Diabetic Anarchists and Other Puzzles
A propaedeutic to something
In this I join with William James: there may be no tendency nearly so central to human life as habit. This is the primary trouble with thinking, at least for that poor thinker whose goal is originality.
There is also, of course, the trouble that our minds are not simply our own. Tics, words, gestures, phrases, routines, clichés, facts, ideas — they are all learned. We mirror each other, we bleed into one another. Something seems more real once we see someone else do it — it’s instinctual. We can combine and recombine, extract and reorder, but we’re working with material not entirely our own. Perhaps there is not even so much of a difference between habit and learning — habit might just be that special case where you learn from your own past. An action of your own becomes a model, rather than an action of someone else.
Some frame this negatively — others’ thoughts are invading your mind, they form a cage you can’t see out of, they hijack you, etc. Others frame this positively — you get to mirror successful people, human knowledge accumulates, etc. Whether it is good or bad is the wrong question — a habit can be exercise or cocaine, an idea can hijack or help. The point is to rule the fact and not be ruled by it, to the extent possible.
To that end, there are a few tricks to thinking originally, at least that I know of. I have certainly not mastered them, but I don’t believe it is presumptuous to say that I have a grasp on most of them. There are likely fewer than you think.
The first trick is this: run the idea backwards. Our minds naturally return to the old conceptual ruts, tried and true, whether they were formed by our wheels or another’s. So, put it in reverse. One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens:
[Recent] [b]ehavioral research has generally concluded that breach [of contract] creates in its victims a feeling of injury that cannot be fully remedied with money, but studies have also demonstrated that … people seem to prefer performance [of the breached contract] and disdain money damages as a remedy, even when the level of [money] damages appears to be fully or even overly compensatory from an objective standpoint.
…
In one experiment … subjects were asked to choose the appropriate level of damages themselves; subjects were then asked to indicate whether breach was morally problematic if the promisor paid the specific damages. On average, subjects asked for damages 2.19 times the expectation value [of the contract if it was performed]. And, further, on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 was “not immoral,” 4 was “somewhat immoral,” and 7 was “extremely immoral,” participants thought that breach rated over 5 — even though in many cases subjects had chosen supracompensatory awards.
This finding was “puzzling,” the author tells us. If you pay enough money, then a breach of contract should no longer be morally problematic. The problem is their implication arrow is facing approximately 180 degrees in the wrong direction. When the conduct is morally problematic, then one must pay more in damages.
Punishment does not make the crime less immoral; it punishes it. Atonement does not wipe away the blood; it acknowledges the stain. The author’s modus ponens is the subjects’ modus tollens.1
Crime and Punishment translates the Russsian word “Преступление” or “Prestupleniye” as “crime.” Etymologically, however, it is more similar to the English word “transgression.” Both have their roots in the metaphor of crossing a boundary. “Trans-” meaning “across, beyond” and “gression” from “gradi” meaning “to walk, go.”
The boundary here is social and moral. Raskolnikov’s murder split him from the web of obligation and openness that had bound him to others. His mind became no longer part of the community. He could not tell Razumihin his secret. His family became unbearable. He decided that the rules which govern others did not apply to him, that he was different, and much of the book is about how tortured and lonely such an individual life is.
To return requires a ritual — generally punishment, confession, atonement, that sort of thing. Whatever is necessary to live again on communal terms.
For your consideration the next time someone is “singled out for punishment.” The tracks run both ways.
Now, I still want to focus on this idea of going in the wrong direction, but a sub-trick, perhaps: misuse an idea. Take a joke seriously, or a metaphor literally. It won’t make you fun at parties, but it might tell you something interesting.
Here is a joke that I am workshopping. It’s not quite right, but if you bear with me, it will get us somewhere. “Sometimes I think about diabetic anarchists.” That’s the joke.
For some time, the wheelhouse of internet history facts included a vignette from the discovery of insulin. Before the invention of insulin, doctors would keep infants suffering from diabetes ketoacidosis in specific wards as they and the parents waited for the comatose children to die (mainly the parents — I imagine the doctors had other patients to attend to). In the 1920s, however, doctors discovered and began to extract the hormone insulin. After the first successful extraction, the doctors raced to a nearby ward and began injecting the children with it. By the time the last one was injected, the first one’s eyes began to open. It was a miracle.
Now, the million million deaths from diabetes extending back as far as humanity is a statistic. Let’s talk about this single ward.
There were 50 children in this ward. Fifty pairs of closed eyes, never to open. Fifty holders of some parents’ dreams, about to let go. One hundred puffy checks, not smiling or rosy or even contorted in sadness or fear. Five hundred little fingers, still at their side. Pudgy toes and wispy hair and not a sound or speck of life. It was serene, like a grave.
Imagine just two parents coming from the room where they recently gave birth. One of them walking carefully in a flowing hospital gown, each step a stutter — flick-pause, flick-pause. Her left arm is holding her stomach — not because of what she just did, but because of what she is about to see. The other arm is held tightly — so, so tightly — between the forearm and chest of her husband. Their fingers are intertwined. He is walking stiffly, trying to match her cadence. It is difficult. Flick-step-step, flick-step-step. He can’t look at her, she can’t look at him, and neither of them can look at their future. He is wearing a red and black flannel, a brown trucker hat. He has an important job — delivery. He brings things to where they need to be, anywhere across Canada, his vast roaming country. The last six months of his life had been organized around this week — all the other deliveries scheduled so he could make this one. The pregnancy had been hard, as they tend to be, but his manager had understood that this was the delivery that only he could make. So he made sure he was home. Like most of his deliveries, this one began right on time. And like most of his deliveries, for the most part his job was sitting and guiding. However, most of the time he was there because someone had to be — this time he was there because he had to be. That is a difference.
Just a few hours ago, she had held her baby and imagined a life. It was a boy. Her husband would show him how to cradle a lacrosse stick, she would hold him upright on his first time out on the ice. She had seen it so many times — a bundle of jacket and scarf and mitten and boot toddling, unsure, on a sleek slick surface. It is a cruel northern joke to force a child just recently proud of walking and running to fall once again onto the ground. But it is their birthright, and the first time he glides across the ice… it looks like magic. Her child would be almost a year old before winter came again. She knew what ten months old looked like — of course she did. By the time her belly began to swell, her eye was on every child see saw: short for five years — are his parents short? Is he eating right? Skinny for 10 months — are they feeding breast milk or formula? Which formula? Does he sleep enough? She could tell a child’s age within a second. But that was different from seeing her own.
It took her a long time to notice that the doctor looked concerned. The baby was less responsive than it should have been. Something was wrong. She was cradling her baby, looking with all her heart. They talked to her husband. As he walked back towards her, she turned to him with a name on her lips. It never made it out.
They walked — flick-step-step, flick-step-step — to the ward. The room neighboring the ward was not empty. That should not have surprised them, but it did. Almost a hundred people. Some looked like them, some didn’t. There was a window into the ward. A few people stared into it. More stared at the ground, or the ceiling, or held their own head in their hands — a terrible substitute. Very, very few looked at one another.
Years ago, she had hit a small moose with her car, just when she had started driving. There is no such thing as a small adult moose, so this must have been a minor. In such cases, it is important to make sure there isn’t a vengeful mother nearby — best to simply drive away. But she was young and had just injured another, even younger thing. In her youth, she exited the car to see. The moose’s eyes stared dull and stunned. It moved, a bit, but not much. She didn’t notice that. She just looked at the eyes. Heavy, dull, washing away.
When she walked into the room neighboring the ward, she saw the moose’s eyes. Some looked at the walls or window or ceiling or floor, but the worst were those staring right at her.
This was the way the story had gone for time immemorial. But stories change. This time, doctors enter the ward in a hurry — that’s strange, she might have thought, if she was capable of it. There’s no reason to enter this ward, least of all in a hurry. They huddle around each baby for a moment. It’s difficult to see what they’re doing, and even more difficult to understand. All the hustle and workmanlike whispers must have felt a bit like seeing schoolboys play tag in a graveyard — joyful, alive, but also tinged with sacrilege.
Then, suddenly, as the doctors huddled around the last few babies, it was no longer a graveyard. I can tell the story only until this very moment. At this point, when that first eye opens, at the first coo or cry or kick of the leg, my imagination fails me. It was a miracle.
I’d like to see that happen in a commune.
See, the joke is supposed to be about those utopians and primitivists whose prophecies betray a certain lack of care, the sort of people who want to return to primitivism with no sense of the human cost of primitivism. These are radicals who decry the avarice and amorality of capitalism but immorally ignore the horribly common brutality of the past and present. This is the cost of the primitive. This ward, a million times over and across the whole earth. Maybe I could have just pointed at the graph, but I don’t think that makes anyone get it.
The creation of insulin, the miracle that now happens every day in every country on earth, relied upon, in the telling of this joke at least, the background of capitalist production and incentives. In a communist world, such an invention would be less likely or impossible (again, in the logic-world of the joke); in a primitivist world it would be barred. So, my diabetic anarchist is supposed to be this contradictory bundle of medical necessity and ill-considered industrial theory. My diabetic anarchist is Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Windmills that grind his grain and quench his thirst.
But! For all I know, he may also be Don Quixote, the only knight who stands by his word. He may be the only one who can truly bite that bullet. Only he can have the faintest claim to bear on the back of his political ideals the death of every infant from the cradle of humanity on out killed by a traitorous pancreas. He is the only one who could possibly meet the table stakes of this game, the only one who could possibly put something commensurable on the line. He’s the only one who could seriously believe that all this is not worth it.
Did you see that? I went in the other direction.
A radical, etymologically, is someone who “gets to the root” of something. The radical is the one who wants to take society up from its roots and put something better in its place. In this sense, radicalism may have been invented in 17th century Europe. People have always created new societies and split off from old ones (cf. The Dawn of Everything). We have always had political consciousness and political movements. However, in 17th and 18th century Europe, people began creating visions of society on pure rational grounds. These societies would be perfect, rational, and require the complete uprooting of current life.
In all the spin surrounding rationality and making sense, a little portion of society was sometimes lost: the fact that it was supposed to be for people. The revolution and violence were justified by idea, by the justified and coherent utopia that would be built upon the patina of all this blood and bone — people be damned.
American Pragmatism is, taken quite roughly, the philosophy that ideas are tools for acting on the world and should not be considered anything higher. The world is too complicated for Truth — our minds and thoughts and language cannot possibly correspond to this hideously and beautifully complex existence. Rather, thought is simply a way of making rules for action — provisional rules, useful in some circumstances but not others, and never perfect, much as action is never perfect. The truth of something is its usefulness for action and nothing more.
However big your ideas are, pragmatism says, they are far too small compared to the world. It is all too complicated for your neat lines and coherent plans, the world wasn’t built for perfection and neither were our minds. Yet when ideas are provisional and disconnected from the transcendent, you cannot live for an idea — it would be just as sensical to live for the sake of a wrench. You do not live for ideas; rather, ideas are for you to use.
Historically, this philosophy was, in part, a reaction to these big ideas. It was a reaction to this very sense that people were putting the cart before the horse — they were valuing high-flung ideas over actual persons. It is therefore a fine reversal if I have ever seen one. But…
Upon its arrival on the shores of Britain, pragmatism drew the ire of some of the United Kingdom’s great thinkers. Bertrand Russell despised it, but no one put their distaste in quite so quippy a manner as G. K. Chesterton, who said, “pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” Ha! You can see that the tracks run both ways once again.
If ideas are nothing more than rules for action to pick up and place down at your whim, what, pray tell, are you acting for? If we could live without ideals, then pragmatism might be a coherent worldview — but if we could live without ideals, then pragmatism would never have been necessary.
“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Indeed, pragmatist, what is a heaven for? And if it is for naught, then what’s a human for?
What seems to me obvious is two things:
Life is immeasurably precious — perhaps the only truly precious thing.
You can’t just live; there has to be something which is lived for.
Clichés are not cliché not because everyone believes them, but because everyone knows they are right yet so few can bring themselves to really believe them. Or at least, they can’t believe it simpliciter. The cliché is the burning hot core around which a heat shield and darkened glasses allow glimpses, or the freezing tundra which requires brutal habits to survive. So we make the structures which allow us to work around the truth, or which allow us to bear it when truly necessary.
The trouble with two such things, both of which true and diametric, is that a reversal takes you not to some forgotten perspective, but to the same place you were pulled from previously. They encroach on one another; the structure necessary to handle one leaves an uncalloused mind open to the other. Here, revelations are not produced between the two things, but in the ancillary forms that the back-and-forth entails. The burning at the back of the mind becomes unbearable, you turn around, and a novel structure is required; the cold running down the spine makes life unworkable, you turn around, and need to bundle up anew. The structure for one is undermined, or its followers are transfixed by a more complex, new, and adaptive structure for the other, and with each revolution, something about the architecture is revealed. But not about the core. Because there, nothing remains to be revealed, only something to manage.
All a prophet is is someone who believes the cliché and reminds you of the burning frozen core.
In the logic airlock of mathematics, a point in space has no volume, movement, or force. It hangs, suspended by the Forms. It is supported not by another thing but by supposition. By Truth, I think. In physics, there is vacuum, but a point is mass. Mass does not hang — it falls. It is pulled by the distortion of spacetime that all the other mass in the universe exerts by being. Mass distorts spacetime — I believe in some models it simply is the distortion of spacetime. Perhaps to be is to distort, to pull and be pulled by everything else. That does not sound all bad. The trouble is not necessarily in the one or the other, but the fact that we have both.
Here is the metaphor: having a purpose, an ideal, is like being fixed in mathematical space. You have an axis stretching out in front of you and a stable perspective. Everything is ordered and constructed. But look at an ideal with a bit too much skepticism and suddenly, rather than being suspended in air, one is falling without support. Yes, your actions can pull you left or right (as long as there is some resistance — note that), but everything you do is swallowed by the far larger reality that you are falling. Falling at this speed, in this void, to your death. Maybe you were even falling the whole time, but never realized so long as you had a fixed reference. Of course, falling in math is falling by supposition. The axis lines move as much as the point does. No, falling in reality is different. You are being pulled, another is distorts the space below you.
A black hole is a puncture of spacetime. Within the event horizon, nothing escapes — not mass, not vibrations, not waves, not even light. No information or thing has enough force to bring you back out. You’re falling towards a black hole. We all are. We are all going somewhere we can’t return, somewhere nobody comes back from. Maybe if that was all there was, that would be alright. But we can understand the ideal. We can think about what it is to be still, to be supported, to have a direction and an axis that was True and Good.
Many people seem to think that death is why we need ideals or that its existence causes morality in some way. I don’t believe that death is why we need an ideal. Even if we were not falling to oblivion, we would still be falling, and that itself is a deep offense to our agency. But the oblivion certainly doesn’t help. It certainly gives a deadline.
One solution: attach yourself to another point, another person. Someone who has not yet realized they are falling. Your fixedness comes from their own — you serve them, they believe (more than believe, but I do not have the right word) it is valuable, you get value. You hang from them.
Some people cannot do this. They cannot serve others for their purpose. Some, I believe, could. Maybe one person isn’t enough — it is childish, but bigger sometimes feels more important. One could pull oneself into a web. Look left and right and see not just one other point but a whole mass in unison. Just don’t look down.
The problem: this does not hold up to scrutiny. If you are really a skeptic, if you really want the Truth, the direction, then you must believe that everyone else truly is falling, and you are what? Gambling on them not finding out? Are you lying to them? Why would that help when lying to yourself failed so miserably? It does not solve the problem that you have no direction. It’s a palliative, not a cure. Now there is simply a net falling, rather than a point.
And from here I do not know where to go, at least within these old walls.
Our third trick for thinking originally is to find the hidden premises. A debate is always framed and conditioned. In our old metaphor, this is the rut itself — but you don’t have to stay in the rut. Once you can see the trail, you can wonder why this well-worn trail exists, and why you are following it.
Assumptions determine method, method determines argument, and argument determines conclusion. Everyone is looking at the same path, but there is no way to choose between one direction or the other. Or, rather, neither path takes you anywhere new. The assumptions are agreed-upon, but they are bad — as in, not productive. There is an antinomy.
Early modern European philosophy was largely split between the rationalists and the empiricists. The rationalists believed that at least some knowledge came purely from logic and the mind itself. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is a famous rationalist proposition, but it is less well known that the famous line was the start of a much grander argument wherein he attempted to use that simple fact to prove all the fundamental philosophical positions he required, including that the external world existed and God existed and God was Good and such assorted conclusions.
The empiricists believed that all knowledge came from experience, and were skeptical that we could know that things like causation or the outside world really existed. They were especially skeptical that we could know any of that merely from the armchair. They mostly spent their time constructing models of human mind and sentiment. Morality was not to be proven or necessary — it was a bundle of human feelings and drives. Cause was not real — it was, if it was anything, an observed tendency of the world.
These two traditions went back and forth — Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza fighting for proofs of the existence of God and freedom and morality while Locke, Berkeley, and Hume tore down the arguments and raised skeptical flags over various cherished ideals. Philosophers built whole systems around these core poles of thought and for a few hundred years this was the major philosophical dividing line in Europe.
The term “antinomy” is most often associated with Immanuel Kant, who used it to refer to those various interminable back-and-forths of the early modern European philosophers. The effect of Immanuel Kant’s system on European philosophical thought is profound and complex. However, for our purposes here it is enough to say that the assumptions of the early modern philosophers were defunct, had outlived any possible productive quality they once might have enjoyed, and Kant took them behind Europe’s shed and sent them upstate to the history of ideas department.
Immanuel Kant’s antinomy on proving a de minimis “unmoved mover” God:
Thesis: there belongs to the world, either as its part or as its cause, a being that is absolutely necessary.
Proof: The sensible world … contains a series of alterations. … But every alteration stands under its condition, which precedes it in time and renders it necessary. Now every conditioned that is given presupposes … a complete series of conditions up to the unconditioned, which alone is absolutely necessary. [Since] [a]lteration thus exist[s] as a consequence of the absolutely necessary, the existence of something absolutely necessary must be granted. But this necessary existence itself belongs to the sensible world. For if it existed outside that world, the series of alterations in the world would derive its beginning from a necessary cause which would not itself belong to the sensible world. This, however, is impossible.
Antithesis: an absolutely necessary being nowhere exists in the world, nor does it exist outside the world as its cause.
Proof: If we assume that the world itself is necessary, or that a necessary being exists in it, there are then two alternatives. Either there is a beginning … which is absolutely necessary, … or the series itself is without any beginning and although [each moment is contingent, the] whole, is absolutely necessary[.] … The former … however, conflicts with the … law of the determination of all appearances in time; and the latter alternative contradicts itself, since the existence of a series cannot be necessary if no single member of it is necessary. [If the being is outside of the sensible world, it must still act on the sensible world, which requires it to be a part of the world.]
The problem is that the thesis and antithesis both assume that the essence of the world must conform to the categories we create for our experience of it. They furnish common definitions of “time” and “cause” and “condition” and “necessary” and then use that to go in two contradictory directions. The problem is not in the argument — they are both logically valid — but in the assumptions they are founded on.
Kant believed that God was not something you can prove by argument, but also scorned the empiricists for thinking they had done away with morality, causality, and God nonetheless. He had his own arguments concerning those and more, but what was important was that they ran on new ground, new assumptions.
The existence of a God, of divine diktat, does not by itself make the problem of meaning or ideals in life go away, for the question becomes: why listen to God? There are various methods to answering this problem, but generally the form the answer takes is in creating an infinite debt — that of creator, redeemer, and partner all in one.
Perhaps there is a story to tell here from the first gods — a debt to the trees, to the rivers, and to the sky — to God — a debt for Everything. As wary as my post-2008 American sensibility is of debt consolidation, this does not interest me so much as the plain observation that humanity seems to have chosen to take on an infinite debt rather than to have no direction at all. Insofar as religion is something people like believing in, there is evidence for a preference of direction over innocence. Better to have a crime and the path of atonement than no crime and no path at all.
“The Human is … its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies Being to that which assures it.” — Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics as First Philosophy
Simone Weil believed that the difference between obligation and right was a difference in perspective. An actor has obligation, the acted upon have rights. I have obligations, you have rights.
What if I cannot merely live, but your life is immeasurably precious?
Do you see it? It’s not a contest, but a distinction.
There are new arguments for the existence of God. Kant dealt with the old ones — ontological, cosmological, and such — that purported a proof of God basically by fiat. The arguments have since become more measured. Within the realm of people screwed-up by modernity enough to argue about God’s existence, everyone is arguing on Kantian grounds now: you cannot prove God, but you can suggest Him. You can make it reasonable to believe in Him and end your argument there.
The most compelling one that I have seen is fine tuning:
The argument begins by noting that the parameters of the universe are finely tuned in the sense that they fall in a very narrow range needed for life. For instance, with the cosmological constant, of it’s [sic] possible values, only 1/10^120 are capable of sustaining anything valuable or complex—most values would result in everything simply flying apart. Fortunately for us, the cosmological constant happens to fall in that narrow value.
There’s broad agreement in physics that there is significant fine-tuning. It falls into three categories: fine-tuning of the laws, fine-tuning of the constants, and fine-tuning of the initial conditions. The laws are finely tuned in that if you tweaked or deleted any of the laws—with the possible exception of the weak nuclear force—no complex structures could arise. There’s also something called the Pauli exclusion principle which also is indicative of fine-tuning.
The constants are the values that get plugged into the laws that determine their effects—for instance, the strength of gravity is determined, in part, by some constant G. These constants are the most widely cited example of fine-tuning: the cosmological constant, for instance, is finely-tuned to 1 part in 10^120—as improbable as throwing a dart randomly across the entire known universe and hitting just one atom. Lots of other constants are finely-tuned.
Finally, the initial conditions are what the universe looked like at the beginning—at the big bang. They’re finely tuned to an even greater degree—the low entropy state at the beginning of the universe represents only 1 part in 10^10^123 of the available values it could have taken on. That’s a truly staggering number—if you wrote the letter 9 on every quark in the universe, the number you’d write out would be much smaller than 10^10^123.
The post goes on and is in general deeply intellectually compelling. It certainly made me more confident in my agnosticism in the face of Russell’s teapot. And yet. It just seems strange to believe in God because of the Planck Length. Doesn’t it? Maybe this belies my (our?) pretended concern with Truth and all that — this is truth (perhaps not Truth), isn’t it? Should I not lead with my head and my heart will follow?
But something is just wrong. Believing in God is too important for these arguments. Their numbers come from academic journals and laboratories — nothing against them, of course (see above, below, and generally everywhere around), but those are not the fonts of prophets. Maybe I can add on to such a theory some of those near death experiences you hear about? Maybe.
And yet going from the bottom-up doesn’t feel much better. Act like I believe in God? Fake it ‘til I make it? Fake who? God? It’s rotten if it’s not True and I can’t act this way in Truth. Something’s missing. I can turn around the argument any which way, even believe the argument, and still I fall.
The fourth trick to thinking new thoughts isn’t so much of a trick, but it’s this: bring in the ignored thing. Ideas cut out all the parts of the world except those they don’t. That’s what makes them workable. But sometimes there’s something missing. You’re looking at a trail and haven’t noticed the scenery, the time of day, the shortcut. You haven’t noticed the open field flowing with golden wheat and a gentle breeze as you trudge through the sinking swamp.
According to Joseph Heath, the hottest thing in political philosophy in the final years of the cold war was a resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world and Frankfurt School inheritors. Many of the greatest minds of political philosophy in the late 20th century put their heads together and tried to formulate a “no-bullshit Marxism.” Here’s his telling:
Marx always insisted that the major difference between his view and that of the “utopian socialists” was that he was not engaged in any sort of moral criticism of the capitalist system, nor was he claiming that capitalism was unjust. He was merely predicting the downfall of the capitalist system, based on his scientific understanding of the laws of historical development. So, for example, his use of the term “exploitation” was not intended to imply any sort of moral condemnation, it was merely a technical term used to describe the extraction of surplus value from labour.
This was obvious bullshit…. Most importantly, workers did not become “immiserated,” as Marx predicted, but rather experienced robust wage growth, so that by the beginning of the 1970s it was really not obvious to anyone that workers had reasons of self-interest to support socialist revolution.
By this time most Marxists had also realized that they needed a moral critique of capitalism, because the whole “predicting its downfall” angle had basically outlived its usefulness. … One of the tasks that the group set itself was therefore to offer an analysis and defence of such a moral critique. The obvious place to start was with the concept of exploitation. …
Over time, however, it became clear that every attempt to answer these questions was running into massive problems. … [(S]ee van Parijs’s, “What (if anything) is intrinsically wrong with capitalism?”). … For Cohen … the problems were caused by Robert Nozick….
The most natural way to specify the wrongness of exploitation is to say that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly. … But as Nozick observed, if this is your view, then you can’t really complain about certain economic inequalities…. Furthermore, taxing away any part of this income looks a lot like exploitation.
This argument made Cohen extremely uncomfortable, because it constituted a direct challenge to the normative foundations of Marxism-as-critique-of-exploitation. He spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive. Then one day (as he tells the story) he decided to leave Oxford and spend some time at Harvard. Upon arriving in America, he discovered that none of his fellow left-wing political philosophers had been losing any sleep at all over Nozick’s arguments. Why? Because they were egalitarians. They didn’t care about either self-ownership or exploitation, so they simply rejected the premises of Nozick’s argument. …
This … forced him to ask the basic question: what is it that I dislike most about capitalism? Is it that, according to some (increasingly arcane) formula, not everyone is getting paid the full value of what they produce? Or is it that some people live in poverty, unable to afford the essentials of a dignified life, in the midst of a society overflowing with riches? What Nozick showed is that fixing the exploitation problem may not fix the inequality problem. … So one really is forced to choose which flaw in the system one cares about most.
Why were Cohen’s American colleagues so quick to embrace egalitarianism? Because they were Rawlsians.
Within the next several years, every member of this project of analytical Marxism at one point or another became a Rawlsian (or Rawls-esque) liberal.
Ah, apologies, I should have mentioned: the title of the blogpost is “John Rawls and the Death of Western Marxism.” John Rawls did not kill Marxism by refuting it, but by talking about something entirely different which made Marxism superfluous. He noticed the ‘fact’ (intuition, idea, moral reason) that no one was looking at and was able to think something new — or something very old in a new way.
Ernst Jünger was a German nationalist at the start of the 20th century. He was also very likely something of a psychopath, or at least in the neighborhood. Yet he was also also a brilliant polymath and refused Nazi entreaties, being one of the first to realize how terrible a threat Hitler was to the world. He wrote On The Marble Cliffs about watching the country he loved burn — worse than burn, he watched it set fire to itself. From a review of the book:
Jünger never admitted even a shred of mental weakness, even privately. But objectively, everything he passionately believed in had been falling apart for years. … For many years, he had strived mightily to guide his beloved country to what he believed was a better path - and had evidently failed completely. How could he possibly have coped with all this?
I believe this book is his answer. And the answer is: look at beauty. Once you realize this, the entire book turns around. When the brothers see the extermination camp and distract themselves with botany, it isn't minimizing the horror, it is advice on how to remain functional in the face of catastrophe. Jünger says that quite explicitly:
We men when we are busied about our appointed tasks fulfil an office; and it is strange how immediately we are possessed by a stronger feeling of invulnerability. We had experienced this already on the field of battle where the soldier, when the proximity of the enemy threatens to sap his courage, turns with a will to duties which his rank prescribes. There is great strength in the sight of the eyes when in full consciousness and unshaded by obscurities it is turned upon the things around us. In particular it draws nourishment from created things, and herein alone lies the power of science. Therefore we felt that even the tender flower in its imperishable pattern and living form strengthened us to withstand the breath of corruption.
Similarly, the narrator's enraptured description of how beautifully the towns burn isn’t callous disregard for the suffering of the inhabitants. It is hard-earned advice for how to cope with seeing such a thing. His repeated celebration of treasured memories isn’t merely reactionary, it points out there is beneficial comfort available there. And perhaps most importantly of all, the boundless intensity of his descriptions repeatedly insists that if you go deeper and deeper into beauty you can enter sublime, mystical, incomparable moments of awestruck glory that can save your soul. Jünger said this book constitutes “an attack on reality from out of the world of dreams” and once you get past the martial, typical Jüngerian metaphor, you can translate that into “an overcoming of reality through visionary strength”. Jünger keeps doing this. Even in his later World War 2 diaries, his descriptions of awful atrocities keep being interrupted with deep appreciations of art and nature.
Immanuel Kant believed that beauty and the sublime were the cognitive tools which connected morality and reality. They each taught us something about the moral law through their application to the world. Beauty, that we could find pleasure in something that does us no self-interested good; sublimity, that we could love and esteem even that which might endanger us. A flower is beautiful even if it does nothing for you — the moral law is good even though it provides you no advantage. A terrible storm is sublime even though it could swallow us into its depths.
It is common to experience morality as a conflict between our own interest and the obligations we feel. But to feel this conflict is not what makes an act moral. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem posits that the strange environment of Nazi Germany was such that all the government propaganda and diktats put the weight of social authority on the side of evil and left only the personal, sentimental temptation to do good. Morality is not restriction. Obligation can be lovingly, joyfully expressed. What makes morality different from sentiment is that it holds even when sentiment doesn’t, but to see a beautiful flower and wonder at this gift from the world — doesn’t it make you want to return the favor?
There are times, almost always when I am alone, sometimes — God help my American soul — when I am driving down a street in pure motion, and basically never when I am reading or working or otherwise engaged, where I feel something that I imagine to be ecstatic love. It feels like I have pure, undirected desire bottled up in my chest. It wants to flow outwards and upwards and touch anything that reaches back out to it as well as most things that don't. My mind tends towards Alyosha kissing the earth; I want to give and embrace. It is not quite pleasure, and not quite pain, but there is within it hints of both an ecstasy and a tension. It is a feeling I quite like, but ‘enjoy’ does not quite seem right. It is paired with a sort of sorrow, as desire usually is, and a kind of lack, as always accompanies it. But the melancholy is inflected with a bigheartedness which almost reaches fullness — the wish is so big and grand (to hold all of creation not in the palm of my hand but the warmth of my chest) that its vastness almost substitutes for its actualization. My heart feels big — not light, not happy, not excited, but like it is stretching against its humble place in my chest, beating away, serving one man, sometimes worthy of its good work. The feeling holds for some time, then I am reminded of something, and it fades. But the wonder, the fullness, the wish for everything remains, I hope, at least in some form. Sometimes it does not show in my actions — petty and cowardly and mean as they can be — but I don't think that makes it forgotten. It just means it is not always in the driver's seat.
I am sometimes pulled by this feeling, and other times by fear — fear, usually, of not looking reasonable. I am almost always ashamed when the fear wins.
I’ve read the Romantics — or at least a couple. I don’t buy it, their aesthetic life. The ecstasy and misery, the transgressions and setting off on your own, the distaste for the give-and-take of human relationship. Everything must be new and sensuous and exciting. The excitement! Oh how excited they are in the hollowness that they wreak on everyone who might need them. The constant search for the stroke of a meaning — or a woman, either seems to work, at least for a little while. I don’t trust it. They seem to believe the whole conventional world can be written off with the right thudding, swollen, swamped word — it’s “turgid,” “fetid,” “dead.”
Once a boundary is transgressed, it is reaffirmed or it crumbles — you are either punished or outlawed. True punishment, punishment which rebuilds the wall, requires rehabilitation. Once the wall crumbles, any thrill which came from breaking it will not come back. Or if it does, it will be a ghost of itself, then a ghost of a ghost, then all the way until it is nothing at all. You are outlawed — the connection is gone.
Beauty can help, it is important, but it is not the capstone of life. It is connective tissue and repair, it helps manage the pain and give the whole thing a sense of unity. But it cannot lead. An ecstatic feeling is just that — a feeling. Chasing sensation, no matter how cultivated the sensation, is not a God I would serve.
The last trick to thinking new thoughts is to change the level of analysis. From The Last Psychiatrist (yes, the one from the other post):2
A quick primer on the new Narcissism. …
A narcissist isn't necessarily an egotist, someone who thinks they are the best. A quick screen is an inability to appreciate that other people exist, and have thoughts, feelings, and actions unrelated to the narcissist. These thoughts don't have to be good ones, but they have to be linked to the narcissist. ("I'm going to get some gas-- because that jerk never fills the car.")
The narcissist believes he is the main character in his own movie. Everyone else has a supporting role-- everyone around him becomes a "type." You know how in every romantic comedy, there's always the funny friend who helps the main character figure out her relationship? In the movie, her whole existence is to be there fore [sic?] the main character. But in real life, that funny friend has her own life; she might even be the main character in her own movie, right? Well the narcissist wouldn't be able to grasp that. Her friends are always supporting characters, that can be called at any hour of the night, that will always be interested in what she is wearing, or what she did. That funny friend isn't just being kind, she doesn't just want to help-- she's personally interested in the narcissist's life. Of course she is.
…
So on the one hand, the narcissist reduces everyone else to a type, as it relates to himself; on the other hand, the narcissist, as the main character in his movie, has an identity that he wants (i.e. he made it up) and requires all others to supplement that identity.
…
Consider the narcissist who wants his wife to wear only white, high heeled pumps. The narcissist wants this not because he himself likes white high heel pumps-- which he might-- but because the type of person he thinks he is would only be with the type of woman who wears white high heeled pumps. Or, in other terms, other people would expect someone like himself to be with a woman who wears those shoes. …
Narcissists typically focus on specific things as proxies for their identity. … The connotations, not the reality, are what matters (especially if other people can't check.)
…
Part of … development comes from not learning that there is a right and wrong that exists outside them. This may come from inconsistent parenting:
Dad says, "you stupid kid, don't watch TV, TV is bad, it'll make you stupid!" Ok. Lesson learned. But then one day Dad has to do some work: "stop making so much noise! Here, sit down and watch TV." What's the learned message? It isn't that TV is sometimes good and sometimes bad. It's that good and bad are decided by the person with the most power.
So the goal in development is to become the one with the most power. Hence, narcissists can be dogmatic ("adultery is immoral!") and hypocrites ("well, she came on to me, and you were ignoring me at home") at the same time. There is no right and wrong-- only right and wrong for them. …
Narcissists never feel guilt. Only shame.
The problem here is not that the narcissist is running the argument in the wrong direction, or that there is some other way to frame the competing arguments, or even that they are missing a separate fact (they know other people exist — if you tell them that they won’t be surprised. The problem isn’t that they have not considered that, it’s that their whole level of analysis is built around a different idea, an idea which does not allow it to be involved.).
The problem is that the narcissist is thinking on the wrong level of analysis, or can’t see the other level of analysis. They are a political reporter who can only analyze policies in terms of which interest groups benefit, rather than what is actually right or best for everyone. They are a ‘wellness’ thinker who only thinks to evaluate forgiveness in terms of individual health. The narcissist can only think in terms of identity (and generally only in that of their own).
Here is a genre of quote I like:
“It is the very pursuit of happiness which thwarts happiness.” — Victor Frankl
“If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time” — Edith Wharton
“Happiness is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves” — F. Emerson Andrews
“Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The eternal error men make [is] in imagining that happiness consists in the realization of their desires” — Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy'. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.” — Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Victor Frankl tells a story of a patient who comes to him after his wife dies:
Once, an elderly practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!”. Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of sacrifice.
Maybe I’m thinking about all of this in the wrong terms. Meaning is not a problem of God or ideals — meaning is lying in the street; one must simply pick it up. The interminable checking-in of “do I have meaning?” “what do I find meaningful?” “is this what meaningfulness feels like?” is not meaning — perhaps if it’s anything, it’s a masturbatory defense against change. It’s still me. It’s the wrong level of analysis.
I suppose this is where love is supposed to come in, that great mystifier. Do you feel the grip of meaninglessness when you look into the eyes of a loved one? Do you feel like nothing matters when you console a friend? Do you feel like you’re falling towards oblivion when a baby’s eyes first open, crying and cooing and kicking its feet? I don’t know. Love is huge and mysterious and maybe all the meaning there is is just trying to figure out what it means. Maybe all of this is just circling around the oldest, most terrible cliché of them all: love. Maybe.
This post may evince a progression. I am not sure if that is correct. It is as much kaleidoscopic as it is serial. I don’t have the answers now; all I see when I read through this are hanging threads. I’m not sure, in fact, that I am even asking the right questions. But I will, the goal is, “live along some distant day into the answer.” That, I suppose, is a large part of this project. I hope we both enjoy the ride.
The next post on TLP is coming soon. I have a bad habit of starting new things, but I generally finish what I’ve started, albeit out-of-order.
Hi. I haven’t read it all yet, but I’ve enjoyed it so far. Concerning anarchy, I feel sure that you (should) know about anarcho-capitalism, but here you paint anarchy only in communist and primitivist colors. I’ll continue reading, but I think it’s a grave error. Also, the diabetic children’s ward sequence overkills, I think. Otherwise, well done!