Writing Great Philosophy for the Sake of the Future

Some of the most important written works neither profit a thinker, nor advance an academic or public career. At first, they offer only themselves. (Or, perhaps, some extraordinary adventures and experiences necessary to write them—yet the total labor required to see them through often dims this value for the author.)

Yet the expectation that compositions should soon yield profits, status, fame or advancement keeps many thinkers and writers away from achieving greater work.

This is one reason why academia is very nearly the death of philosophy, and the market for writing, little better. Most who somehow emerge from modern “education systems” and have philosophy to offer—ideas cultivated through study and appreciation of the sciences (the fields of human knowledge) and expressed as a creation of art—are obliged to bury their ideas in entertainment in order to sell their work and support themselves. This is valuable, but second-hand.

While philosophical works should not quite follow “art for art’s sake,” they must be undertaken without promise of rewards save important work of great meaning. Though it is no guarantee, great philosophy first requires appropriate ambition, and dedication of oneself.

And we all require more great philosophy. Without great works to develop new ideas for the future, there will be no future different from the consequences of the ideas inherited from the past.

There are too many old and misplaced ideas we are living with. If they were ever right, they are no longer right, for us, now. We are still counting on Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, and so many others to write our future—implicitly. Even Darwin has yet to sink in. We are still building upon ancient notions like foundations we almost never notice. Many of the newest sources are centuries old; many of those we call “modern” thinkers are unoriginal recyclers, copycats, and poor synthesists of the grab bag. Yet people who repeat echoes of Rousseau, Paine, and poor readings of Jesus wonder why they cannot change things. Utopian faiths, demanding abstractions, and political revolutions come up empty because they have been tried before without understanding, only to be repeated now as though new.

We wonder why we’re stuck in a present that still looks like the past—degraded, plus technology that—we like to hope—has something to say, because we don’t. No, we’ll only have a different future when enough of us commit to thinking and writing for one.

Learn from cats.

When I see an unwell, undernourished 20-plus year old cat display more moxie than most humans I know, it’s a powerful reminder of how far away people have withdrawn from their better instincts.

Cats struggle to survive when life gets hard—stray cats, even more than pets. People think from time to time that it might be easier if they weren’t alive, when they’re depressed or feel sorry for themselves. People learn to feel anxious or guilty about being here, and even pick up that humans ought to apologize for being alive on Earth. Cats consume. People do too, but they have learned to question that, feel uneasy, or detest it.

Cats go after what they want. People are reluctant to go after what they want, and they’re afraid to get it. Cats focus on what they’re doing at the moment. People distract themselves from being present. Cats revel in pleasurable sensations and devote serious time to them. People feel guilty about feeling pleasure, and deny themselves, or feel like they need permission or an excuse. Cats love affection when they want it. People reject affection when they want it.

It seems that cats have feline nature on their side implicitly, but people won’t accept their own human nature.

Other animals besides Man aren’t uncertain about whether it’s good to be vigorous or direct. You have to wonder about an animal that wastes its years before getting sick or old doubting or diffusing its vital energies instead of accepting them before they’re gone.

The Political Correctness of Death Threats, and the positive right to not be offended

In a blog post I recommend, Katabasis writes about multiple cases in Britain in which ”Three separate University Atheist / Secularist student societies have come under attack from islamists” but also politically-correct peers. One case involved a cartoon depicting “Jesus and Mo.” In another at Queen Mary:

students had organised a talk on ‘Sharia Law and Human Rights’. An Islamist thug turned up (with help apparently), filmed members of the audience and threatened violence against them if he heard of any “insult to the prophet”.

Having now spent some time with the Queen Mary students to find out first hand what happened I can tell you that these kids are feeling not only scared, but also very isolated. Not only do the various students unions involved in these debacles appear to be uncritcially taking the Islamist side against all reason, demanding that the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist societies censor themselves or – in the case of LSE – face expulsion from the Union, but I’ve heard a number of them asking ‘where is the left’?

The university “left,” mired in PC culture and allergic to offense to the point of a zealot’s intolerance in their own right, responded by attacking the victims of death threats such as beheading. Take for example the LSESU Socialist Workers Society statement: ”The Atheist Society’s efforts to publish inflammatory “satirical” cartoons in a deliberate attempt to offend Muslims serve to highlight a festering undercurrent of racism.”

It is disgraceful but typical of PC reactionaries that actual oppression doesn’t matter compared to conceptualized victimhood—on behalf of someone else!—or rather some collective identity idol that’s not intended to be interactive or reflective of real people.

The entire account of the surreal PC university culture from the LSE Society is here and worth reading, as is the entire post by Katabasis, particularly to get a sense of just how serious these threats have been, and how unserious and inadequate the response of offense-policing censors and offense-averse police has been.

An American observer may note the irony here that the “creeping tide of sharia” feared by so many anti-Muslim bigots in America since 9-11 is to some extent a reality in exemptions from British law, but while almost exclusively nonviolent and mostly moderate Muslims have been persecuted extensively in the US, actual violent Islamists have been allowed to force their sensibilities of offense upon British society and threaten critics, while those critics have been dutifully attacked for stirring up trouble.

Non-white Muslims are among the special, protected groups under a sanctimonious, multicultural (that is, anti-white, anti-Western, and anti-Anglo) regime of victimhood—so much so that pretend religious adherence can be used as a defense for savagely attacking a woman for being white.

(Americans should also note that Britain is a country where people who defend themselves may be prosecuted, and will be excoriated by the politically correct. In that linked case, the woman’s boyfriend had the gall to fend off four women ripping her hair out, which in its threatening maleness was seen as a mitigating factor by the judge.)

The British infection is at a very advanced state. But I’m not talking about the Islamists, for if they were not treated to special rights to threaten others and impose their will by force, they would stop. Far worse is the cultural infection of pusillanimous political correctness which routinely blames real victims even as special victimhood is cultivated like a renewable resource.*

It’s a predictable disaster when people allow free speech to be trumped by the presumed right to not be offended.

This is an ideal occasion to explain the difference between negative rights and positive rights, the importance of the distinction, and why positive rights set a dangerous precedent.

Traditional, negative rights like freedoms of expression and private property are simply based on people being left alone to do what they will, or treated equally from an official legal perspective—like rights of the accused.

The “right not to be offended” is an example of a positive right. In order for you to not be offended, someone else has to be MADE to shut up. Who’s going to do that? And of course, someone has to determine what the fuck “offensive” means, even though it’s clearly in the eye of the beholder. So with that one pseudo-right, we would empower an entire social apparatus of political correctness to adjudicate and require compulsive thuggery on a massive scale if we wished to enforce it.

Officializing such a right makes these problems even worse, not only metastasizing the state to control citizens so they refrain from “offense,” but ensuring arguments over the official definition. Real illustrations extend from mandated censorship of “bad words” in broadcasts (see George Carlin’s seven dirty words routine) to censoring dissidents during every major war—for nothing is more offensive to jingoes.

Other examples of presumed (positive) rights include food, jobs, high wages, housing, etc. Someone else must be compelled to provide these things for you, so they inherently violate negative rights. They violate the freedoms not to be forced to serve others, or comply with the demands of others.

Positive rights aren’t rights in the traditional sense at all, they are demands on others.

It’s worth noting that “human rights” documents such as the European Convention on Human Rights and UN Declaration  make no proper distinction between the two, in addition to qualifying rights so that they are subject to interpretations of political and bureaucratic officials, and thus useless. The common public perception of human rights is a muddle between licenses to enable tyrannical demands in the name of good ends, and rights that were devices used to help ensure personal freedoms since the Magna Carta and more recently, the American Constitution.

*Addendum: In another stark indication of this abysmal cultivation of victimhood even at the expense of real victims, the violence, hooliganism, and thievery of opportunist rioters in 2011 provided an opportunity for many PC British leftists to sermonize about racial and economic justice, privilege, and other buzzwords, and lecture about the plight of the downtrodden in underprivileged welfare communities—never mind that many of those subsequently arrested turned out to have good jobs, and never mind that the rioters’ targets were often the local businesses serving these communities.

Writing to-do list for February and the rest of 2012

Taking stock of what February’s going to be like, as I gradually emerge from flu-congested mental functions that have kept me poking about on the web at best—

• Looks like I have about 20,000 words toward my next major writing focus to sort through (not including notes), although the main challenge there will be to always refresh my perspective instead of getting bogged down in editing what I already have. This will be my latest systematic entry in the reformation of vital philosophy—not intended to be book length, but concise, compelling, and evocative like myth.

• Also about 5,000 words toward a secondary anthropology vid-doc project on war and human nature, plus more in notes. Current reading is research for that.

• I have some very large but uncounted amount of material towards my next big book, on a multidisciplinary theory of the human mind and sort of a explorer’s map/”user’s manual,” to resort to an inadequate phrase. That is the other really exciting thing on the horizon this year. Tempted to dive back into that sooner but I don’t plan on it quite yet, because I know it’s going to become all-consuming once again, when I do.

• I also plan to avoid dealing with the clutter of hundreds of thousands of words in material for sundry essays, articles, and aphorisms on the burner because I want to maintain focus on the first two things above. There’s a certain amount of reorganizing that has to be done at some point, though, once I decide what directions I want to prioritize out of all these things I once planned to follow up, years ago. Some I started during my novel, some before.

• The elephant in the room is that I need to decide how much I want to reinvest in web publishing. That will determine whether I’m going to focus on fewer, larger projects like novels, nonfiction books, and media, or again diversify into more varied web-based writings, as I used to when I accumulated all the stuff I have on hand.

Operation Blackout: Learn more about SOPA/PIPA

http://sopablackout.org/learnmore/

Promethea.org and prometheanmovement.org will be striking in support on Jan. 18th.

Why Some Political Issues Must Come First

Glenn Greenwald writes:

If you don’t really care about these issues — war, empire, the denial of due process, suffocating secrecy, ongoing killing of foreign civilians, oligarchical manipulation of the Fed and other government policies, militarized foreign policy and police practices, etc. —  then it’s easy to blithely dismiss the need to find some way [that Ron Paul provides] to challenge the bipartisan consensus on those issues.
…
One final point that should be made: I do not believe that the issues on which I principally focus are objectively The Most Important Ones. There are many issues of vital importance that I write about rarely or almost never: climate change, tax policy, abortion, even the issue which affects me most personally: gay equality. None of us can write about every issue meaningfully. The issues on which I focus are ones where I believe I can contribute expertise, or express views and points not being heard elsewhere. But there are many other issues of genuine importance, and I have no objection to those who, when forced to choose, prioritize those concerns over the ones about which I write most frequently. That is why I wrote — and meant — that “there are all sorts of legitimate reasons for progressives to oppose Ron Paul’s candidacy on the whole” and “it’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate [Obama] are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else.”

As much as I admire this guru of civil liberties, I think he’s wrong here, in practical terms. Some issues must sensibly come first, if others are to be considered at all.

For example: I would be very surprised if—assuming that Paul is not elected and nothing is done about spending and debt—the national-and-international debt house of cards collapses, the dollar is massively devalued, people are struggling to feed and clothe their families, and the worst thing gay Americans have to worry about is whether the state will sanction their marriage.

At least, in the worst-hit, most desperate communities, gays will not only find themselves scrabbling along with everyone else, but potentially defending themselves along with other minorities (including dissidents like myself), who are so often demonized and blamed during difficult times.

Outsiders by nature or circumstance—all those of unusual and outspoken beliefs, lifestyles, and minority identities—will find ourselves on the fringe of whatever new ‘mainstream’ emerges in many communities, which will almost certainly be intolerant. Lynchings and other attacks will occur. It’s worth remembering that the major factor behind lynchings in the South wasn’t an aimless “racism” but resentment over postwar devastation, economic suffering, and occupation that rendered Southern white men powerless and poor and hungry for someone even less powerful to hurt.

Even worse, in such a scenario it becomes rather likely that scared, angry and desperate people will resort to supporting a system or competing systems of abject fascism —especially given the burgeoning police-state precedents which no major candidate but Ron Paul has opposed—and it will almost certainly not be a gay-friendly or minority-friendly fascism but a fundamentalist-friendly one.

Reproductive rights aren’t very often thought about either when governments are hounded by hungry people and desperate to control or placate them. Control will include intrusions into personal life far greater than the bogeyman of potentially having to argue a legal case about abortion at a state level (the specter raised against states’ rights); placation will include pandering to powerful fundamentalist Christian interests who are intolerant of abortion or even birth control.

It will be easier to rule by dividing, and set groups against each other than to solve severe economic problems.

It also makes little sense to debate the greater importance of a positive-rights social issue such as gay marriage over traditional negative-rights civil liberties when the entire principle of open debate is being challenged, along with the right to protest. The time for debates over other issues is once, first, the right to debate is itself secured against imminent threats.

At present, only one presidential candidate in the US race can credibly claim to be devoted to defending the right to speak out against the government, and that is Ron Paul. The freedom of political speech, most especially including the right to attack the powerful, comes first in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights for a reason. Whether you admire all of Paul’s policies and ideas—who can expect this from a politician?—or detest some of them, or whether you like him or hate him personally is all irrelevant compared to that. We can’t even have that conversation without the right to speak out and disagree together.

The remaining Republican field and the sitting president are all, more or less, for criminalizing free speech and setting precedents which will erode this right for the future. For example, effective reporting and dissent from Wikileaks led to open threats by the Obama administration and threats against Julian Assange by openly fascist candidates such as Newt Gingrich, who called him an “enemy combatant”; only Ron Paul defended Wikileaks and Bradley Manning. The Obama administration also believes the president has the right to detain and assassinate citizens on the basis of activities formerly protected under the First Amendment, and to the general agreement of the Republican field save Ron Paul.  Even public discourse on the internet is under attack. The entire social climate since 2001 has increasingly become intolerant of differing opinions, and only one major candidate opposes this direction entirely.

Once precedents are set, it will be irrelevant why the measures were first enacted—for IP or for “terrorism.” They will be used for anything and every case in which the government or connected corporations wish to suppress free speech and open debate, just as anti-terror surveillance measures and other extralegal procedures provided under the Patriot Act were primarily used against suspects in the drug war, not accused terrorists.

This is not a time when we have the luxury of having whatever political priorities we like. We are genuinely under threat of fascist control and economic collapse. First, we must secure a minimal right to dissent and free spaces for debate in public, in print, and online, and for that we—civil or fiscal libertarians, classical liberals or progressive liberals, anarchists, individualists or communitarians, independents, left/right/miscellaneous—must work together. Then we can all worry about debating what we really want.

And yes, a similar rationale of priorities trumping social issues for progressives would also indicate that anarchists, nonvoters, and all those who perhaps sensibly refuse to participate in politics normally would be well-advised to consider that their luxury of non-participation is not guaranteed. Those like myself who object to the system in which we find ourselves coerced would prefer not to sanction it with participation, because we do not agree with its very existence. And yet, it is patently absurd to suggest that a voluntarist or anarchist has no immediate interest at stake between a lone neo-Jeffersonian presidential candidate and a field of police-state fascists presiding over an economy drowning in debt.

Again: first, we must secure a minimal right to dissent, and opportunities to make alternate cases to people who will care about something besides fear-based survival and finding someone to blame.  Then we can argue the abolition of the state. We should also expect this to be far easier with sympathetic Jeffersonians or even semi-libertarians than with authoritarians.

Anti-psychiatry; an example of polarized debate between anti-science fringe and orthodoxy

Reading on the internet has probably already introduced you to the anti-psychiatric movement, which appeals to the dislike people have for the “disease model” and fear of medication for mental illness, which relates to their fears of being out of control of their own minds. Although they will have already experienced this as human beings, if not also as sufferers of particular disorders, they may not have accepted it any more than people can accept the fact of their future death.

In short, the anti-psychiatric movement, and specifically its anti-psychopharmacological message, appeals to the folk rejection of the mind or “soul” people think of as their unitary self being in some way integrated or derived—to some debatable degree—without conscious control, and being subject instead to the evolution, development, oddities and dysfunctions of a physical electrochemical brain, a compound, complex adaptive system. Despite mountains of scientific evidence, folk beliefs about the brain prefer to believe it is merely the seat of consciousness. This is just as true of secularists, who won’t use the word “soul,” but still believe in a metaphysical notion about the mind, falsely distinguishing the experience from the brain from which it emerges.

Figureheads of the movement like Thomas Szasz also portray psychiatry almost exclusively as a soulless industry abusing and controlling patients and selling destructive “medicine” they don’t need for imaginary ailments, rather than as a non-monolithic medical field which is generally less problematic now than some of its earlier history, but still muddling through, like its patients, not without problems, errors, and differences of opinion. The evil-psychiatry portrayal is mixed with a lot of disprovable medical ignorance and some brazen lies, but as is well known on the internet, most readers are not diligent in their fact-checking and not particularly critical about sources.

If any of them know, I have never seen one of the many people who reference the anti-psychiatry quack Thomas Szasz ever mention that his group, the so-called “Citizens Commission on Human Rights,” is a front for the Church of Scientology.

Scientologists have to be wise to their need for fronts like this to promote their views, which will otherwise be received as if they come from a science fiction cult—because they do. They have an agenda to disparage medical science, psychopharmacology, all psychiatric and psychological theories and treatment options—effective and ineffective, appropriate and inappropriate alike—to promote their own brand of quackery instead. This isn’t news, but I imagine that it will be useful for some readers on the internet, who have been taken in by some of the false arguments figureheads like Szasz have promoted, to learn about their associations with Scientology.

That was enough reason to make this post, but I would also like to briefly connect it to a larger pattern I have repeatedly noticed in dialogues about contentious science.

One unfortunate effect of anti-scientific criticism you will see is the gradual elimination of other positions with sensible criticisms of the establishment, in the fight between two absolutes.

One analogy to the environment created between the pro-medication (many would say, over-medication) psychiatry and anti-psychiatry camps (the latter essentially dismissing the science behind psychopharmacology, the former exaggerating its precision and utility) can be found in the environment created by vaccine critics attacking the vaccine establishment. Advocates like Paul Offit end up claiming vaccines can virtually never do any harm just to counter baseless claims that vaccines never did any good (polio, anyone?), or caused autism, or poison people, or spread HIV. Meanwhile, the fact that different vaccines vary widely in their effectiveness and safety, and evidence that both a great deal of industry money and centralized regulatory and public health information systems do distort both approval of vaccines and public perceptions of vaccines, are largely ignored.

Scientists become more shrill, dogmatic, and devotional, and adopt more politically-calculated positions, in response to bizarre anti-scientific positions attacking them which are shrill, dogmatic, and devotional from the beginning.

This also reminds me of what happened between the anti-Darwin positions (Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates) and the establishment academic positions on evolution. Prominent evolutionary scientists and advocates were increasingly pushed not only into a reactionary atheism but a reactionary neo-Darwinism, with some even intolerant or dismissive of valuable gadfly Steven Jay Gould.

The extremity of the debate sets the tone for a shallower discussion and understanding of science in which there is a temptation to underplay, distort, or ignore facts on *both* sides, to refuse to yield ground and to refuse ammunition to “the other side”—for there erroneously will appear to be only two, to the combatants.

One conclusion I would draw is that the partisan involvement of the public in a scientific field makes science less scientific. It’s not only the lure of public funding that can corrupt scientists, as in the Climategate IPCC scandal. It’s also that the rancorous mentalities of public debate with non-scientists frequently erode the essential scientific mentalities of openness and impartiality that require careful construction and maintenance. Scientists are humans too, and they become defensive about their turf just as readily as others. The public is understandably concerned about the effects of applied science, but interference with the aim of altering scientific conclusions to become more acceptable to preconceptions (the true bane of science) seems to corrupt scientists reacting to it more than they realize.

Even more so, public dialogue and understanding about contentious scientific subjects becomes corrupted, and polarized.