Rational Philosophy

On the genetic ancestry of the duck-billed platypus, the beating of suspects by police in Philadelphia, and the race tensions in the Democratic primary contest.

The duck-billed platypus has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, but has fur and nurses its young. And now that an international team of scientists has decoded the duck-bills genome its uniquely ambivalent classification — part reptile, part mammal — has become a little less mysterious. The team found that the duck-bill’s genetic line split off from the other primary line over 166 million years ago. It has many genes in common with other mammals, but has retained many reptilian genes.

In Philadelphia, police and city officials have hurried to stress that the beating of restrained suspects caught on tape by television news reporters wasn’t racially motivated. The police officers were mostly white, the suspects black. (One presumes that this means they would have beaten white suspects, too.)

And in the contest for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton has again hinted that her success with white voters makes her a better matched against the Republicans.

We live in the confines of our prejudices. Prejudice rests on the fear that our identity of self isn’t supreme.

Philadelphia city officials probably believe they act out of a different fear when claiming that race wasn’t a factor in the beatings. One presumes that they fear the incident will fuel racial tensions. Asserting that race wasn’t a factor allows them to feel that they’re acting to diffuse the tension. But asserting that race is not a factor before that aspect of the beatings has been thoroughly investigated seems to work counter to that aim.

Hillary Clinton fears losing more than she fears anything else, even betraying her bigotry. However latent and denied it is, bigotry does seem to underpin Clinton’s use of the difference of her race from Obama’s as a tool to further her campaign.

The duck-billed platypus, amalgam of reptile and mammal, can stand as an emblem of the possibility of living without prejudice. Rather than spending so much time parsing our differences, how much better would the world be if we could acknowledge that the world is just as diverse and bizarre as we can accept it to be.

On lying, fibbing, tricking and kidding.

My four year-old son is learning the nuances of deceit. When he’s caught claiming that he didn’t eat that piece of candy you said he couldn’t have he says he was “just joking.” His deceptions have a straightforward purpose — to get something that he wants which would otherwise be denied him, or to avoid responsibility for something that would incur his parents’ displeasure. Transparent and predictable, his lies seem to come with the territory of being human. He’s learning about the commodity of untruth, and its cost.

One would think that by the time a person has grown to adulthood he or she has learned that obvious, easily uncovered untruths have little value and come at a high cost, especially when you live in the public eye.

Hillary Clinton, one can presume, must understand, abstractly at least, the high cost of silly lies. And yet she trots them out as if she were a four year-old. (I’m not exculpating Barack Obama, but his lies at least seem to be in keeping with his general philosophy and purpose, whereas Clinton’s sometimes confound us with their preposterous posturing.) Claiming to George Stephanopolous, for instance, that her support for summer gas tax relief was something other than just political pandering insults the intelligence of those who would vote for her.

Recent research into the psychology of lying suggests that people lie to deceive others or to deceive themselves. This research also suggests that lying to deceive oneself has an aspirational quality — the student who inflates his grade point average aspires to that grade point average, and, more often than not, will get closer to it over time.

Very often politicians lie because they aspire to be right. They lie to defend a position because they believe in their ability to hold correct positions. Hillary Clinton desperately wants to believe that her aspiration to the presidency is legitimate. Beyond anything else, a victory would validate her sense of her right to be center stage — politically and personally. When someone fights so desperately to win, it gives us a window into what they feel they have to lose.

Philosophically, deceit is a simple concept — the presentation of untruth in place of truth. We can quibble about what we mean by truth, about whether anything can be completely objective, but this is hairsplitting. When a student says his grade point average is 3.7 when it is really 3.1 this is deceit.

And deceit isn’t confined to humans. The natural world abounds with deceit. Animals camouflage, impersonate, dissemble, trick… all with the aim of staying alive or furthering their genes.

Early philosophers such as Socrates and Plato focused a great deal of attention on the mechanics of deception and the antidote of reason. They did this because they felt that too often people were deceived by illogic. Clear, unfettered truth was the primary battleground of their philosophy.

Amazingly, many hundreds of years later, despite great advances in so many fields, we still don’t teach our children the fundamentals of logic and reason as a matter of course. Until today, until right now, I’ve thought that this was simply an oversight. But I wonder now whether the battle that Socrates started isn’t still underway. Perhaps it’s a battle of humanity for humanity.

Here we have highly educated people fibbing like four year-olds. In Socrates’ day, the sophists were aware of their deceptions, and they succeeded because people wanted to believe them. Just so today, the Clintons of the world know that they’re dissembling, but people want to believe them. We like rhetoric. We like to think that the world might be something other than what it is. Reality is hard. The truth is unsavory. Let’s go for a drive…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.