimate purpose is to deprive us of the very possibility to do wrong. The asymmetry would then persist between our present (and future) self and our previous self, which to our present self is another. The event would be similar to the case where someone voluntarily signed a contract that made them a slave for the rest of their lives.

(Hauskeller 2013, 79)

What should we make of this argument? It privileges the belief that freedom from the yoke of others is what matters to moral agency — that we should be left to grow and develop into moral agents through natural processes — not manipulated and manufactured into moral saints (even by ourselves). But I’m not sure we should be swayed by these claims. Three points seem apposite to me.

First, a general problem I have with this line of argument is the assumption that it is better to be free from the manipulation of others than it is to be free from other sorts of manipulation. The reality is that our moral behaviour is the product of many things. Our genetic endowment, our social context, our education, our environment, various contingent accidents of personal history, all play an important part. It’s not obvious to me why we should single out causal influences that originate in other agents for particular ire. In other words, the presumption that it is better that we naturally grow and develop into moral agents seems problematic to me. Our natural development and growth — assuming there is a coherent concept of the ‘natural’ at play here — is not intrinsically good. It’s not something that necessarily worth saving. At the very least, the benefits of moral conformity would weigh (perhaps heavily) against the desirability of natural growth and development.

Second, I’m not sure I buy the claim that induced moral enhancement involves problematic asymmetries of power. If anything, I think it could be used to correct for asymmetries of power. To some extent this will depend on the modality of enhancement and the benefits it reaps, but the point can be made more generally. Think about it this way: The entire educational system rests upon asymmetries of power, particularly the education of young children. This education often involves a moral component. Do we rail against it because of the asymmetries of power? Not really. Indeed, we often deem education necessary because it ultimately helps to correct for asymmetries of power. It allows children to develop the capacities they need to become the true moral equals of others. If moral enhancement works by enhancing our capacities to appreciate and respond to moral reasons, or by altering our desires to do good, then it might help to build the capacities that correct for asymmetries of power. It might actually enable effective self control and autonomy. In other words, I’m not convinced that being moral enhanced means that you are problematically enslaved or beholden to the will of others.

Third, I’m not convinced that self-enslavement is a bad thing. Every decision we make enslaves our future selves in at least some minimal sense. Choosing to go to school in one place, rather than another, enslaves the choices your future self can make about what courses to take and career paths to pursue. Is that a bad thing? If the choices ultimately shape our desires — if they result in us really wanting to pursue a particular future course of action — then I’m not sure that I see the problem. Steve Petersen has made this point in relation to robot slaves. If a robot is designed in such a way that it really really wants to do the ironing, then maybe getting it to do the ironing is not so bad from the perspective of the robot (this last bit is important — it might be bad from a societal perspective because of how it affects or expresses our attitudes towards other, but that’s not relevant here since we are talking about self-enslavement). Likewise, if by choosing to undergo moral enhancement at one point in time, I turn myself into someone who really really want to do morally good things at a later moment in time, I’m not convinced that I’m living some inferior life as a result.

That’s all I have to say on the topic for now.

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* Though note: if the stakes are sufficiently high, non-selective application might also be plausibly justified.

This work by John Danaher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. CC Licence

Moral Enhancement

[image error]A recent comment on my piece, “The Future of Religion,” offered a few good objections to my transhumanism. I’d like to offer some brief replies to those objections.

First, Dr. Arnold stated, “One of your assumptions seems to be that enhancing human well-being will be the fundamental driver of our technologies.” This may be true but isn’t what I’m saying.

For me, it’s the other way around. I’m saying that using future technologies have the potential to greatly enhance human (and posthuman) well-being. It is easy to see how technology does this today by considering sanitation, clean water, vaccines, labor-saving devices, antibiotics, dentistry, comfortable furniture to sit and sleep on, well-designed shelter, heating and cooling, etc. Just consider living in the middle ages when the life expectancy was about 25 years and, for the most part, people died miserably. So we can imagine that future technologies will enhance human flourishing even more.

Now I do agree with the professor that many technologies: 1) benefit only those who can afford them (that was true in the past, is true now, and may well be true in the future); 2) are designed only for profit (and thus may or may not benefit people); and 3) can have disastrous results (nuclear weapons are an obvious example).

Dr. Arnold also says that “technologies will be developed with broader concerns of human well-being as the fundamental driving force.” I suppose some will and some won’t and some will be a mixed bag. For example, medical research is often driven both by profit and the researcher’s sincere desire to do good. Such issues raise economic considerations about the extent to which, for example, the supposed “invisible hand” (pursuing your self-interest in the market helps others) is operative.

So the extent to which the common good motivates support for science and technology probably depends on the cultural milieu. So in the Scandinavian countries, there is a better chance that concerns about the common good motivate scientific research and economic policy than in the USA where those in power (especially Republicans) increasingly don’t care about the common good. (And when government does try to help its citizens, say by passing an “affordable care act,” private interests and the political parties they control work to undermine the promotion of the general welfare.)

So I agree when Dr. Arnold says, “I see little reason to be particularly hopeful that we will manage this [develop technologies aimed at increasing human flourishing unless] … we will have either (a) effective democratic control over technology developments that bend them to universalizable (or general) human needs, or (b) an enlightened core of leaders who develop them in these ways.” This insight reinforces my view that some countries are better than others in promoting the flourishing of their citizens.

I also agree with Dr. Arnold that capitalism creates desires for things we don’t need, “Our big tech companies, more than anything, seem driven by figuring out ways to market stuff to us that we don’t need.” (I actually think the issue with tech companies relates more to the data they collect which can be used for good or ill.) Again all this raises complicated issues about capitalism, the wealth inequality it creates, the destruction of the environment it encourages, and more.

But the market is a human creation so this again leads me back to the fundamental problem—humans have reptilian brains forged in the Pleistocene. We are so deeply flawed morally (territoriality, aggression, dominance hierarchies, etc) and intellectually (thousands of brain bugs) that in order to avoid being destroyed (climate change, nuclear war, environmental degradation, pandemics, asteroids, etc.) we need a radical upgrade. And technologies like genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, neural implants, and nanotechnology hold the promise of, for the first time in human history, upgrading our programming.

Naturally, there are obvious risks involved and no risk-free way to proceed. I’m just not sure whether we can slowly become more educated and improve culture fast enough to survive. But perhaps using technology to expedite the process of reprogramming ourselves will lead to our extinction too. I just don’t know.

I’m not even sure where the weight of reason lies on this issue or if we now possess the intellectual wherewithal to know how best to proceed. Maybe reason is mostly “the slave of the passions,” because of our evolutionary history.

What I know is this—only intellectual and moral virtue will save us.

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Note: I’ll try to do more research on this topic soon. For more see[image error]

Unfit for the Future: The Need For Moral Enhancement (Uehiro Series In Practical Ethics)[image error] (Oxford University Press)

[image error][image error]

The Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate[image error]

(Oxford University Press)[image error]

[image error][image error]

Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives[image error] (W. W. Norton & Company)

” Reply to commentators on Unfit for the Future” – Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu

“The Moral Agency Argument Against Moral Bioenhancement” – Massimo Reichlin





“Is It Desirable to Be Able to Do the Undesirable? Moral Bioenhancement and the Little Alex Problem” – Michael Hauskeller






Why is It Hard for Us to Accept Moral Bioenhancement?: Comment on Savulescu’s Argument – Masahiro Morioka




“Would Moral Enhancement Limit Freedom?” – Carissa Veliz

“With impeachment, America’s epistemic crisis has arrived”

David Roberts has penned perhaps the most insightful piece about the current political crisis in America I’ve read recently, “With impeachment, America’s epistemic crisis has arrived.” It follows up his 2017 piece on America’s epistemic crisis about which I wrote previously. As Roberts writes:

That crisis involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality. We have sorted ourselves into polarized factions living in different worlds, not just of values, but of facts.

In his previous piece, he wondered what would happen if Mueller offered “clear, incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt” but Republicans prevented their supporters from discovering this truth and thus “the truth was revealed but it had no power, no effect at all …”

Of course, while Mueller’s report was extraordinarily damning it was Bill Barr’s efforts allowed the administration to dismiss it without consequences. But with impeachment, the questions becomes “whether the right can shield itself from plain facts in plain sight.” [Sure they can because the techniques of political manipulation are so powerful and its targets so insulated.]

The difference between the Mueller report and the impeachment inquiry is that:

the story behind the impeachment case is relatively simple: Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but Trump withheld it as part of a sustained campaign to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation of his political rival Joe Biden’s family. There’s a record of him doing it. There are multiple credible witnesses to the phone call and larger campaign. Several Trump allies and administration officials have admitted to it on camera. Trump himself admitted to it on the White House lawn.

So its both obvious Trump is guilty and that his enablers don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.” Yet, it’s also obvious there is something wrong.

Holding US foreign policy hostage to personal political favors is straightforward abuse of power, precisely the sort of thing the Founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution. It’s a clearly impeachable pattern of action, documented and attested to by multiple witnesses, confessed to multiple times, in violation of longstanding political precedent and a moral consensus that was, until 2016, universal.

So the Republicans’ messaging machine is now asking itself how to respond to criminal, impeachable, traitorous action in plain sight. In essence, they want to know if

the machine successfully hold the right-wing base in an alternate reality and throw up enough fog to keep the general public at bay for long enough to get through the next election? It seems challenging, given the facts on record, but this is just the sort of challenge the machine was built for.

But how did it all come to this?

1) The rise of tribal epistemology

Roberts has written previously about “Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology.” Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with questions about the nature and limits of knowledge, how we come to know things, whether anything can be truly known, what justifies knowledge, what counts as evidence, how confident should we be about claims, etc.

For Roberts “tribal epistemology … is when tribalism comes to systematically subordinate epistemological principles.” He explains this idea but drawing an analogy “with tribal morality, which people are more familiar with. ” For example, the moral claim that torture is immoral is meant to apply cross-culturally or across tribes. But tribal morality subsumes moral principles. It’s ok for us to torture you but it’s wrong for you to torture us because we’re the good guys and you’re the bad guys.

In tribal epistemology, the interests of the tribe subsume impartial “epistemological principles, like standards of evidence, internal coherence, and defeasibility.” What’s good for the tribe determines what is true and members of our tribe are who we trust.  Needless to say, this undermines the idea of universal, objective, impartial truth.

So anyone who fails to agree with the tribe “marks themselves as an enemy of the tribe even if they had previously been members of the tribe [they are now called members of the deep state, never Trumpers, etc.] Since they have been rejected by the tribe anything they say can be discounted.

A decades-long effort on the right has resulted in a parallel set of institutions meant to encourage tribal epistemology. They mimic the form of mainstream media, think tanks, and the academy, but without the restraint of transpartisan principles. They are designed to advance the interests of the right, to tell stories and produce facts that support the tribe. That is the ultimate goal; the rhetoric and formalisms of critical thinking are retrofit around it.

How did all this come to be?

Talk radio and the birth of Fox News in the 1990s were turning points. They eventually expanded to create an entire, complete-unto-itself conservative information universe. It was capable of cranking out stories and facts (or “facts”) in support of the conservative cause 24 hours a day, steadily shaping the worldview of their white suburban audience around a forever war with The Libs, who are always just on the verge of destroying America.

As Roberts detailed in … “The caravan “invasion” and America’s epistemic crisis,”

… over time this led to a steady deterioration in fealty to norms, epistemological and otherwise, to the point that something like 30 percent of the country is now awash in a fantasia of conspiracy theories and just-so stories.

As journalist Alex Pareene wrote in a scathing 2017 piece, the propaganda machine that the right built to keep its base outraged grew out of control and swallowed the GOP. “They’re screwed,” Pareene wrote of conservatives, “because they and their predecessors engineered a perpetual misinformation machine, and then a bunch of people addicted to their product took over the government.”

At this point, anyone

with any power on the right is deep in the bubble, right up to the president himself, who spends a considerable portion of his time watching and tweeting about Fox News. There are no more moderates or responsible Republicans behind the curtain, keeping an eye on the difference between tribal tall tales and reality. Fox natives are running the show, including the federal government.

Trump himself stated tribal epistemology in its most basic form when he said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” If you’re one of us, you believe our stories.

2) Republicans need to maintain doubt and prevent consensus

And to maintain power all Republicans need to do is keep the partisan split in place, make sure that the facts of the case are unknown or misunderstood, in other words, make sure no consensus emerges. [After all, they’re all in on it and must protect each other. They act like the Catholic church protecting child molesters, or the police protecting bad cops. They can’t confess to being criminals are they might all go down.]

3) The right has hacked the cognitive biases of voters and reporters

The key here “is a strong tendency, especially among low-information, relatively disengaged voters (and political reporters), to view consensus as a signal of legitimacy. It’s an easy and appealing heuristic: If something is a good idea, it would have at least a few people from both sides supporting it.” To hack this tendency you make sure there is no consensus—not about biological evolution, climate change, anything.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has been very canny in recognizing this tendency and working it ruthlessly to his advantage. He realized before Obama ever set foot in office that if he could keep Republicans unified in opposition, refusing any cooperation on anything, he could make Obama appear “polarizing.” His great insight, as ruthlessly effective as it was morally bankrupt, was that he could unilaterally deny Obama the ability to be a uniter, a leader, or a deal maker. Through nothing but sheer obstinance, he could make politics into an endless, frustrating, fruitless shitshow, diminishing both parties in voters’ eyes.

Thus Republicans want the public to see the impeachment proceedings as just more partisan bickering.

Tribal epistemology is key to this. Republicans must render partisan not only judgments of right and wrong but judgments of what is and isn’t true or real. They must render facts themselves a matter of controversy that the media reports as a food fight and the public tunes out.

And Republicans have a huge advantage because of the effectiveness of their propaganda machine.

As a massive post-election study of online media from Harvard showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. “Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,” the researchers found. “On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.” … the right not only commands the highest rated cable news network and an army of supportive online media outlets, it is spending millions on Facebook, Tik-Tok, 4chan, 8chan, and God knows what other online swamps, targeting messages where their audiences are rather than futilely attempting to reach them through the Washington Post.

4) Impeachment is make or break time for America’s epistemic health

Roberts begins this section with these profound and chilling words:

As Putin and other modern autocrats have realized, in the modern media environment — a chaotic Wild West where traditional gatekeepers are in decline — it is not necessary for a repressive regime to construct its own coherent account of events. There are no broadly respected, nonpartisan referees left to hold it to account for consistency or accuracy. All it needs, to get away with whatever it wants, is for the information environment to be so polluted that no one can figure out what’s true and what isn’t, or what’s really going on.

The recipe is always the same: attack independent media outlets as partisan enemies of the regime and, by proxy, enemies of the people. At the same time, use the media under state control, along with an army of bots, trolls, and shitposters, to inject accusations, lies, and conspiracy theories into the public dialogue.

In an information fog filled with vexed uncertainty, people will either tune out, revert to their tribal affiliations, or both. They will seek a strong leader who offers simple certainties and a clear account of who is to blame for the chaos. Confusion and fear, not deception, are the ultimate goal.

That is precisely the kind of machine the US conservative movement has built: one designed to produce confusion and fear. Trump is its natural leader, the first Republican president to reflect the party’s contemporary core and character, and his impeachment is its ultimate test.

In this environment, the Democrats are tasked with defending

… clear evidence, painstakingly laid out in a Constitutionally prescribed process, communicated through mainstream news outlets. The facts are clearer than ever, but those institutions are weaker and social trust, which the right has been concertedly attacking for decades, is at a low ebb.

In opposition is a large but stable minority united by unquestioned loyalty to a tribal leader, dedicated to guerrilla information warfare unconstrained by conventional norms of accuracy or consistency, and motivated by an almost eschatological will to power.

If the latter triumphs, if it is able to muddy and distract enough to make impeachment just another Mueller, just more partisan white noise, we will cross a kind of rubicon … 

Moral consensus will have become impossible. Epistemological consensus will have become impossible. It will show that no amount of evidence is capable of bridging the partisan gap. The epistemic crisis, and its attendant political crisis, will be fully upon us.

Ultimately, communication, and with it survival as a polity, depends on a shared body of facts and assumptions about the world. For decades, the right has been sawing away at the threads that still connect it to mainstream institutions, procedures, and norms of conduct, to the point that it has created a hermetically sealed and impenetrable world of its own.

And, as Roberts concludes,

The machine was primed and waiting for someone like Trump. Now, with his erratic and indefensible conduct, he is accelerating the breach, pushing the right into ever-more cult-like behavior, principles laid aside one after another in service of power.

That is what a tribalist like Trump wants: for communication and compromise across tribal lines to become impossible, so that loyalty becomes the only measure and everything is reduced to pure struggle for dominance. If he makes it through impeachment unscathed, he and the right will have learned once and for all that facts and evidence have no hold on them. Both “sides” have free rein to choose the facts and evidence that suit them. Only power matters.

If the right’s epistemic break becomes final and irreparable, as impeachment threatens, then no matter what happens in the next election, American democracy is in for a long spell of trouble.

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Brief Response – As I’ve said many times on this blog, once reason and evidence no longer constrain, there is nothing left but power to adjudicate disputes. As Will Durant taught me long ago, civilization is a high achievement but rests on very thin threads. It doesn’t take much for our reptilian brains to unweave those threads and descend into madness. War and genocide are always closer than we think.

I hope I’m wrong.

The Future of Religion

History is littered with dead gods. The Greek and Roman gods, and thousands of others have perished, yet Allah, Yahweh and a few more still survive. But will belief in these remaining gods endure? It will not. Our descendants will be too advanced to share such primitive beliefs.

If we survive and science progresses, we will manipulate the genome, rearrange the atom, and augment the mind. When science defeats suffering and death, religion as we know it will die—religion will have lost its raison d’être. For who will pray for heavenly cures, when the cures already exist on earth? Who will die hoping for a reprieve from the gods, when science offers immortality? With the defeat of death, science and technology will finally have triumphed over ignorance and superstition. Our descendants will know that they are stronger than imaginary gods.

As they continue to evolve, our post-human progeny will become increasingly godlike, eventually achieving superintellgence, either by modifying their brains or interfacing with computers. From our perspective, our offspring will come to resemble us about as much as we do the amino acids from which we sprang.

As our descendants distance themselves from their past, they will lose interest in the gods. Today the gods are impotent, tomorrow they’ll be irrelevant. You may doubt this. But do you really think that in a thousand or a million years your descendants, traveling through an infinite cosmos with augmented minds, will find their answers in ancient scriptures? Do you really think that powerful superintelligence will cling to the primitive mythologies that once satisfied ape-like brains? Only the credulous can believe such things. In the future, the gods will exist … only if we become them.

Still, the future is unknown. Asteroids, nuclear war, environmental degradation, climate change or deadly microbes may destroy us. Perhaps the machine intelligence we create will replace us, or we might survive but create a dystopia. None of these prospects is inviting, but they all entail the end of religion.

Alternatively, in order to maintain the status quo, some combination of neo-Luddites, political conservatives or religious fanatics could destroy past knowledge, persecute the scientists, censor novel ideas, and usher in a new Dark Ages of minimal technology, political repression, and antiquated religion. But even if they were successful, this would not save them or their archaic ideas. For the killer asteroids, antibiotic-resistant bacteria or some other threat will inevitably emerge. And when it does only science and technology will save us—prayer or ideology will not help. Either we evolve, or we will die.

But must we relinquish religious beliefs now, before science defeats death before we become godlike? We may eventually outgrow religious beliefs, but why not allow them to comfort those who still need them? If parents lose a child or children lose a parent, what’s wrong with telling them they’ll be reunited in heaven? I am sympathetic with noble lies; if a belief helps you and doesn’t hurt others, it is hard to gainsay.

Still, religious consolation has a price. Religion, and conservative philosophies in general, typically opposes intellectual, moral, and technological progress. Religion has fought against free speech, democracy, the eradication of slavery, sex education, reproductive technologies, stem cell research, women’s and civil rights, and the advancement of science. It has been aligned with inquisitions, war, human sacrifice, torture, despotism, child abuse, intolerance, fascism, and genocide. It displays a fondness for the supernatural, authoritarian, misogynistic, hierarchical, anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-progressive. (Consider just the role that evangelical Christians played in the recent American elections.) As any honest student of history knows, religion has caused and continues to cause, an untold amount of misery.

One could even argue that religious beliefs are the most damaging beliefs possible. Consider that Christianity rose to power as the Roman Empire declined, resulting in the marginalization of the Greek science that the Romans had inherited. If the scientific achievements of the Greeks had been built upon throughout the Middle Ages, if science had continued to advance expeditiously for those thousand years, we might live in an unimaginably better world today. Who knows how many diseases would be cured by now, or how advanced our intellectual and moral natures might be? Maybe we would have already overcome death. Maybe we still die today because of religion.

The cultural domination by Christianity during the Middle Ages resulted in some of the worst conditions known in human history. Much the same could be said of religious hegemony in other times and places. And if religion causes less harm in some places today than it once did, that’s because it has less power than it used to. Were that power regained, the result would surely be disastrous, as anyone who studies history or lives in a theocracy will confirm. Put simply, religion is an enemy of the future. If we are to survive and progress, ideas compatible with brains forged in the Pleistocene must be replaced. We shouldn’t direct our gaze toward the heavens but to the earth, where the real work of making a better world takes place.

Of course, religion is not the only anti-progressive force in the world—there are other enemies of the future. Some oppose progressive ideas even if they are advanced by the religious. Consider how political conservatives, virtually all of whom profess to be Christians, denounced Pope Francis’ role in re-establishing Cuban-American relations, his criticism of unfettered capitalism and vast income inequality, his warnings about the dangers of climate change, and his recent call for a  nuclear-free world. Plutocrats and despots hate change too, especially if it affects their wallets. The beneficiaries of the status quo don’t want a better world—they like the one they have.

How then do we make a better world? What will guide us in this quest? For there to be a worthwhile future we need at least three things: 1) knowledge of ourselves and the world; 2) ethical values that promote the flourishing of conscious beings; and 3) a narrative to give life meaning. But where do we find such things?

Knowledge comes from science, which is the only cognitive authority in the world today. Science explains forces that were once dark and mysterious; it reveals the vast immensity, history, and future of the cosmos; it explains our evolutionary origins and the legacy that leaves upon our thoughts and behaviors, and it tells us how the world works independently of ideology or prejudice. And applied science is technology, which gives us the power to overcome limitations and make a better future. If you want to see miracles, don’t go to Lourdes, look inside your cell phone.

Ethical values do not depend on religion, as can easily be demonstrated, and the idea that people can’t be moral without religion is false, no matter how many think otherwise. Instead, ethical values and behaviors arose in our evolutionary history, where they may also find their justification. Yes, some moral-like behaviors sometimes favored by evolution have also been prescribed by religion—cooperation and altruism come to mind—but the justification of these values is biological and social, not supernatural. We are moral to the extent that we are because, for the most part, it’s in our self-interest; we all do better if we all cooperate. And everyone can endorse values that aid our survival and flourishing—even our godlike descendants.

Finally, to truly give our lives meaning, we need scientific narratives to replace outdated religious ones. We need stories that appeal to the educated, not ones based on superstition, mythology or obscurantism. With the death of religion imminent, we need to look elsewhere for meaning and purpose.

And one such narrative already exists. It is the story of cosmic evolution, of the cosmos becoming self-conscious. Nature gave birth to consciousness, and consciousness comes to know nature. Through this interaction of the universe and consciousness reality comes to know itself. Surely this story is profound enough to satisfy our metaphysical longings. And, it has an added benefit over supernatural accounts of being based in a scientific account of the world.

What is our role in this story? We are the protagonists of the evolutionary epic, and determining its course should be our destiny. We ought to willingly embrace our role as agents of evolutionary change, helping evolution to realize new possibilities. We are not an end, but a beginning. We are as links in a chain leading upward to higher forms of being and consciousness. This is our hope, this gives our lives meaning.

I don’t know if we can make a better future, but I know that no help will come from the gods. Turning our backs on them is the first step on our journey. It is time to put the childhood of the species behind.

Summary of The Philosphy of Epicurus

Epicurus

© Darrell Arnold Ph.D.– (Reprinted with Permission)

https://darrellarnold.com/2019/08/13/...

Both Ancient India and Ancient Rome knew various types of hedonists. In India, Carvaka proposed that people are and should be motivated by their desire for pleasure. Proponents of Carvaka did recognize that pleasure is often accompanied by pain. However, as cynics about knowledge and the future, they did not develop a system encouraging individuals to forgo short-term pleasure for greater long-term pleasure but instead argued that the pleasure of intense short-term pain was worth the pain that followed it and they recommended devoting one’s life to its pursuit. The later counterpart to the Carvaka in Ancient Greece, the Cyrenaics, similarly recommended a life in search of intense short-term pleasure. (A contemporary equivalent might be seen in the philosophy of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.)

The better known philosophical version of Hedonism, however, was developed by Epicurus. Epicureanism, as the philosophy became known, advocated forgoing many short-term pleasures and instead focusing on the overall pleasure and pain distribution over a lifetime. More pleasurable than a life devoted to short-term pleasure was one in which one moderated one’s desires.

Epicurus distinguished between “moving” pleasures and “static” pleasures. Moving pleasures occur when we are in the process of satisfying our desires, like the satisfaction we feel when scratching an itch. These are what people usually are referring to when speaking of pleasures. However, there is also the pleasure after the gratification has been achieved, the satisfaction after the scratch or after eating. Epicurus argues that it is these latter, not the former pleasures that are the most satisfying. We should thus not seek the moving pleasures but rather ratchet down our desires so that we are more often in the state of static pleasure, feeling no itch to be scratched, metaphorically speaking.

There are [also] natural desires — like the desire for food — that bring us great satisfaction and that it is necessary for us to satisfy. These, Epicurus finds, we should gratify, but not overindulge. Other desires are natural but not necessary, such as the desire for luxury goods. Epicurus thinks we are best served by not cultivating these. Though we might enjoy a luxurious desire now and again — like a luxurious meal — we are to be careful not to wake a striving for such desires. Vain desires, such as the desire for power, control, or great wealth should be forgone completely. As Epicurus states about his understanding of wealth: “If you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don’t give him more money; rather, reduce his desires.”

The enjoyment of natural and simple pleasure is greater than all the riches in the world. Epicurus also thinks that virtues are needed for a happy life, as are justice and friendship. All such goods are ultimately instrumental, though. They are valuable insofar as they contribute to a happy or pleasurable life.

Ataraxia, or the tranquil life, was indeed the goal of Epicurus, and it required the [above] mentioned goods. It also however required overcoming three base fears: fear of the gods, fear of the afterlife, and fear of death. While the Epicureans believed in gods, they thought that the study of metaphysics should lead one to understand that the ancient Greek view of the gods was incorrect. A correct understanding of metaphysics would show that though the gods exist, they have nothing to do with human affairs. They are thus not to be feared.

Epicureans took a similar rationalistic approach to the study of the issues behind the fear of the afterlife and the related fear of death. Study should lead us, Epicureans thought, to conclude that there is no good reason to fear the afterlife or death. At death, since we cease to be, there will be no pain. Therefore death is not to be feared. Study also shows that there are no good reasons for the belief in the afterlife. Though many of the specific arguments of the Epicureans will no longer resonate with us, many will still find a reason to respect their view that a life of rational reflection will lead to the overcoming of superstition about metaphysics and will thus help individuals avoid the pains associated with such superstition.

Epicurus’s quest for the life of tranquility in community with like-minded people who were committed to simple lives of study and reflection did not just remain a philosophical ideal. In 306 BCE, when Epicurus was 35, he purchased a house on the outskirts of Athens and allowed people to live there. The space, which became known as the Garden, allowed women and slaves, and it became the first of many such communities throughout the Mediterranean. People in these communities shared in the communal work and spent time by reading, contemplation, and writing. They were in some sense like religious communities, but lacking traditional views of the gods and advocating simple lives of rational reflection in friendship and community.

Given the focus on the life of pleasure, though, as well as the rejection of traditional religion and metaphysics and the admittance of both men and women in such communities, these communities came to be viewed as quite threatening to early Christians. Early on there were consequently rumors of these communities as dens of decadence, depicting those within them as pursuing luxuries, engaging in orgies, and spreading dangerous ideas and a dangerous form of life. The Christians did respect some of the elements of the communal life however and various communes later became Christian monasteries.

____________________________________________________________

For more see the recent article “How To Be An Epicurean.”

Summary: The Philosphy of Epicurus

Epicurus

© Darrell Arnold Ph.D.– (Reprinted with Permission)

https://darrellarnold.com/2019/08/13/...

Both Ancient India and Ancient Rome knew various types of hedonists. In India, Carvaka proposed that people are and should be motivated by their desire for pleasure. Proponents of Carvaka did recognize that pleasure is often accompanied by pain. However, as cynics about knowledge and the future, they did not develop a system encouraging individuals to forgo short-term pleasure for greater long-term pleasure but instead argued that the pleasure of intense short-term pain was worth the pain that followed it and they recommended devoting one’s life to its pursuit. The later counterpart to the Carvaka in Ancient Greece, the Cyrenaics, similarly recommended a life in search of intense short-term pleasure. (A contemporary equivalent might be seen in the philosophy of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.)

The better known philosophical version of Hedonism, however, was developed by Epicurus. Epicureanism, as the philosophy became known, advocated forgoing many short-term pleasures and instead focusing on the overall pleasure and pain distribution over a lifetime. More pleasurable than a life devoted to short-term pleasure was one in which one moderated one’s desires. Epicurus distinguished between “moving” pleasures and “static” pleasures. Moving pleasures occur when we are in the process of satisfying our desires, like the satisfaction we feel when scratching an itch. These are what people usually are referring to when speaking of pleasures. However, there is also the pleasure after the gratification has been achieved, the satisfaction after the scratch or after eating. Epicurus argues that it is these latter, not the former pleasures that are the most satisfying. We should thus not seek the moving pleasures but rather ratchet down our desires so that we are more often in the state of static pleasure, feeling no itch to be scratched, metaphorically speaking.

There are natural desires — like the desire for food — that bring us great satisfaction and that it is necessary for us to satisfy. These, Epicurus finds, we should gratify, but not overindulge. Other desires are natural but not necessary, such as the desire for luxury goods. Epicurus thinks we are best served by not cultivating these. Though we might enjoy a luxurious desire now and again — like a luxurious meal — we are to be careful not to wake a striving for such desires. Vain desires, such as the desire for power, control, or great wealth should be forgone completely. As Epicurus states about his understanding of wealth: “If you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don’t give him more money; rather, reduce his desires.” The enjoyment of natural and simple pleasure is greater than all the riches in the world. Epicurus also thinks that virtues are needed for a happy life, as are justice and friendship. All such goods are ultimately instrumental, though. They are valuable insofar as they contribute to a happy or pleasurable life.

Ataraxia, or the tranquil life, was indeed the goal of Epicurus, and it required the mentioned goods. It also however required overcoming three base fears: fear of the gods, fear of the afterlife, and fear of death. While the Epicureans believed in gods, they thought that the study of metaphysics should lead one to understand that the ancient Greek view of the gods was incorrect. A correct understanding of metaphysics would show that though the gods exist, they have nothing to do with human affairs. They are thus not to be feared. Epicureans took a similar rationalistic approach to the study of the issues behind the fear of the afterlife and the related fear of death. Study should lead us, Epicureans thought, to conclude that there is no good reason to fear the afterlife or death. At death, since we cease to be, there will be no pain. Therefore death is not to be feared. Study also shows that there are no good reasons for the belief in the afterlife. Though many of the specific arguments of the Epicureans will no longer resonate with us, many will still find a reason to respect their view that a life of rational reflection will lead to the overcoming of superstition about metaphysics and will thus help individuals avoid the pains associated with such superstition.

Epicurus’s quest for the life of tranquility in community with like-minded people who were committed to simple lives of study and reflection did not just remain a philosophical ideal. In 306 BCE, when Epicurus was 35, he purchased a house on the outskirts of Athens and allowed people to live there. The space, which became known as the Garden, allowed women and slaves, and it became the first of many such communities throughout the Mediterranean. People in these communities shared in the communal work and spent time by reading, contemplation, and writing. They were in some sense like religious communities, but lacking traditional views of the gods and advocating simple lives of rational reflection in friendship and community.

Given the focus on the life of pleasure, though, as well as the rejection of traditional religion and metaphysics and the admittance of both men and women in such communities, these communities came to be viewed as quite threatening to early Christians. Early on there were consequently rumors of these communities as dens of decadence, depicting those within them as pursuing luxuries, engaging in orgies, and spreading dangerous ideas and a dangerous form of life. The Christians did respect some of the elements of the communal life however and various communes later became Christian monasteries.

____________________________________________________________

For more see the recent article “How To Be An Epicurean.”