batch two of exports from locals

content/post/Bloom-on-liberal-openness.md

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+---
+title: "Bloom on Liberal Openness"
+date: 2020-05-24T20:45:40Z
+tags: ["liberalism", "conservatism"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "allan-bloom|/img/allan-bloom.jpg|Allan Bloom" >}}
+
+From: [The Closing Of The American Mind (1987)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impoverished/dp/1451683200/), by Allan Bloom
+
+----
+
+
+
+> ...Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family—what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United States. This was an entirely new experiment in politics, and with it came a new education. This education has evolved in the last half-century from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality.
+
+> The palpable difference between these two can easily be found in the changed understanding of what it means to be an American. The old view was that, by recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers. The immigrant had to put behind him the claims of the Old World in favor of a new and easily acquired education. This did not necessarily mean abandoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean subordinating them to new principles. There was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself.
+
+> The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward-looking. It does not demand fundamental agreement or the abandonment of old or new beliefs in favor of the natural ones. It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?
+
+> From the earliest beginnings of liberal thought there was a tendency in the direction of indiscriminate freedom. Hobbes and Locke, and the American Founders following them, intended to palliate extreme beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. The members of sects had to obey the laws and be loyal to the Constitution; if they did so, others had to leave them alone, however distasteful their beliefs might be. In order to make this arrangement work, there was a conscious, if covert, effort to weaken religious beliefs, partly by assigning—as a result of a great epistemological effort—religion to the realm of opinion as opposed to knowledge. But the right to freedom of religion belonged to the realm of knowledge. Such rights are not matters of opinion. No weakness of conviction was desired here. All to the contrary, the sphere of rights was to be the arena of moral passion in a democracy.
+
+> It was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. The effective way to defang the oppressors is to persuade them they are ignorant of the good. The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.
+
+> The gradual movement away from rights to openness was apparent, for example, when Oliver Wendell Holmes renounced seeking for a principle to determine which speech or conduct is not tolerable in a democratic society and invoked instead an imprecise and practically meaningless standard—clear and present danger—which to all intents and purposes makes the preservation of public order the only common good. Behind his opinion there was an optimistic view about progress, one in which the complete decay of democratic principle and a collapse into barbarism are impossible and in which the truth unaided always triumphs in the marketplace of ideas. This optimism had not been shared by the Founders, who insisted that the principles of democratic government must be returned to and consulted even though the consequences might be harsh for certain points of view, some merely tolerated and not respected, others forbidden outright. To their way of thinking there should be no tolerance for the intolerant. The notion that there should be no limitation on free expression unless it can be shown to be a clear and present danger would have made it impossible for Lincoln to insist that there could be no compromise with the principle of equality, that it did not depend on the people’s choice or election but is the condition of their having elections in the first place, that popular sovereignty on the question of black slavery was impermissible even if it would enable us to avoid the clear and present danger of a bloody civil war.
+
+> But openness, nevertheless, eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.
+
+> Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them. To use language now popular, civic culture was neglected. And this turn in liberalism is what prepared us for cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction, which seemed to carry that viewpoint further and give it greater intellectual weight.
+
+> History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. The intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them aware of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else. John Rawls is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone. In A Theory of Justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or corrupt activity. Indeed, he should be esteemed, since esteem from others, as opposed to self-esteem, is a basic need of all men. So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one...
+
+> ...The upshot of all this for the education of young Americans is that they know much less about American history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one of the few things that they used to come to college with that had something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passions. It is the rarest of occurrences to find a youngster who has been infused by this education with a longing to know all about China or the Romans or the Jews. All to the contrary. There is an indifference to such things, for relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. This is not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.
+
+> Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.”...
+
+> ...The reason for the non-Western closedness, or ethnocentrism, is clear. Men must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are good can they rest content with them. A father must prefer his child to other children, a citizen his country to others. That is why there are myths—to justify these attachments. And a man needs a place and opinions by which to orient himself. This is strongly asserted by those who talk about the importance of roots. The problem of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life. A very great narrowness is not incompatible with the health of an individual or a people, whereas with great openness it is hard to avoid decomposition. The firm binding of the good with one’s own, the refusal to see a distinction between the two, a vision of the cosmos that has a special place for one’s people, seem to be conditions of culture. This is what really follows from the study of non-Western cultures proposed for undergraduates. It points them back to passionate attachment to their own and away from the science which liberates them from it. Science now appears as a threat to culture and a dangerous uprooting charm. In short, they are lost in a no-man’s-land between the goodness of knowing and the goodness of culture, where they have been placed by their teachers who no longer have the resources to guide them. Help must be sought elsewhere...

content/post/a-response-to-brian-holdsworth.md

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+---
+title: "A Response to Brian Holdsworth"
+date: 2020-06-08T21:23:14Z
+tags: ["capitalism", "moral values"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "economics"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< youtube RU4WKbGI9CM >}}
+
+Brian confuses political ideology and economic theory, in this video. Here is what I have to say about it:
+
+The opening premise is mistaken. Capitalism, properly understood, does not concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a minority. Where "concentration" is understood to mean the granting of a moral privilege to some men, to possess and control all wealth to the exclusion of others, the free market is therefore explicitly opposed to concentration. All individuals are endowed with the right to possess and control only the wealth they themselves have come to justly create or acquire as property. This is not strictly a feature of capitalism, but of the doctrine of natural rights that Adam Smith took from John Locke. So, "property" is probably the only genuinely political feature of the theory of capitalism - it takes property as presuppositional, though. It does not argue for it.
+
+The movement of wealth through society, then, can only occur where just voluntary exchanges take place, and the justice of those exchanges is determined by a price mechanism negotiated by the individual making the exchange, not by a central authority. The fact that this leads to unequal distributions when looked at overall, is *not an injustice*, because the transactions that led to them were all just (except, of course, where the rules of property were violated; force, fraud, theft, etc). Though Aristotle is definitely not a capitalist, he would have accepted the justice in exchange of capitalism, based on his own theory of proportionality in justice. I owe to you precisely what I have taken from you, and vice versa.
+
+Secondly, capitalism is not a political ideology that reduces humans to nothing but material needs. Capitalism is an economic ideology that does not require any particular stance on what human nature is (unlike Marxism, which does - see Marx' Paris Manuscripts), in order to be coherent. It simply looks at how humans actually interact with each other, in situations of exchange of value, and offers a systematized description of those interactions. Given this description, it makes prescriptions about how best to facilitate interactions of value exchange. That's all. Therefore, if you take capitalism as a political system you're making a category error. That it fails as a political system is not a flaw, because it is not a political system.
+
+He is quite right that our society has largely abandoned spiritual values for material ones. But this is not a flaw of capitalism, as such, because it is not the purpose of capitalism to tell us what things we should value. It is only the purpose of capitalism to tell us, of the things that we do value, what is the best way to distribute those values, and what is the most just way of exchanging those values with each other. To determine what values are worth creating and exchanging you need, at a minimum, a political ideology, if not a religion. And capitalism cannot substitute for that - because its not intended to.
+
+The mistake that Chesterton and Pope Paul II make, is in insisting that any theory of economics directly reinforce the particular value hierarchy of Catholicism. It's not enough, in their view, that capitalism is compatible with Catholicism, because compatibilism leaves open the possibility of challenging the value hierarchy. But to co-opt capitalism in the service of any particular value hierarchy is to misunderstand what it is for.

content/post/adams-vs-dickinson-where-do-you-fall.md

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+---
+title: "Adams vs Dickinson: Where Do You Fall?"
+date: 2020-07-04T22:34:43Z
+tags: ["1776", "american revolution"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< youtube RDzwtl5Z2cA >}}
+
+Are you a Dickinson or an Adams? Today, we all think we'd be on Adams' side of the debate. However, given the relationship between the colonies and the British crown, and the people who populated the Continental Congress, I don't think the choice is really all that clear cut.
+
+Imagine it this way: you live in a small territory recently purchased and controlled by the United States. You moved there from your home state where you'd lived most of your life, in order to set up a US outpost, and make a new life for yourself.
+
+Gradually, the federal government starts taking arbitrary liberties with your territory. Revoking constitutionally guaranteed rights, on the basis that it's not "really" the US. Ignoring your pleas for redress. Forcing you to quarter US troops in your home against your will, stationed there because of the strategic importance of the territory.
+
+Then, after a brief protest over these rights violations that gets particularly violent, the US cracks down HARD, and kills a bunch of people, including some of your own extended family members.
+
+You send a peace offer to the US, asking again for redress, this time, directly from the President. But he sends back to you a message saying that you're all traitors, and that he's going to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. What would your feeling be, then? What would you do next?
+
+I submit, that John Dickinson was, hands down, one of the bravest, one of the most loyal, and one of the most tragic figure of all of the Revolutionaries. He wanted desperately to remain loyal to his homeland - as any one of us Americans would, now. He held out hope against hope that George would come to his senses. And he lost almost as many friends in the colonies for this stance, as Tom Paine would later lose because of his outspoken atheism.
+
+Watch this, and tell me that Dickinson doesn't at least have a respectable position...

content/post/creativity-transcendence-and-love.md

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+---
+title: "Creativity, Transcendence, and Love"
+date: 2020-05-15T20:20:58Z
+tags: []
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "kids-in-grass|/img/kids-in-grass.jpg|Children Playing In The Grass" >}}
+
+People tend to romanticize the inspiration of the artist, or the insight of the philosopher. It is often depicted as a kind of tsunami of creative passion, that washes over the mind and consumes the person. Archimedes in the bath, or Mozart on his deathbed (I hate you, Milos Forman) come to mind as examples. But this is pure fantasy, as far as I can tell.
+
+Instead, ideas are like drops of water falling from the sky, on an arid summer day. You have to catch them in something, as they fall, and preserve them in the soil of ink and paper. Otherwise, they evaporate as soon as they hit the ground.
+
+You don't get to choose which are the good ideas and which are the bad. All you can do is leave them in the soil, and wait to see which ones turn to weed, and which bear fruit. You have to tend your garden, to prune the weeds from time to time. But be careful not to be too aggressive. Because you'll starve out promising buds before they have a chance to flourish.
+
+Once an idea has taken root, however, pulling it up is next to impossible. You'll have to dig and chop and saw and hack for a long time, to extract a robust thought. And even then, you won't be sure you've gotten all the roots out. Eventually, shoots may reappear in other places, as those hidden roots re-animate and sprout again. But if the idea is a good one, you'll need to do little to care for it once it is firmly rooted, and it will bear fruit for you, the rest of your life.
+
+The point of this metaphor, is to suggest that the mental life of the philosopher and the mental life of the artist, though similar in some ways (in the sense that you don't really control what ideas you're given), is still radically different in the sense that the philosopher must take an active role in the collection, cultivation, and curation of the ideas that are given to him. One cannot simply let the garden grow wild, and then pluck from it whatever one wishes.
+
+But even if we concede that the artist too is actively engaged in a kind of collection and tending process, still the kind of garden created will be very different from that of the thinker. Different tools arising from different selection criteria will result in a very different shape and composition, and that is determined by a different hierarchy of values. For the artists' chief concern is beauty, while the philosopher's north star is truth. Arguably, there is a third gardner, the theologian, who's guiding principle is goodness (the highest of the transcendents, according to Plato). But, we'll set him aside for the time being.
+
+The point I want to get to, this far into my ramble, is that all three of these things - truth, goodness, and beauty - rely on each other in some respect. However, they still somehow function independently of each other. I can set aside questions of goodness and beauty and still make sense of a concept like truth. It is possible to formalize an abstraction of truth so subtle and delicate that only a mathematician could appreciate it. Likewise, with conceptions of beauty and pleasure, and conceptions of "The Moral Law Within" (as Kant put it). But all three of these things taken in their independent, rarified form, are desiccated corpses or at best marble statues. They must be unified in some way, in order to *give them life*.
+
+The life that arises out of that union, when it works, is the life of love. This is why Aquinas' conception of love is only partially correct. Willing the good of the other is only one third of the total picture of love. Desiring the beauty of the other, and wanting to know the truth of the other, are just as important. To will the good of the other, as an isolated motive, is self-annihilating at best. To desire the beauty of the other, as an isolated motive, is self-indulgent hedonism. To seek the truth of the other, as an isolated motive, is at best reductive self-satisfaction.
+
+But in combination, the three motives intertwine and become inseparable. And in that union, you have the reconciliation of the selfish will with the self-less will. The closest we can ever expect to get to God, on earth.

content/post/equality-is-fake-news.md

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+---
+title: "Equality Is Fake News"
+date: 2020-05-22T20:35:48Z
+tags: ["equality", "nozick", "rawls"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "equality|/img/equality.jpg|Equality" >}}
+
+I want to make a bold claim: I don’t think there is any such thing as ‘equality’.
+
+Now, just to clarify: clearly, arithmetic and geometric equality is real. Otherwise the “ = “ wouldn’t exist. What I am referring to, is the sense of the term that gets applied to human social and political relations. This kind of equality is a phantasm; a will-o-wisp; a unicorn, in *all* its varieties. If we look at particular examples of what people tend to call “equality”, what we find are hidden changes in the meaning of “equal”. Changes so significant, that only the application of entirely different concepts could make those examples intelligible. What are those examples? Well, I think they can be boiled down to four: comparisons of economic condition, comparisons of ‘opportunity’, comparisons of legal status, and comparisons of social status or relational concern. Each of these descriptive terms is further colored by a prescriptive connotation that needs to be understood separately. Let’s explore each of these forms of so-called equality, to discover why they’re not what they appear to be.
+
+First up, is equality of condition. This is typically rendered in popular politics as “equality of outcome”, but this is somewhat mistaken. When talk of the equality of ‘outcomes’ arises in common parlance, our imaginations are captured by visualizations of people in various circumstances in which it is implied that the individuals in those circumstances have the same amount of accumulated wealth or purchasing power, pictured in terms of possessions, or land, or wardrobe, or more vulgarly, in terms of dollar amounts on paychecks. Whether that is a starting position or an ending position, or somewhere in the middle, is not typically part of this picture. So, it’s not outcomes per se that we are concerned with, but the observable snapshot in time at which we wish to make a comparative judgment. This is something Robert Nozick called an “non-historical end-state patterned distribution”. This is fancy philosophical jargon meaning that the justice of circumstances lies not in the process by which a pattern is arrived at (because we aren’t even concerned with the process) but rather in the distribution pattern of goods we find in any particular moment.
+
+But the point of the concept is not simply to describe reality as it is. Instead, it is to insist on a *normative* standard. In other words, when we look out at the world and find patterns of difference, we are to take that as synonymous with ‘inequality', and since we are to take the pattern of similarity we’ve constructed in our minds as synonymous with ‘equality', then a divergence is present; and, where a divergence is present, an injustice is present. In short, an absolute state of similarity is the default standard against which all relative comparisons are judged. But why? To begin with, knowing that the world is a place of constant change from moment to moment, how are we to decide which moments are the proper ones to render judgments of the patterned distributions present? What’s more, given that the world is also a place of fluctuating contexts and scopes, how are we to decide which comparisons will result in valid judgments? For a parochial example, why should comparing athlete salaries to educator salaries be considered reasonable? Why wouldn’t we compare educators with educators? Or athletes to actors?
+
+More fundamentally, given that reality is indeed a place of constant change and varying gradations of scope and context, where do we get the notion that the world ought to be a place of absolutely homogenous similarity, even in some narrow sense like incomes? This is a misapplication of the idea of Platonic Idealism, I think. In the Platonic view of reality, the transcendent ideals are absolute indivisibles that give everything their meaning. Truth, goodness, beauty, justice, love, courage, even things like color and shape. There is some state of indivisible perfection to which an object or relation or property is compared, in order to judge its quality. The more perfect a thing is, in other words, the fewer “parts” it will have. The redness of a red apple is *more perfect* if the redness is the same over the surface of the entire apple (rather than, say, streaked or mottled or faded in places). Likewise with equalities of “outcome”. Difference implies a plurality of circumstances. A plurality is not a unity. Therefore, difference in circumstances is imperfection. Thus, “inequality” is an imperfection that must be rectified, if we are to call it justice. To put this in explicit political terms, divergence from mathematical uniformity in material condition requires correction because our own constitution says we’re “created equal” (we’ll get to that shortly), and because our default state demands equality, any manifestation of comparative difference in reality is therefore tantamount to denying the humanity of the individual, in some way.
+
+There is a lot to unpack here. As I’ve already pointed out, there are incredibly weak grounds for assuming that homogeneity of material condition ought to be our standard of judgment. The fact that large portions of the voting population do this, is quite disturbing frankly. Nowhere in reality can we find any kind of uniform state of material condition among men remaining relatively homogeneous for more than very short periods of time. So, it boggles the mind where we might have gotten a Platonic ideal for such a thing. Even Plato himself never argued for a Form of The Equal; Aristotle, who did adhere to a mathematical sense of justice in his Nicomachean Ethics, only accepted proportionality, expressed as a balanced ratio. You may have more in proportion than me, of whatever we’re measuring, but if the ratio of the two tabulates to a unity (mathematical 1.0), then we’re good. Robert Nozick famously dismantled the aspiration to conditional equality by pointing out that any attempt to rectify observed differences in condition, on a program of conditional equality, would itself result in enormous and wide-spread injustice, itself. Because the state would need to be empowered to monitor every interpersonal interaction for its material value, and impose a redistribution where a violation of absolute homogeneity was detected. You can read more about that on my formal blog, here: https://bit.ly/2XlIFFl
+
+In this installment, I'm sure I've thoroughly rustled the jimmies of my left-leaning readers. In the next installment, I will be harshing the mellow of my more right-leaning readers. Equality of Opportunity is also fake news. Stay tuned for that.

content/post/is-ought-a-semantic-solution.md

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+---
+title: "Is-Ought: A Semantic Solution"
+date: 2020-06-19T22:03:54Z
+tags: ["hume", "is-ought dichotomy", "metaphysics"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "lassie-and-timmy|/img/lassie-and-timmy.jpg|Lassie and Timmy" >}}
+
+David Hume is famous for the "is-ought" problem, which comes from this famous passage, in his "Treatise on Human Nature":
+
+> In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. **For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained;** and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (Treatise 3.1.1)
+
+I think an answer to Hume is not only possible, but relatively simple. First, let's dispense with the common mischaracterization of this passage. Hume never argued that "you cannot derive an ought from an is", in the sense that moral imperatives cannot be extracted from the facts of reality. Indeed, it may be that you can, and he'd probably be the first to concede the point if you had a good case. What he is telling us here, is that the classical understanding of logic doesn't seem to leave any room for "ought" statements.
+
+What does this mean? Well, classical logic deals with static objects of thought: subjects and predicates. A subject, very simply put, is just a "thing". A pen, you, the Titanic, Lassie, couch cushions, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony are all subjects. Predicates are *what can be said about* those things. So, for example, given "The Titanic *sank in the Atlantic*", "The Titanic" is the subject, and "sank in the Atlantic" is the predicate. It is a phrase *describing* something that happened to the boat. Other examples: "You *are reading this essay*", "Lassie *always rescues Timmy*", "Beethoven's 9th Symphony *has 4 movements*". So, What can be said about a subject is not simply what is happening to it, but also what properties it exhibits. In short, anything that *describes* a state of affairs involving the subject.
+
+From here, you can start chaining statements together: (1) Lassie is trained to rescue her friends. (2) Timmy is Lassie's friend. (3) Timmie is always getting into trouble. I think you can see where this is leading: Therefore, Lassie always rescues Timmy. But the question is *why* you saw what was coming. The full explanation for this is too complicated for a morning post. But, you can see it in the statements, as they relate to each other. Statements (1) and (2) are "linked" by the words "Lassie" and "Friend". Statements (2) and (3) are "linked" by the word "Timmie". And we have an implicit "link" between (1) and (3) in the words "rescue" and "trouble" - the former always results from the latter: Trouble begets rescue. These "links" are what is known as the "transitive" property of logic. Somehow, we know that the statements accumulate to form a complete picture. That complete picture is what is stated in the conclusion. Note that the conclusion is itself just another subject-predicate description statement itself.
+
+What Hume was complaining about, can be illustrated by modifying our example: (1) Lassie is trained to rescue her friends. (2) Timmy is Lassie's friend. (3) Timmy has gotten himself into trouble. Therefore, Lassie should rescue Timmy. Something has changed in between statement 3 and the conclusion. Now, instead of describing a state of affairs already present, we are *prescribing* a desired state of affairs. Hume is complaining that classical logic doesn't have any mechanism to accommodate the transition from *description* to *prescription*. This has lead to all sorts of confusions. Like the one that says that Hume thought it impossible to transition from description to prescription. Or an even worse mischaracterization: that facts never imply any moral imperatives on our part (i.e. that reality is literally meaningless). Its possible that Hume argued this elsewhere. I admit I've only ever read The Treatise. But he's not making those arguments here.
+
+In any case, the point I want to make, is that statements formulated using "should" or "ought" are not explicit statements of fact about the subjects they carry, but *implicit* statements of fact about the state of mind of the person uttering the statement. Whoever wrote down "Lassie should rescue Timmy" *wants Lassie to rescue Timmy*. But is there a way to recast the statements so that they are about their subjects, rather than their producers? Well, how about this: (1) Lassie is trained to rescue her friends. (2) Timmy is Lassie's friend. (3) Timmy had gotten himself into trouble again. (4) Lassie rescued Timmy. Therefore, Lassie is a good dog. In this case, we're no longer making a prescription, but making a value judgment in our conclusion. I should add that there is a hidden premise in this formulation as well: (1b) Good dogs obey their training. We infer from the fact that Lassie rescued her friend, that she was trained to rescue her friends, and that the standard of a good dog is to obey their training, that Lassie is therefore a good dog. This all seems to follow just fine. But this is because a value judgment is *a kind of description* (we'll set aside for now whether normative values can be real properties).
+
+So, this is one way we can bridge the gap between "is" and "ought" - to think of "ought" statements as compressions of value judgments. In other words, using our example, (1) Lassie is trained to rescue her friends. (2) Timmy is Lassie's friend. (3) Timmy had gotten himself into trouble. (4) Lassie is a good dog, if she rescued Timmy. (5) Lassie rescued Timmy. Therefore, Lassie is a good dog. In order to make this work, we had to incorporate the use of a modus ponens, but it is entirely valid. But does this solve the problem? How much of a difference is there between a statement of value judgment, and a statement of imperative expectation? It seems to me, not much. Lassie should rescue Timmy. Okay. Or else, what? Or else, I'll judge Lassie to be a bad dog. If Lassie wants to be thought of as a good dog, Lassie will rescue Timmy. If we frame our statements this way, perhaps the gap between is and ought will be less confounding.
+
+But if this solution is too "clever", in the sense that you'd have to cynically redefine every "ought" statement you came across, then the problem we want to solve is to make imperatives (or prescriptives) work within a framework of logic that is strictly explicit, and capable of accommodating more than just descriptive statements, *on their own terms*. We've already begun this for modal problems: the difference between what *was*, what *is*, and what *will be* can be accommodated in some forms of modern formal logic. So perhaps there is a way to do this for what should, and what shouldn't be.

content/post/locke-destroys-filmer-with-facts-and-logic.md

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+---
+title: "Locke Destroys Filmer With Facts and Logic"
+date: 2020-05-17T20:29:14Z
+tags: ["locke", "filmer"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+Everyone who studies undergraduate political philosophy already knows what Locke has to say in his Second Treatise on Government.
+
+But in this age of "reaction" videos, roasts, and "pwnage", I think the polemics in Locke's FIRST treatise are *way* more entertaining! It is, hands down, the longest objection screed I've read of the Enlightenment thinkers, apart from the responses to Descartes' Meditations.
+
+The opening paragraphs had me in stitches:
+
+> *"...truly, I should have taken sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, as any other treatise, which would persuade all men that they are slaves, and ought to be so, for such another exercise of wit as was his who writ the encomium of Nero; rather than for a serious discourse, meant in earnest: had not the gravity of the title and epistle, the picture in the front of the book, and the applause that followed it, required me to believe that the author and publisher were both in earnest. I therefore took it into my hands with all the expectation, and read it through with all the attention due to a treatise that made such a noise at its coming abroad; and cannot but confess myself mightily surprised, that in a book, which was to provide chains for all mankind, I should find nothing but a rope of sand; useful perhaps to such, whose skill and business it is to raise a dust, and would blind the people, the better to mislead them; but in truth not of any force to draw those into bondage who have their eyes open, and so much sense about them, as to consider, that chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them.*
+
+> *If any one think I take too much liberty in speaking so freely of a man, who is the great champion of absolute power, and the idol of those who worship it; I beseech him to make this small allowance for once, to one, who, even after the reading of sir Robert’s book, cannot but think himself, as the laws allow him, a freeman: and I know no fault it is to do so, unless any one, better skilled in the fate of it than I, should have it revealed to him, that this treatise, which has lain dormant so long, was, when it appeared in the world, to carry, by strength of its arguments, all liberty out of it; and that, from thenceforth, our author’s short model was to be the pattern in the mount, and the perfect standard of politics for the future..."*
+
+SIR ROBERT FILMER: YOU HAVE BEEN PWNED.
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "pwned|/img/pwned.jpg|PWNED" >}}

content/post/marxism-and-exploitation.md

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+---
+title: "Marxism and Exploitation"
+date: 2020-05-11T20:12:45Z
+tags: ["marx", "exploitation"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "lady-labor|/img/lady-labor.jpg|Lady Labor" >}}
+
+What is exploitation?
+
+Marxists make a great deal of hay out of the term. What are they talking about?
+
+The dictionary offers a definition that perhaps accidentally includes a subtle but profound distinction. Exploitation is either (a) “to make full use of” or “derive benefit from”, or (b) “to use unjustly”, or “to derive unfair benefit from”.
+
+So, on the one hand, we have a neutral term that might even be seen as a positive, in some respects. Indeed, the resourceful woodsman will tell you that it is a virtue to fully exploit what you harvest from nature. To use anything less than the entire deer, is wasteful and wanton.
+
+On the other hand, however, we have a term that is unequivocally negative. It is not just a descriptor for a relationship. It is a moral condemnation of that relationship, as such. Exploitation is, by definition, “unfair” and “unjust”.
+
+Marx (in both his Paris writings, and in Kapital) wants us to take the second sense of the term. He grounds this opinion in his Paris theory of alienation, wherein, anything less than the complete self-creation of one’s own products of thought is tantamount to enslaving oneself to an overlord, in order to make it happen. When you are tasked with producing what someone else has envisioned, you are alienated from it, because it is not your vision you are creating, but someone else’s. What’s worse, the wage you are given for that labor must then be used to go out and purchase the means of your own survival: food, shelter, clothing — which you would have made on your own, had you not been burdened to make things for others in the first place.
+
+Let me put this in concrete terms. There are two ways to get an apple. One, is to plant an apple tree, and spend years tending, pruning, and nurturing the tree until it bears fruit. At which point, you can pick the apples, and make apple pie for yourself and your neighbors. The other way, is to go to a grocer or an apple orchard, and purchase apples with which to make your apple pie. In the first instance, the entirety of the project is yours. You conceived of the idea, you devised the plan, you spent the effort and the resources, and you reaped the rewards. In the second instance, someone else conceived the idea, someone else yet devised the plan, still someone else spent the effort, and yet you reap the rewards.
+
+The problem gets even worse when currency is added to the second picture. You give $20 to the grocer or the orchard operator, and you collect your apples. But do the builders of the grocery shack, or the orchard barn get any of that? Do the pickers, the growers, and the packing laborers get any of that? According to Marx, the operator takes the lion’s share, and leaves the rest with a tiny fraction, just large enough to appease their basic needs and no more. Thus, relationships of exploitation are inherently unjust, and as such, exploitation just is an injustice.
+
+But this account should leave any thinking person slightly perplexed. For starters, who in his right mind, has the time and the wherewithal to raise his own apple trees? And, if one spent most of his time exclusively tending apple trees, or weaving cloth, or growing beans, or pressing paper, or spinning pots all for oneself, where would one get the time to pursue anything else one might be interested in, or for that matter, that one might need for survival?
+
+Marx (or perhaps Engles, who wrote the margin comment) recognized this problem. Was communism then to be a doctrine for pastoral craftsmen, who spend their mornings stitching shirts, their afternoons tending gardens, and their evenings, writing treatises? But this is an aside. The main point I wish to make, is that this view of exploitation as *definitionally* unjust, is one in which free market cooperation would become morally impermissible, because you cannot engage in cooperative enterprise without agreeing to a division and specialization of labor, and that cannot be done without a means of value exchange beyond rudimentary barter.
+
+The broader implications of this are remarkable. It suggests that what Marx was troubled by, was not the fact that men exploited each other for mutual benefit. It was the fact that the benefits of that exploitation did not flow in the correct direction, as he saw it. The “surplus” value Marx identified in commercial transactions really does exist, but it does not reside in the remuneration of the factory owner. That currency is merely a token representation of the benefit he has already provided to the community. Likewise, the salary paid to the workers in that factory.
+
+I learn a skill, I train in a craft, I study a subject, entirely in the hope that someone, somewhere will find value in exploiting that effort. But because we are human beings, predicting who that might be is not perfectly possible. If, over time, I find no one, I change careers until I do. Exploitation is commerce. Commerce is cooperation. Cooperation is civilization. Marx wanted exactly the opposite. We can see the practical consequences of that in the 1917 revolution, and later in Cuba.
+
+Thus, in one sense, Marx is right. Capitalism is exploitation. But so is Communism. The difference between the two, is that Capitalist exploitation is the kind that describes a mutually beneficial relationship, while Communist exploitation describes an injustice on a scale unfathomable by even Marx himself.

content/post/notes-on-anarchism.md

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+---
+title: "Notes on Anarchism"
+date: 2020-06-10T21:31:15Z
+tags: ["anarchism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+Over the weekend, I read David Miller's ["Anarchism" (1984)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anarchism-Modern-Ideologies-David-Miller/dp/0460110934/). An academic overview of the political philosophy in its many guises. Miller was even-handed and thorough enough to include chapters on both individualist and communist variants of anarchism, and a covered a lot of the histories in gloss, in the middle chapters. If you can get your hands on a copy (it's sadly out of print) I highly recommend it.
+
+In the meantime, here are my reading notes on the book (I'm too busy right now, to restructure this into a review). I hope you find them useful:
+
+------
+
+Miller's definition of the state:
+
+" ...*The state is not equivalent to government in general, and indeed some anarchists have made use of this distinction to suggest that their aim is not society without government, but merely society without a state. Looked at in historical perspective, the state is the specific form of government which emerged in post-Renaissance Europe, and has now established itself in every developed society. What are its main characteristics?*
+
+- First, the state is a *sovereign* body, in the sense that it claims complete authority to define the rights of its subjects - it does not, for instance, allow subjects to maintain customary rights which it has neither created nor endorsed.
+- Second, the state is a *compulsory* body, in the sense that everyone born into a given society is forced to recognize obligations to the state that governs that society -- one cannot opt out of these obligations except by leaving the society itself.
+- Third, the state is a *monopolistic* body: it claims a monopoly of force in its territorial area, allowing no competitor to exist alongside it.
+- Fourth, the state is a *distinct* body, in the sense that the roles and functions which compose it are separate from social roles and functions generally, and also that the people who compose the state for the most part form a distinct class -- the politicians, bureaucrats, armed forces, and police... *"
+
+Miller's summary of the anarchist critique of the state:
+
+1. **The state is illegitimate.** Miller: "...*the anarchist, in effect first takes the old Augustinian adage, 'Without justice, what are states but bands of robbers?' and removes the qualifying clause. He claims that no state... could have come into existence without something akin to an act of piracy on the part of those who would become its rulers. For why would men freely surrender their rights to such a Leviathan?*..." Indeed. Are social contracts, divine right, cultural tradition, or ethnic supremacy really enough to justify authority over other men? Locke may have a better argument here than either Rousseau or Hobbes (if you accept the idea of a divine nature for man), but not by much. A better argument is still sorely needed.
+2. **The state is coercive.** Miller: "...*the state... reduces people's freedom far beyond the point required by social co-existence. It enacts restrictive laws and other measures which are necessary not for the well-being of society, but for its own preservation...*" - (a) the preservation of the state could be justified if it could be established that the preservation of society depended upon it as well. (b) the whole point of the state is to constrict freedom to a bounded set of acceptable behaviors. That requires the threat of force, in the final analysis. The fundamental question is not, should my range of choices be limited, but rather, which choices should be considered unacceptable?
+3. **The state is punitive.** Miller: "...*The state... inflicts cruel and excessive penalties on those who infringe its laws, whether or not the laws are justified in the first place...*" - This is a straw-man. Cruelty and excess are subjective standards. Some states don't condone those anyway (look at the US Constitution, for instance). What's more, the same cruelty and excess is possible without the state. And, if we're questioning the legitimacy of the laws, we're just making a redundant appeal to #1 above.
+4. **The state is exploitative.** Miller: "*...The state... uses its powers of taxation and economic regulation to transfer resources from the producers of wealth to its own coffers, or into the hands of privileged economic groups.*" - This complaint relies upon an implicit acceptance of property. For, if there is no right of ownership, then what complaint could the anarchist have about the state's authority to sieze it? What's more, if you look at what the state actually does, the "privileged economic groups" to which transfers flow often tend to be the economically *disadvantaged*. The fact that some people can exploit flaws in the implementation of the system for personal gain, is no argument against the state in principle.
+5. **The state is destructive.** Miller: "...*The state... enlists its subjects to fight wars whose only cause is the protection or aggrandizement of the state itself - all anarchists believe that, without the state, there might be small-scale conflicts, but nothing to resemble the horror and devastation of modern warfare...*" - Setting aside the reliance upon an appeal to an unspecified purpose (why should the state not be destructive or engage in war?), the complaint here seems to be not that the state is the source of conflict, but that it somehow increases conflict, and amplifies the conflicts that occur either way. To attempt a refutation of this would require a counter-factual claim. How could it be shown that the state is the source for the scale of devatstation of modern warfare? We would have to speculate on the kinds of martial innovations and ambitions for war people would have in a stateless situation.
+
+Thus, at bottom, moral legitimacy is the one fundamental problem to be solved, if the state is to maintain its pride of place in the modern political mind. So, what is legitimacy?
+
+Returning to Miller: "...*What does it mean to recognize authority? First of all, it is not the same as recognizing power even though authority and power often go hand-in-hand in practice. If I comply with someone's instructions because of the possible consequences of not complying - say he threatens to have me beaten up or thrown in jail - I am acknowledging his power rather than his authority. Acknowledging authority means recognizing someone's right to direct or command, complying with his will because one believes it proper to do so. I may acknowledge the power of a lion - say if I change my path to avoid meeting it - but I cannot acknowledge its authority. Anarchists are not so foolish as to fail to recognize the power of states -- indeed they draw attention to the potent mechanisms which states have available to enforce compliance with their dictates, ranging from physical force to soft persuasion - but this is a far cry from recognizing their authority*..."
+
+So, legitimacy is the moral recognition of a state's authority to command obedience. But if moral recognition is granted and I therefore comply, then why would the exercise of physical force (aka power) be required to compel my compliance? And If moral recognition is not granted, what right could there be to forcibly compel obedience with the state's commands? It seems, then, that "moral recognition" must be a special kind of relationship. Something that extends to, say, a social agreement or consensus opinion? Or perhaps, the "recognition" is not mine or anyone else's that is required, but some higher arbitrating power (i.e. God)? What else could it be?
+
+Miller: "...*moral recognition of authority has to be distinguished from... other ways in which a person may comply with another's commands for moral reasons*...."
+
+1. **That's what I was going to do, anyway.** Miller: "...*We are sometimes told to do things which we believe are morally obligatory in any case, so in 'complying' with an order in such a case, we are not recognizing authority but simply acting on our own moral assessment of the situation*..."
+2. **Let's not make the situation worse, or, I don't want to rock the boat just yet.** Miller: "...*we may find ourselves living among people most of whom do recognize the authority of some institution -- a government, say -- and, without recognizing it's authority ourselves, we may decide that it would be damaging to undermine it by flagrantly violating it's commands*..."
+3. **Expediency, or self-interested pragmatism**. Miller: "...*circumstances may require someone to perform a co-ordinating role - say to clear a traffic jam - and everyone will see that they should take their cue from whoever stands up and starts directing traffic*..."
+4. **Listen to the experts**. Miller: "...*Anarchists are keen to point out that they have no wish to challenge the authority of scientists or skilled craftsmen in their own sphere... I accept [the beliefs of the scientifically trained] because I know the [scientifically trained man] has a record of giving successful advice... Accepting the authority of the specialist does indeed affect my subsequent conduct, but only because I wanted to [achieve some end that required the expertise] in the first place*..."
+
+So, according to anarchists, these four varieties of moral authority are not what we are talking about when we talk about the moral authority of the state. But it seems to me, that this rules out any possible definition for "moral authority" at all. What else could it be, but some amalgamation or subset of these four forms of compliance? Particularly, where we are insisting that fear of consequences is not the main driver of political legitimacy. What else could it be?
+
+In private contracts, authority is justified as an extension of individual autonomy, because I consent to the agreement with the person placed in a position of authority over me - say, in the case of a doctor with a DNR order, or an employer with a stringent set of employment rules. But in these cases, the doctor and the employer do not have *sovereign* authority. They only have contractually conditional authority. This is something Hobbes' contract tried to deal with, by making the Sovereign a *product of* the contract, and not a *party to it*. As a product of the contract, he resides outside of it, and as such, his authority is irrevocable.
+
+But it makes no sense to say that permanent political authority could be conferred on to someone arbitrarily, by the contractual agreement in which the conferee is a stranger to the contract. Ultimately, his authority flows from the contract (because he would not *be* a sovereign were it not for a contract), and the contract's meaning is bound up in the intentions of those who commit to it in the first place. If the parties to the contract refused to honour it anymore, what would there be to stop them from rejecting the Sovereign *they created in the first place*? His political might, of course. But that was what we were trying to morally justify in the first place.
+
+Miller: "*...Although authority is often said to be on the decline in the modern world, this assertion is only true in a limited sense. Our contemporaries are indeed less likely than their ancestors to take authority for granted, because authority no longer seems to be part and parcel of social positions generally, but is instead created for specific purposes -- in enterprises, bureaucracies, armies, and so forth. We recognize, therefore, that all relationships of authority need to be justified by the ends that they serve. But in practice, we seem perfectly ready to follow the directives of an authority without further question -- indeed in some cases alarmingly so...*"
+
+So, the upshot of philosophical anarchism is that moral authority can be granted only in cases where ***the ends justify the means***? That cannot be right. Not by itself, anyway. There are all sorts of ends that, depending on your time preference, could be used to justify whipping out the guns of the state. How many are now clamoring for the violent overthrow of the state at all cost, in order to "remedy" the injustices of police brutality? How many are apologizing for police violence, on the basis that it serves the end of civil order? Surely, there must be a case for political authority from first principles, rather than last?
+
+Note, also, how embedded in the fantastical athropologies of Hobbes and Rousseau, is a hidden ends justifies the means argument for the social contract state: why, if we didn't have one, then things would be way worse!
+
+Nozick's inevitability argument - that the nature of services like protection and insurance are prone to natural monopoly - seems convincing to me, particularly in the light of modern anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and (ironically) some of the arguments made by radical capitalists like Friedrich Hayek. So, perhaps "legitimacy" is a red herring? In other words, perhaps the search for a moral defense of state power is itself beginning from a false implicit premise: that the "natural" state of man is one in which relations of authority backed by power wouldn't exist. Perhaps the question philosophers need to ask themselves is not, "what makes political power morally legitimate?", but rather, "given that man is a creature that tends toward relations of hierarchical power, what is the best way to cope with that? How can we make those relations as just as possible?"
+
+Still, this seems like a concession, rather than an answer.

content/post/social-media-is-groupthink-programming.md

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+---
+title: "Social Media Is Groupthink Programming"
+date: 2020-06-15T21:50:34Z
+tags: ["joe rogan", "jack dorsey", "twitter"]
+topics: ["psychology", "sociology"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "witch-trials|/img/witch-trials.jpg|Witch Trials" >}}
+
+I think something is deeply wrong with social media. Mainly, I think this about Twitter, but that may just be because Twitter is the most glaring symptom of whatever this problem is. The following is a short snippet from a podcast discussion between Joe Rogan and Jack Dorsey (dated **Feb. 2, 2019**). It's at the point where they're discussing the nature of the medium, and the various forms that content on Facebook and Twitter can take:
+
+----
+
+> **Rogan**: ...text is so limited. It's great for just getting out actual facts. But it's so...
+
+> **Dorsey**: -- Also thinking! It's so close to thinking! Like, there's no composition! That, to me, is the most beautiful thing about Twitter. But, also something that can be uncomfortable. Like, I can compose my life on Instagram. I can compose my thoughts within a Facebook post, and it can look so perfect. But, the best of Twitter is just super-raw, and it's right to the thinking process. I just think that's so beautiful, because it gets to consciousness, it gets to something deeper.
+
+> **Rogan**: How so? How is it different from a post on Instagram or a post on Facebook?
+
+> **Dorsey**: ...the character constraint and the speed demands a more conscious, present-focused thinking, versus stepping back and -- composing a letter, and thinking about all the outcomes...
+
+----
+
+Note how Dorsey thinks you are *more* conscious, the *less* you use your rational faculty to filter your immediate reactions. Dorsey is telling us that he doesn't understand what self-awareness really is. For all his years of meditation and mindfulness study, he does not recognize that what Twitter encourages by the demand for immediacy, is for people to be *less* conscious, and *less* mindful, of what they are doing.
+
+Without a practiced effort of conscious self-reflection -- without the willingness to step back and observe ourselves first -- the content of our speech and actions are nothing more than the hand-puppets of our determined animal instincts and emotional reactions. In other words, Twitter, as a platform, is a giant broadcast amplifier of the most unconscious animal instincts available for tapping. This is why outrage mobs exist. And Dorsey thinks this is the most beautiful feature of the service.
+
+Dorsey is quite right to recognize the psychological depths he is plumbing with this platform. But, rather than facilitating "healthy conversation", what Jack is doing, is merging the unconscious shadows of millions of untutored people, into a single super-organism with the power to destroy anything upon which it chooses to focus its gaze. That he derives so much joy from this (as is visible in the podcast), is frankly disturbing.
+
+I think the "super-organism" is metastasizing into something global now.
+
+The human animal is constructed in such a way, that boundaries of various kinds are essential to its success as an individual, and as a group. Psychological boundaries between child and parent, between brother and sister, and between peers in the same community, insure that no single individual is able to jeopardize the health of the tribe. Likewise, by extension, boundaries between tribes insures that no one tribe is able to dominate the landscape and threaten the survival of the species as a whole by monopolizing all landscapes. The causality of this, from an evolutionary perspective, might fall out in exactly the opposite way. Individual groups of humans evolve along with the climate they grow up in, enabling them to thrive in that region, but making it difficult for them to thrive elsewhere. This is why you won't find Kodiaks in West Virginia, or Parrots in Anchorage.
+
+But the human animal has the capacity to engineer his surroundings. To "transcend", if you will, the physical limitations of geography and climate, by means of a rational exploitation of the resources in that environment. This has made it possible for Siberian Russians to live in Saudi Arabia, for Eskimos to find work in New York, and for colonial Englishmen to build whole cities on the North American continent.
+
+Now, there is a new dimension to this dissolution of boundaries. The internet has become a sort of "meta-mind", into which we all plug ourselves, surrendering a portion of our own cognitive autonomy to an electronic hive mind. Tragically, the portion we've surrendered is the one connected most closely with the limbic system. And this is the portion that platforms like Twitter exploit for profit. Not only have the boundaries between the "spirited" and "appetitive" portions of the mind been disintegrated, and the rational portion diminished to nothing more than a tiny rider on top an uncontrollable elephant (see Plato's tripartite soul, and Jonathan Haidt's "happiness hypothesis", for more details). Now, boundaries *between minds* are being dissolved as well.
+
+Prior to the internet, and social media in particular, moral panics were limited either in scope, frequency, or duration. Even panics that had more widespread effects (e.g., the "satanic panic" of the early 80's), only occurred in the United States, and only lasted a few months, before burning out quickly in a fizzle of exhaustion and mockery. Going much further back in history, there were famous Salem witch trials. So called, because they occurred in one small region of Massachusetts between March of 1692 and March of 1693. At the same time, no such witch trials were taking place in Edinburgh or London, or Dutch South Africa, or the East Indies.
+
+Why is this? Why are moral panics, sans ubiquitous social media, so limited? I think it's because before the electronic hive-mind, there was the possibility of existing *outside the hive*. Londoners could look to Massachusetts with disdain and horror, because they had just shaken off their own political radicals of the same stripe (see: the beheading of Charles I), and because they did not identify with the colonists directly, except as fellow countrymen (remember, this is before the American revolution). In other words, they were swimming in a different social milieu. Likewise, with the "satanic panic", and other panics like it in the modern era. They were acute, particular, short-lived, and mostly isolated, because there were numerous social milieus within which one could mingle. This gives you multiple moral and social perspectives on the same phenomenon, and that triangulation tends to falsify totalizing fears and absolutist ideologies.
+
+We are losing this, today. Ubiquitous internet, and monolithic social media, is beginning to homogenize all social milieus into a single, all-encompassing social mind. There is no possibility of "stepping outside" this milieu, even if you simply stop using social media, because *everyone else around you IS using it*. This universal, homogeneous social milieu is an agar culture, ripe with psychological bacteria from the fact that it already has diminished our capacity to draw lines between the appetitive and the rational. Those bacteria spread easily, as a result.
+
+What you end up with, is a world in which globe-spanning paranoias of various kinds constantly grip the entire connected first-world population, roughly every nine to eighteen months. And I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop it.

content/post/the-loss-of-self-awareness.md

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+---
+title: "The Loss of Self Awareness"
+date: 2020-06-29T22:13:16Z
+tags: ["gilbert and sullivan", "satire", "meaning", "self-knowledge"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology", "sociology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "not-a-pipe|/img/not-a-pipe.png|Not A Pipe" >}}
+
+In the early 90's, I attended a performance of the Mikado put on by the college troupe my younger brother was involved in. There was one member of the cast who'd taken it upon himself to refuse to *act* when on stage. He would appear, shuffle to the places he was supposed to stand, and then shuffle off, when the scene required it.
+
+I asked my brother what that guy's deal was, and he said they couldn't remove him because of the threat of a complaint against the school, and that he was "protesting" the caricature portrayal of asians in the musical, by refusing to act. I rolled my eyes and went one with my life.
+
+Here we are, 20 years later, and everyone everywhere is falling all over themselves to strip the culture of anything anywhere that might be construed as unflattering, by anyone for any reason. From the Land-O-Lakes indian woman, to black face in TV shows from 35 years ago, it's all got to go. No matter what. That sure escalated quickly.
+
+But something new has just occurred to me in all of this.
+
+Gilbert & Sullivan were satirists. Sometimes, the satire was superficial and obvious. "A Modern Major General" from Penzance is one such example. He's the cartoon depiction of an over-educated buffoon that couldn't lead a regiment on a field trip to the zoo, much less execute a war in the Congo.
+
+But The Mikado takes the satire to another level. Here, we are not treated to English buffoonery directly, but to the way Victorian English buffoonery *sees the rest of the world*. Gilbert and Sullivan were *making fun of what the English establishment imagined the orient to be*, and by extension, severely criticizing their own culture in the process. In other words, for the fellow in my brother's performance, the point went over his head like a Blue Angels fly-by.
+
+When you look today at a lot of the symbols being torn down and stripped away, the same phenomenon appears. The point of a Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis or Jeb Stuart statue is as much a dire reminder of what the American union had to overcome to survive, as it is a veneration of these men. And when you look at TV shows from the 70's and 80's, in which references to minstrels and magpies are present, what you find is that they were subtle biting critiques of the old Vaudeville culture out of which Hollywood itself had arisen. Like the Mikado, modern American television was taking the industry itself to task for its own past, through the use of layered irony.
+
+Which gets me to the point of this post. It seems to me, there is a growing segment of the population that is so thick, that it is incapable of grasping multiple layers of meaning. Anything deeper than the surface is simply incomprehensible to them. I used to try to be charitable about this. I used to assume this was churlishness or some sort of disingenuousness, in which the desire to "catch you out" encouraged bad faith interpretations of this stuff. But I'm beginning to think that in fact, it is some sort of bizarre cognitive impairment. Could it be, that our society is collapsing because we are becoming less and less capable of coping with multiple levels of subtlety in meaning?

content/post/the-platonism-of-aristotle.md

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+---
+title: "The Platonism of Aristotle"
+date: 2020-06-02T21:01:35Z
+tags: ["aristotle", "plato"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "plato-and-aristotle|/img/plato-and-aristotle.jpg|Plato And Aristotle" >}}
+
+This is for my friends here, who wonder how it is that I can claim that Plato and Aristotle are not as diametrically opposed as the dominant narrative about them claims. The following is an extended snippet from [*Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry*](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plato-Aristotle-Agreement-Platonists-Philosophical/dp/0199684634/) , by George E. Karamanolis. While the snippet isn't a definitive refutation of their supposed opposition, it is the beginning of a sustained argument that claims to show just that. You can read the book yourself, to find out more. And, given that the author is Greek, I'm going to take that as definitive :D
+
+------
+
+> The Platonism of Aristotle and the Paripatetics
+
+> ...judging by the activity of Platonist commentators, if there was one work which every Platonist in late antiquity had to study, it was the Categories. How, we wonder, did the Categories become such a basic text for Platonists to study, given its non-Platonic metaphysics? The Christian Origen included dialectic in his course of studies, while both Gellius and Apuleius seem to have learnt logic. Platonists also studied Aristotle's major works on the soul and on the universe, such as the De anima and the De Caelo, and wrote long commentaries on them.6 In these works, however, Aristotle rejects several views which were subsequently regarded as the core of Plato's philosophy, most famously the view that the soul is immortal, and the idea that the universe had been created by a divine craftsman. How, then, did Platonists committed to Plato's philosophy come to find Aristotle's views worthy of study?
+
+> One must bear in mind that several commentaries have been lost. Like Simplicius, Syrianus also wrote commentaries on the De caelo and the De anima, yet they do not survive. The question becomes more pressing given that, for Platonists of all ages, and especially for those of late antiquity, nothing which was considered to be systematically contradictory to, or critical of, Plato could be acceptable, let alone philosophically important and beneficial, precisely because Plato enjoyed an enormous authority and his philosophy phy was taken for truth. Any philosophical activity aiming to refute or to criticize Plato was assumed a priori to be mistaken or not even worthy of the name of philosophy. Apparently the Platonists who did study Aristotle regarded him as being neither systematically nor radically in conflict with Plato.
+
+> In fact, it turns out that the majority of Platonists in this era shared the view that Aristotle's philosophy, when understood in the right spirit, is essentially compatible with Plato's doctrine, as they interpreted it. Platonists actually maintained that the core of Aristotle's philosophy both supports and complements Plato's philosophy, and this, they argued, was not accidental. If it were, it could neither be helpful in the study of philosophy nor of particular importance, and thus hardly worthy of systematic study. When confronted with contradictions between tween Aristotle and Plato, Platonists argued that such contradictions were only apparent, the results of uncritical focus on the letter and not the real spirit of the texts.? And they explicitly stated that Aristotle's works were both useful and philosophically important for a Platonist. For this reason, such a study, they believed, had to be done in a systematic and proper way.
+
+> This means at least two things. First, Aristotle's work was assigned a definite place in the Platonist philosophical curriculum. Platonists wrote introductions (Prolegomena) in which they gave an overview of Aristotle's philosophical work and explained how his philosophy is to be studied. Thus Aristotle's treatises were integrated in the context of such a curriculum.9 What is more, the study of Aristotle was a requirement which had to be fulfilled early, because it was considered preparatory for the study of Plato's philosophy,'0 the final aim for any serious Platonist. Second, students were guided and assisted in their study of Aristotle. This was done in two main ways. First, as was the case with Plato's dialogues, Platonist teachers suggested a certain order in which their students should read Aristotle's works so that they could make progress. As their divisions of Aristotle's works suggest, they considered his philosophy to form a system. But unlike Andronicus' systematization of Aristotle's writings, this system was devised specifically for Platonists. Second, Platonists assisted their students by either lecturing or writing commentaries on Aristotle. Often we find that these merely reproduce their oral teaching in their schools in Athens or Alexandria. It thus becomes clear that the existence of so many commentaries by Platonists is to meet a perceived need in the envisioned philosophical curriculum, which was the study of Aristotle. Syrianus, we are told, guided Proclus to read within two years the entire work of Aristotle, and thus introduced him through it to Plato's metaphysics.
+
+> It is not, then, the case that some Platonists from the third to sixth century AD studied Aristotle's philosophy for its own sake. Rather, Aristotle was appropriated by Platonists because they found his philosophy, if properly studied, a prerequisite for, and conducive to, an understanding of Plato's thought…
+
+> ...The extant commentaries on Aristotle, then, are merely the tip of an iceberg. They testify to a systematic study of Aristotle and also to the existence of a certain prevailing ideology concerning his philosophy, namely that it is essentially in accord with that of Plato. Of course this ideology, however dominant, was discussed and challenged among Platonists. Syrianus, Proclus, and Philoponus are examples of Platonists who questioned aspects of it and criticized several Aristotelian doctrines in their work. But they were also thoroughly familiar with Aristotle's work, and showed considerable respect for it.14 From what we know, almost all Platonists agreed that Aristotle's logic, which included his theory of the categories, does not contradict Plato's ontology and is philosophically valuable. Yet for most Platonists Aristotle was important in several other areas. So the Platonists of that time quite generally acknowledged Aristotle as another, albeit limited, authority next to Plato….
+
+. . . . . .
+
+> ...Plato did not impose any interpretation of his work or any other kind of doctrinal unity on the basis of which Academic loyalty was judged.' We know that Academics often disagreed with views considered as Plato's. Most conspicuously, Speusippus, whom Plato appointed as his successor in the Academy, rejected the Forms in favour of mathematical entities.2 Eudoxus on the other hand, who probably was appointed acting head of the Academy while Plato was in Sicily (367-365 Bc; Vita Marciana 11), identified man's highest good with pleasure (NE 117269-25; cf. 1101627-32), a view to which Plato objected (NE 1172b28-31) most clearly in the Philebus (20e-22b, 60a-c).3 Unlike Eudoxus, and perhaps opposing him, Speusippus distinguished sharply between pleasure and good,4 while Aristotle specified his own position distancing himself equally from both Academics' views.
+
+> Like other Academics, Aristotle was not expected to hold the same views as Plato. The fact that he developed positions different from, or even critical of, Plato's, did not make him less of a Platonist. On the contrary, Aristotle may well have seen himself as remaining faithful to Plato's spirit of philosophical inquiry, which arguably was the essential element of Academic membership. In fact, Aristotle is much nearer to Plato in spirit, and increasingly so as he progresses in his career, than the early Academics.6 His decision to have his own circle of students may have been motivated by his different ideas about how Plato's philosophy was to be continued. We know that Aristotle disagreed with the views of Speusippus and Xenocrates.7 Perhaps he also disliked their efforts to systematize Plato's philosophy, which changed considerably the intellectual climate in the Academy. It is tempting to surmise that it was in reaction against this climate that Aristotle decided to have his own students when he came back to Athens from Macedonia (in 335)…
+
+> ...The only report which claims that Aristotle started his own school with the aim to oppose Plato comes from a man of manifestly aggressive temperament and as such quite unreliable. This is Aristotle's student Aristoxenus, who, as has been seen (Introd., s. 4, pp. 40-1), argued that Aristotle had founded the Lyceum while Plato was still alive in a spirit of spitefulness against him.12 Being himself a Pythagorean,13 Aristoxenus was generally hostile to Plato in favour of Pythagoras oras (frs. 61-68W).14 He showed bitterness also against Socrates (frs. 51-60W) and even against Aristotle; he is attested to have insulted Aristotle's memory when he was not appointed head of the Lyceum (fr. I W). Aristoxenus' claim about Aristotle's departure from Plato's school apparently was meant to suggest that Plato was not worthy of respect and to praise Aristotle for leaving his school. Given its polemical purpose, Aristoxenus' view lacks credibility and already in antiquity was distrusted; the historian Philochorus (c. 340-260) argued that it was a fabrication)’...

content/post/the-universality-of-human-consciousness.md

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+---
+title: "The Universality of Human Consciousness"
+date: 2020-06-30T22:26:55Z
+tags: ["mind", "consciousness", "god"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "andeluvian-man|/img/andeluvian-man.jpeg|Michelangelo's Man" >}}
+
+In academic circles right now, it is very trendy to study and write on the philosophical thought of ancient tribal Africans and near-easterners. Keen attention is paid to thinkers who "got their first" - which is to say, if you can find an African thinker that stumbled upon the cosmological arguments of Aquinas or Anselm chronologically before Aquinas and Anselm thought of them, or an Indian thinker who discovered the is-ought dichotomy chronologically before Hume, you'll be an instant academic hero.
+
+To be sure, there have been debates raging in academia for decades, about the amount of intermingling and admixture that went on between various peoples in the ancient world. And, to be sure, most of this has been motivated by a jealous desire for attribution. It's incredibly petty and demeaning, to be frank. If my guy got there first, then our guys are smarter than your guys, nya-nya-nee-boo-boo.
+
+But I think a much more important point lurks behind all of this. It's something that archeologists and anthropologists have vaguely understood for half a century. Human beings are *mostly alike*. You see, it really doesn't matter how much intermingling and how much admixture there has been, because if there's been *any at all*, it means we're all capable of commerce with each other. What's more, it means that *ideas are commutable*. It would be no surprise whatsoever to me, to discover that half a dozen cultures around the world had thinkers that had conceived of the idea of, say, a "categorical imperative", or an "is-ought dichotomy", or a dualist metaphysics, or an inter-subjective epistemology, or a divine providence, or self-ownership, or any one of a thousand other concepts. Why would it not be surprising?
+
+A very famous quote is attributed to Alfred North Whitehead: "The entire history of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato". Whitehead is only half-right. While it is true that the west has been bathing in the conceptual framework of Plato and Aristotle for centuries, what he doesn't acknowledge, is the possibility that later thinkers may have managed to stumble on concepts similar to those found in the conceptual framework of the Greeks, *entirely independently* of the Greeks. But even if they all are just riffing on what they found lying in those writings (like Kant, for example), the span of time and the divergence of cultural circumstances are vast enough between, say, Aristophanes and Descartes, that if consciousness were entirely bound by present cultural conditioning, then attempting to decypher the ancient Greeks would be next to impossible for us. And yet, it's not. In fact, like Shakespeare's plays, much of what the Greeks, and the late Romans, wrote, is instantly recognizable once its translated. Democratus' atoms, Epicurus' pleasure principle, Aristotle's categories of thought and rules of logic, Socrates' dilemma of the good and search for essence, are all familiar to experiences we have today, now, in the real world, personally. How is that possible, if we're all creatures of the hear-and-now culture?
+
+The present fashionable answer, is to say that aeons of oppression imposed by some bygone tyrannical forefather has perpetuated a kind of indefinitely reproducing false-consciousness. Or that, the monolithic "white man" simply plundered every surrounding "brown" culture for its intellectual artefacts, and have been living off the profit of that plunder ever since. Both of these answers are ridiculously complicated attempts at side-stepping. Let's say the accusation is correct, at least in some small measure. The ancient Greeks, for all their warlike tendencies, were also a powerfully curious people. So, what if they did manage to import a version of the ancient Egyptian theodicy, or ancient Nubian agricultural techniques, into their own culture, by way of commerce or conquest? What are the implications of this? Well, at that moment, it would mean that disparate tribal "consciousnesses" (read: cultures) are *not incommensurate*. It would mean that Greeks could look at what Phoenicians or Egyptians were doing, and listen to what they were saying, *and make sense of it for themselves*. That capacity to make sense of what your neighbor is doing, means that you and he share *the same kind of mind*. And this, it seems to me, is a *far simpler*, and far more satisfying answer to how it is that disparate cultures can share themselves with one another: because, fundamentally, we're all the same.
+
+And this is why it would not be surprising at all to me, that an Ethiopian thinker might have come up with the idea of a fact-value dichotomy, or that an Egyptian thinker might have come up with the idea of atoms, or that we all - and I do mean all - at some point in our history, imagined some sort of universal god, and a distinct soul or self that motivates the body. It's because we all share the same experience of reality, and are constructed in such a way that we all can recognize that experience in each other. In short, while it's not necessarily "self-evident", it is apparent on very little effort, that all men are indeed *created equal*.

content/post/two-kinds-of-legitimacy.md

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+---
+title: "Two Kinds of Legitimacy"
+date: 2020-06-12T21:40:25Z
+tags: ["chaz", "riots", "legitimacy", "statism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "chaz|/img/chaz.jpg|CHAZ" >}}
+
+It seems to me, there are two kinds of state authority. The first, is what I have already talked about yesterday. Philosophical legitimacy - a rational grounding for the moral claim to the privileged use of force. But there is a second kind of state authority, that emerges only in the actual exercise (or restraint of exercise) of power. Psychological legitimacy - the confidence that subjects and citizens have in the state's exercise of its privilege. It is this second kind of legitimacy that I think is relevant to us, in the present circumstances.
+
+Over the course of the last four days, a loosely organized band of lightly armed leftist insurrectionists, under the banner of "Antifa" and the "John Brown Gun Club", have cordoned off a six block area in the center of Seattle, Washington, and claimed it as their own. City police have abandoned the area, leaving hundreds of actual law-abiding land owners and residents to fend for themselves, while they wait for further instructions from Seattle's feckless mayor, and clueless Governor.
+
+This is not the first time that these insurgency groups have tested their mettle. In the past few years, their "protest" events have grown more and more violent, and their willingness to harass and intimidate citizens caught in their melee has escalated to the point of taking temporary total control of sections of blocks (See Portland, Oregon, for example). But this week is the first time that the revolutionary "LARPing" (as it's called now), has metastasized into full on treasonous political insurrection. The group has brazenly erected its own borders and hung signs and flags of sovereignty. It has armed guards patrolling entrance and egress points. It has warlords patrolling the internal territory they've occupied. This has gone far beyond the childish fantasy of "sticking it to the man", and entered the realm of grown-up consequences. Consequences I do not think these groups believe are seriously imminent.
+
+Which gets me to my point. Perhaps they are correct not to take the threat from the surrounding state very seriously. One of the "heroes" of this insurrectionist movement is a man named John Brown, who convinced a small group of followers that incremental reform was not enough to resolve the problem of slavery in the United States. He made it his personal mission to take up arms against the state, in an attempt to either compel it to abandon the practice of slavery, or overthrow it. He and his followers were spectacularly unsuccessful, as Wikipedia recounts:
+
+------
+
+> ...In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia), intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread south through the mountainous regions of Virginia and North Carolina; there was a Provisional Constitution for the state he hoped to establish. He seized the armory, but seven people were killed, and ten or more were injured. Brown intended to arm slaves with weapons from the armory, but only a small number of local slaves joined his revolt. Within 36 hours, those of Brown's men who had not fled were killed or captured by local farmers, militiamen, and U.S. Marines, the latter led by Robert E. Lee. Brown was hastily tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men (including three blacks), and inciting a slave insurrection; he was found guilty on all counts and was hanged. He was the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States...
+
+------
+
+I do not think it is an accident that these people have chosen the first man convicted of treason, as their mascot. They quite literally see themselves as enemies of the state. But they do seem to be ignoring the horrific fate of Brown and his band of misfits. I think there is a reason why they do not fear a Brown-like fate for themselves: because that kind of threat no longer exists.
+
+Since the Kent State incident in 1970, American state governments have been extremely skittish about the use of force within their own borders. We may see that as a virtue, in some sense. A state that exercises restraint in the practice of its privilege is thought to be a just one. But, there is a difference between a state that restrains itself out of principle and strategy, and a state that restrains itself, because it is *afraid of its own power*. I believe the events of this week clearly show that we have crossed a rubicon, and the state no longer has any confidence in itself.
+
+This is dangerous. Because a state that has no confidence in itself is likely to act erratically, and will inspire contempt and disregard in its subjects and citizens. In the United states, the government is constituted for the purpose of defending individual *property* and *liberty* rights. What has become evident in Portland, is that the state is either unwilling or unable to execute on this duty. One could argue, I suppose, that the prevalence of corrupt cops in local police forces is actually another symptom of this same dereliction of constituted duty. Either way, the end result is the same: nobody takes the state seriously, whether or not it is morally justified in some philosophical sense.
+
+This is a double-bind situation. Because, while doing nothing erodes confidence, what happens if Governor Inslee suddenly finds his balls in a box in the corner of his office? Or even worse, what if Donald Trump marches the Marines into Portland? In the case of John Brown, most citizens were behind the new government, and were eager to see it establish its authority. Note (even in a Wikipedia article) that local farmers were more than happy to ally with federal troops to recapture a *federal* armory. Would local Seattle residents ally themselves with Inslee's state patrol, or Trump's Marines, against the CHAZ warlords? Would the rest of the country see such an action as a legitimate use of force for the protection of the rights of property holders in Seattle? I'm not so sure. And if you're not so sure either, then we have ourselves a legitimacy problem.

content/post/you-reap-what-you-sow.md

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+---
+title: "You Reap What You Sow"
+date: 2020-06-07T21:16:34Z
+tags: ["hobbes", "analytics", "fact-value dichotomy"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "theology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "leviathan-color|/img/leviathan-color.jpg|Leviathan In Color" >}}
+
+In a recent debate online someone complained to me, after I had pointed to one problem with idea of the Sovereign in Leviathan, that Thomas Hobbes would not have cared about such things as the "fact-value dichotomy". He went on to assert that the analytics were simply misinterpreting the Enlightenment. I think he is mistaken.
+
+It is true that Hobbes would not have 'cared' about the fact-value dichotomy. Indeed, he would have barely been able to make any sense of the idea if you were to pose it to him. But this does not make what he did, any less relevant to it. Hobbes (and later Hume and Rousseau) laid the groundwork for what Nietzsche would later make conscious through his storytelling, and what analytics like Mackie and Russell would systematize through their critiques of ethics and metaphysics in the wake of it all.
+
+When you (1) divorce intention from the universe, and (2) divest the universe of the ultimate source of intention (and indeed, order itself), what you end up with is a political order that is entirely a product of human ego and human will. But if the point is to look to nature for how we should order ourselves then, as the analytics rightly point out, we have a problem. Human purposes are value-laden. If the universe itself is no longer value-laden, then we cannot hope to look to it for help in making decisions - or, for that matter, for any clue about what things to care about. At which point, rule becomes a matter of caprice and physical strength. Might makes right.
+
+Is it really any wonder why peers and colleagues of Hobbes were constantly accusing him of atheism?