Whither the West?

Tag: postmodernism

  • Why Tolkien Hated Dune

    A short intro to the philosophy of ethics

    J.R.R. Tolkien maintained a very private, but very negative opinion of Frank Herbert’s Dune. In Tolkien’s Library, entry 964, Tolkien is quoted as having written in an unpublished letter to John Bush, on March 12 1966, “It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines. At least I find it so. In fact I dislike Dune with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment”. [EDIT 21 March: A comment noted that “hated” is too strong a word – see my comments at the end for a defense of my word choice.] Tolkien does not elaborate, leaving the reasons for his intense dislike as an exercise for the reader. However, when one peers under the hood into the underlying philosophies of the two authors, one can easily imagine the answer: Herbert and Tolkien are exact moral opposites. Tolkien was an avid Deontologist and Dune is pure Consequentialism.

    Deontology and Consequentialism are two of the biggest rival camps in ethics. Deontology (from Greek: δέον, ‘obligation, duty’ + λόγος, ‘study’) says “acts are in themselves either good or bad”, whereas Consequentialism says “whether an act is good or bad depends on the consequences”. The central message of Tolkien’s work, hammered again and again and again, is that one should be a deontologist, a simple, good person who does charitable and good things, and that where evil arises in the world it is not the result of being inherently “bad” but rather by being convinced that one can commit small acts of selfishness and vainglory that one is convinced work toward a greater good. As Gandalf, speaking with the author’s voice, no doubt, says, “Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

    Dune is much the opposite. The Dune saga focuses on the morality of consequence, the tradeoffs of rule, the interactions of large and often amoral systems, the ways in which a man wields these powers to achieve his goals, and the way in which the long-term consequences of his actions determine his ultimate moral worth. Herbert writes, “Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind.” That is to say, greatness depends on human perspectives; if people perceive something as great, it is great, and that opinion can change over time as morality evolves.

    We can see already that this morality diverges from Tolkien’s simple, deontological “slave morality“, in which greatness does not depend upon the spirit of the times, but rather embodies a spirit that stands the test of time, a prototype of Captain America’s famous “no, you move” monologue. To wit, consider Aragorn’s rather direct opposing quote, “Deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised” (RotK). One might argue that Herbert explicitly deconstructs the Tolkeinesque hero embodied in Leto (I) Atreides, whose valiance and refusal to embrace Machiavellian calculus, his staunch clinging to his personal and family honor, ultimately cost him his life. But the moral disagreement between Herbert and Tolkien goes much deeper.

    Though there is no evidence that Tolkien continued to read on in the series (indeed he passed away in 1973, so could not have read beyond the second book, Dune Messiah, though since he disliked the original it would be odd for him to read on), those who have read past the introductory books up to God Emperor of Dune (it was introduced in Dune Messiah, but its full elaboration was only given in GEoD) know about the so-called Golden Path. The Path is, in short, a path to avoid humanity’s extinction. Leto II views the eventual extinction of humanity as something to be avoided at all costs, worthy of all sacrifices, and as such the Golden Path – his plan to so brutally oppress humanity that future humans would go their separate ways and refuse to ever submit themselves again to centralized rule -is pure, unadulterated consequentialism – the ultimate, millennia-long evil, countless acts of barbarity and oppression, to achieve a possible good. As Leto II extols, “I have been called many things: Usurper, Tyrant, Despot. Some even call me the greatest mass murderer in history. They are not entirely wrong. My actions have caused great suffering, and I bear that burden willingly, for I know that the future of humanity depends on it.” In other words, the ends justify the means. And thus the zenith of necessary ends justifies the nadir of abhorrent means. We need not even imagine what Tolkien thought of this: Gandalf (as we mentioned earlier, Tolkien’s surrogate), addresses it: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

    The philosophical disagreement between Tolkien and Herbert touches on many more subjects, of course, and another prominent disagreement was that Tolkien was a very devout Catholic and Herbert was not exactly friendly towards religion. Herbert saw religion as an inherently mutable, utilitarian institution, and Herbert was dismissive or even openly antagonistic toward religious truths. In the world of “Dune,” religion serves as a powerful tool for control and manipulation, with institutions like the Bene Gesserit using it to shape political and social outcomes – indeed the central prophecy (that of the Lisan al Gaib) of the original book was a completely artificial contrivance for political machinations of the Bene Gesserit. In contrast, of course, Tolkien saw Christianity as channeling eternal moral truths about kindness and redemption, and his world-building reflects his belief in a higher power and cosmic order, with themes like mercy, sacrifice, and the triumph of hope over despair mirroring his theological perspective.

    Religious differences aside, the central argument between the two authors is the moral one. Tolkien is a modernist (or even pre-modernist); Herbert is a post-modernist: Tolkien encourages everyone to follow a single template of goodness; Herbert encourages cynicism and doubt of the institutions that produce templates, and shows the anguish experienced by Paul when he is forced into a template to survive. If one had to summarize these different perspectives in one sentence, Tolkien argues “Strive for goodness, and people will come to call it great”, whereas Herbert argues “strive for greatness, and people will come to call it good”.

    Edit 21 March: A Defense of the term “hated”

    As mentioned above, a post on https://potbanks.wordpress.com/category/tolkien-gleanings/ took issue with the term “hated”, finding it mischaracterized Tolkien’s feelings, which, as he himself wrote, were “strong dislike” not “hate”. However, I do believe that the word “hate” does not have nearly the same meaning as it did in the 1960s when Tolkien penned his comments, and certainly not the same as it did earlier in the century when Tolkien was developing his own ideolect and semantic impressions. It is a word that has undergone a great deal of semantic inflation, and is thus much weaker than it used to be – according to Google Ngram viewer it took on a new life after 1980 and is is more than three times more present in common usage today than it was in 1920. Someone born since 1980 – most blog readers – would likely use “hate” to express the same intensity of emotion for which someone born in 1892 would use “dislike”, let alone “strongly dislike”.

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hate%2C+dislike&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3#

    The commenter mentioned that the title is “clickbait-y”, and this is not entirely wrong, because the era of clickbait is both a contributor to, but also a result of, the aforementioned semantic inflation. On the one hand it is true that an article titled “Why Tolkien Disliked Dune” would bait fewer clicks than one that uses the term “hated”, on the other hand as mentioned above the choice of words is merely keeping step with what is a living and evolving language. Phrasing the title as “Hwætforð Tolkien āsċūnode Dune” would be even less clickbait-y.

  • Diplomacy on the Moral Battlefield

    Of Myopic Postmodernism and Memetic Syncretism

    A fundamental problem exacerbating the acerbic tone of the culture wars across the West is that in online debates on social media platforms there are no mechanisms to incentivize the voicing of support and agreement. In order to make friends and preserve relationships in our personal lives, it is often good to be pleasant, to be agreeable, to find compromise solutions and to support and encourage others in their thoughts and ideas; online, however, there is currently no way to “like” a “like”, and readers have little reason to retweet or like a comment that simply says “good point, I agree”. We get points for comments that begin with “actually…”; we get retweeted when we articulate why something is offensive. No one rewards those who try hard to take up the perspective of the other side and see things generously and sympathetically. The result is often that people whom we may agree with are often fair game for those who think we do not agree in the right form, to the right extent, or for the right reasons.

    I recently encountered the following meme with the accompanying (paraphrased) critique [for those who are unfamiliar with the symbolism, the blue-pink-white pattern on the sheep is a transgender flag]:

    Image altered from the original at
    [https://nakedpastor.com/products/lost-transgender-lamb-him-her-print]

    These images may try to do well, but they are really wide of the mark. They start with the premise that Christianity is morally correct and then try to reconcile it with queer identities. But guess what: queer identities don’t need the approval of Jesus or Christians to be beautiful and valid.

    Trying to put Trans issues on Christian terms results in the situation of a cisgender heterosexual man as the primary agent in the scene. The trans person is depicted as a sheep, but the cis het savior is depicted as human. That’s upsetting. The reality is that trans people have no need of the help of “good” cis people. They’re completely capable of carrying themselves. They just need to not be attacked and discriminated against.

    I am not a Christian (though I was raised as one), but neither was I amenable to the takedown, in part because it was blind to its own moral framing and limitations. The author decries the fact that the meme is based on a “premise that Christianity is morally correct” but does not bother to explore their own moral presumptions. Doing so reveals that the above meme is an excellent cultural artifact, and an elegant moral syncretism between postmodernism and Christianity.

    Large wars encompass many different terrains and battle conditions. The columnar infantry tactics that Napoleon used to curb-stomp everyone from Jaffa to Jena proved woefully inadequate to confront Spanish and Russian guerrilla strategies; Allied soldiers in the Pacific theater of WWII adopted tactics and perspectives on prisoners that would have been unthinkable war crimes on the Western Front. The general war of the “left” – for social justice and individual liberation (one that I am generally a partisan of) – is a war that is waged across many theaters by many different actors and coalition members, and each theater has vastly different languages of conflict and vastly different (and sometimes incompatible) tactical requirements. There is the theater of racial social justice which involves many morally conservative minority religious organizations; there is the theater of feminism which requires affirming the reality of gender and sex and how they affect and repress women; there is the theater of LGBTQ+/SGM which requires affirming the socially constructed and malleable natures of gender and sex. To the point of the above critique, there is a theater within the community of Christians, and within that theater there is the front wherein liberal Christians are fighting against conservative Christians to convince moderate Christians that “Jesus Loves Everyone, Yes Even Those People“.

    The moral perspective of the critique in question is a manifestation of the general postmodernist framework – i.e. the validity of individual identities is paramount, and moral structures must adapt to a live-and-let-live perspective to allow people to free themselves from oppressive structures. However, that is *not at all* the moral framework of Christianity generally or conservative Christianity especially, wherein “these are the moral guidelines handed down by The Creator of the Universe, your individual differences be damned”. And as much as secularists like myself may disagree with this general premise, I feel it overwhelming obvious that accepting the premise does lead the majority of all humans (not just Christians, but theists more broadly) to some greater sense of meaning and contentment in their lives. To come running into a battlefield of moderate Christianity, completely ignoring this perspective is to risk alienating if not radicalizing a good portion of those potentially “convert-able” moderate Christians who will recoil with a curt “If I have to choose between taking moral cues from The Creator of the Universe or Judith Butler, I’m going with the former”. Perhaps – just perhaps – a more tactful approach can be fruitful.

    In service of the online culture that rewards dissent and offense, activists and ideologues of both the left and the right engage in a constant and often intentional decontextualization of the words and images of the “other”, searching for a “gotcha” moment, a line or a symbol that from some angle may be hurtful but which in the context of the broader discourse or in the particular setting it was uttered is perfectly reasonable. To the case at hand, the above meme is a gem of the culture wars (which may in fact be over) because it is an attempt at a reconciliation or syncretism between the Christian and postmodern worldviews, and it does by taking the example of a transgender person – truly a morally outrageous figure to a worldview that views humans as created by god – and attempts to emphasize the fact that those same moral guidelines handed down by “The Creator of the Universe” and that make such a figure morally outrageous do, after all, include the imperative to love everyone. The visual and verbal language employed would be problematic if employed within a theater that operates according to the postmodernist ruleset, like the theater of combatting negative stereotypes of SGMs (and in that context, this meme would indeed, as the critic notes, be insulting for its connotations of dehumanization, a cis-het male savior, etc.). But this meme is not designed for that purpose. It is designed with the visual and verbal language of the intra-Christian theater, wherein, as most readers may be aware, the sheep metaphor is well established and not at all dehumanizing (quite the contrary – all humans are equally sheep and equally in need of salvation), and the Christ figure (though problematic for all the reasons that the Abrahamic masculine divinity is problematic, but this is a digression) is usually not read as a figure of gendered oppression, is asexual and thus not “het”, and in liberal Christian readings is only arbitrarily and inconsequentially physically male.

    It does seem that the postmodernist perspective is winning the war of ideas, as Christianity, even of the liberal “love everyone and then maybe look at some of those other rules” variety, just does not seem to be adapting quickly enough to keep up (secularism is waxing in popularity in Australia the US) – but then again, maybe it doesn’t have to: Christianity (and Islam) are outgrowing secularism globally. The world of the next generation will be a more religious place than that of today. Perhaps that means we should give even more thought to the benefits of reverse syncretisms of this kind, evangelizing religious believers with secular and modernist ideas. To the issue of the tone of online discourse, there are possible solutions at the level of the individual online platforms – granting points in some way to those who voice agreement – but in general the solution must come from changes in our personal attitudes and culture. People can embrace policy positions or come into a political coalition for a variety of different reasons. To require that potential allies be not only in agreement with us but to have the same reasons for their agreement is a recipe for endless strife. “Treat thy neighbor as thyself” requires an online addendum: “treat thy online opponent as if they were in the room with thee”.

  • The Heterozygote Advantage and the Crisis of Western Authority

    question

    I.

    There is a concept in biology known as Heterozygote Advantage. If you’re already familiar with this concept, feel free to skip to section II.

    As one may know, sexually reproducing organisms inherit two copies of each gene: one from the mother, one from the father. Sometimes having two identical copies doesn’t mean much. Sometimes it means a lot. Having one recessive allele (gene variant) and one dominant allele usually means that the recessive one can be passed on along with the dominant one, but the dominant one is the one that is presented in the organism. For example, if a child inherits one blue-eyed allele and one brown-eyed allele, the dominant brown-eyed allele is the one that drives (so to speak) the phenotype (the way the organism biologically presents its genes) while the recessive blue-eyed allele rides shotgun, serving no function in the organisms per se but maintaining the possibility of being the one that is passed on to this organism’s offspring when it’s time to send one of the two genes into the next generation’s car, to continue the metaphor.

    Say hypothetically that there’s a recessive gene that allows people to heal really quickly. If you inherit only one copy of this gene, since it’s recessive, the dominant “normal healing” gene is the one that is presented in the organism, and there’s no biological difference from someone not having the “quick healing” gene. If, however, an organism has two parents who have this recessive “quick healing” gene, and happens to inherit both copies, then this child would have the Quick Healing trait. This child could get in deadly car crashes and be more likely to survive, be shot on a battlefield and be able to heal before bleeding out, etc. Even if this child never got an adamantium skeleton and never gained the ability to eject and retract blades from his hands, this child would be more fit – more likely to survive into adulthood and pass on genes – than one who did not have this genetic combination (ceteris paribus). This would be, for most intents and purposes, a good genetic combination to have (leaving aside the fact that in many organisms in nature, quick healing attributes are correlated with higher propensity for cancer). We would say in this situation that this organism has a Homozygote Advantage. This means, there is an advantage to having both copies of a gene where there is not an advantage to having only one.

    Then we have the opposite concept: a heterozygote advantage. As one may be able to infer from the above idea, a heterozygote advantage is one in which it’s more beneficial to have only one copy of an allele than two. The classic example of this is Sickle Cells: one copy of the gene that produces sickle-shaped blood cells makes red blood cells less susceptible to attack by the parasitic plasmodium that causes malaria, conferring an advantage in fitness. Having two copies of this same gene, however, makes too many blood cells too misshapen; the circulatory system struggles to deal with this complication, and Sickle Cell Anemia results, usually ending in premature death. This is a homozygote disadvantage, or a heterozygote advantage.

    II.

    The term “meme” has in recent years taken on a very different meaning than that which it originally had. Professor Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to refer to the cultural analogue of a gene. In the same way that “genes” were the discrete units of genetic information that were passed on and selected for and allowed a population to achieve continuity and evolve, likewise “memes” were the discrete units of ideas and cultures that were passed on and selected for and allowed sociocultural populations to achieve continuity and evolve.

    In the past decade or two, this term was somewhat misappropriated (though somewhat accurately applied) from its original usage in cultural studies and information theory and used to describe elements of Internet Culture – image macros, witty comment chains on reddit, propensity for voting to name things “Harambe” or “Xy McXface”, or the trope of misdirecting people via links to 80s British Pop music videos. Perhaps because internet culture was create ex nihilo so recently, participants were eager to identify elements of commonality and give them the name “meme”, hence the prominence of this term in reference to internet culture viz. every other area of culture.

    Nevertheless, the original definition of a meme – any transmittable element of culture – remains valid. How broadly or narrowly one should define memes in this sense is open to debate – people’s idea of the proper length of a Toga can be a meme as much as the concept of the Mandate of Heaven or the consensus about the right age for a boy to begin his manhood quest – these are all culturally specific ideas that are transmitted vertically (communicated between generations) and horizontally (communicated verbally, textually, etc. among contemporaneous members of a group), and are subject to inception, evolution, and oblivion.

    III.

    I would like to focus on one particular meme: skepticism. I will define this simply as “the notion that propositions should be doubted”. This is a meme, an idea-gene, if you will, that not everyone has. In some cultures great efforts are made to minimize the prevalence of this meme, namely in rampant authoritarian or theocratic societies in which doubt of the Supreme Leader or The Party or The Faith are seen as ills to be purged; critical thinking is not prized or cultivated. When the skepticism gene is manifest in a skeptical culturotype (the ideological analog to phenotypes) they are pruned from the flock.

    Thus, like any genes or memes, the meme of skepticism is not an unalloyed good. In environs and situations in which survival is precarious and military-esque deference to authority is necessary to stay alive, having a sudden increase in skepticism and doubt of the hierarchy could lead to the death of the society and the individuals that it comprises. But at other times, the meme of skepticism presents great advantages: being creative, willing to go one’s own way, follow one’s inclinations and not blindly stumble after the herd can yield enormous benefits when it comes to science, business, art, politics, or personal interactions. I would posit that there is a strong correlation between the prevalence of the skepticism meme and the level of creativity, dynamism, and liberty of a society.

    But that does not mean that this correlation is purely linear. That does not mean that forever increasing the prevalence of the skepticism gene results in ever more creative, dynamic, and liberated societies; or perhaps it does, but that manifests in ways we don’t like. Because when the low-hanging, transparent falsehoods of life are stripped away, when the lies of the authorities are exposed, how does skepticism know where to stop? How does the skepticism known if it has penetrated the facades and is gnawing through the pillars of the firmament?

    IV.

    When we picture the embodiment of skepticism, we may picture someone like Galileo, or Descartes, or Martin Luther. In the minds of many, skepticism is associated with things that we generally prize in humans: with discovery, with challenging oppressive institutions, with exploration, with innovation, and perhaps with a scientific mindset. We normally wouldn’t associate it with people we despise, with people we think are delusional, with people we might think are in the grip of dogmatic and destructive ways of thinking. We don’t think of Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers, Global Warming Deniers. We don’t think of 9/11 Truthers. We don’t think of Pizzagaters.

    But these groups are in many ways extremely skeptical. In fact, they are far, far more skeptical than the rest of us. They’re homozygous skeptics. They’ve inherited a double-serving of the “skepticism” meme. They doubt not only the facts, but the authorities that produce those facts, the institutions that those authorities serve, and even go so far as to doubt the ideologies that give rise to those institutions and authorities. A natural reaction of most normal people is to say that Flat Earthers are crazy and deluded. But they are saying “using only empirical observation, the world looks flat. You and I have never gone into space, never built a GPS system, never had to calculate and experience parabolic trajectories that take into account the supposed curvature of the Earth. You are taking it on faith from books and authorities that the Earth is round, whereas there have been plenty of societies that just took it from faith and books and authorities that the earth was flat. How are you any better than that?”

    Antivaxxers, dangerous though they are, are equally skeptical of authority and “established” truths. An antivaxxer points to thalidomide, to the vacillating warnings on fat and cholesterol and sugar, to the financial links between pharmaceutical companies and regulators, an Antivaxxer points to Tuskegee and says “how can you trust that?”

    Global Warming Deniers and 9/11 Truthers similarly point to the credibility of the authorities that interpret evidence at us. In an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, journalist danah boyd [sic] makes the argument that Pizzagaters were doing their own form of investigative journalism, truly feeling that they were seeing through secret codes and webs of lies and deceipt to expose a dark Washington DC underground. [source]

    These groups of hyperskeptics are not un-explainable deviants, nor could they not have been predicted. Rather, we created them, you and I and our school systems and our cultural tropes. They are the natural predictable end state of western society: when we encourage everyone to think for themselves, question everything, and doubt authorities, why shouldn’t we doubt all the things we can’t directly observe? Why do we still have any trust in any authorities? Who are we to say “whoa, wait a minute, I didn’t mean question that!”? When the selective pressure of western society encourages the proliferation of the “skepticism” meme, how are we surprised when people begin to inherit it homozygously?

    How does the skepticism know if it has penetrated the facades and is gnawing through the pillars of the firmament?

    V.

    The above skepticism is corrosive in itself, and the game of undermining scientific and medical knowledge presents obvious dangers. But in recent years these tendencies have reached a fever pitch, and become tinged with cynicism. If skepticism is the notion that propositions should be doubted, then its cousin, cynicism, is the notion that motives should be doubted. Cynicism would tell us that people who promise great things, who ask for your trust and loyalty in order to change your life or the world for the better, are usually looking for a way to take advantage of your trust and use you for their own ends.

    This brings us to the crux of this argument, and the fulcrum of Western society: what happens when this skepticism and cynicism is turned on our social and political institutions? What happens when homozygous skepticism is swapped out for cynicism, or occurs alongside it? The fact is that this process is happening now, throughout the West. From Trump to Brexit to Hungary and everywhere in between, the meme of “agenda-calling” is infiltrating social and political discourse. Anyone who wants anything has “an agenda”. The media has a liberal agenda. The EU has an agenda to subdue British power, or to erase Hungarian culture. Scientists have an agenda to destroy the oil industry and American jobs. And of course, their expressed motives – of providing information, of delivering on the promises of liberalism, of securing the peace and health of the world – are just facades to hide their secret abuse, pilfering, and power-grabbing.

    Be skeptical of them. Doubt the institutions. Doubt the motives.

    I do not wish to enter the argument of whether, or to what extent, Russia is actively interfering in Western politics, but I wish to submit that this ideology of cynicism and skepticism intertwined and directed at politicians has long been a core of Russian political psychology, and that it is the idea now infiltrating western political discourse. “I think what the Russian discourse is [is] that it’s, in fact, very difficult to cleave perfectly to [a set of morals],” Nikitin said. “And anyone that claims to the contrary can be unmasked as, in fact, being just as flawed as anyone else is” [source].

    This strategy is commonly called “whataboutism”, but that term misses the mark. “Whataboutism” is, literally, a usage of “what about…” also known as the “tu quoque” (you as well) fallacy. When someone criticizes you, you can respond with an accusation that the other person, or something the other person supports, is guilty of the same thing. Rather, this tactic of agenda-calling, unmasking, and dragging of idols through the mud perhaps deserves terms like “weaponized cynicism”, “weaponized skepticism”, or “weaponized postmodernism”. The idea that all ideologies – democracy, liberalism, good governance, freedom of the press, etc – are merely lofty promises that abusive politicians make to empty your pockets when you’re not looking – is a defense mechanism used by autocrats to make their critics out to be doe-eyed naifs.

    But to return to the Russia question, the fact is that it doesn’t really matter whether this is Russian meddling – because either way, we set ourselves up for it. We encouraged the skepticism. We filled the ideological meme pool with the skeptical meme. We must contend with the results. And we must find new pillars to hold up new firmaments.

    PS.

    An obvious criticism to this description is that there’s no need to resort to genetics and heterozygote advantages to explain this; this is a simple question of extremism. There’s a moderate, healthy amount of skepticism, and then there’s extreme, nigh-solipsistic skepticism. What we need to do is to encourage the healthy amount and discourage the extreme nigh-solipsistic kind.

    But I’m not sure that quite captures the way this works. First of all, it seems hard to pinpoint that a person picked and chose their level of skepticism and thought “hm, I really like being an extremist”; rather, these seem to be a priori propensities to doubt everything or not. In that way, they perhaps operate more like genes than political ideologies, which are at least in part a collection of individual policy and candidate preferences.

    Second, I’m not sure it’s one-dimensional; I think it’s possible that there are two slightly different domains of skepticism that someone can have individually, and only when they inherit the skepticism gene in both domains do they get these dysfunctional outcomes like flat-eartherism. Perhaps these domains are along the lines of “institutional skepticism” – skepticism of the authority of impersonal bodies; “societal skepticism” – skepticism of the veracity of lay common sense; or “empirical skepticism” – skepticism of the authority of senses to deliver veritable outcomes; “scientific skepticism” – skepticism of the truth-finding ability of scientific processes and community. I’m sure we can all think of people who have a few of these attributes, but do we know anyone who is skeptical in all of these domains?

    Can we agree that these are, to a large extent, uncorrelated dimensions – one could be maximally skeptical of science while having no skepticism for societal lay common sense, or vice versa – ?

    To that extent, I do think these operate as discrete attributes rather than a general “skeptical” spectrum.

  • Not Postmodern

    What is the West?

    Not Postmodern.

    Now, a lot of people like to use these terms like “modern”, “postmodern” and even “anti-postmodern” without knowing exactly what they mean. So for the sake of having some common vocabulary for once, let’s define our terms.

    Modernism – the philosophical outlook that defined the West through the late 19th and early 20th century. Essentially, a belief in progress, a belief in objective success in human development, and a belief that a better and more prosperous and free world could be achieved through the right combination of technologies and institutions. Modernism requires a belief in an objective truth, a belief in some sort of scale upon which human societies can be judged, and a belief in the power of human intellect and spirit.

    The Nobel Prize, the World Health Organization, and the Kellogg-Briand pact were examples of applied Modernism.

    So were Colonialism, Communism, and Nazism.

    Gulags, concentration camps, and apartheid were seen as necessary means for these grand visions of social progress. In the eyes of many “moderns”, force and death were unfortunate but necessary means of making way for humanity’s future, of eliminating the unwanted vestiges of the old to make way for the new.

    It is no surprise, then, that in the wake of the Second World War, some people began to question the tenets of Modernism. “Who are you,” the first post-modernists might ask, “to determine what a better society should be? What does ‘better’ even mean? How is it defined? These are socially constructed terms that don’t mean anything. I am entitled to an opinion about social progress as much as you are”.

    In the past few decades, this postmodern discourse has proven startlingly successful. Though initially postmodernists scored excellent political points against racist, sexist, and other repressive ideals, these memetic ideas, having run out of monsters to slay, have been turned in praetorian fashion against some of the core pillars of Western civilization. The attitude that “everything is opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own” and “there are no objective facts, only narratives” have taken the West by storm. This cynical weaponized postmodernism has propelled Brexit supporters to grow “tired of experts”, have propelled Trump supporters to create their own “alternative facts”, and the impulse to “question everything and think for yourself” has subsidized the rise of Flat Earthers, Intelligent Design subscribers, creationists, anti-vaccine advocates, and birthers, content to believe that “what they feel to be true” is just as valid as empirical evidence, for, after all, we are all entitled to our opinions. The pendulum of philosophical dialectic has swung far too far.

    To put it squarely – albeit perhaps too on-the-nose – postmodernism is anti-Western, for it is against the large group identities such as those of civilizations. Post-modernism is a critique of all collective values, a critique of shared assumptions, even if those values are freedoms of inquiry and debate, and those assumptions are rational and scientific ones.

    Post-modernism says “why should we privilege traditional western freedoms over other kinds of values? Why should we privilege scientific mindsets over other kinds of mindsets?”

    The Neomodernist West must respond: “because they make everything better”.

     

  • To Explain is Not to Excuse

    Scott Alexander recently posted his thoughts on the merits of social shaming of explainable sociopsychological phenomena. Beginning his discourse with the new hyperprogressive idea that “lazy-shaming” should be ended, Alexander counters that

    I imagine [an anti-Lazy shamer] believing he has a fundamental value difference with people who use the term “lazy”. They think that some people are just bad and should be condemned, whereas he wisely believes that everything has a cause and people who have issues with motivation should be helped. But it’s not clear to me that this is a real difference.

    Alexander’s dialogue goes in a more semiotic and semantic direction than I would think about this subject from, but nonetheless touches on an important idea that should perhaps be one of the cores of neomodernism: being able to explain the origins or nature of problem does not necessarily excuse it. We should strive to explain and understand as much as possible. But once explained and understood, we must then strive to decide which things are good or bad, and encourage those things which are good and reduce those things which are bad. Body image/weight/fat-shaming discourses fall into the same category as the Lazy-shaming discourse above. There are many reasons that people gain excess weight — social, psychological, emotional, genetic, habitual, economic — the list goes on. No one should ever be bullied or abused for their physical condition. Yet at the end of the day, obesity is an extremely deleterious condition that is for the most part correctable — and to the end that it is correctable, social carrots and sticks must continue to demonstrate that obesity is condition to be escaped and avoided.

    To some extent, I am a supporter of the to explain is to excuse mindset with regard to socioeconomic conditions. A person who grew up and lives in a “poor” community may be subject to many socioeconomic memes that influence his or her behaviors in ways that are not conducive to his or her socioeconomic advancement. This is not that person’s fault, and thus, to some extent, we should not poor-shame on the personal level. On the one hand, it is simply, unarguably, better not to be “poor”, and in some aspects this is a correctable condition based on some changes such as saving (do more), spending (fewer depreciable and consumable assets), and behavioral (don’t smoke or drink too much alcohol) habits. And then on the other hand, in other aspects (the majority of aspects, likely), there are areas of this that are completely uncorrectable by individual means (educational background, job availability, level of income).

    With laziness as discussed by Alexander, there are many similarities — often, laziness is simply the result of bad memetic input: people have learned the wrong habits, have not learned the right habits, etc. But there is a difference between explaining how or why someone becomes lazy and condoning or accepting it as a should.

    Neomodernism must avoid the pitfalls of modernism: the anti-human, unexplaining, undeterred drive to some form of grand betterment. But it must too avoid the excesses of postmodernism: the all-accepting particularism that sees no difference between the is and the should be. It’s important to break the perception that explanation and condemnation are some kind of substitutes for one another and that they exist on the same spectrum. Rather, one can ideally strive to explain everything and then figure out what to condemn after the fact, and not let the status quo become synonymous with the should.

    Applicability to Academic Freedom/Freedom of Inquiry

    There is another aspect to this Explain/Excuse relationship: often, seeking to academically explain or research a topic, or to publish information on a topic, is seen as apologetics or excuse for heinous things. People who interview or research terrorists, KKK members, pedophiles, etc., may all be shamed for even engaging in such practices. “How can you even listen to what this person has to say? You’re giving them a platform! You’re validating them!” This was often the case with Trump supporters, for example, in the lead up to the 2016 election.

    This enters into murky waters. On the one hand, freedom of inquiry and expression means very little if it does not grant the ability to research topics that offend and disgust us. On the other hand, there are some highly offensive fringe views or objective behaviors that do get amplified and normalized by their publication and repetition.

    What do we say to this dilemma?

    The answer, I think, is to research and publish these ideas, but to do so from an objective, neomodern lens (“these people have their own reasons to believe these things, but they are factually wrong”), and never from a relativist postmodern perspective (“these people believe these things, and how do we really know that their truths are less valid than our own?”). I contend that a core problem with modern academia, journalism, and other sorts of “publicative/promotional” media is not bias, but rather the fact that in attempting to avoid bias, journalism has cultivated a relativism and apathy toward objective fact. There is a difference between apathy to valid opinion based on objective fact (whether, given racial socioeconomic discrepancies, there should be affirmative action programs, for example), and apathy toward the basic facts themselves (whether or not significant portions of welfare recipients are lying and manipulating the system to receive free money).

    This is what a neomodern research and journalism should be about: understanding the perspective of others, understanding that different interpretations exist, but being firm and unyielding in the face of abuse or falsification of objective fact. To Explain is not to Excuse.