Means and ends in politics

There is not necessarily just a single species of progressive person, as far as political movements are concerned. In other words, the work of different "progressive" groups may possibly be in conflict with each other . One example is the fact that the environmental movement concerned with whales may not really care about politicians to about nuclear weapons (on second thought, though, the same people seem to be interested in both of these issues, so this first example may not be a very good one -- in fact, it will turn out that it isn't, because there is no fundamental difference between the two issues). My second example, a better one, has to do with the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, on one hand, versus the antinuclear [weapons] movement, on the other. If the revolution in Nicaragua fails, some of those concerned with the Nicaraguan experiment may not care very much whether the Bomb falls or doesn't fall. In other words, they may feel that if the Nicaraguan [revolutionary] experiment fails, the survival of the homo sapiens is not something worth worrying about. The third example is about the fact that a proponent of feudalism, for example, was a progressive person several hundred years ago. In other words, and more generally, contradictory causes have been "progressive" at different times and places. An item in the newspaper today made me aware of this contradiction again. A certain extreme-leftist European group, while denouncing nuclear missile, had also denounced "petite bourgeois pacifism." Apparently they feel that the usual antinuclear protester has the wrong attitude. They seem to see such a person as someone who is simply concerned with peace, that is, lack of any kind of conflict. Notwithstanding the obvious Marxist rhetoric, there does seem to be an important point here. On one side there is concern for peacefulness and stability. On the other side there is concern for pursuit of concrete realizations of high ideals. The kind of tragedy that can result from confusing the two can perhaps be illustrated with reference to the Iranian revolution. The rhetoric has always declared the revolution to be for the betterment of the lot of the downtrodden and the exploited. One notices the contradiction when one sees that the clergy who preach for an end to injustice and exploitation, represent the very forces that caused the problem in the first place. Religion is the opiate of the people; it tends to keep them pacified and concerned with their small personal problems, and to keep them from perceiving the larger societal picture. It is a means of keeping people ignorant of the real nature of their plight. For example, it keeps them from realizing that concern for personal salvation, and therefore disregard for the essentially social nature of human existence, is a part of the problem. By assuming the progressive rhetoric, the Iranian clergy managed to lure the progressive elements to its side. The progressives forgot that religion is not something to join for them, but rather something to try to get rid of.

What does God have to do with it?

Religions just say "Believe." How can I believe, when you don't give me anything to believe? Religion is completely without substance. If they say "believe in God and the message of this or that messenger of God," I would say "Why?" If they bring in miracles, I would give Hume's answer, including the fact that even if I personally saw a miracle, it would only prove something wrong with my senses; and also there is the fact that miracles do not prove the existence of a God, and so how can they prove somebody is a messenger of God? If in answer to my original question "Why?" they say "Because we believe in brotherhood and peace, and so on," I would say "I already believe in all those things, and they have nothing to do with belief in any God or religion I do not need God or religion to think and act as a mature adult human being. The basis of humanism is not a set of beliefs; rather, it is a mature realization of what it means to be a human being, namely to think and act rationally, or in other words not to act according to the whims and impulses. A rational agent is a moral agent, because a rational agent automatically behaves morally, that is, in accordance with principles of brotherhood, charity, and so on. Charity is based on faith in man, and hope for his future.

If an advice falls in the forest...

People consult others about their own problems, in order to have their own thoughts and incipient decisions confirmed. If the second person does not confirm those thoughts and decisions, he may be disliked. But this may be completely rational, in his own way. In rejecting the consultant for giving unfavorable advice, the first person is saying "You are not what I thought you were." In other words, the seeker comes to the adviser with the subconscious thought in mind that "I know this person is such and such a type of individual, and that therefore he would see the situation in such and such a way, which is also how I see this situation." If this expectation is not confirmed, the seeker rejects the adviser and his advice; he rejects the adviser, because the adviser turns out to be a "phony" -- he has been pretending, as the seeker sees it, to be something other than what he is; the seeker rejects the advice, because the advice, as the seekers sees it, is issued from a source that the seeker now does not see as competent to advise the seeker on the matter. If the seeker is unwilling to reject the advisor, however, the seeker will try to distort the advice; he may think to himself: "He didn't really understand what I meant, because I didn't explain it very well"; or "even though he said "Do A," he really meant "Do B ""; or "To implement his advice to "Do A," I would really have to "do B""; or "He tried his best, but he really doesn't know about this sort of thing."

Feminism and Compassion

One rather puzzling feature of the feminist movement is hatred of men. It has perhaps justifiably led some to think of feminists as essentially lesbian – the point being that there are legitimate feminists, but that the rest are feminist because they are lesbian, not lesbian because they are feminist. This is, of course, an oversimplification of the matter, in any case. The point, however, is a serious one. Some lesbian feminists claim that lesbianism is inseparable from feminism, because man is the enemy. In other words, they see a conceptual conflict (and not simply an emotional one) between intimacy with men and the cause of feminism. They interpret their whole being in feminist terms are, and can therefore only fit intimacy with another woman into the picture. This is what they claim, in any case. It seems, however, that this view is based on an interpretation of feminism as the liberation of the female species, rather than that of female human beings. Whether conceptually wrong or not, their analysis is contrary to historical evidence. The main impetus behind the modern feminist movement was the American Civil Rights movement, which was definitely aimed at improving women’s lot as much as that of men. Lesbian feminism, however, loses touch with humanist values as soon as it becomes able to divide humanity into two species. This is perhaps why compassion and peace pervaded the Civil Rights and peace movements of the 1960s, and are absent from the feminist movement. On a more practical level, it’s true that overstatement is needed in order to make important and unfamiliar concepts understood, but espousing hatred of man simply in order to make a point is ridiculous, if not ultimately counterproductive. To make men out to be a gang of brutes out raping their wives and committing incest with their daughters, neither just rewards the many men who are deeply concerned about the plight of women, nor does it creates the proper frame of mind for women to help men understand the nature of that plight.

How real are you?

I was thinking about the idea that on the strict philosophical level one can’t talk about a dead person – at least not without using highly convoluted language. For example, I can’t talk about a dead person and use words like “he” or “she” or “John Smith” in referring to the person, because, strictly speaking, these words are meaningful only in reference to living persons who can be pointed out as the reference point for these words. So far, it seems that we can only talk about what exists. But this distinction breaks down in the case of a person who I am not sure is still alive or not. If I am not sure whether John Smith is alive, I can talk about him as a person who quite possibly a exists; the possibility is enough to enable me to do so, since in no case are we certain of anyone’s existence unless the person is sitting right in front of us – someone I saw a minute ago may have been struck by lightning right after leaving. If it turns out that the person I was talking about did not exist as I was talking about him, this fact in itself should not make what I said meaningless. After all, we constantly talk about people who we assume to be still alive, who could possibly not be alive. There is, however, an apparent paradox here. On one hand, we can talk about anything that we presume to exist, whether it does or not. On the other hand, we can’t talk meaningfully about anything, as we may be wrong in presuming its existence . The paradox can be resolved if we realize that the problem here is the concept concept of “thing”, and other concepts like it, such as “person.” “He,” “she,” “John Smith,” “tree,” and so on are fictional constructs that we create in our minds to make it possible to go on living . Such concepts are equivalent to nonexistent ones such as “Napoleon” and “the Library of Alexandria.” Both in the case of “the living, breathing, John Smith” and “Napoleon,” I am referring to constructs in my mind. An objection at this point is that John Smith would surely not agree that he is an artificial or fictional construct. We may answer the objection by trying to clarify the matter further. When someone else refers to me as “he," he is creating a fictitious entity. His "he" is a different entity than my “I.” My “I” and John Smith’s “I.” are both quite real, or at least real insofar as they are the foundations for everything else that we are and know. But what makes the “I” itself possible is the historical nature of human consciousness. We are, so far as we know, the only creatures on this planet who can think of “Napoleon” or “yesterday’s lunch.” The same thing goes on when we refer to “John Smith.” What we mean when we say “John Smith” is the set of memories we have of a particulars spatio-temporal continuity's behaviour. We can only see and think in historical terms. One question at this point is whether the “historical” and “fictitious” are interchangeable, because if they are, then the “I” may also be fictitious – because the “I” appears also to be historical. There seem to be two solutions. The first one is to say that the transcendental “I” is unhistorical and eternal. The other solution is to say that the “I” is in fact of the same nature as everything else. These seem to correspond to the Dualist and Monist solutions in various philosophies.

Character is behaviour

Personal character is a means of predicting people’s behaviour, and not a means of judging their behaviour. People observe one’s character from the outside, so an act that is “out of character” is really in character. This is because the act is a part of the person’s total behavior. The pattern of behaviour can only give us general directions in predicting people’s behaviour, and not judgments about particular acts.

Quality versus quantity in J.S. Mill

Can we know whether our actions are right by using J.S. Mill's theory? --

Happiness, being a quality, is not measurable . In other words, qualitative concepts such as happiness, cannot be quantified, or, for that matter, defined. The reasons for the unsuitability of happiness as a moral criterion should become clearer as we proceed.

Even if we assume happiness to be quantifiable, and even if we are convinced that some action produces happiness, we can never be sure whether it can produce the same balance of happiness against happiness in the long run. Smoking cigarettes may make people happy, but in the long run they may pay for all of that "happiness" with a greater "amount" of unhappiness. How is one to balance many years of mild happiness against a few years of intense unhappiness (due to lung cancer and so on) unless one evokes a "higher" criterion, for example, the intrinsic value of human life? If human life is valuable irrespective of the amount of happiness or unhappiness that it producers, then we can say that smoking cigarettes is bad because it cuts human life short, and not because it causes unhappiness. The problem is that Mill disregards the question of whether the means towards happiness are good or bad in themselves or not.

To remain within his own theory, however, Mill has to disregard the significance of means in any action, and stress only the end result of actions. An act can have a very "happy" consequence, without necessarily being a result of "happy" means. For instance, a feudal lord may drive his serfs night and day in order to produce the maximum possible amount of grains and so on, all the while telling them that it is all for their own eventual happiness. The latter may be true, but one may ask whether all the unhappiness during the year was worth the happiness gained at the end of the year. The question cannot be answered by mere reference to quantitative comparison of the two amounts of happiness and unhappiness, assuming such comparison to the possible. An adequate answer requires reference to such matters as human dignity and freedom, which are outside the Utilitarian sphere of definition.

Mill also does not make it clear how exceptions to moral rules are dealt with, that is, how does one know how widespread those exceptions are.

Mill's theory suffers not only from the inability to tell us what action is right, but also from internal inadequacies and inconsistencies. For instance, what would be the motive or incentive for a person, in cases where there is a conflict between personal and general happiness, to follow the Utilitarian principle and ignore his own happiness for the sake of general happiness? In other words, Mill does not deal with the apparent priority of self-interest in all human actions in a convincing way. The incentives mentioned by Mill, that is, the "external" motives of law and opinion, and the "internal" ones of education and reason, do not seem to be quite adequate to deal with the problem:
(a) If we need laws to act as incentives for good behaviour, then what is the use of a personal code of behaviour such as Utilitarianism?
(b) Opinions of others are by no means infallible, since on one hand they can be manipulated and altered to his own advantage by a sufficiently clever person, and on the other hand others do not know about a great deal of one's behaviour, and, of course, they are not able to form any opinions about them as a consequence.
(c) No matter how highly educated a person may be, he can probably never escape from the overwhelming influence of self-interest on his actions.
(d) Mill refuses to base his morality on subjective feeling about actions, and now he wants to base it on subjective reasoning processes. If the morality of actions can be rationally derived, then what is the use of general moral principles such as Utilitarianism?

Dialectic of praise

Complimenting someone for having done something, or praising the quality of his work, is often a sign of a lack of appreciation. In the first case, the compliment may be interpreted as "Oh! So you finally overcame your laziness and did this.” In the second case, the praise may be interpreted as "See! You're quite able to do an acceptable job; so there is no reason or excuse for allowing your laziness to overcome you.” In both cases, the "nice words" quite likely have an undertone of reproach. True and deep appreciation can only be shown by being nice to the person; such an attitude proves to the person that he is appreciated, rather than this or that act of his.

The absurd meets the irrational

It occurred to me a while back that it might be interesting to try to figure out whether Jesus believed he had the answer, or whether he merely hoped (fervently) that he had the answer. The question arises because religious faith appears at best to be no more than a Pascalian wager. Such a faith, although it may make the person feel warm and holy, is never a rational certainty -- not to speak of its essentially paradoxical character. Hence faith gives rise to hope, and thus to charity; but it does not give rise to rational belief. Any evidence to the effect that Jesus had a rational belief in his message, then, would seem to be proof that he was either indeed the son of god, or that he was "emotionally disturbed.” One way to settle this question may be by analyzing the tone of his sermons: does he seem to be stating rational beliefs, or is he "selling"? Is he just trying to convince his audience, or is he trying to convince himself too?

From hero to madman

The treatment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by the Western media. His heroism and defiance of the system were originally admired. Later on, the idea resurfaced that whoever would destroy his personal life or even inconvenience himself in any way for the sake of an ideal, must be a madman. Hence began their reports on what was wrong with him, and eventually he was shunned and ignored by the media. In the [former] East, dissidents are suppressed; in the West, they are ignored -- hence they in fact receive more attention in the East than in the West. Solzhenitsyn's fall from hero to madman can perhaps be understood in light of the previous post: the man who lives for an ideal is incomprehensible to the average person; since the gods are dead, he is simply "abnormal" -- in other words, a madman.

Deification by design

The primitive’s deification of whatever he/she does not understand – principally, large-scale natural phenomena – is translated into the theistic person’s deification of whatever is morally beyond belief, and hence beyond understanding; the character of a “prophet,” for instance, is beyond the common person’s understanding – hence, for example, the deification of Jesus. The primitive worships that which arouses powerful feelings in him/her, and yet seems utterly superior to the primitive’s own level of existence. The Christian worships Jesus, because Jesus’ message has a powerful emotional impact, yet the Christian does not really want to be like Jesus; the Christian, therefore, has to believe that Jesus is utterly superior to his own level of existence. The Christian indeed fears Jesus, in the same way that the primitive fears Thunder. Jesus threatens to destroy the Christian’s real ideas about the right way to live and to be. The Christian is as far from understanding Jesus, as the primitive is from understanding thunder.

Nazism is history... or is it?

Hitler may have lost the war, but he did not lose the Kampf. The "ideals" of Mein Kampf -- which are, in fact, Hitler's observations on how the realities of the human condition can be used to propel a small group to power -- are on their way to become the realities of each country in the world. National Socialism as the actual political philosophy of the post-war world.

It’s for a good causality

Causality has generally been misunderstood. The concept of a mechanical, and therefore meaningless, causality misses the “intentionality” or purpose that is inherent in causality; in other words, the correct meaning of the world “causality” contains the connotation of purpose, and any mechanical understanding of causality is simply a misapprehension borne of fuzzy thinking. When a glass falls off a table and breaks, one clear way of understanding the event, as opposed to unclear, passive, ways of understanding it, is by describing it this way: “The floor broke the glass.” The description may at first seem absurd, but it is no more absurd than “I lifted the glass to my lips” – rather than “The glass got lifted to my lips.” The supposed accidentalness of human existence, a bastard child of the evolutionary theory, stems from a similar root, namely, a misunderstanding of the nature of evolutionary causality. An illustration from a different field may help to clarify the matter. Take cooking. The usual understanding of the process of cooking is that the ingredients come into being as a result of interactions between the sun and the soil, and then they are picked up and used as food. Let us look at the matter differently. The sun and the soil give plants what these require. Plants use what they are given to improve themselves and to ripen into tasty and nutritious produce; hence, they give of themselves to animals. Animals use what they are given by plants to nourish themselves, and to grow and mature, hopefully, into good friends of the earth. In the case of human beings, then, the intention would be to give rise to a being that is capable of a relatively full appreciation of the whole process.

The Essences of Childhood

Children take their lives and the world more seriously than adults do; a child accepts every facet of life as intrinsically meaningful. He/she does not require a superstructure of laws of interaction and meanings of relationships to make sense of the world. This purity and atomism of childhood begins to disappear as more and more laws and extrinsic meanings are taken for granted. Hence, adults become blasé about the world, while moving away from essences. As an illustration, the essence of goodness and evil are directly accessible to a child; to an adult, however, goodness and evil are vague, abstract, and intangible unknowns that have nothing to do with the “concrete reality" of day-to-day life. Adults, therefore, play the game of life, though without being truly serious about it; children, on the other hand, play their games in total awareness of their meanings, and in earnest seriousness. Children know the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in the latter three’s actual essence, and require no concepts to “visualize” them; adults need the concepts to categorize and visualize those essences, as they are no longer able to directly perceive them. Children are not taught the essences; rather, they are made to forget them. Does one begin to get old when one has completely forgotten the essences?

From showing-off to showing-with

At some point in life, not necessarily the same point for everyone, childish showing-off turns into adult sharing. In children, showing off may be a means of trying to overcome a sense of weakness or virtual non-existence; this will become clearer if we perhaps extend the meaning of “child” to include all supposedly immature persons; it is a known fact among a certain elite that the search for a physically attractive mate is for reasons of vanity, rather than individual need or want. The latter point can be substantiated by a desert-island illustration: in such a situation, basic sexual compatibility is sufficient, and no frills are necessary – or even meaningful. Showing-off, then, is for a “child” a means of affirming some meaningfulness for her existence as opposed to the existence of others. As the basic existence of the person gradually become established, however, the need for antagonistic existence diminishes; there grows, in its place, the need for filling out qualitative gaps in that existence. In other words, the person is more or less aware of his own weaknesses at this point, weaknesses that he has to live with, and which he cannot overcome by acquiring new toys to show off. At this point, the person needs simultaneously to show her own weaknesses and to overcome them; she needs to show her weaknesses, because that is the only way she can be what she really is – in other words, showing one’s weaknesses becomes a means to confirm one’s own existence, as opposed to the earlier state, where showing weakness was suppressed at all cost. Mere unveiling of weaknesses, however, leaves a meaningless and empty blank. Hence, the weaknesses need to be overcome as they are being unveiled. This can be done by mutual collaboration between two persons; as the first person shows off, for instance, her knowledge of geography or his new car, the second person moves in, and, by showing interest or enthusiasm, brings meaning into the situation. Speaking more explicitly, the first person, by showing off her knowledge or his possessions, communicates his/her need for approval. Therefore, showing off, far from creating interpersonal distance and antagonism, as it did in “childhood,” become a means of sharing oneself with others. An established and mature personality no longer means to say, “I have a lot of knowledge, money, or taste”; rather, such a person wishes to convey his/her qualitative weaknesses, and to seek help in alleviating them.

The one in all

Why should I try to be considerate and warm towards the bank teller or the supermarket cashier? After all, she is only a stranger who I will never get to know. Nevertheless, isn't she just like me and all the people I do know? Wouldn't I like to have been friendly towards the people I now know, when I did not yet know them? Aren't people, therefore, deserving of consideration and warmth, irrespective of whether I happened to know them or not? After all, everyone is someone's friend or acquaintance. Thus, perhaps, the mystic's vision of "the one in all" -- or, as some of them would say, the vision of the friend in all; through such a vision, the artificial duality of friend and foe, and hence that of I and he, dissolves into a unified vision of all humanity, and perhaps later into a universal vision embracing own life, and eventually the entire cosmos; the latter may perhaps be accomplished by thinking of the cosmos as a part of what I am, rather than an "it".