Radical Constructivism in the Slums

There is a thumb-rule which states that any journal of philosophy that publishes contributions from graduates or lecturers in Film Studies or somesuch fluff is a journal unworthy of serious attention. The rule serves to remind us that, for the sake of precious time, one had better attend to more important matters — to weeding the garden, to cleaning the lavatory, to seeing how many mints one can balance on one’s tongue — than to reading such likely piffle. As with all thumb-rules, however, it has its failings; after all it is possible that a serious journal of philosophy will one day publish a contribution from a graduate or lecturer in the aforementioned studies that is worthy of serious attention, a contribution which we would miss if we were to cast the journal out of hand with a flick of the figurative thumb.

.....On a day in which I find myself at a loose end without mints and in the avoidance of work, I have persevered with the written work of one Nick Redfern, postgraduate in Film-Studies and proponent of the doctrine of Radical Constructivism, published in the soberly named journal Essays in Philosophy:

Radical Constructivism does not deny the existence of a reality independent of the mind of the historian, but states that, as the historian is limited by his or her experiences, such a reality cannot be known. [1]

.....Now, it does not follow that because a man is limited by his experiences, he cannot know a mind-independent reality, unless one defines experiences as those things which preclude knowledge of a mind-independent reality, in which case one begs the question. One might suggest — quite unradically — that not all experiences are limitations that keep one away from a mind-independent reality, but rather that at least some of them are informed by a mind-independent reality. It is after all a strange conception to view experience as a prison, in which the mind is locked away from all contact with the outside world, indeed so strange and counter-intuitive that one might expect to find a stronger argument to account for its acceptance. Yet one does not.

.....The argument brought forth by Mr Redfern is a variation of an old one that has found many forms throughout the ages, an argument that is at least as old as the bones of the Sophists. The modern forms of the argument are usually a little more sophisticated – or, at least, they usually take up more space on the page – but the argument is essentially the same: since one knows the world only in relation to oneself, one knows nothing of the world outside of oneself. But as already stated, the argument is either non-sequitous or question-begging. It would be more honest, therefore, if its proponents would drop it in favour of an open declaration of a besetting doubt. Mr Redfern is in no such mood, however:

The key to evaluating competing knowledge claims, therefore, is not to seek to compare them to a mind-independent reality that cannot be known, but to assess their cognitive viability or functional fitness. [2]

Thus, Newton’s contention that the gravitational field of a body is proportional to the body’s mass and varies inversely with the square of distance from the body is a claim that is best evaluated not by observation of a mind-independent reality, which, as any lecturer worth his weight in academic pap will tell you, cannot be observed, but rather by its “cognitive viability” or its “functional fitness”; or, in other words, we should evaluate all claims to knowledge only by how well they fit in with whatever we already believe.

.....One shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that this man is a proponent of a radical politics that requires a radical constructivism for its defence, whereby he can continue to believe what he likes.

.....

[1] Nick Redfern, “Realism, Radical Constructivism, and Film History” Essays in Philosophy: A Biannual Journal, Vol. 7:2, June 2006. Original emphasis.

[2] Ibid.

Fewtril #139

Many have given us their conceptions of Hell for which they have envisaged less the foulest tortures than the eternal submission to annoyances. In this fine tradition, I present my own: Sitting for eternity listening to people discussing novels. Even a red-hot poker would come as a relief.

Anachronism in the Circumstantial Sense

There are two senses in which a thing may be said to be anachronistic: firstly, in the historiographic sense, in which a thing is not set in its correct historical time, as contained, for instance, in the view that Sir Isaac Newton was a member of the Automobile Association; and secondly, in the circumstantial sense, in which a thing does not fit in well with a state of affairs, or is found to be almost useless therein, as contained, for instance, in the view that aristocracy does not fit in well with our modern ideas of social justice, or in the view that it is almost useless to bring a sword into battle against a jet-fighter.

.....The fact that a thing does not fit in well with a state of affairs or is almost useless therein, however, does not necessarily speak ill of that thing or well of that state, except as a practical concern; for that state can be determined by all manner of human choices, right or wrong. It is even possible that a state of affairs could obtain in which moral scruple itself is anachronistic, being that it does not fit in with, or is almost useless under, a technical and rationalised order that sees it as a bar to progress. We have even caught a glimpse of this in some of the political movements of the twentieth century, wherein moral scruple was typically dismissed as an anachronistic expression of “bourgeois morality” — a “lower stage” of social progress. Despite this, some still feel it is sufficient argument against the goodness of a thing to say that it does not fit in well with the present state of affairs, when really they ought to be judging the state just as much as the thing that is out of place in it. This, I suppose, is the triumph of pragmatism over moral principle.

The Coldest of All Cold Monsters

When old Friedrich opined that the “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters” [1], he was reacting, we may presume, against the increasing development of the impersonal and rationalized form of government which grew apace in his day. Nowadays, despite all the hindsight that history may provide, but perhaps because of the growth of this State, we find many who are of almost the opposite opinion: that the State is the name of the benign deity that will secure our salvation. One such is Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, for whom few developments in State-power would be unwelcome, and for whom talk of despotic tendencies is the talk of delusion:

It takes a delusion of some grandeur to imagine that an all-seeing eye really cares what you are up to every minute of the day. But it’s one that seems to be shared by the vociferous campaigners against ‘the surveillance society’.

.....

ID cards is the issue these fears coalesce around. . . . [T]he threat to fundamental civil liberties somehow eludes me. [2]

That something eludes Ms Toynbee should not surprise us. It should alarm us, however, that she, and many like her, are so deluded as not to have noticed the many and diverse ways in which the State has grown ever more watchful, and are so lacking in thought not to have considered that the “all-seeing eye”, if not a practical possibility, is nevertheless the logical end of this development. But then, I suppose, since this development has happened over centuries, one could be forgiven for having come to regard it as part of the natural order; for indeed therein lies not so much a conspiracy—though no doubt some have conspired for greater power—than a development of the natural desire to overcome insecurities. In a similar vein, Leszek Kolakowski remarks:

Many technical, demographic, and social circumstances conspire to devolve the responsibility for more and more areas of life onto the State. We are accustomed to expect from the State ever more solutions not only to social questions but also to private problems and difficulties; it increasingly appears to us that if we are not perfectly happy, it is the State’s fault, as though it were the duty of the all-powerful State to make us happy. This tendency to bear less and less responsibility for our own lives furthers the danger of totalitarian development and fosters our willingness to accept this development without protest. [3]

Ms Toynbee and her kind, however, are bearers of a faith that allays such fears, namely, the cod-panacean faith of democracy:

[F]or as long as the state remains democratic we can decide what use is made of it and how we are protected from possible abuses. [4]

Such baby-talk befits the age, wherein too the mother-talk of demagogues babbles soothingly into countless heads the belief that “we the people” contains to any significant extent “I the person”, and that the rulers and the ruled are in essence one and the same. But as Hans-Hermann Hoppe tells us:

[W]ith a publicly owned government . . . [t]he distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, not only will exploitation increase, whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money ‘creation’ (inflation) or legislative regulation [but also] the number of government employees (‘public servants’) will rise absolutely as well as relatively to private employment, in particular attracting and promoting individuals with high degrees of time preference, and limited farsightedness. [5]

By such tendencies, illusions, and limited farsightedness, it may even be that democracy is more perfectly suited to totalitarianism than any other form of government. Against this view, one might suggest that public opinion would secure us against the worst excesses of State-intrusion; for it is true that public opinion determines to some extent the direction of the democratic State. Again, however, we do not escape, since the government that depends upon public opinion for power tends to shape it towards its own ends, as Lord Acton noted:

[A] government entirely dependent on [public] opinion looks for some security what that opinion shall be, strives for the control of the forces that shape it, and is fearful of suffering the people to be educated in sentiments hostile to its institutions. [6]

The situation would be all the worse if the State were to grow even more powerful than it already has; for the greater its power, the greater its power to shape public opinion in favour of the maintenance and growth of that power, even to the end that one day the democratic-totalitarian State would be able to proclaim quite truthfully that it really does represent public opinion.

.....Now, whilst we ought to suppose — in harmony with our humility — that human life is messier than our logical and empirical abstractions thereof suggest, we ought nevertheless to pay due heed to such insights as they provide, so as to have eyes for the actual tendencies towards the logical consequences of those abstractions, and so as not to fall into the complacency and ideological faith that so often pass for sound judgement and fact amongst the rag-scribblers and their followers.

.....

[1] F.W. Nietzsche, “On the New Idol”, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part One), in The Portable Nietzsche, tr. & ed. by W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1976), p.160.

[2] Polly Toynbee, “CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder”, The Guardian, 7th November 2007.

[3] Leszek Kolakowski, “The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society”, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.173.

[4] Polly Toynbee, op. cit.

[5] Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “On Monarchy, Democracy, and the Idea of Natural Order”, Democracy: The God that Failed (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p.48.

[6] J.E.E Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton), Review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe, in the Quarterly Review 145, January 1878, reprinted in Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Vol.1: Essays in the History of Liberty, ed. J.R. Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 57.

Fewtril #138

From what we see around us, we may deduce that the fear of seeming stuffy surpasses that of appearing boorish.

A Regret

To my regret, I am not a man of leisure and independent means who sits all day in his dressing-gown in the morning-room of his country retreat and scribbles such little trifles as these. Rather, every day I must go to a place of work, where I am employed as a monkey performing for peanuts — for which predicament I am entirely to blame. The tedium has been relieved, however, by the opportunity to blog, for which purpose I have my note-book and the vast resources of the internet. My boss, however, has begun to notice my less than enthusiastic undertaking of the job for which I am employed, and has understandably suggested that I stay offline. So, now that I have been rumbled, with an official eye to be kept on me, blogging is going to be more difficult. I shall, of course, endeavour to continue for the sake of my sanity, but I suspect blogging will be even lighter than it is at present. Then again, the preservation of sanity might just dictate that I throw caution to the wind, that I continue as normal, and that the consequences be damned.

Fewtril #137

Perhaps the depth of our downfall should be measured by the number of sociological schemes for our salvation.

Fewtril #136

In some circumstances, it takes a great effort to tell the difference between a clever man doing us wrong and an idiot doing his best.

Fewtril #135

What explains the absurd confidence in dialogue and debate but that they provide innumerous opportunities for the loquacious to try their luck at charming the spots off leopards?

Fewtril #134

Every new idea runs the risk of becoming surrounded by pitchforks and firebrands; though it must be said it would serve us well if some of them were lynched.

Chamfort

“If you want to make a good impression in society, you have to submit to being told all sorts of things you already know by people who don’t even know them themselves.”

Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort, Reflections on Life, Love and Society, tr. & ed. by Douglas Parmée (London: Short Books, 2003), §165, p.84.

Essential Icelandic for Online Debate

Þú, vinur minn, ert hálfviti. – You, my friend, are a half-wit.

A Dust and a General Disorder

Disbelief is a most useful servant for the glib and shallow soul who might like to impress with the fancy of his sober incredulity. Anyone – even a fool – might discern the obvious, and for want that he be taken as a sage seeing beyond common sight, and for want moreover that his thoughts remain unprovoked by sense, a man may shut off his sight, and set himself immodesty to decrying as myths all threats to his repose. This is the aspect of false scepticism which T.H. Huxley noted:

When I say that Descartes commemorated doubt, you must remember that it was that sort of doubt which Goethe has called ‘the active scepticism, whose whole aim is to conquer itself’; and not the other sort which is born of flippancy and ignorance, and whose aim is only to perpetuate itself, as an excuse for idleness and indifference. [1]

There is another aspect of false scepticism, however, noted by many, and to which G.C. Lichtenberg gave succinct expression:

With most people disbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another. [2]

Thereby a man might describe as a persistent myth any fact that stands against his beliefs. I suspect that this aspect largely underlies the other. Whatever the case, with both aspects in full play, we find that a mass of men sets about exploding “myths” all over the place, such that a dust and a general disorder is thrown up around every matter, to which it is then difficult to attract clear and calm attention.

.....

[1] T.H. Huxley, Aphorisms and Reflections From the Works of T. H. Huxley, selected by H. A. Huxley (London: MacMillan & Co, 1907), §.XVII, published online at The Huxley File.

[2] G.C. Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, (Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1984), L.670 from Sudelbuch L (1796-1799), p. 514. [“Bei den meisten Menschen gründet sich der Unglaube in einer Sacher auf blinden Glauben in einer andern”.]

Silly Old Trout

In the opinion of Germaine Greer, the better kind of art is that which one cannot collect. Therefore, since one can collect the works of, say, Hogarth, Rembrandt, Turner, or Caravaggio, she must think them necessarily inferior to works such as Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off, an uncollectable work to which I presume Professor Greer alludes in the following passage:

The artist positions you in a dark room and turns the light on, and off again. He does no more because there is no need to do more. In finding yourself equal to the encounter, you are empowered with the artist’s own intellectual energy. For the time you are together, you are sharing the same cerebral space. [1]

If she really finds herself intellectually stimulated by a light going on and off, one might suggest she take up a vocation more suited to her level of intellect, though, considering that she now frequently writes opinion-pieces for the The Guardian, one might suspect she has already found it.

[1] Germaine Greer, “Here’s a message for the art mafia in their black Bentleys: the really good stuff is uncollectible”, The Guardian, 23rd October 2006.

Fewtril #133

We often shy away from understanding and talking about the adverse and harmful consequences of our actions; for those actions seem so much the better if we concentrate instead on the principles that guided them. Such is the mannered and callous way in which we remain faithful to our principles come what may.

Under the Watch of Liberalism

Ms Soumaya Ghannoushi of The Guardian asks:

Are liberal societies completely immune to totalitarianism and despotism? Could the boundaries between these systems not be blurred? Could the liberal system itself not slide into tyranny, whilst still preserving its veneer of freedom, tolerance and pluralism?

She then gives three supposed examples of liberal societies descending into tyranny: the United States of America during the McCarthy era of the nineteen-forties and -fifties; France during the student tantrums of the late nineteen-sixties; and Britain during the miners’ strike of the mid-nineteen-eighties. It should be clear, however, that these are examples of relatively liberal societies trying to defend themselves against far more illiberal movements, against whose advance illiberal means were necessary. After all, if liberal societies were to allow — by a consistent application of liberal principles — the spread of ideas and movements antithetical and hostile to them, then they would soon enough fall to their enemies.

.....Yet there is in the purest form of liberalism the seed of an insane optimism — a belief that everyone will act well and wisely, or at least not evilly, once he is set free from authority, superstition and adverse circumstance, such that society will progress to ever-greater perfection — an optimism which permits the growth of tyranny if it is not first made sane by the admission that freedom does not by itself teach goodness or halt evil. It is because liberal societies tolerate in the first place ideas, sentiments and movements which are antithetical to freedom that they become so illiberal in the end; for they allow the growth of those things against which they must eventually respond in kind, or be overthrown.

.....In the nineteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt wrote:

The word ‘freedom’ sounds fair and rich, but only he who has never experienced slavery under the baying masses, called ‘the people’, seen it with his own eyes, and suffered civil unrest, should talk about it. There is nothing more piteous under the sun, experto crede Ruperto, than a government from under whose nose any club of intriguers can steal the executive power, and which then must tremble before zealous ‘Liberalism’, churls, and village magnates. I know too much history to expect anything from this despotism of the masses other than a future tyranny, wherewith history will have its end.

Even when liberty is extinguished under the watch of liberalism, however, its slogans and principles may remain, in whose lip-service a thousand laws seek the security of everyone from everyone else, over which the State is the sole and all-embracing judge.

.....The trouble is that, as long as authority is disdained in the name of freedom, we shall fall victim time and again to power that sets itself no limits.

.....

[1] Soumaya Ghannoushi, “Skin-deep Liberalism”, Comment is Free (Weblog of The Guardian), 19th October 2006.

[2] [“Das Wort Freiheit klingt schön und rund, aber nur der sollte darüber mitreden, der die Sklaverei unter der Brüllmasse, Volk genannt, mit Augen angesehen und in bürgerlichen Unruhen duldend und zuschauend mitgelebt hat. Es gibt nichts Kläglicheres unter der Sonne, experto crede Ruperto, al seine Regierung, welcher jeder Intrigantenklub die executive Gewalt unterm Hintern wegstehlen kann, und die dann vor dem “Liberalismus” der Schwünge, Knoten und Dorfmanaten zittern muß. Ich weiß zuviel Geschichte, um von diesem Massendespotismus etwas Andres zu erwarten al seine künftige Gewaltherrschaft, womit die Geschichte ein Ende haben wird.”] Jacob Burckhardt, Brief an Gottfried Kinkel, 19. April 1845, Briefe (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1929), pp.119-20