Rational Philosophy

Dick Cavett’s folly, guns in parks.

The NY Times grants Dick Cavett considerable space to reflect in an entry called “À la Recherche de Youthful Folly.” Proust would roll in his grave. I’m not sure whose folly bears more of the responsibility for the piece making its way into the paper. Cavett wrote it, but the NY Times published it. Cavett reveals himself to be an unapologetic jerk. He talks about stringing newspapers across the road at night so that car drivers would get spooked and brake suddenly. He talks about deliberately tripping a fat guy who was chasing him after such a prank. He talks about ruthlessly picking on one of his peers. “Distasteful but [...] funny, which to me is always the important thing,” Cavett says.

Sure, these were things he did as a kid, but I think we all knew kids like that, and we knew then that they would always be jerks.

What’s the point of Cavett’s piece? Beyond self-indulgence, it’s hard to tell. But it does give us an example of immorality. Apart from a couple of throw away comments, Cavett displays a singular lack compassion for those who suffered at his hands. Yet his actions caused them unnecessary distress and put them in danger.

“Compassion,” Schopenhauer opined, “is the basis of all morality.”

Schopenhauer himself suffered greatly through the lack of compassion others showed him. When he submitted his essay “On The Basis of Morality” in response to a contest offered by Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies, his was the only entry, but the society refused to award it the prize because they said he’d misunderstood the question.

The Royal Danish Society asked: “Are the source and foundation of morals to be looked for in an idea of morality lying immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and in the analysis of other fundamental moral concepts springing from that idea, or are they to be looked for in a different ground of knowledge?”

Schopenhauer answered that morality arises out of our awareness that:

1. Living things strive to exist.

2. If we oppose the striving to exist of another living thing (i.e., cause it deliberate harm) we are acting immorally.

Compassion, in Schopenhauer’s moral system, is the awareness that another’s suffering is no different from our own.

Maybe the Royal Danish Society just didn’t like his answer…

The marvelous thing about Schopenhauer’s explanation for moral feeling is that it strips away all of the layers of artificial moral concepts that arise out of systems of thought (religious and social) and examines morality in a very raw and immediate form.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has proposed a rule change that would allow people to carry concealed weapons in some national parks (the ones where state laws permit carrying concealed weapons). What intrigued me most about this story was the way in which the proposed rule change had come about: Kempthorne “proposed the rule in response to letters from 51 United States senators — 42 Republicans and 9 Democrats — who asked that the current rule be changed.”

So either 51 senators up and decided that despite the absence of any alarming crime statistics this was an issue that warranted a letter to Dirk, or the NRA lobbied the senators to press the Interior Secretary on the matter.

Those who run the parks oppose the proposal, saying that the guns would create more problems than they would resolve.

Which brings me back to thinking that our society suffers from a lack of philosophical instruction and education. Shouldn’t our children learn about such things? Shouldn’t those who administer our government be able to see past and hold firm against transparent political manipulation?

Dick Cavett and others like him can perhaps convince themselves that because something is socially acceptable it is not immoral. Schopenhauer’s piercing injunction reveals how ill-founded is such thinking.
Schopenhauer also said: “Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity!”

(For those interested in the origin of moral and other feelings, my own book begins with the fundamental principles of space and time, arriving at some of the same general conclusions as Schopenhauer.)

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.

On biobigotry, regular bigotry, and the apparent contradiction of free-will.

Natalie Angier writes about our tendency to project human characteristics onto, and make human judgments of, animals. We take a dislike to certain species and favor others. And we justify our preferences on the basis of an animal’s behavior, its choice of habitats, its degree of invasiveness, its plumage… in short, on anything that inspires our appreciation or dislike. Angier calls this biobigotry.

Angier rightly implies that an animal is what it is and does what is in its nature to do; any judgment we put on it has relevance only as an artifact of our mind. By using the word biobigotry Angier connects the concept to the human-human bigotry of judgments based on race, gender, age, weight, etc.

Here we come to the paradox: If we say that animals do what it is their nature to do and shouldn’t be judged for it, then carry this idea forward and apply it to people, who likewise do what it is their nature to do, we end up concluding that people, too, can’t be judged as inherently despicable or adorable.

Is this a supportable premise?

It is wrong for Angier to condemn cowbirds for leaving their eggs in other birds’ nests; that’s what cowbirds do. But is it likewise wrong to condemn a person who steals, for instance? Isn’t the act of theft a result of a certain set of circumstances — genetic, environmental, and circumstantial.

If we follow this approach to its rigorous conclusion we can end up deciding that no one can be blamed for anything. For most of us this doesn’t sit well. So how can we resolve this paradox.

The resolution lies in the concept of free-will. The cowbird does not reflect on a set of choices available to it and decide it would prefer to leave its eggs in another bird’s nest. But the person who steals has a range of options from which to choose. Stealing is a choice.

Immediately, though, we see a problem with this approach. One could argue that for someone who is going to steal the range of possible options is illusory. The options exist in theory, but in practice he or she is preconditioned to reject the other options.

In this new paradox we have reached the limits of the applicability of human judgment. When we judge someone we judge them against a range of possible responses and actions, regardless of whether the person could have actually chosen differently given his or her psychological makeup and the situation at hand. We judge and condemn, in effect, not the person, but the person’s inability to make a better choice.

What response to public wrongdoing?

In his chronical of Eliot Spitzer’s predecessors in doing wrong, N. R. Kleinfield makes a compeling case for a connection between power and irrational risk-taking. The piece focuses on sex scandals, but could just as easily have included bribery and corruption. Kleinfield draws on the opinions of experts in psychology to underscore the logic behind the link — people who seek power typically have an appetite for high stakes and pushing the envelope.

We gasp in surprise when we learn of each new scandal, but perhaps we should not really be surprised. Abuse of power, sexual extravagance, and a sense of being above the law have been with us all through history. The difference is that these days there’s generally more accountability, and more publicity.

In his initial announcement, Spitzer apologized to his family and said that his connection to the prostitution ring was a private matter (although he did apologize to the public, too). This echoes previous scandaleers who have either explicitly or implicitly sought to separate their private actions from their public role.

Unless we’re to compound the abuse of power, any illegal actions should be appropriately prosecuted. But what about immoral or inappropriate acts, things that are not illegal or wouldn’t typically be subject to prosecution.

As members of society we can ask ourselves two questions:

1. How much do we care to let the private actions of public figures reflect upon their public roles?

2. How do we action upon that answer?

In America in recent years it has begun to seem that the intense scrutiny of the private lives of candidates for public office has gone beyond the point of appropriateness and good sense. After all, if we accept that those who seek public office must be prepared to tolerate risk, and to gain or lose a great deal, shouldn’t we tolerate the idea that this personality type won’t be happy with slippers and a pipe in the evening (at least not a tobacco pipe)? I’m not saying we should excuse or overlook illegal activity, nor turn a blind eye to serious character flaws, but the important thing is that the person can do the job he or she is elected to do.

If the politician can maintain a rational and exemplary record of public service, why should we care, or even need to be aware, that he or she has a personal pecadillo or two?

Which brings me to the definition of flaws. On moral matters we define a sin as something that, from our perspective, we would judge immoral. As I outline in my book (LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive), it’s possible to point to a rational origin for our sense of morality, thereby lending it an objectivity, but as morality reveals itself in the world, it tends not to be rational.

Let’s cut the politicians a break and allow them their private lives, flaws or no flaws, moral or immoral. Let’s not dig if we’re only digging for private dirt. When society expects its leaders be not just effective and law-abiding, but also irreproachable in mind and body, society loses.

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

(Or Reading, Writing and Ramifications…)

“The Fall” by Albert Camus was the first book of literature I read by choice. (Before that I think I’d read mostly books from Ian Flemming’s James Bond series,
Agatha Christie’s detective series, science fiction, and the like). “The Fall” opened up for me a whole new world of reading. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it also opened up a whole new world of thinking.

A new study has shown that the flu is more common in the winter because the virus remains more stable and lives longer in cold dry weather. The debate about why the flu was more common in winter had raged for decades. The researcher’s clue to testing the flu’s communicability under controled conditions (more explicitly, what animal to test on — Guinea Pigs) came from reading a report from 1919 about a flu pandemic in New Mexico. (The author of the report noted in passing that Guinea Pigs at Camp Cody had succumbed to the flu.)

And in a New Orlean’s court case today, where the defendants may be asked to present their genitals for review in order to help prosecute a rape case, Defense attorney Robert Jenkins made the comment “I’ve never seen it before. Even in fiction, you don’t see this kind of stuff.” Which, when you think about things you do see in fictionalized court cases, is a statement as bold as the prosecutor’s request.

My wife, a lover of purchasing books if not always reading them, has set herself the challenge of reading ten books while she’s pregnant. When she asked me if I had any suggestions Camus’ “The Fall” was right up there. It’s a short book and she’s about half way through. Last night she felt so affected by what she was reading that she paused and read out loud a passage in which the narrator recalls a traffic incident in Paris. Stopped at a traffic light behind a stalled moped the narrator, who saw himself as the victim of events, ended up being seen by everyone around him as the villain. I don’t remember enough of the book to summarize its themes and aims, but my wife has been struck by the way that Camus exposes the layers of psychology that enwrap our everyday lives: Why do we try to be nice and good? Do we have an ulterior motive? Is that our only motive? How do we know? What makes up a person, his actions or his thoughts?

Camus, Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Graves, Gunter Grass, James Joyce, Proust and so many other great writers wrote fiction that provokes inquiry and thought about the nature of the human condition and, in many ways, the nature of existence. Reading such texts communicates this process. We don’t need to agree with the writer’s perspective, and rarely is the writer’s perspective explicitly declared or even implicitly declared, but it is difficult to read the books of such writers without pausing to reflect. And it is difficult to reflect without acquiring some new insight.

The flu researcher makes his own case for writing down points of interest that may seem incidental at the time (such as Guinea Pigs with flu), but that can open up whole new realms of insight for readers in a dim, distant and indeterminate future. “Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” says Dr. Palese, who made the discovery.

And the Defense attorney in the New Orleans court, unwittingly I think, points to the value of fiction as a way of expanding the realm of the possible. Fiction has been instrumental in changing what’s acceptable, possible, and conceivable. That the Prosecutor in the case has outdone fiction is a credit to his imagination if not his legal prowess.

All of which makes me want to go and read.

But before I do, I must stop to consider the flip side of this literatic love-fest. Even the best of texts can be misunderstood and misused. And the worst of texts can be downright dangerous in the wrong hands. The intent of the writer and the perspective and persuasion of the reader will determine whether a particular text generates more good than ill.

And what’s considered a dangerous book by one generation may be lauded as a groundbreaking work of innovation and courage by the next. (James Joyce’s Ulysses springs to mind; although it may not be the best example unless the sample group happens to be students of modern literature.)

Can we say then whether the overall value of literature and writing is in general positive, negative or neutral?

(This reminds me of a discussion I had earlier this year with someone who questioned, since truth and scientific understanding is not absolute, whether we can say that science has made progress.)

The question, in practice, is clearly unanswerable. Even if we were to agree on definitions for positive and negative, how would we compile a quantitative inventory of all of the positive and negative influences of things written and read?

Which reminds me that things written, while they should stir and prompt our own thinking, should not replace our own thinking. Whatever dangers exist in things written don’t derive from the writing itself, however inciteful and twisted, but from our being influenced by them without sufficient reflection and questioning. Just because we read Justine doesn’t mean that we’ll become amoral. Although if we swallow de Sade’s words without reflection, we may well come away worse off than when we arrived. But surely that would be our fault, not de Sade’s?
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I buy coffee and a carrot muffin every day for breakfast from a “Pret” cafe in midtown Manhattan. As I do wherever I go, I strive to be pleasant when I get my breakfast. I see people being unpleasant sometimes and it makes me cringe. (Isn’t it less stressful to be polite and helpful and sympathetic to those with whom we come into contact? And, I should point out, Pret does a great job of attracting and training its staff to be polite and courteous, too.) In any case, this morning there were no carrot muffins out on the rack so I took a blueberry muffin instead. When I stepped up to pay, the person serving me recognized me, remembered what I typically purchase, and rang up a carrot muffin. When she realized that I’d settled for blueberry she went out of her way to hunt down a carrot muffin for me. (It was delicious.)

Republican Representative Deborah Pryce in announcing her retirement today had this to say about America’s increasingly media-driven campaigns of dirty politics: “I don’t think anything will change until Americans revolt and get it into their heads that they need to be informed voters instead of just listening to the paid political ads.” But she also freely admitted that she’d resorted to attack ads in order to hold onto her seat in last election, to the tune of $4.5 million. Which makes one wonder whether politicians don’t also need to do a little revolting of their own. The message though is that being nice, in politics at least, doesn’t pay off. That’s the prevailing wisdom. I’m not sure whether any politician has yet dared to be nice in the face of his or her rival’s nastiness.

Various religions have long taught the virtues of being nice, of not retaliating. The texts of Christianity (the religion with which I’m most familiar) stress the importance of being kind and peaceful even in the face of unkindness. Although, if I remember rightly from my attendance at church, long ago, as a boy, the religion seemed to attract a high proportion of petty, judgmental and holier-than-thou people. But I guess you can’t necessarily blame the teachings for the people they attract!

The 2001 movie Evolution, in amongst slapstick humor and great special-effects, teases up an interesting philosophical question. The movie’s premise: A meteor carrying the necessary genetic material for a very different form of life crashes into the earth. The new form of life has two characteristics that set it apart from the kinds of life forms with which we’re typically familiar: 1. Life evolves exponentially faster. 2. The species are uncompromisingly unpleasant and aggressive. I was fascinated by this second characteristic (made easier to observe by the first).

In the context of the movie, life can evolve even if the members of its various species behave with uncompromising aggression. But could this be true out in the universe? Does any principle indicate that we will get further by being nice?

Here’s a theory (one that I explore in greater detail in my book): Being nasty can help an individual survive in certain situations. It can help us get our coffee ahead of the next guy, or it can even make a difference between life and death — the killer instinct. But when we think about survival more broadly, in a family or social group, being nice starts to pay off. Being nice creates social bonds and payback. It leads to cooperation and sacrifice. I would argue that being nice is a much more enlightened practice than being nasty and one that pays great dividends over time.

If only politics could evolve to be more enlightened, too.

I saw a news clip today about a New York City stockbroker assaulting a fellow spinner in a spin class (he pushed him and his bike against the wall). The reason: he was enraged by the man’s grunting.

And yesterday I was introduced to the term “Dumbfounding.” As reported in the science section of the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, has proposed that human beings have an innate and pre-rational sense of judgment about right and wrong that evolved as useful to our survival, but leaves us “dumbfounded” when our rational mind can’t explain why we feel that something is abhorrent or wrong.

I would guess that the NYC stockbroker’s ire derived from a pre-rational response; when he wakes up tomorrow he’ll wonder how he could have been so enraged as to assault another person for grunting, and get himself into so much hot water in the process.

Haidt’s hypothesis concurs with my own thinking on the origin and evolution of our moral sense. In LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I propose that our sense of morality has been baked into our genes through evolution, and came about for the very simple reason that if we are to persist as an organsim we need to react in certain ways that will help us survive (all of which I tie to the very concrete principles that shape the universe). This also gives us a very concrete basis by which to understand and discuss our sense of morality.

But upon reading about the poor stockbroker and his unfortunate victim I was struck again by something that occurs to me regularly. We live in a world, in a society, that has evolved very rapidly, and evolves ever more rapidly. We are evolved but we’re less evolved than sometimes we’d like to think. We step out into the world feeling that we are equal to its challenges, but it’s like stepping out onto a moving sidewalk. Whether it’s the grunting of a fellow spin class member, or a jittery stockmarket, or a pair of dirty socks left lying on the bedroom floor, we’re not always as psychologically well-equipped as the world demands. Our rational minds have created a mental world that has a dizzying range of customs, procedures, laws, etiquette, social and workplace demands, and underneath the surface our innate urges and responses sometimes can’t keep up.

A “Teen Magazine” quote from Vanessa Hudgens before her nude photo scandal:

“I’m a good kid,” Hudgens said. “I’ve been brought up with very good morals, and I’m not going to go out and do something I don’t want other kids to do.”

“I love being a role model because, in Hollywood, there aren’t a lot of role models to look up to. The fact that there’s a whole bunch of good kids coming out who are now stepping into the limelight, I’m very proud of that.”

On the face of it, reading this, one could criticize Vanessa Hudgens for being deceitful. But one could also argue that her comments were intended “in character” that she was maintaining a public image as a projection of her clean cut character on a clean cut show. The point here is that her intent makes a difference, philosophically, because intent and perspective shape our moral perspective.

To take a more important example, the current administration, it seems clear, deceived the public about the imminent threat posed by Iraq. The aim of this deception was to follow through on a plan to attack Iraq and displace Saddam Hussein. Further discussion of motive becomes a little more murky. Did the administration believe that Saddam, WMD’s aside, posed the kind of threat that demanded invasion? Did the administration have a “gut” desire to invade Iraq and use various justifications to themselves or others in order to support this “gut” desire?

An accurate moral judgment of duplicity requires a sense of the intent. Does this mean that no act or action is inherently immoral?

If we were to accept this perspective we would throw the moral compass of most people into a frenzy of confusion. Most religions, for instance, identify prohibited or immoral acts or practices.

And if morality requires subtle assessment of intent or perspective, how are we to find a new compass? A rational compass?

But, if we are pragmatic and rational, we cannot hold onto the concept of “immoral acts.” Nothing is inherently immoral. Morality flexes and adapts, it bends to the tide.

We can find a pragmatic and rational basis for morality, a basis that adheres to Plato’s strict indictment:

“Unless someone can distinguish in an account the form of the good from everything else, can survive all refutation, as if in a battle, striving to judge all things not in accordance with opinion but in accordance with being, and can come through all this with his account still intact, you’ll say he doesn’t know the good itself or any other good.” – Plato’s Republic VII

And concurs with his incisive statement:

“The bad is what destroys and corrupts, and the good is what preserves and benefits.” – Republic X

(More on this to come in future postings and in my book…)