Apparently Jeremy Lin has a Tebow-like ability to kiss God's ass. And God doth grant him favors in an inconsequential zero-sum game wherein to love a Lin is to hate his enemy. God hates Kobe precisely as much as he loves Lin. Now about those drone victims, is the problem that they're adulating an imposter divinity's rear or that God is busy watching the Knicks?
If I were a religionist, I'd urge an end to these omnipotence rumors. Do you know what kind of dick it makes you, big G, if you can but don't stop the bad things from happening?
Forget that. God is bound and gagged. Lucifer's got him. He wants to help the little people but can't.
"But why should I worship him if he can't help me?," asks the self-righteous gooddoer. Well, that's what the end times are about. God's gunna kick Lucifer's ass, and then he'll be able to save you. You'll be glad you bet on him then.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Evil
Evil does not exist on its own. It's simply a word used by humans to indicate some sort of harm. I don't know how anything can be "deeply evil." Sounds metaphysical. "Very harmful" maybe.
I equate evil with victimization. Evil is the strong punching the weak, an adult spanking a child, an adult scolding a child, an adult manipulating a child with praise, drones ending lives, bosses using employees' economic dependence to control them, teachers using systems of reward and punishment such as grades, detentions, and "good job!" stickers to push kids down paths they wouldn't choose on their own, propaganda systematically diminishing opportunities for acting in one's own best interests (not talking about voting); evil is a human or a human system halting, retarding, redirecting the autonomy of another human without an obvious net benefit to the one acted upon.* (For example, if you push someone out of a car's way and they fall to the ground with some minor scrapes, you're replacing a greater loss of autonomy with a lesser one. A non-evil exception.)
On the other hand, if you look inside the human body for evil, things get a lot murkier, for me anyway. The Alice Miller view, which I subscribe to, locates hate in repressed trauma. Example: Adults beat Stalin badly. Stalin the child, unable to confront the life-threatening horror of the truth, takes on the role of his parents in order to survive. "I'm bad, my parents are right" can be allowed into consciousness. "My parents want to kill me" cannot. The pain of Stalin the child disappears from consciousness but remains in the body. The repressed anger is an internalized conflict, internalized evil. Millions die. If we could look inside Stalin, what we'd find is a miserable bastard fighting for psychic survival. Which is not to say he wasn't evil. Of course. The point is that he was evil. The evil was in him. It just wasn't the work of a rational agent.
Non-sociopaths follow the same processes, more or less. Here's a hypothetical: A man is walking down the street. He sees someone his size punching someone much smaller. A number of forces compete to determine his action. Fear that he might get hurt himself. Fear that if he doesn't help, he'll feel like a coward or moral failure. Does he feel genuine empathy with the victim and want to fight off the bully with a similar intensity he'd want to fight off his own victimizer? Whatever he does, he'll always end up taking the least unpleasureable path. Even empathy works this way. It pushes him in the direction of using his body to prevent victimization, an admirable but dangerous move. The empathic person feels good if he intervenes in this case, bad if he doesn't. He's selfish. Every action is selfish in this broad sense. Selfishness is not the problem. Bad selfishness is the problem.
Stalin was acting bad-selfishly. The forces that won the competition to determine his actions were not empathic or rational. If you could talk to Stalin and give him the best explanation possible for why he's evil and why he should stop murdering people, anything that would make him confront the horrible truth is at a severe disadvantage. It would be recast in terms of the narrative he has spent his whole life constructing to protect himself.
I was a socially conservative Catholic until I was 20. Two things changed me. I read the Bible** and took a class called Philosophy of God with a Hegelian Catholic professor. I had something of an epiphany. Cognitive dissonance won. I just couldn't believe the old stuff anymore. My defenses were worn down by ideas. The struggle to believe things my judgment rejected was too much. These days I'm more principled and politically less of a dick, arguably. So where do I get credit? For reading the Bible? Taking that class? I did those things to try to re-affirm my harmful beliefs. It just didn't work out.
Now even if you take the view that most or many or the most important choices are basically like cake versus salad, the thing I know I shouldn't do and the thing I know I should, where I'm a rational subject weighing the naughty against the nice, the complexity of each human life would make it impossible to determine what sort of free choice was involved in the myriad actions in each human life. Which forces were aligned against which, and how powerful they were, what sort of knowledge, this DNA and that environment, how each choice affects the dynamics of future choices. All these factors would change each new cake versus salad choice. All that matters is what real people do, not what a good person would have done in a situation.
Fortunately, these apparent challenges from a basically relativist perspective are not a problem as long as you focus on evil acts. Shredded limbs, rape, and torture are atrocious to anyone whose body has not been put through hell. We all have the same DNA. This is the anchor. The role of choice in Obama's actions is irrelevant and impossible to determine anyway. But we know he's responsible for killing. We know this is evil because our bodies tell us and we listen. We know that he wants to control and dominate and subjugate, etc. To hell with that mass-murderer. I mean the real Obama, not the caricature who's deviously surveying the same world we are and choosing evil.
*Take out the word human and there's a definition of violence. Violence happens when a force halts, retards, redirects the autonomy of another force.
**Some sects raise kids on the Bible. The kids get used to the crazy. Catholicism raises kids to think God loves them as long as they're obedient and to think Jesus is groovy. They don't emphasize the Bible. You have to be really smart to twist the Bible into a love-y message so it needs to be left to experts.
I equate evil with victimization. Evil is the strong punching the weak, an adult spanking a child, an adult scolding a child, an adult manipulating a child with praise, drones ending lives, bosses using employees' economic dependence to control them, teachers using systems of reward and punishment such as grades, detentions, and "good job!" stickers to push kids down paths they wouldn't choose on their own, propaganda systematically diminishing opportunities for acting in one's own best interests (not talking about voting); evil is a human or a human system halting, retarding, redirecting the autonomy of another human without an obvious net benefit to the one acted upon.* (For example, if you push someone out of a car's way and they fall to the ground with some minor scrapes, you're replacing a greater loss of autonomy with a lesser one. A non-evil exception.)
On the other hand, if you look inside the human body for evil, things get a lot murkier, for me anyway. The Alice Miller view, which I subscribe to, locates hate in repressed trauma. Example: Adults beat Stalin badly. Stalin the child, unable to confront the life-threatening horror of the truth, takes on the role of his parents in order to survive. "I'm bad, my parents are right" can be allowed into consciousness. "My parents want to kill me" cannot. The pain of Stalin the child disappears from consciousness but remains in the body. The repressed anger is an internalized conflict, internalized evil. Millions die. If we could look inside Stalin, what we'd find is a miserable bastard fighting for psychic survival. Which is not to say he wasn't evil. Of course. The point is that he was evil. The evil was in him. It just wasn't the work of a rational agent.
Non-sociopaths follow the same processes, more or less. Here's a hypothetical: A man is walking down the street. He sees someone his size punching someone much smaller. A number of forces compete to determine his action. Fear that he might get hurt himself. Fear that if he doesn't help, he'll feel like a coward or moral failure. Does he feel genuine empathy with the victim and want to fight off the bully with a similar intensity he'd want to fight off his own victimizer? Whatever he does, he'll always end up taking the least unpleasureable path. Even empathy works this way. It pushes him in the direction of using his body to prevent victimization, an admirable but dangerous move. The empathic person feels good if he intervenes in this case, bad if he doesn't. He's selfish. Every action is selfish in this broad sense. Selfishness is not the problem. Bad selfishness is the problem.
Stalin was acting bad-selfishly. The forces that won the competition to determine his actions were not empathic or rational. If you could talk to Stalin and give him the best explanation possible for why he's evil and why he should stop murdering people, anything that would make him confront the horrible truth is at a severe disadvantage. It would be recast in terms of the narrative he has spent his whole life constructing to protect himself.
I was a socially conservative Catholic until I was 20. Two things changed me. I read the Bible** and took a class called Philosophy of God with a Hegelian Catholic professor. I had something of an epiphany. Cognitive dissonance won. I just couldn't believe the old stuff anymore. My defenses were worn down by ideas. The struggle to believe things my judgment rejected was too much. These days I'm more principled and politically less of a dick, arguably. So where do I get credit? For reading the Bible? Taking that class? I did those things to try to re-affirm my harmful beliefs. It just didn't work out.
Now even if you take the view that most or many or the most important choices are basically like cake versus salad, the thing I know I shouldn't do and the thing I know I should, where I'm a rational subject weighing the naughty against the nice, the complexity of each human life would make it impossible to determine what sort of free choice was involved in the myriad actions in each human life. Which forces were aligned against which, and how powerful they were, what sort of knowledge, this DNA and that environment, how each choice affects the dynamics of future choices. All these factors would change each new cake versus salad choice. All that matters is what real people do, not what a good person would have done in a situation.
Fortunately, these apparent challenges from a basically relativist perspective are not a problem as long as you focus on evil acts. Shredded limbs, rape, and torture are atrocious to anyone whose body has not been put through hell. We all have the same DNA. This is the anchor. The role of choice in Obama's actions is irrelevant and impossible to determine anyway. But we know he's responsible for killing. We know this is evil because our bodies tell us and we listen. We know that he wants to control and dominate and subjugate, etc. To hell with that mass-murderer. I mean the real Obama, not the caricature who's deviously surveying the same world we are and choosing evil.
*Take out the word human and there's a definition of violence. Violence happens when a force halts, retards, redirects the autonomy of another force.
**Some sects raise kids on the Bible. The kids get used to the crazy. Catholicism raises kids to think God loves them as long as they're obedient and to think Jesus is groovy. They don't emphasize the Bible. You have to be really smart to twist the Bible into a love-y message so it needs to be left to experts.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
causality and moral responsibility; taking on Silber
In a world of humans with perfect knowledge, ethical responsibility would not be a difficult question. You're flying the flag of the empire. You're supporting its wars. Its wars are killing children. For profit. You're evil. You cause harm, you're guilty. The end.
This is the Arthur Silber worldview. Clean, simple, convenient. I agree with it, mostly.
But humans do not have perfect knowledge, and even when they have access to it, there are processes, defenses mainly, that will prevent them from understanding it.
We might say there are two types of responsibility, causal and ethical. The first refers to the effects of one's actions. The second refers to what we can blame someone for, how we justify our emotions toward people who hurt us or others we empathize with. If I'm trying to save the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein but it turns out I'm actually making things worse fighting for the empire, I'm causally responsible for the damage done. But am I ethically responsible? What could I have known and how could I have known it?
Now my parents raised me Catholic. At age seven, I was in a tiny room with a strange man saying, "forgive me father for I have sinned, it's been three weeks since my last confession." I was apologizing for my existence, essentially, accepting that I was a horrible piece of shit. I remember telling my mom at one point that the devil was trying to get me to say bad words but I was so good I wouldn't even give him the pleasure of thinking bad words. I was mind-fucked is what I'm saying. My parents were prominently involved. They put me in that position. They decided I would exist, first of all, and then they watched as I was abused. Now, causally, there's no doubt in my mind that they damaged the shit out of me. I was suicidal by age 14 or so. This is not something that happens on its own. Fear of abandonment by God is something my parents and their stand-ins put in me.
Are they ethically responsible, and to what extent, and how, and why? Given their particular position in the world, how could they have known? Was there edifying information available to them that they rejected, evilly? What edifying information did they reject, why, and what processes would have led them to making decisions that would not have harmed me?
(For an Alice Miller-inspired thinker like Silber, it would be easy to say I'm protecting my parents here. But I've told my parents that their religion almost killed me, that their Church is evil, that their empire is evil, etc. Intellectually, I know they're at fault and grant them no pedastals.)
I have a metaphor for this, unoriginal though it may be. I'm in a tunnel with a flashlight. At the outer edges of the light, there are things I can see only dimly. Beyond that, nothing, just darkness. Is it a simple act of will that lets me see what I do? Is my own acceptance of my complicity in these violent systems a result of my will and therefore admirable?
I've suggested before that freedom/determinism is a false dichotomy, that the choices are: either everything is free or everything is determined. I declared that I'm as free as a rock, and this is good (arbitrarily). There is a difference between rocks and me of course but I'd like to suggest that this difference is best divorced from the freedom/determinism question. My brain has me interacting with the world in a way rocks can't, but is this difference describable in terms of freedom? I don't think so. Abstractions do not give you freedom. Math does not give you freedom. Awareness that more than one option exists does not give you freedom.
This brings me to a related point. In a recent post, just after a quote by an imperialist explaining how the U.S. conquest of the Phillipines was all for the better of the people of that country, Silber states: "[The rulers] know exactly what they're doing." No, they don't. There's an important difference between "I want to kill heathens/barbarians/Satan spawn/threats to humanity/Others/people who want to hurt my family/vermin" and "I want to kill humans who are just like me in every way that ethically matters." I'd personally get behind the killing of people who want to carry out Satan's plans of causing human suffering because I oppose unneccessary human suffering. I just don't think such people exist. The Other is a myth. The rulers do not know what they're doing in the way that Silber does. If they did, they wouldn't do it. Good will is fake.
I think, for all intents and purposes, it's probably a good idea to focus only on the actual harm being caused to humans by humans. It's best not to make it personal, not to worry about the question of ethical responsibility. "They're evil, fuck them!" is stupid. Worse still, it's tribalism. I don't mean one shouldn't be angry. I mean that anger, while serving a good purpose, should be understood in terms of real harm, not personal demons or evildoers.
In sum, ethical responsibility IS causal responsibility, but the minds of those who cause harm are irrelevant except insofar as knowledge of them helps one prevent future harm.
This is the Arthur Silber worldview. Clean, simple, convenient. I agree with it, mostly.
But humans do not have perfect knowledge, and even when they have access to it, there are processes, defenses mainly, that will prevent them from understanding it.
We might say there are two types of responsibility, causal and ethical. The first refers to the effects of one's actions. The second refers to what we can blame someone for, how we justify our emotions toward people who hurt us or others we empathize with. If I'm trying to save the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein but it turns out I'm actually making things worse fighting for the empire, I'm causally responsible for the damage done. But am I ethically responsible? What could I have known and how could I have known it?
Now my parents raised me Catholic. At age seven, I was in a tiny room with a strange man saying, "forgive me father for I have sinned, it's been three weeks since my last confession." I was apologizing for my existence, essentially, accepting that I was a horrible piece of shit. I remember telling my mom at one point that the devil was trying to get me to say bad words but I was so good I wouldn't even give him the pleasure of thinking bad words. I was mind-fucked is what I'm saying. My parents were prominently involved. They put me in that position. They decided I would exist, first of all, and then they watched as I was abused. Now, causally, there's no doubt in my mind that they damaged the shit out of me. I was suicidal by age 14 or so. This is not something that happens on its own. Fear of abandonment by God is something my parents and their stand-ins put in me.
Are they ethically responsible, and to what extent, and how, and why? Given their particular position in the world, how could they have known? Was there edifying information available to them that they rejected, evilly? What edifying information did they reject, why, and what processes would have led them to making decisions that would not have harmed me?
(For an Alice Miller-inspired thinker like Silber, it would be easy to say I'm protecting my parents here. But I've told my parents that their religion almost killed me, that their Church is evil, that their empire is evil, etc. Intellectually, I know they're at fault and grant them no pedastals.)
I have a metaphor for this, unoriginal though it may be. I'm in a tunnel with a flashlight. At the outer edges of the light, there are things I can see only dimly. Beyond that, nothing, just darkness. Is it a simple act of will that lets me see what I do? Is my own acceptance of my complicity in these violent systems a result of my will and therefore admirable?
I've suggested before that freedom/determinism is a false dichotomy, that the choices are: either everything is free or everything is determined. I declared that I'm as free as a rock, and this is good (arbitrarily). There is a difference between rocks and me of course but I'd like to suggest that this difference is best divorced from the freedom/determinism question. My brain has me interacting with the world in a way rocks can't, but is this difference describable in terms of freedom? I don't think so. Abstractions do not give you freedom. Math does not give you freedom. Awareness that more than one option exists does not give you freedom.
This brings me to a related point. In a recent post, just after a quote by an imperialist explaining how the U.S. conquest of the Phillipines was all for the better of the people of that country, Silber states: "[The rulers] know exactly what they're doing." No, they don't. There's an important difference between "I want to kill heathens/barbarians/Satan spawn/threats to humanity/Others/people who want to hurt my family/vermin" and "I want to kill humans who are just like me in every way that ethically matters." I'd personally get behind the killing of people who want to carry out Satan's plans of causing human suffering because I oppose unneccessary human suffering. I just don't think such people exist. The Other is a myth. The rulers do not know what they're doing in the way that Silber does. If they did, they wouldn't do it. Good will is fake.
I think, for all intents and purposes, it's probably a good idea to focus only on the actual harm being caused to humans by humans. It's best not to make it personal, not to worry about the question of ethical responsibility. "They're evil, fuck them!" is stupid. Worse still, it's tribalism. I don't mean one shouldn't be angry. I mean that anger, while serving a good purpose, should be understood in terms of real harm, not personal demons or evildoers.
In sum, ethical responsibility IS causal responsibility, but the minds of those who cause harm are irrelevant except insofar as knowledge of them helps one prevent future harm.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
there's a Kant in me balling his miniature eyes out
"I disagree with the moral system in which you imagine your actions being magically multiplied. The test of an action is not what would hypothetically happen if everyone did it, but what will actually happen if you do it." Ran Prieur
Mmm, that's good. It seems that a strict understanding of immanence -- the notion that there is only this world, always becoming, and not some deep (e.g., Platonic) structure or divinity with a separate existence -- points this way. Anarchism also seems to suggest as much.
Kant's categorical imperative (only do what you'd want everyone to do) may have value as a hypothetical, but it also has value on the liberal path to do-what-the-fuck-I-say-or-else. What's the problem with liberalism, you ask leadingly? This sort of if-everyone-would-just projection, perhaps, is part of it, though I'll be damned if I'm gunna stop projecting just like that.
Mmm, that's good. It seems that a strict understanding of immanence -- the notion that there is only this world, always becoming, and not some deep (e.g., Platonic) structure or divinity with a separate existence -- points this way. Anarchism also seems to suggest as much.
Kant's categorical imperative (only do what you'd want everyone to do) may have value as a hypothetical, but it also has value on the liberal path to do-what-the-fuck-I-say-or-else. What's the problem with liberalism, you ask leadingly? This sort of if-everyone-would-just projection, perhaps, is part of it, though I'll be damned if I'm gunna stop projecting just like that.
Monday, November 14, 2011
what is human choice?
A pretty obvious objection I didn't address yesterday: The difference between rocks and people is choice. You can't just call what rocks do "choice" and get rid of the problem.
Ah, that difference. Not easy. I'm saying that the main* processes through which rocks and people act are essentially the same. I mentioned abstraction as the key difference, suggesting this animal ability was better understood as a difference of degree in its departure from inanimacy and such. Rocks don't use concepts. They don't hold a bunch of ideas in front of a mind's eye and compare them. They don't feel cognitive dissonance when two ideas clash; they don't compare, however clearly or confusedly, consciously or unconsciously, the needs/desires of their bodies for survival and displeasure avoidance to their bodies' traumas and resulting desire to avoid displeasure (what Freud meant by superego). There's no short-term versus long-term, etc. There's no calculative function in the mix.
This is what is usually meant by "choice" in the freedom/determinism context, I think: an agent weighs two or more options, in concept form, and determines which is better based on...well, really, you need some sort of detachment. Rationality? What the hell is that? I mean the whole thing depends on a detached subject, doesn't it? The detached subject is a fantasy along the lines of the God fantasy. It sounds nice to some, depending on their personal histories and needs and whatnot, but it falls apart upon examination.
So this is really about deconstructing the false dichotomy of detached reason and emotion. I submit a possibly obvious point, that I have to assume has been said somewhere much better than I can put it: every thought that's ever been thunk has been thought with bodily needs, what are often called emotions, as the driving force. The desire to help people is an emotion accompanied by concepts. If you see a starving African on TV and want to help them, for example, your body is telling you that pain is bad and must be avoided. Call it empathy, but it's actually selfishness. (A certain kind of) selfishness is good. When you think you're "choosing," as the term is normally used, you're lucky if you're responding to that most rational-ish emotion called cognitive dissonance. All of which is only bad if you wanted to be a certain type of god. I'm saying, it's ok, you can be a different type of god. Atheism is freedom. Determinism is freedom.
(OK back to 1st person.) I can use ideas, chosen for emotional reasons, in response to my body, to re-arrange my emotions and make me better, happier, etc. Cognitive dissonance and empathy are my friends. I want to say they guide me but here's the crazy part: they are me. I'm not following them, I am them.
Brain hurts, time to stop.
*I waver on whether to include this qualifier. I'd like to get rid of it but not confident enough.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
I'm as free as a rock, and this is good
How does the world reproduce? How does now become a different now and why does it become this rather than that? However else one describes the process, I think it helps to understand it as action, incredibly complex action that takes a lot of doing. A rock from 1990 needed to do a lot to become whatever it has become in 2011. The action that needs doing is existing. Whatever it is that rocks are doing is essentially the same as what humans are doing so that if you say rocks are determined, you're saying humans are determined and if you say rocks are free, humans are free. Which word is better to describe existing, or acts of existence, freedom or determinism? This is a matter of taste.
The real question, after we get past the false dichotomy, is how the manner of existing of humans differs from that of anything else. If there's a difference worth mentioning, it's that our visual abilities have us at a certain distance from world, withdrawn to some limited extent from its gravity, where our relatively isolated brain-ish ecosystem creates freaky colorful frog-birds with an armpit obsessed erotic...it's weird is what I'm saying. Our brains can reduce the incredible complexity of an apple to the number "1" and put the world together in a peculiarly human way, call it realism, stemming from evolutionary processes. And in this visual world, we have reach and we have power but we've lost a lot. Everything "looks" determined. From another "view," in our bodies, we feel free. Our non- or pre-visual selves are far more connected with world, whereas the human way of seeing is world-historically exceptional and whatever it has to say about freedom/determinism has no effect on the way existence happens, or the way world does. We just are, and we are in the same way as rocks, with only differences of degree, not kind, between us. To the rocks I say, kanpai!
The real question, after we get past the false dichotomy, is how the manner of existing of humans differs from that of anything else. If there's a difference worth mentioning, it's that our visual abilities have us at a certain distance from world, withdrawn to some limited extent from its gravity, where our relatively isolated brain-ish ecosystem creates freaky colorful frog-birds with an armpit obsessed erotic...it's weird is what I'm saying. Our brains can reduce the incredible complexity of an apple to the number "1" and put the world together in a peculiarly human way, call it realism, stemming from evolutionary processes. And in this visual world, we have reach and we have power but we've lost a lot. Everything "looks" determined. From another "view," in our bodies, we feel free. Our non- or pre-visual selves are far more connected with world, whereas the human way of seeing is world-historically exceptional and whatever it has to say about freedom/determinism has no effect on the way existence happens, or the way world does. We just are, and we are in the same way as rocks, with only differences of degree, not kind, between us. To the rocks I say, kanpai!
Saturday, November 12, 2011
served
I went to a restaurant. There were some dirty looking brown people with diamond necklaces outside, looking weak and hungry, maybe a bit angry. Nothing but concrete everywhere. Hmm, I must be dreaming, I thought. I walked in. There were a bunch of fancy suits eating lobster, steak, I don't know, what do rich people eat? I couldn't actually see their plates. There were some tough-looking dudes in the corner, who looked like they belonged. I sat down, ordered a cheeseburger. It was crazy cheap, I guess; I mean a cow was raised for years, fed regularly, slaughtered, packed up and shipped, prepared by a cook, all for 15 minutes' pay, though I used to be able to get bigger cheeseburgers for less, I recall. I saw a truck pull up outside and unload a bunch of food, brilliant food I assume. A nerdy guy handed him some rubies or something, they looked like, uh, natural resources. The truck drove away. Then I saw the tough guys head outside, heard some screams, saw them come back in with a bunch of diamond necklaces. "What the hell was that?," I asked them. They just smiled good-ol' boyishly from a distance as a slick-haired man told another slick-haired man to tell me, "some evil bastards who hate this fine establishment were trying to come in and rob the place. You should be grateful they took care of everything for you." "Yeah, wow, I am," I said. The tough guys gave the necklaces to the rich guys who pocketed most and gave the rest to slick-haired guys, tough guys, and nerdy guys. Another truck pulled up, another nerdy guy got up and went outside with diamond necklaces. An announcement came over a loudspeaker, "The good people will now rise and thank our tough guys for protecting and serving us." Heartfelt applause, very loud; OK, it was a roar, or some other big sound that animals make in response to specific triggers.
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