My major reason for critiquing high liberalism: Although modern, secular institutions aren’t churches and don’t make faith-based knowledge claims to truth and knowledge, these institutions (faculties, bureaucracies, administrations) aren’t necessarily safe in the hands of even the most wise and good. Rationalists, practioners of science and scientism, as well liberal idealists cultivating radicals aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be.
Postmodernism has profoundly anti-scientific, anti-free thinking elements within itself, and using radical ideologues as drivers of change subjects high liberals to the demands of radicals, merely later on.
Change is a constant, from within and without. Idealism can blind one to the tragic depths of human nature, and problems of action in the world, just as the casual abandonment of deeply conservative truths can lead to unexpected dangers.
‘They are, in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terrorism to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organise itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness. Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.’
‘In 30 brief essays James goes on to tell us — in his most digressive, conversational manner — about the books he’s discovered or returned to quite probably for the last time.’
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Not entirely unrelated:
John Gray begins a discussion of his book ‘The Silence Of Animals‘ with a quote from Conrad:
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Added bonus if you act now in the face of no possible objective knowledge.
Part of Bryan Magee’s series:
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Nietzsche directed his thought against Christian morality, secular morality (Kantian and utilitarian), was quite anti-democratic, and anti-Socratic.
Feynman (wikipedia) wonders what makes science science. He manages to argue quite well why he doesn’t think psychology meets a certain standard.
At least, he says the following:
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all theapparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.’
What is the bar as to when the social sciences become a science?
One place I find myself often retreating (knowledgably, and sometimes not) is a place of skepticism when it comes to such knowledge being used in institutional settings.
What if the latest research on a certain psychological disorder, early-educational practice, or thinking about certain mental-states and their treatment, because of this potential ambiguity, simply doesn’t hold up well over time and under greater scrutiny?
Aside from the actual quality of research, then, this research can fill a role much greater than clinical application and abstract appreciation in the society at large (political, personal, monetary, ideological, professional).
It can become the thing that people talk about, and know, which makes them feel connected.
One need merely observe how many rather higher-quality journalistic publications rely on a steady stream of popular social science interpretation to maintain their audiences and keep certain groups of people chattering.
Brain-scans, pop neuro-science and various other examples come to mind.
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What if the latest treatment/practice that flows from such research becomes not only fashionable, but standardized, conventional wisdom attached to institutional authority?
A whole new set of issues can arise here, including issues of freedom of association, political liberty, and freedom of speech.
After all, some teachers and some students can be dull, unambitious people.
Some educrats’ ambitions far outstrip their abilities, motivated as they are to engage in the petty, political scrambling going on behind the scenes the bureaucratic labyrinth.
Some, but clearly not all, anyways.
We live with a lot of freedoms and the responsibilities these freedoms require, including thinking for ourselves and responding to new information, especially when our interests are at stake.
This, unlike the system highlighted in the below quote from the late Robert Conquest, steadfast chronicler of Soviet authority and leadership in practice:
But, he does point out certain dangers and makes me laugh at the same time:
“Those teach who can’t do” runs the dictum,
But for some even that’s out of reach:
They can’t even teach—so they’ve picked ’em
To teach other people to teach.
Then alas for the next generation,
For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.
Where psychology meets education
A terrible bullshit is born.’
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I should also note that Feynman bristled at philosophers endlessly philosophizing about the nature of scientific knowledge, and who often are looking to borrow what they can from it to bolster their own metaphysical theories about the world.
“Scientific explanation depends upon principles of method: being presupposed in scientific enquiry, these principles cannot be proved through it. Kant believed that such principles would be reflected in basic scientific laws; and it is one of the tasks of metaphysics to provide grounds for their acceptance.“
Metaphysics will love you not…but at least philosophy can potentially recognize some of its shortcomings against such measure.
Addition: And is that really a primary aim of metaphysics? Why must it be so?
‘When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted “an epistemology,” he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear–it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn’t matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party’
Worth a read.
The arts and humantities can be given a seriousness of purpose, I’m guessing, but must that purpose necessarily be scientific?
Do creative musical/artistic geniuses really need to understand particularly well how the sciences advance? How much does it matter that a theater major understands how the sciences come to say true things about the world and predict with high accuracy how nature behaves beyond a philosophy course or two?
I could be wrong.
Clearly, one problem is that out of the postmodern malaise comes the nihilism, moral relativism and general desperation where many can be found clinging to the sciences, or some standard of rationalism and reason that doesn’t seem sufficient in answering all the questions religion claims to answer. Nor does it seem sufficient as a platform to understand human nature, history, tradition, the wisdom in our institutions, and the experience past generations can offer beyond its own presumptions.
Lots of people can thus make ideology their guide and political change their purpose, or the State their religion and their own moral failings or moral programs everyone’s moral oughts through the law and politics.
Addition: If the British left, and Eagleton as somewhat representative of it, can’t sanely recognize that part of the problem is the way that Muslims seek a religious kingdom here on earth, and that there can’t be reasonable discussion of this, then…see here, where Roger Scruton suggests a return to religious virtue: From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”
Brewster Kahle is building an Internet Archive which aims to offer universal access:
‘…a Library of Congress for the 21st century built through private philanthropy and sweat equity…’
…How libraries endure was on Kahle’s mind when I visited the Archive in San Francisco’s Richmond District earlier this year. “What happens to libraries is that they’re burned,” he said. “They are generally burned by governments. The Library of Congress, for instance, has already been burned once, by the Brits. So if that’s what happens, well, design for it, make copies.”
You can’t step in the same river twice, and much of our stored knowledge can be gone in the blink of an eye.
Cloud computing seems poised to shake things up, but backup plans are welcome, and Kahle seems motivated to think about where technology and library science are meeting. He discusses his scanning centers and bookmobiles which are getting books cheaply into the hands of people who may never have held them before:
As always, worth a read. Do we make the moral laws, or do the moral laws make us? Does Darwinian thought support conservatism?:
‘While wondering why Hayek’s writing shows so little overt discussion of religion, Father Sirico argued that Hayek’s understanding of social order as emerging best through spontaneous evolution is applicable to the evolution of religious belief. He made three points in support of this claim.
First, he noted how often Hayek cited religious thinkers like Lord Acton and the late scholastics of the middle ages, who supported the idea of social order as the “result of human action but not of human design.”
Second, Father Sirico argued that Hayek’s condemnation of rationalist constructivism and scientism could apply to the rationalism of the “New Atheists,” who try to dispose of all inherited religious beliefs and then reconstruct all our beliefs as personal constructions of reason.
Third, he argued that Hayek’s account of how social order arises from a gradual evolutionary development could also apply to the development of religious doctrine. The doctrines of Christianity arose through many centuries of experience as an evolutionary process of adaptation and refinement. He found this best expressed in some of the writing of John Henry Newman’
On that second note of morality being derived from rationalist constructivism and scientism, this blog is still seeking forms of ‘classical’ liberalism in good faith, or a liberalism which runs on consent and which tolerates dissent, a liberalism which supports broad definitions of free speech and recognizes deep disagreement in the public square. Is Isaiah Berlin’s value-pluralism an option?: On this site, see: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty” …
In the political realm, seeking equality as an ideal, for example, and equality of outcome, rather than equality under the law, seems to get the incentives wrong, invites the mediocre to power, and misses the boat on human nature and the wisdom of constrained institutions. It seems wise to ask:
“Freedom from what, and freedom to what end?”
“Do I support coercion in order to reach my desired outcome, ideal, or vision of the good society?”
“How are my commitments working out in practice?”
Hayekian thought may offer options to allow moral judgment, moral thinking, and even religious moral thinking to not necessarily be crowded out of the public square in favor of progressive Statism, eliminative materialism, and rationalist public policy.
‘In sum, OPR defends public reason liberalism without contractarian foundations. It is Kantian without being rationalistic. It is Humean without giving up the project of rationally reforming the moral order. It is evolutionary but not social Darwinist. It is classical liberal without being libertarian. It is Hegelian and organicist without being collectivist or statist. It shows us how political authority can be justified but only by accepting that moral authority limits it. It pushes us to look towards the practical and reject the utopian while simultaneously maintaining that a truly free and equal social order is within our grasp. It rejects the aspiration of political liberalism to neutrality among conceptions of morality while simultaneously retaining its spirit by sectioning off social morality from other normative domains.’
I tend towards skepticism when the idea of a free and equal society is raised. Food for thought.
Addition: Ideals of freedom and equality unconstrained, but I’m certainly open to new ideas.
Hitchens has crafted a path out of socialism…to a sort of American neo-conservatism and new Atheism…out of materialism and attacks on Mother Teresa but a sustained attack on faith from reason: Isn’t virtue attached to reason part of the problem of materialism, and isn’t that a deeper problem?: Via Youtube: Christopher Hitchens On Faith And Virtue
Walter Russell Mead seems to be envisioning a reinvigorated liberalism 5.0, arguing that 60′s progressivism and 40-50′s conservatism (American politics more generally) are behind the times. There’s been a fundamental shift that we must adjust to, and it involves technology and globalization for starters.
Sadly, the video does not include the discussion of both Kant and Chomsky, nor the Chomskian linguistic revolution. Click through for parts 2 and 3.
Kant’s novel answer to the problem of how scientific knowledge is possible (Newton’s Principia), relies partly on David Hume’s assertion that no universal knowledge can be achieved by induction alone, as the video does a good job of explaining.
Here’s a quote from a previous post on this site:
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Kant realized that Science itself, and its claims to objective universal laws that are good for all time, past present, and future, and for all space (the tiniest particles to apples to the moon to all celestial bodies) were under threat from Hume’s induction problem, and he set out to find a solution. Here’s a good summary from If-Then Knots (which also goes into the Kant/Chomsky connection):
‘Those propositions that we knew independent of any particular fact about the world (a priori) but which also contained new information about the world (synthetic) were synthetic a priori.
How do we know such propositions? On Kant’s account, synthetic a priori statements are derived from the conditions that make experience possible. For example, we know propositions in geometry because they are derived from the conditions that make possible the experience of spatially extended objects. From his account of mathematics as grounded in synthetic a priori statements about space and time, Kant felt that he could put Newtonian mechanics on objective and certain foundations.’
and:
‘…Kant used the transcendental method to derive synthetic a priori propositions, which he argues form the foundation of scientific (ie, objective and certain) judgement. Simple enough, right?’
One consequence of Kant’s view is that knowledge of objective reality is due to some extent on our own onboard apparatus. Reality, or the reality which is knowable, has already conformed to our minds, rather than the other way around. Kant thought his own project may best be used as a negative limit for possible knowledge, including the threat scientific knowledge faces from Hume’s problem of induction. Kant’s views of time and space are complex: (and his thinking has some questionable connections to subsequent developments in mathematics).
Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is totally consistent with Kant’s epistemology (although, obviously, Kant never used it as an example, having been dead for 153 years when Chomsky first published his theory):
The Universal Grammar is a priori.
Unlike his predecessors in the field of linguistics, Chomsky does not join the empiricists in claiming that learning a language is just a matter of imitation. There has to be something in our mind, something innate, that makes the knowledge of any human language possible. In fact, Chomsky has postulated the existence of a language organ in our brain that would come equipped with knowledge of the Universal Grammar. Non-human animals, lacking that language organ, can never become fluent in any human languages.
Reality conforms to the mind
In the context we are discussing, by “reality” we mean “language”. In the empiricist’s view, the mind is just a passive receptacle of information—if you spoke to a child in any sort of language (English or Arabic, but also a computer language or an alien language) from the moment they are born, then the child would become fully proficient in it. In contrast, in Chomsky’s theory, a human child could never acquire a computer language or an alien language as their first language, since those languages do not conform to the Universal Grammar (FOOTNOTE: An alien language would doubtless conform to some sort of Universal Grammar, but it would be the Alien Universal Grammar, as opposed to the Human Universal Grammar.) So the Universal Grammar makes our knowledge of language possible, but also limits the kinds of languages we can know, just like our a priori of space makes our perception of physical objects possible, but also limits the kinds of objects we can perceive—to, for instance, three-dimensional objects.
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So, Chomsky, may something of a Kantian in his revolutionary work on linguistics.
Yet, I was asked if there is any connection between Kantian transcendental idealism and Chomsky’s political philosophy, and I remain doubtful I could provide proof of such a connection.
It has remained confounding to me that Chomsky has clung to a philosophical idealism that serves, at best, as a platform to critique all human organizations relentlessly (especially the U.S. government, and “corporate tyrannies,” military and civil hierarchies but also fascist tyrannies and other oppressive regimes).
Perhaps, after Kant’s moral philosophy, Chomsky believes that we must derive the laws of morality a priori from reason itself, rather than from experience (and Humean habit), thus lending such laws a presumed universality and objectivity. Chomsky seems to hold a rather strong and positive definition of individual liberty, perhaps sharing a space in the social contract tradition which seeks to maintain the consent of the governed (a tradition which includes Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all of whom approached the problem in different ways). He remains highly skeptical of authority, claims to authority and argues that individuals are best served by anarchy, or anarcho-syndicalism, or some form of libertarian socialism. The burden of proof, on this view, would be upon governments, institutions and groups of individuals to justify interference into the lives of individuals. According to Chomsky, when people do deal with each other (as they must), they ought to do so voluntarily, entering and leaving obligations of their own will as do the leaders of a community council, or perhaps as occurs at a faculty meeting solving problems as they arise (not exactly practicable for most states, nor for the large scale of nation states).
It would be curious to imagine how such a view would respond to Hobbes’ fool, or any threats an individual might pose to any ruling body over him when it is rational for him to do so (a room full of anarchic libertarian socialists may have trouble finding common ground). It is my belief that neither anarchists, nor community councils, nor faculties would maintain legitimate power for long, and the strong, free individual would soon find himself ruled by those who cared not for his positive, generally rights based, definitions of freedom.
Yet, as to the original question, I can’t seem to find satisfactory proof of a connection. Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
Addition: A reader mentions Kropotkin, and points out that some of Chomsky’s thinking harkens to the heady days of the Russian Revolution (Chomsky’s family emigrated from Russia).