Category Archives: Philosophy

Special: The blurring of reality

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Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?

-Edgar Alan Poe

Casey Anthony – a case study in blurred reality: Source – Parismatch.com

The horrific murders of innocents at Sandy Hook ignited a political firestorm over gun ownership, an issue that is really a red herring. Much less mention occurs about our non-existent mental health system, or the effect of violent gaming in blurring the distinction between fiction and reality and thus desensitizing young people to graphically horrific violence.

Yet, when I think about how reality and fiction are blurred I can’t help but think that games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Medal of Honor are taking up more and more time in the lives of children as young as six or seven years old. Should we be concerned that such exposure might cause people to take fiction into reality at some future date?

Well, when I was growing up my generation was treated to bloodless violence in Westerns, cartoon characters struck by hammers and falling pianos, and Moe slapping and pounding Curly and Larry. Not to mention Superman flying. Now, I’m not saying that someone somewhere didn’t attempt to emulate this behavior with deadly consequences–some may in fact have done so. But neither I nor anyone I knew personally ever thought for one minute that you could hit someone with a hammer and not have it hurt.

So, if in fact young people are influenced towards violence today because of the entertainment afforded them; and if, in fact, we were not thus influenced (which I maintain we were not); what might be the difference?

Was is that we ourselves were more grounded in reality? Or was it that the world we lived in was? Did our parents and significant influences know the difference, and provide us with a security in our reality that is, somehow, missing today?

Are we, as a society, blurring the distinction between reality and fiction? If so, are consequences like Sandy Hook and the AMC shootings in Colorado simply symptomatic of this disconnect?

Rob Lowe (L) as Drew Peterson (R). Source:crimeticker.com

For the past several weeks, thousands have been glued to TruTV, mesmerized by testimony from a young woman in Arizona who murdered her lover by shooting him in the head, stabbing him 29 times, and slitting his throat. Her serial testimony about the various and sundry sex acts she committed with the deceased has drawn an ardent audience (probably mostly males!) and has been a ratings bonanza. This trial is the consequence of a gritty and horrific event that really happened: a bullet violated a man’s skull, a knife pierced flesh and vital organs, and an ear-to-ear slice across his throat segmented jugular veins. His body decomposed for days in a damp shower stall. Stinking to high heaven.

Now, we turn to TruTV for entertainment: the blood and stink has receded into a fog of unreality. Once the trial is over, it will probably be a year or less before Lifetime turns it into a movie. The reciprocity between reality and fiction will thus come full circle.

This is what happened with the heart-wrenching case of Casey Anthony and her beautiful but unbelievably murdered child Caylee. The performance value of her trial was evident not only in ratings for HLN and TruTV, but in the physical confrontations that sometimes occurred outside the courthouse as people literally fought for a place in line (some having come from many miles away to see the “show”).

And, of course, there was a Lifetime Movie.

There is another thing that connects the Jodi Arias case with Casey Anthony: both young women apparently have to think to tell the truth. Their reality is what they say it is at the time. Are they sociopaths, or are they merely reflective of a larger society that finds the distinction between truth and reality fuzzier and fuzzier? And did the Anthony jury perhaps suffer from the same inability to distinguish truth from fiction?

I could go on. Drew Peterson not only drew television cameras to him, he flaunted his newfound celebrity. And–guess what?– he was the subject of a Lifetime movie.

Now that I think about it, Rob Lowe played Peterson–and he also played the prosecuting attorney in the Casey Anthony movie. Blurred reality seems to have become a full-employment opportunity for Lowe!

Plato once illustrated a philosophy about reality and appearance with a simile about a cave. All people who sat in the darkness could see were shadows of things that were cast on the wall from a wall of flame behind them. Most people took the shadows for the reality, and lived their lives accordingly.

Could it be that we need to clear out the shadows, move into the light,  and ground ourselves in reality in order to live our lives properly? If so, how do we go about climbing out of the cave when it is so comfortable in there?

If I am onto something here, other innocents in the future may be on the path to destruction. And not just because of guns (Jodi Arias inflicted most of her damage with a kitchen knife), but because we can’t judge between what is real and what isn’t.

Sandy Hook was real.

My greatest fear is that we will reduce it to unreality with a–God forbid–Lifetime movie.

The Righteous Mind: a paradigm-shifting look at how we behave ethically

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This is a guest review of  The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt (Pantheon, 2012, 448 pages) by John Scarbrough, Ph.D., a professor of Psychology and Sociology at Lincoln Land Community College, Springfield, Illinois. It is, however, more than just a review. It is a thorough analysis of a paradigm-shifting book that may foster the integration of philosophical ethics with psychology, sociology, anthropology, and perhaps even biology in college curricula of the future. It purports to help those with left political leanings understand those who lean right a little better, but this is not just a book about political leanings. It is a book about how we are motivated ethically, and it is well worth the attention of thoughtful people everywhere.

A Tale (Tail) of Two Elephants
Louise and Ralph are elephants tied together at the tail. Louise, the mommy elephant, almost always turns left but in a forward direction often in disregard of what her tiny rider Logic instructs her to do. Ralph, the daddy elephant, almost always turns right and aims backwards, usually in disregard for what his little rider Facts directs.

And, of course, if they are standing still, there is tension from the opposite pulls. But when they try to go somewhere or get something done they pull and strain and get red and blue in the face. Well Louise generally gets blue in the face and Ralph generally gets red in the face. And they snort and holler and almost trample one another in frustration. Louise accuses Ralph of not listening, not seeing nuance, not stopping to smell the flowers but worst of all, Louise accuses Ralph of being a dunderhead pachyderm low on empathy and not caring for others at all. Ralph bellows that Louise is soft in the head, illogical and always giving away everything they own and not requiring the recipients to work for it. Louise loves change and hope and anything new and Ralph hates disruptions in his hard working routine, despises rule breakers and particularly hates new elephants coming into his territory, particularly ones that are taller or browner or believe in a different elephant god. How dare they?

Book Summary

Part I “Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second”

“The mind is divided, like a rider and an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.”(p. xix)
The elephant is made up of successful, evolved emotional and intuitive reaction modules which have served us well and have helped us survive as a species. The rider is a later add-on who generally isn’t as rational as we believe him to be, but rather rationalizes what the elephant has already decided to do. This backs up Hume’s view of human nature and strongly disagrees with Plato’s views of our rationality. And it agrees with Wilhelm Wundt’s experiments in his 1890’s psychology laboratory.

It’s all based on research, including fMRI’s of people’s brains while making decisions. The activity goes to the amygdala and other emotional centers first, actions are initiated and then the information goes to the “thinking” neo-cortex.

But the rider does convince the elephant sometimes and is most often successful when he is among a group of supportive peers whom he admires, respects and whose approval he wants. The elephant is most likely to listen when these people are gently questioning the elephant’s conclusions. But when either Louise or Ralph is scared, they both react with fear and become more conservative. Even bad smells and tastes can make the elephant more judgmental and more likely to push her further into her entrenched position.

Later in the book, he adds that group rituals, group marching and music helps us change the direction of our hard-headed elephant.

Morality partially grew out of an innate distinction between the worship of the sacred on one end and the violation of the sacred resulting in disgust on the other. We have a “face-finding module” in our brain which takes amorphous stimuli and constructs the perception of a face, perhaps an angel or an elf. Added to this is a built-in module to seek agency. The kitten who is chasing your hand under the covers is not thinking about the cause but only attacking the effect. We construct great searches for the cause and often have concluded gods cause the rumblings of nature. Whether it be the farmer in Kansas praying for rain or the Hawaiian trying to placate the volcano goddess Pele, we humans have looked for lots of supernatural causes. Whether there is a god or not is another question, but we certainly are tuned to look for her.

Morality is intuitive first and second socially learned to acquire the continued interaction of peers we value. Morality, according to Haidt, is not about the search for truth. And this tells us a great deal about why liberals and conservatives yell right past one another.

We lie, cheat and with the help of our press secretary (prefrontal lobe) are so good at it that we easily convince ourselves. Two of our “logic” tricks are special twists of confirmation bias: “Can I believe that?” is used when our elephant already has a strong emotionally based belief and we want to believe it. “Must I believe that?” is used when someone else is trying to persuade us and we don’t want to believe it. If 99% of climate scientists conclude global warming is largely the result of humans and we believe it is not, then all we need is to find one scientist (or more often, one politician) who disagrees to enable us to hang onto our belief.

Part II “There is More to Morality than Harm and Fairness”

The rider is reason; the elephant, intuition / inclinations: who is really in charge? Image: Startuplokal.org

Are you liberal and WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic)? If so your values tend to narrowly emphasize individual rights and fairness. If you are conservative and non-WEIRD, your moral systems emphasizes these but also emphasizes the importance of the community and things sacred. Conservatives emphasize a broader set of values in making judgments while liberals focus so much on individual rights that they minimize the importance of tradition, rule of authority as well as the divine and religious. No wonder a woman’s rights trump the sacredness of the fetus for the liberal and the words “God and country” ring so many bells for the conservative.

So both the liberal and the conservative elephants’ moralities are based in a continuum of at least these five dimensions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Individualistic cultures emphasize care and fairness while communitarian societies emphasize all five. Isn’t it interesting that liberals tend to be individualistic and conservatives tend to emphasize the group? Just the opposite of how many political arguments play out in America today.

Haidt argues our moral foundations arose to help us survive in groups. Care/harm evolved to enable us to take care of children; fairness/cheating evolved to make cooperative groups work and help keep members from being exploited; loyalty/betrayal arose from making and keeping coalitions; authority/subversion came from establishing relationships in hierarchical groups; and sanctity/degradation came first from avoiding bad food and later from avoiding pathogens and parasites. I’d say these are interesting but not proven. And, of course, much of his argument hangs on these issues. But whether they evolved biologically or not, it seems fair to argue that these moral traits exist and came about to solidify people within groups.

As a result of his research, Haidt added the Liberty/oppression moral foundation and altered the Fairness/cheating moral foundation to emphasize the proportionality of fairness, or at least the perception of proportionality. In other words, his respondents wouldn’t have liked Jesus’ story of the worker who came late to the vineyard and received the same pay as those who worked all day. Liberals and conservatives both emphasize proportionality of effort, although, as you can guess, they interpret this very differently.

In his own studies, Haidt demonstrates that liberals score much higher on care and fairness and conservatives score more highly on loyalty, authority and sanctity. Much of this data comes from people filling out questionnaires and answering questions on the web site, YourMorals.org. It’s not clear if these large samples are truly representative of U.S. adults. And this may be a big problem for the research. Others have found that the extreme left and the extreme right are both authoritarian and closed minded. Are these findings the result of a sample bias?

Further, he argues that these results fit nicely with Emile Durkheim’s vision of how society works collectively and interdependently. Durkheim was the great sociological thinker and researcher from the latter part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century who showed how suicide was not primarily an individual act but varied enormously by how tightly one was integrated into meaningful social groups. And this evidence goes against such great thinkers as John Stuart Mill who championed individuality to the point that he argued the only true reason the state could restrain someone was to prevent harm to others. Mill presents a utopia of individualism and Durkheim presents a reality of interdependence of peoples. And that interdependence is cemented by social rituals, tradition, observance of authority and loyalty to one’s group.

Haidt is the first psychologist (other than me) who I’ve ever heard mention and appreciate the great ideas of Durkheim. Indeed psychology and sociology are respectively marked by an emphasis upon the individual or upon the group.

Part III “Morality Binds and Blinds”

Charles Darwin argued that group level selection for group survival traits was essential to understanding evolution. From the 1970’s to the present scientists like Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) have argued that Darwin was wrong and that there is no mechanism except for the individual organism to compete and survive on an individual basis with traits gradually emerging or disappearing based on large numbers of individuals. And from this it was inferred that individuals are naturally selfish. Remember back in college when your professor did all kinds of twists and turns to “prove” that people who give to charity are doing it for selfish reasons?

Haidt disagrees and says that humans, bees, ants, wasps and termites and a few species of other critters, including some shrimp and beetles have evolved genes for ultrasociability. It’s called multi-level evolution and is supported by a few scientists, including no less luminaries than E. O. Wilson and G. Holldabler from their studies on evolution of insect groups to help feed long dependent offspring and to aide in inter-group conflict.

Bees build hives and have specialized labor and humans build tribes and corporations and complex societies with specialized labor. Is all of this the result of biological evolution? No, it’s the result of the co-evolution of genes and society. Our groupishness is the root of our success as a species and the root of our conflict between groups. And that trait did evolve on a group selection level. Or did it evolve on an individual level which benefitted the group? And groups with more individuals with these traits survived better. Either way, the result, according to Haidt, is ultrasociability.

According to Tomasello, a primate researcher, “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” But we humans do that and much more all the time.

“Bees construct hives out of wax and wood fibers, which they then fight, kill and die to defend. Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill and die to defend.” (Haidt p 207)

He goes on to argue that massive co-evolution of genes and culture has occurred in the last 12,000 years. We are not genetically identical to our hunting and gathering ancestors and some of the modern genes evolved to prepare us for war as well as for co-existence within our groups. We also evolved to suppress aggression, to aide in territorial defense and prevent free-riding of lazy group members. A moral community was born.

So we are a lot like chimps but shared intentionality and a moral community made us a little like bees with a “hive switch.” Symbols and threats flip that switch. Flags, flag pins, Iranian nuclear facility building, immigrants and political parties all trigger our groupishness, trigger our hive switch and make it much more likely the elephant and not the rider will respond to such threats and symbols. We were all Americans for a few days after 9/11.

He goes into the role of mirror neurons, oxytocin (the chemical that binds) as well as dopamine and other feel good neurotransmitters. And he covers transactional leadership and advises leaders to use our knowledge of human groupishness to get a group to work. Leaders should help diverse peoples feel like a family, use synchrony like singing together, marching together (to flip the hive switch) and use healthy team competition, not individual competition to motivate.

He asks, can’t we all get along and love each other unconditionally? Nope. Evolution didn’t prepare us for that. The most we can accomplish is love within our groups based on similarity, fair dealing with free riders and “… a sense of shared fate…may be the most we can hope to accomplish.” (Haidt p 245)

And then Haidt tells us religion is not a waste of time and resources. Like so many other social activities it builds social capital and moral capital and, like Durkheim told us long ago, with all of its failings, religion binds us together into a community of believers. It unites us within our group. “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” (Haidt p 270)

He says that thinking about religion as nothing but beliefs about the supernatural may lead you to conclude that at best it is delusional and a waste of resources and at worst the path to the downfall of human culture. But if you think about it as Durkheim did, you will see that it is a great cohesive force within groups and thinking about it from a Darwinian perspective may lead you to believe is the result of multi-level selection and the basis for binding humans together. God may or may not exist but religion is a powerful and basic force binding people together.

Review of the Book

This book may be a game-changer; it may start a paradigm shift helping liberals and conservatives to better understand the focus of each other. Clearly, without any doubt, Haidt demonstrates that we are not solely rational creatures absorbed only in our economic self-interest but we are highly emotional beings who are great at rationalizing ideas and behaviors which our elephant already supports. And our self-interests are based on six inherited moral foundations of care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity.

Whether these moral foundations are biologically inherited through individual selection, group selection or developed socially is important but whatever the source, these foundations of morality clearly emerge from the data and are part of us. But why do conservatives emphasize all six and liberals only two or three? And are people born that way? Yes, about 40% of our conservative or liberal leanings are in our genes, genes waiting to be shaped by experience.

It seems that we need liberals to explore, innovate and come up with changes that may help our societies survive. And we need conservatives just as much to put the brakes on and keep us from changing too quickly.

But, as Michael Lynch points out in the New York Times (“Opinionator,” Sep 30, 2012), there is something contradictory about spending a couple hundred pages of rational, well documented discourse using hundreds of scientific studies, in other words, reason, to convince us through logic that we are not really creatures of reason. So, while this book is greatly insightful, it must only be one part of a very complicated picture.

Under what conditions, other than with peers, marching, moving in sync to music and doing Japanese corporate style exercises does our elephant respond to reason and change its point of view? Haven’t we measured the cumulative effect of a university education on broadening the outlook of students over a four year period? I suspect the fMRI studies of decision-making in the brain, as fascinating and illuminating as they are, aren’t capturing the full range of decision-making over time. Plato cannot be completely wrong about the role of reason and he and Hume don’t completely disagree about the role of passion in our thinking. After all, didn’t Plato argue that reasoning well was a difficult thing to acquire and that usually only the philosopher-kings became really good at it? And surely I haven’t spent forty years teaching people to think critically, to no avail. At least my elephant hopes not.

And what about the well documented birthers, anti-science, anti-evolution, anti-acceptance of-global warming folks who make up about 30% of the Republican Party (see The Republican Brain, by Chris Mooney)? While their actions make sense within Haidt’s model (science causes change and threatens world views which are based on tradition, authority and the sacred and “Obama isn’t one of us.”), aren’t they too traditional? Aren’t the Tea Party followers so reactionary that they are blinding us to decisions which need to be made to save our country and perhaps the whole world?

If conservatives are much lower on measures of empathy than liberals, how does this all fit in with measures of sociopathy? But aren’t far left authoritarian figures just as low on empathy as the far right? Sociologist G. William Domhoff in an online posting “Who Rules America” (June 2009) documents the many studies which note there is a “right” and “left” way to most things we perceive. And his research, unlike Haidt’s, finds remarkable authoritarian aspects to personalities drawn to the far left and the far right. How can these separate sets of finding be reconciled? Is there a third piece missing or are Haidt’s samples biased, particularly the ones taken on the Internet?

And aren’t the New Atheists (e.g. Dawkins, Hitchens and others) and other anti-religion people of the left and the libertarian party ignoring important traditions of sacredness and respect for hierarchical authority which has built our societies by creating social and moral capital?

Then there are the conservative’s fears of immigration and religions unfamiliar to them. While understandable using Haidt’s framework, is it workable in a fast changing society? Our society is changing at such a dizzying pace that Toffler (Future Shock) might be shocked! And Haidt tells us that fast change can generate fear and fear is the one emotion originating in the amygdala which makes both liberals and conservatives more resistant to change and therefore, even more conservative.

What about the northern European societies who are 90% atheist? How will they build social and moral capital? And how are they meeting the needs which religion has always served?

If we evolved to bond with our in-group, how do we expand that in-group to include all of humanity? Or is that past our abilities? Didn’t the United States of America arise out of colonies?

Didn’t the city-states of Italy merge to become Italians? Didn’t the European Union form out of many countries? But, of course, we are now seeing that union threatened.

So one question is: How far can we push group solidarity and respect? Will it take an alien invasion to get us to cooperate with cultures very different from our own? And are things changing too fast for the evolved abilities of the human species? Can our elephants handle it?

Closing the Allegory

And, as Louise and Ralph struggle and wrestle and bump each other, they edge ever closer to the ragged cliff. If they fall, neither will survive. And gone will be Louise’s dreams of a perfect future as well as Ralph’s memories of a perfect past.

We need both but will they fight and bruise one another so badly that they force a stalemate while other nations surge forward and dominate the world? Or maybe they’ll fight until they fall off the ragged cliff causing our society to collapse. There is a sobering third choice and that is working out a compromise based on the understanding that both are natural and necessary and deserve respect*.

Will the “Mommy party” and the “Daddy party” benefit from marriage counseling or will they continue on the path to divorce?

Whatever happens, the world won’t stop changing as the great but, I think deluded, William F. Buckley hoped when he said his position was, “standing athwart history, yelling Stop.”

*Go to civilpolitics.org for Jonathan Haidt’s specific suggestions on how to handle similar situations and personalities in our homo sapiens ‘duplex’ (a classification he frequently uses…part chimp, part bee colony) world. In short, take a look at what personal and political changes he suggests we make before we fall off that cliff.

References

Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene (2nd ed.). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Domhoff, G. William, June 2009 “The Left and the Right in Thinking, Personality, and Politics” Internet: Who Rules America?

http://whorulesamerica.net/change/left_and_right.html?fb_action_ids=606563476884&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

Haidt, Jonathon, 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon.

Holldobler, B, and Wilson, E. O. 2008. The Superorganisms. The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies. W. W. Norton, New York.

Lynch, Michael, “A Case for Reason” September 30, 2012 article in the online New York Times Opinionator

Mooney, Chris, 2012 The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality. New Jersey: Wiley.

Asshole management — a practical use for philosophy

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This is an advance review of Assholes – a Theory, by Aaron James, which will become available October 30, 2102, from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

There are quite a few good jokes about people with degrees in philosophy. One of my favorite comic strips, Non Sequitur, by Wiley Miller, has a lot of fun with this. One example shows a man standing in front of a hot dog stand. The caption reads, “PUTTING A DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY TO WORK.” The sign on the front of the hot dog stand reads, “Hot dogs – Pretzels – Pithy Quotes.” Another sign on the side indicates that the order comes with a “free side of Goethe.”

Since I teach philosophy, I am often asked to come up with a good reason why a person should major in the subject, and I offer the usual bromides: “It will make you better at what you do, whatever it is;” “It is great training for a career in the law” (except for that pesky ethics course, which frequently gets in the way!). Or, “It makes you think deeply.” I don’t mention that my studies in philosophy and theology opened the door for me in state government. Yes, like most philosophy teachers, I have long wished that philosophy would enjoy a resurgence of applicability to life in the real world.

Well, it has happened!

It started in 2005 with a book titled On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Princeton University and former Professor at Yale. Frankfurt demonstrated the value of philosophy in dealing with one of society’s most troubling aspects. At last — philosophy touched on a real world problem!

Now, another philosopher will publish a long-needed philosophical study of yet another troubling real-world problem: asshole management.

Aaron James. Image souce: U of C, Irvine, Faculty Profile

Assholes: a Theory (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 10/31/2012) is the latest book by Arron James, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is no dilettante: he has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has authored many books on philosophy, focusing on fairness in society. So, a book on a category of people who basically think what’s ‘fair’ is ‘fair’ only so long as it deals them all the cards is a very appropriate topic, one that everyone–not just philosophy students–can gain something from. In fact, while he drops many big names from the history of philosophy in the course of his book (Kant, Rousseau, Aristotle, Rawls, and even the most feared, Hegel), he does so in a way that makes their points understandable to the average reader and offers a very instructive handbook on how to deal with one of life’s biggest problems.

We’ve all experienced them. Assholes, that is. The boss who, at the slightest hint of displeasure by a board member about a report written by staffers, throws the staff under the bus without even analyzing the worthiness of the remark. The guy who butts into line at the movie theater, or at the lunch counter. The guy who swerves in and out of traffic lanes, frequently endangering other commuters, as though he is the only person who has to be someplace on time. The father who only asks to see his child from a failed marriage when he “misses” the kid in a moment of self pity. We know them when we see them, but have we ever stopped to ask ourselves what it is, exactly, that makes a person an asshole? To wax philosophical, what is the “essence” of an asshole? This is where philosophy is very important because philosophy, ever since Socrates, starts out by defining its terms.

James tells us that an asshole is a person who allows himself to enjoy special advantage ‘systematically’ due to an “entrenched” sense of entitlement (“entrenched” means the person will never change), and who is oblivious to complaints about his behavior because of that overwrought sense of entitlement.

Okay. Think real hard. Did you ever encounter someone like that? Of course you have. At work. At church. In school. At home. Just about everywhere.

Here’s a tougher one. Does this describe you? If so, then you could be an asshole. Of course, if you are, it probably won’t register because, after all, you are entitled to be that way!

James’ book invariably takes him into the realm of politics, and I was worried that I was going to encounter a left-wing diatribe (the guy teaches in California, after all), but he is “fair and balanced” in his condemnation of those he feels fit the bill: Rush Limbaugh is an asshole–but so is Michael Moore. Fox News gets a good drubbing–but so does MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (I couldn’t agree more!). And James has an especial dislike for Ann Coulter.

But can Ann Coulter be an asshole? There is an interesting discussion about whether assholes are exclusively male. He notes a difference between men and women that is culturally developed: women tend to be less aggressive, and so (according to him) they tend to disguise their contempt for other peoples’ opinions by pretending to appreciate them–and then turning around and going after them behind their backs. I won’t go any further, except to say that, Oh, ladies, you are going to have a field day with this!

At bottom, James contends that assholery is a moral issue, largely because the asshole disregards the humanity of those whose opinions he ignores. He calls Kant into the debate to recognize that every human being has moral worth, and the importance of every person to be recognized is crucial. The “proper asshole”, by his stable characteristic behavior, completely misses this point.

Where James hits the nail squarely on the head is when he addresses the effect of assholes on society. Why is it, for example, that Congress is unable to do anything except along party lines, (a phenomenon that has also affected the legislature in many states–particularly Illinois)? Here, James speaks the language of the common man and woman, because some visitors to the Illinois State Fair were sporting buttons that read “Vote the Assholes Out!” Come to think of it, it was on Democrat Day.

Assholery affects cooperative effort, and James tells us that “Cooperation is fragile.”

The prospects for any society depend to a large extent on circumstance and fate. And so cooperative people must remain vigilant if decent society is to last. Cooperative vigilance is the only bulwark against decline, especially in capitalist societies.

There are laugh-out-loud-funny parts in this book, but, at bottom, the discussion is a serious one. And it is smartly written. I am thinking about making this book required reading in my philosophy courses. Finally, I have an answer to that pesky question, “Why study philosophy?”

Copyright 2012 Isaac Morris

All Tied Up in Love

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Angelo Bronzino - Allegory of the Triumph of Venus. Yale University Press.

How many weddings have we attended where we “oohed” and “aahed” about how beautiful the bride was, how handsome the groom, and heard declarations of love eternal that were blessed by the Divine? Then, all too frequently, we read that this same couple has divorced—sometimes sooner than later, sometimes after years. Oh, not all. Many people who commit to one another do manage to keep it together, but the number of people who don’t should make us wonder whether our expectations and our understanding of what love is might be unrealistic.

And where do we get these ideas about love? How is it that we over-idealize and set ourselves up for disappointment? According to Simon May, author of Love: A History (Yale University Press, 2011), our attitudes and understanding about what love is has been passed down through the millennia by such people as Plato, Augustine, Ovid, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and a host of others that we may have never heard of but whose notions nonetheless impact our lives in ways we don’t understand.

But what, you may ask, can these dead philosophers possibly have to say about love that is of any importance to me? The answer is—quite a lot.

May is a professor of philosophy at King’s College, University of London, and he assures us that, yes; philosophy has a lot to say about love. And sex. According to May, love is the search for “ontological rootedness.” That’s a mouthful. But what it means is clearly understood by every newborn infant who ever moves her head towards a mother’s breast. It is the intense and primal need to feel loved; to feel that their existence has another’s to bond with. It is a force that has led to happiness—but also to unbridled lust, murder, wars, and countless unhappy marriages.

The primary template for this need to belong can be traced to Plato, who believed that our loves here were merely entryways to a deeper understanding of eternal love—in fact they are merely a way of finding our way to the eternal through the temporal. We hunger for this beautiful person, but in reality for Beauty itself: a physical attraction can lead me to eternal satisfaction. This idea is further developed in the Old Testament—in fact the love of God for the Hebrews is frequently explained in terms of a romantic love (as in The Song of Solomon). We live in a world that is changing, dangerous, and frightening: we seek security and stability through a relationship with someone who has power to control it all. As such, love and fear sometimes get all mixed up.

Something of this can be seen in the astounding success of a recent novel, Fifty Shades of Gray: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, by E. L. James (Vintage, 2012), which tells of a woman’s desire to be taken care of by someone who can offer security and affection—even if the price for that is to be tied up and blindfolded now and then. She even comes to enjoy the submission. This has apparently resonated with millions the world over, judging by sales of the book. Why? When we find someone to whom we are willing to submit ourselves, May says, we do so unflinchingly and unquestioningly—just as Abraham did when God, who had promised him the world, asked for the sacrifice of Abraham’s only son. He did not hesitate. Such is the need we have for “ontological rootedness.”

One is reminded of the Baltimore Catechism, which taught us “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul, with thy whole strength, and with thy whole mind.” That’s a pretty tough thing to ask, but then God is thought of as the source and sustenance of our existence. When you love someone like that, however, you do whatever that love demands.

But what happens when God is removed from the picture, as it has for many in the modern world? When we translate this love to mere humans? Do we experience human love in the same way? Is our love unconditional, eternal, selfless, and everlasting?

The answer, May says, is no. We are not Gods. There is nothing unconditional about human love. After all, we are seeking something from those we love—that sense of “ontological rootedness.” And when you mix sex up in the mix, it gets even more problematic. Yet, we still idealize love, still harboring unrealistic expectations, and thus we are rife for exploitation, disappointment, and unhappiness. This fairy-tale anticipation of “happily ever after” can result in sometimes ill-advised relationships albeit with the highest of ideals.

May traces attitudes towards love—and sex—from their genesis in Greek philosophy and Western religious thought through to the modern world where God, after the Enlightenment, is gradually further removed from the picture. In fact, he posits the notion that love, which at one time was a by-product of a spiritual relationship with the divine, replaces the divine. No longer do we say “God is love,” but rather, “Love is God.”

…the lover becomes the focus of love to such an extent that…the loved one is in danger of dropping out of the picture. At the limit, love falls in love with itself—and so, as the ultimate good, comes to hold the position once occupied by God.

The last part of that question from the Baltimore Catechism also reminds us to love “our neighbor as ourselves.” Our society clearly shows us that sexual ecstasy has replaced religious ecstasy on the altar of our lives, and one’s love is dangerously close to becoming an object, and love much less of a relationship: instead we encounter “f___ buddies.” “The Big ‘O’ has replaced the “Big Guy in the Sky”.

This book raises some troubling questions about our sexual and emotional relationships, even questioning the extent to which we are capable of loving our own children—when our idealized notions demand that such love is “unconditional.” It frequently isn’t.

In reality, it is as with all love: the parent will love those children most who give him the greatest of ontological rootedness—those with whom he feels most grounded and at home; perhaps because they poignantly echo the qualities that, for him, define his life and its origins; perhaps for more mysterious reasons. They might be unreliable, feckless, and a cause for great sadness to him; but he will love them regardless.

This is not a book to be read once. In fact, having finished it, I only realize that I will have to acquire it for my library and read it several times more before I fully comprehend its implications. It is a course in philosophy in its own right—but that shouldn’t put off the average reader. If you ever wondered what philosophy was, or how it can address our lives in a meaningful way, you need to give this a try. It’s not an impossible read and is, ultimately, well worth the time.

Rating (5/5)

Copyright 2012 Isaac Morris

Madman or Genius?

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If you find pearls [in Nietzsche's writings], don’t think that they all are genuine. Be suspicious, because this man has a sickness of the brain.
-Paul Julius Möbius (1853-1907)

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

-Alexander Pope

I write this review with trepidation. Why? For one thing, like so many Americans, my understanding of Friederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is minimal (which I readily admit even though I teach philosophy) because my reading of him has only been sporadic. It is also tainted by the expressed opinions of others throughout my life (which may, in part, explain why my reading of him was sporadic).

Buy on AmazonMy first introduction to Nietzsche was in high school, following Time Magazine’s April 8, 1966 cover story, “Is God Dead?” Later, the nuns showed films of Nietzsche (or rather an actor portraying him) in an agitated state, emphasizing his diseased mind later in life, and I remember seeing emblazoned on the screen, “’God is dead.’ – Nietzsche. ‘Nietzsche is dead’ – God.”

When I was in seminary, as an undergraduate, any discussion of Nietzsche in philosophy was passed over quickly and lightly, although mention of such stalwarts of theology as Paul Tillich, Hans Buber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer was frequent. Did my professors not know, or not care, that these beacons of thought about God and existence were deeply influenced by Nietzsche?

So, was the writing of Nietzsche simply the rambling of a mind diseased by syphilis, as pious nuns and priests told me? Was whatever he wrote, therefore, tainted by a diseased mind?

Well, these answers to these questions are not certain. It is now the opinion of some that his disease was not syphilis, but could have been schizophrenia or–as one writer contends–a tumor of the pre-frontal lobe. One thing that most of us in America have never stopped to think about is the degree to which Nietzsche’s writing has influenced the way we think. Whether we admit to the post-modern attitude that is seen in the eclectic values of an Oprah Winfrey, or repeatedly speak of “empowering” ourselves; whether we go to church yet secretly wonder whether we will survive after death, or buy into the notion that values are a matter of circumstances of the present moment, absent any absolutes to guide us; if our thinking approaches these issues in this fashion at any time, we are displaying the influence of the thinking of Nietzsche.

As a teacher of philosophy, I always stress the notion that ideas we hold unconsciously can radically affect our lives; therefore, we should examine our attitudes and bring them to consciousness, thus helping us understand our behavior. Socrates said it better: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” When I say it, I betray a bit of unconscious Nietzschean influence because it sounds as though I am “empowering” my students!

Now, along comes a book by a University of Wisconsin-Madison history teacher that helps us understand the source, degree, and contradictory influences of Friederich Nietzsche on American thought: American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago Press, October 2011).

It is interesting that Ratner-Rosenhagen is a history teacher, and not a philosophy teacher. Her book is touted as an “intellectual history” of American thought as influenced by this radical German philosopher. It is appropriate, since even a cursory reading of Nietzsche reveals a man who is, himself, an “intellectual historian” who calls into question the answers that philosophy has historically provided.

As it turns out, she explains, influence traversed the Atlantic both ways. She examines the notion that Nietzsche, as a young man, was deeply influenced by the American philosopher of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Emerson he discovered “a new kind of thinker” who saw the most fundamental question of philosophy as “not What is the nature of being? What are the conditions of knowledge? or How do I know? But rather…”How shall I live?”
This suggests that Nietzsche was disenchanted—and indeed he was—with philosophy that sought to provide firm foundations for our lives, beliefs, and thoughts; that he saw them as arbitrary, arrogant, and artificial.

Nietzsche, in fact, put a sledgehammer to work in his anti-foundationalist attitude toward faith and philosophy and realized that, absent a firm metaphysical footing in philosophy or even a firm belief in God, the only question remaining is “How shall I live?” And in fact, how do we live in a world without a firm philosophical or spiritual footing? The question has been asked throughout the 20th century, and the man who opened the Pandora’s box by saying what many people had thought about in quiet moments but dared not say aloud was Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s introduction to the United States was plagued by poor translations, which certainly didn’t help with interpreting what the man was saying; and a flurry of different interpretations that, more often than not, were the result of quick readings and the fact that Nietzsche used witty and striking aphorisms (the media would have loved him; he was the inventor of the ‘sound byte’). He did not write like most philosophers; you could actually understand his train of thought. Unfortunately, he frequently contradicted himself—or at least was perceived as contradicting himself.

Through the years, the attitude towards this philosopher changed with the times. Early progressive intellectuals from the left saw a new voice that would lead us to a better future. Evangelists read words of the devil who threatened their faith and their Sunday attendance. If this wasn’t bad enough, when World War I broke out, even his apologists backed away because of the widely-held notion that German militaristic philosophy took its cue from Nietzsche’s idea of a “will to power,’ and his notion of Übermensch.

As for the Übermensch, Ratner-Rosenhagen spends a good deal of time discussing how people argued over the translation of this word. Furthermore, the intent of this term—which is most commonly translated as “Superman”—is explained in differing ways that may seem familiar. Some taught that the notion of Superman was, indeed, the man who exercises the ‘will to power’ to take control of our lives and destinies (a view Hitler adhered to). Others discussed the notion of Übermensch as a spiritual replacement of a stronger soul by a soul racked with pain over the fact that he lives in a world without the foundations that had always existed before. A world without God. Of course, today we hear differing explanations of the equally confusing term jihad; is it a call to militaristic action, or a spiritual struggle?

One thing that is clear from reading this much-needed history of thought is that, as Alexander Pope once wrote, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” A shallow understanding of the Bible can lead people to justify slavery, the stoning of homosexuals, or the primacy of Peter. The opposite notions are just as easily discoverable, and most of us—who know our bible only from Sunday school or from what our teachers taught us—aren’t thinking for ourselves but only parroting what we have heard (or read incompletely). I get the impression that this has been the fate of Nietzsche. After all, Huey Newton found in the German philosopher a champion of civil disobedience. Hitler found a champion of anti-Semitism (which is strange, since he was not anti-Semitic, and broke off a friendship with the composer Richard Wagner over this issue). Some socially progressive Christians viewed him as a prophet whose attack on religion was not an attack on faith as much as an attack on the complacency that moderns experienced because of their faith.

Will the real Nietzsche please stand up?

I myself am inspired and enlightened by Ratner-Rosenhagen’s history, enough so that I have begun to put the pieces together in my growing understanding of Nietzsche’s thought and its impact on our lives. Peter Gay, the editor of Walter Kaufman’s monumental translation, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, best summed up the real lesson regarding Nietzsche:

Shallow judgments frequently take one of three forms. Either one knows all about Nietzsche: he was the man who said, or claimed, or believed this or that. Or one knows how to label Nietzsche as, say, an irrationalist metaphysician, or an evolutionist in ethics, or an existentialist. Worst of all, people who have never read a single one of his books from beginning to end “knew” at one time that he was the kind that had caused World War I, and a generation later that he was a Nazi philosopher. Regarding this last notion, suffice it here to say that all serious interpreters of Nietzsche, no matter how much they may disagree on other points, agree that this absurdity can be supported only by either rank ignorance of his works (common at one time in the English-speaking world) or an incredible lack of intellectual integrity (common to a few Nazi hacks). In fact, no other philosopher since Plato and Aristotle, with the exception of Kant and Hegel, has influenced so many widely different thinkers and writers so profoundly.

Was Nietzsche a madman, or a martyr (as some would have it)? Or was he a man who did what philosophers are supposed to do: ask fundamental questions about our most closely held assumptions that leave us uneasy—and anxious? Is he guilty of heresy, or of simply positing “inconvenient” truths? If there is anything to be learned from Ratner-Rosenhagen’s thorough study of his influence on our lives, it is that interpreting the work of this very influential thinker is not something to be attempted unless we are seekers or truth rather than seekers of affirmation for those assumptions we cling to so tenaciously.

Copyright Isaac Morris January 21, 2012