Month: December 2016

A recent analysis of the New York Times‘s coverage of international news over the past couple of decades indicates its editorial emphasis on the Middle East as opposed to elsewhere.  This ‘bias’ is attributed to ‘reader interest,’ which means that readers are attracted to a news source if that source gives them information that interests them, and if that news source fails to deliver the information they want, they will turn to other sources.  The author of the analysis at <www.nemil.com> simply offers it as information rather than a critique of a newspaper that prides itself on its fact-based, source-confirming objectivity, but notes that if the Times has an implicit bias, then we can expect other news purveyors with fewer resources and a less rigorous devotion to ‘truth’ will have a more pronounced bias.  All of which implies that ‘objectivity’–the notion that it is possible to behold and to communicate information about the world as it is as opposed to the world as it seems–is an extremely difficult if not impossible condition to achieve.

The world of is as opposed to the world of seems.  Objectivity vs. subjectivity.  Sub specie aeternitatis vs. sub specie temporis.  God vs. you, or me, or anyone, or . . . ‘us.’  Let’s focus on the us.

We understand the notion of subjectivity as referring to the fact that all perception is grounded in individual states of consciousness.  What you experience is not exactly what I experience, even if we are experiencing an event or situation together, and for a host of reasons, including the quality of our perceiving equipment (I may be deaf; you may have acute hearing) and our various cognitive and emotional resources.  Thus, even if the five senses of two different subjects are equally acute, the disparate experience each subject brings to a perceived event alters the understanding of that event.  This understanding is called apperception.  Since disparate perceptual, cognitive, and emotional states inform the way we experience what is, we must therefore conclude that what is is always filtered by every subject, and therefore what is is always perceived–or apperceived–as what seems to be.

But now we ask, How is it possible to live in a common world?  A world that seems to be more or less the same world for you and me?  The answer is consensus, the tacit understanding of a shared world based on the socialization process and regular social interaction.  While plants and animals pass on to the next generation their ‘understanding’ of the world through genetic codes, humans add to that genetic transmission a cultural knowledge passed on through each individual’s learning process.  The cultural heritage of a particular society thus informs its members’ view of the world, of what is, through a certain lens, so to speak.  This ‘lens’ is the social filter that admits or limits or ‘spins’ information perceived by the subject.  It comprises the language, religion, values, etc.–the culture–of the society into which one is born and raised.  Behind this social filter is the personal filter that develops for each person as that person acquires his or her unique experience of living-in-the-world, or, as Heidegger called it, Dasein.  We experience our world in time and space, and an individual inhabits a sequence of spaces and times that are unique to that individual.   

Two filters, then, mediate our experience of the world: our social filter and our personal filter.  The social filter limits our perception of what is (we’ll call that objective reality) to what our socialization process has taught us; the personal filter limits our perception of what is to what our personal experience–stored forever in our memory–guides us to value as important to our survival and happiness.  Our memory is divided into what is immediately accessible–our conscious mind–and what is only indirectly accessible, our unconscious mind.  As depth psychology has demonstrated, we are motivated to act at least as much by the promptings of the information stored in our unconscious mind as by that in our conscious mind.

We live, then, in a more-or-less common world due to our socialization.  But this means that the ‘common world’ is really only common to the members of our particular society.  What about other societies and the various individuals living in them?  What of ‘objective reality’ do we share with them?  The answer to this question is twofold.  We share the generic genetic inheritance of genus Homo, species sapiens; and we share the cultural heritage of a global society.

E.O. Wilson, in Consilience and in other of his writings, refers to what he calls “gene-culture co-evolution.”  The genetic inheritance of homo sapiens evolves very slowly: we are little different from our ancestors of 100,000 years ago.  Human culture, by contrast, evolves must faster: the isolated clans and tribes of prehistoric humans gradually evolved into nations, empires, and nation-states.  The advent of electric power and multiple sources of kinetic energy (carbon-based fossil fuels, nuclear fission, and the various alternative sources such as wind and sun) facilitated the growth of transportation and communication systems, thus leading human societies to become less isolated.  Today, in the famous phrase of Marshall McLuhan, humans live in a virtual “global village.”  The mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans that once separated human societies from one another now no longer constitute impediments to social interaction.  So, is our common world like a village, a society with shared knowledge and values?

In The Art of the Impossible (1997), Vaclav Havel characterized today’s world, not as a “global village,” but as a “single planetary civilization,” the various cultures of which are in conflict.

The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges.  We stand helpless before them, because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives.  But our inner selves continue to have a life of their own.  And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of Human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people–behind its back, as it were–cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe.  [ . . . ] The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic.  Armed with the same super modern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of the various tribal cults are at war with one another.  By day we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires.  The abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, grows constantly deeper.

However we seek to characterize today’s world–global society, global village, planetary civilization, or Buckminster Fuller’s “spaceship earth”–it’s pretty clear that its unity is superficial, held together with international laws that have shallow roots in custom and a technology that is constantly changing.  One area of our lives we all have in common, however, is the enterprise of science, especially natural science.  It is now truly international, and its norms and methods are shared and respected in every culture and society.  The Paris Agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of December, 2015, signed by 174 nations on Earth Day, 22 April 2016, is but one example of  global accord on a shared concern for the natural environment in which all humans must live.  All signatories accepted the assessment by an international consensus of climate scientists that Earth’s climate is significantly affected by human activity, and that the human community is thereby imperiled. This global accord on the value of science is greatly to be cheered, but science faces its own challenges, especially from politicians, who must respect the immediate needs of their constituents as well as, or unfortunately more than, the long-term welfare of their descendants.  Politicians skeptical of scientific claims to knowledge of, for example, biological evolution and the dynamics of climate change, seem to be pandering to the fears and desires of an unenlightened constituency, and while this is probably true in most cases, it is also true that an intellectual support for their skepticism has been established by post-modern theories of epistemology and metaphysics.  These theories question the very premise of objectivity upon which all science proceeds and depends.

The very notion that we can know “objective reality” has been in vigorous contention since Friedrich Nietzsche, the hugely influential modernist philosopher par excellence, argued reasonably and effectively that, as he said, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”  His “perspectivism” is grounded in radical subjectivity, the claim that all cognitive judgments are derived from individual or group states of consciousness and are thus limited by that consciousness.  Such an epistemic understanding is behind all the post-modern “centrisms,” from the familiar “ethnocentrism” to “Eurocentrism,” “logocentrism,” “androcentrism,” “phallocentrism,” and so on, all of which emphasize that truth claims come from a point of view or perspective, and therefore are more in the service of power rather than disinterested truth.  “It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against.  Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm” (Will to Power, sect. 481).  This critique of disinterested knowledge claims sounds very much like the rationalist’s critique of religion: something is not so simply because we feel a strong desire that it be so.

I conclude these thoughts with this proposition: A belief in objective knowledge is as much a faith as a belief in a certain kind of spiritual reality.  It is the scientist’s faith.  Without this faith, science could no more have produced its astonishing and consequential conclusions than the world’s religions their enormous power over the minds and behavior of humans for millennia.  It is the faith that the human mind is capable of understanding natural processes, and so far, that faith has been justified by results.  What has shaken that faith has been: (1) the weaknesses of its method when applied to human affairs (the social sciences); and (2) the non-science community’s failure to understand science as an ongoing process of hypothesis-testing, verification, falsification, application, and, sometimes, misapplication. The Nietzschean critique has been a salutary injection of metaphysical and epistemological skepticism into the tendency of science to become “scientism”–the belief that the scientific method is the only valid approach to truth claims.  But that critique needs to recognize its own excesses, and one of them is the claim–the truth claim!–that the pursuit of objective knowledge, the faith in that pursuit, is itself inherently vain.  In matters of ultimate reality and our relation to it, faith is not only required, but unavoidable.

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David Remnick, in “It Happened Here” (New Yorker, 11/28/16), quotes from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, in which Rorty refers to the plight of the American working class in the age of globalization, which incentivizes corporations to seek cheap labor pools in developing countries, thereby dooming the merely high-school educated to a marginal economic status.

“Something will crack.  The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for–someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. [ . . . ]  One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out.  Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. [ . . . ]  All the resentment which the badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

So now we can see why the Black Lives Matter movement had (and still has) the unintended consequence of fueling the rage of the white working class, and why the “gains made in the past forty years” by the previously marginalized–homosexuals, “people of color,” Native Americans, women–are at risk.  For the white working class, comprising as much as 42% of the population (2010 census data)–has become itself another marginalized group.  In the post-war period of the 50s and 60s, when indeed all boats were lifted in the rising tide of the American economy, the white working class could believe in the American Dream.  As President Clinton put it in 1993: “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”  But the rules changed, and not to the benefit of the working class.  In 1999, for example, on Bill Clinton’s watch, the 1935 Banking Act (aka the Glass-Steagall Act) was repealed, enabling commercial banks to practice investment banking, thus putting deposits and loans at risk, and this eventually resulted in the collapse of the mortgage industry and massive foreclosures throughout the country.  The deregulation mania begun by President Reagan in the 1980s and continued by Clinton in the 90s and Bush in the first decade of the millennium led to the financial crisis of 2008, from which the nation has only incompletely recovered.  Everyone has been negatively affected by this crisis, but the group whose fortunes have fallen the farthest is working class whites of European background.

The above is by now a familiar post-mortem.  What I’m concerned about now is to focus on the mortem.  What has died?  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be born?

A friend has characterized the Trump “election” (the scare quotes are to acknowledge the College, despite the 2.5 million plurality of the opposition) as a wake-up call to the educated fully-employed elite of “symbolic analysts” that in effect have constituted a political-economic-cultural oligarchy.  She says that this will be an “exciting” time.  That’s a positive spin on what seems to be a crisis of confidence in the System that brought us to the prospect of the leadership of a man whose public record is that of a crude and vulgar huckster.  True to the instincts of the demagogue, Trump saw his opportunity for power (“the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as Henry Kissinger once said) in the 2008 election to the presidency of Barak Hussein Obama–a mulatto with a name that conjures up “black African,” “Muslim,” and the late dictator of Iraq.  Obama won the election in large part for the same reason Jimmy Carter won in 1976: his predecessor was despised, and Obama, like Carter, was regarded as a consummately decent man who could cleanse the White House.  While those who voted for Obama saw a Kennedyesque young man of character, intelligence, and hopeful vision, Trump saw a foreigner–black, Islamic, essentially “unAmerican”–whose image he could exploit by focussing attention on Obama’s surface appearance, which coincided neatly with that of of America’s present enemy, Islamic terrorists.  By pushing forward and sustaining against all evidence his allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, the birthplace of Obama’s father, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to the “nonsuburban electorate” of Middle America that he knew was his core constituency.  His message to that resentful group was this:

“The Ivy League multiculturalists of the coastal cities and suburbs are now in charge.  They don’t give a damn about you.  They are the cosmopolitan elite whose allegiance is to themselves and their privileged kids.  To justify their greed they spout idealistic crap about ‘social justice’–raising the fortunes of blacks and Hispanics and Asians–instead of the real Americans of white European descent, the people like you who built this great country, which is being given over to this pack of losers from loser cultures.  This Harvard-educated law professor with his African father and flower-child hippie mother looks down on you.  This fucking nigger looks down on you!  He condescendingly says you ‘cling to your Bibles and your guns’ to keep ‘meaning’ in your lives, as if religion and your Constitutional right to protect yourself and your families were things to be pitied!  And how did this uppity nigger get to be President?  Two things: the System, which is designed for them, not for you; and, I have to tell you, your own passivity!  You let this happen!  And why?  Why?  Because you put your trust in the System!  The very System that screws you right, left, and center!  I know this better than anybody!  I’m fabulously rich because I know the System, I play the System!  I know how fucked up it is!  But I’ll be damned if I let it beat me!  And now that I’m at the top, I look out over this great country, this once-great country, and I see that all my wealth and fabulous success is not enough to fill my cup.  What I want now, more than all my wealth, more than anything, is to help you help me to make this country great again!  You are what made this country great, and we can make it great again!  Hillary says we can be ‘stronger together.’  I like that.  It’s a good slogan, but . . . ‘together’ with whom?  With the colored? With Lakeisha and Wing Dong and Pablo and Ahmed and Ramaswamy?  I don’t think so!”

What Trump intuitively understands is deep motivation.  Despite rational self-interest, despite law-based community, despite the Christian love ethic, despite e pluribus unum, Americans share with everyone else the social ethics and instincts of the tribe.  Tribalism is based on the identity of blood, whereby one’s neighbors are kinfolk.  The automatic assumption of tribalism is that anyone outside a broad kinship network is a potential enemy.  The primary reason a stranger enters your neighborhood is that he wants something you have.  He may want to trade or barter, but until he gives convincing proof that he’s willing to give you something he has in return for something you have, you must assume that he is prepared and willing to take what you have by force or swindle.  The liberal left naively prefer to assume goodwill; the conservative right, believing in the power of Original Sin more than the power of Love, prefer to assume ill will.  The multicultural experiment of the liberal left, Trump says, is now exposed as a Trojan Horse. Opening the gates of the Promised Land to the non-Europeans is like ancient Israel accommodating the Assyrians or Judah accommodating the Babylonians–an invitation to dissolution and destruction.

The election of Trump is a crisis, not only for America but for the world.  The vision expressed in the Declaration of Independence, instituted by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and reaffirmed by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, is now under siege by a counter-statement of what may be called “neo-tribalism,” a tacit doctrine that posits racial and ethnic identity as the primary glue of social cohesion.  This doctrine defined the human social systems of the pre-modern world.  With the founding of the United States of America in 1776, inspired by the Enlightenment doctrine of Reason, a new basis of social cohesion emerged, most eloquently and succinctly stated in the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our father brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  That is, America is based on an idea rather than blood relationships.  What binds Americans together is not blood kinship, which implies racial and ethnic identity, but a common belief: that the values and ideals of freedom and equality define an American’s personal and social and political identity.  It is this fundamental belief that the election of 2016 has put in question.  Americans now must decide whether they belong to the party of Lincoln or the party of Trump.

 

 

 

 

At the end of my last post, back in March of this hideous year, I teased my readers by referring without explanation to a lecture by Gregory Bateson titled “From Versailles to Cybernetics,…

Source: A Break in the System, Pt. II