first wave of posts migrated from locals

config.toml

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ theme = "blackburn"
 
 title = "Ipse Solus"
 author = "Greg Gauthier"
-copyright = "© 2021. All rights reserved."
+copyright = "© 2022. All rights reserved."
 canonifyurls = true
 paginate = 10
 

content/post/George-Wills-American-Conservatism.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+title: "Will On American Conservatism"
+date: 2020-03-31T16:23:15Z
+tags: ["conservatism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "american-conservatism|/img/will-conservatism.jpg|The Conservative Sensibility" >}}
+
+George Will, On The Character of American Conservatism (From his book "[The Conservative Sensibility](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conservative-Sensibility-George-F-Will/dp/0316480940/)" )
+
+------
+
+> ...Although it distresses some American conservatives to be told this, American conservatism has little in common with European conservatism, which is descended from, and often is still tainted by, throne-and-altar, blood-and-soil nostalgia, irrationality, and tribalism. American conservatism has a clear mission: It is to conserve, by articulating and demonstrating the continuing pertinence of, the Founders’ thinking. The price of accuracy might by confusion, but this point must be made: American conservatives are the custodians of the classical liberal tradition.
+>
+> In the Anglophone world, this tradition began with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, in the context of authoritarian governments that ruled confessional states, those with established churches. Liberalism acquired its name, and became conscious of itself, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when liberty was threatened by the forces of order—by institutions and instruments of the state, often operating in conjunction with ecclesiastical authorities. Liberalism championed individualism and the rights of the individual against those forces of enforced order. The label “liberal” was minted to identify those whose primary concern was not the protection of community solidarity or traditional hierarchies, but rather was the expansion and protection of individual liberty. Liberals were then those who considered the state the primary threat to this. Liberals espoused the exercise of natural rights within a spacious zone of personal sovereignty guaranteed by governments instituted to serve as guarantors of those rights. Today, when the French describe—disparage, really—Margaret Thatcher’s kind of free market doctrines as “neo-liberalism” their terminology is not mistaken. For many years now, American conservatism has been the strongest contemporary echo of this liberalism in the trans-Atlantic world.
+>
+> American progressivism developed as an intended corrective to traditional liberalism. Progressives aimed to redress what they perceived as a dangerous imbalance. Their goal was to strengthen the powers of order—of the state—which had supposedly become anemic relative to the surging powers of entities and autonomous forces in America’s industrial society—banks, corporations, railroads, trusts, business cycles. In Europe today, the too few people who think the way American conservatives do are commonly called liberals, and people who think as American progressives do are called social democrats. In America today, there are a few intellectually fastidious people who think as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals did, but who are reluctant—perhaps for what they consider reasons of historical accuracy—to call themselves conservatives, so instead call themselves classical liberals.
+>
+> In recent decades, many Americans who were comfortable identifying themselves as liberals, and who prospered politically by doing so, have come to refer to themselves as progressives rather than liberals. They have done this for tactical reasons: The label “liberal” was devalued by association with various governance disappointments. Progressives are, however, terminologically accurate. Progressivism represents the overthrow of the Founders’ classical liberalism.
+>
+> The progressives’ indictment is that the Founders’ politics is cramped and uninspiring because it neither aspires to, nor allows for, the integration of the individual’s spiritual needs and yearnings with the individual’s political identity and activities. To this indictment the American conservative’s proper response is a cheerful, proud plea of guilty. The world has suffered much, and still suffers, from politics freighted with the grand ambition of unifying the individual’s social and moral lives. Such politics inevitably aims to fuse individuals into an organic community, with little social space in civil society for institutions—civic, religious, commercial—that can respond to human needs with politics largely left out.
+>
+> One lesson of the twentieth century is that the comprehensive politics of the integrated state promises fulfillment but delivers suffocation. In contrast, American patriotism is “an intricate latticework of ideals, sentiments and overlapping loyalties” that involves politics but is not primarily about politics.
+>
+> Conservatism’s celebration and protection of individual autonomy does not, as many critics now charge, condemn the individual to a desiccated life of shriveled social attachments or to the joyless pursuit of material enjoyments. Conservatism neither advocates nor causes individuals to be severed from familial, communal, or religious affiliations. Rather, it demarcates a large zone of individual sovereignty in which such affiliations can be nurtured. By pruning the state’s pretensions and functions, conservatism prevents the emergence of an enveloping state, in the shade of which other institutions cannot thrive, and often wither. In a political setting that insists upon the reality of individual autonomy and the morality of self-reliance, some find solace in an omnipresent and omni-provident state. Conservative governance should minimize opportunities for indulging this temptation.
+>
+> Conservatism’s great gift is preservation of the social space for the personal pursuit of higher aspirations. If people fail to use this space well, that is their failure, not conservatism’s….
+>
+> ..In the phrase “American conservatism,” the adjective carries a lot of weight. Conservatism became conscious of itself as a political philosophy through the writings of Edmund Burke. Subtle and profound, his works are rich in prudential lessons that remain germane. Nevertheless, his thinking is in the European tradition of throne-and-altar conservatism. America has no throne, and most Americans want altars kept apart from the state’s business. Burke’s conservatism was, in large measure, produced by British premises and French events. European conservatism has generally sought to conserve institutions and practices, such as social hierarchies and established churches, that were produced by the slow working of historical processes spanning many centuries. American conservatism seeks, as Alexander Hamilton did in the Republic’s infancy, to conserve or establish institutions and practices conducive to a social dynamism that dissolves impediments to social mobility and fluidity. So American conservatism is not only different from, it is at bottom antagonistic to British and continental European conservatism. The latter emphasizes the traditional and dutiful, with duties defined by obligations to a settled collectivity, the community. Because American conservatism is about individual liberty, it cultivates spontaneous social order and hence encourages novelty.
+>
+> In the stream of Western political thought, American conservatism is exceptional in a way that is related to the theory of “American exceptionalism. ” The multifaceted postulate of American “exceptionalism” includes one or more of these ideas: Americans were born exceptionally free from a feudal past, and hence free from an established church and an entrenched aristocracy. This made them exceptionally receptive to intellectual pluralism and exceptionally able to achieve social mobility. America had an exceptional revolution, one that did not attempt to define and deliver happiness, but one that set people free to define and pursue it as they please. Americans codified their Founding doctrines as a natural rights republic in an exceptional Constitution, one that does not say what government must do for them but what government may not do to them...

content/post/a-mind-shaped-universe.md

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+title: "A Mind Shaped Universe"
+date: 2020-05-09T18:06:01Z
+tags: ["mind", "metaphysics", "order", "intelligibility"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "pondering-the-sky|/img/pondering-the-sky.jpg|Pondering The Sky" >}}
+
+As far as I can tell, when it comes to mind, there are four possibilities:
+
+1. Mind is an illusion. It doesn't exist at all. We only think we're experiencing ourselves consciously, because the particular arrangement of matter and energy that constitutes what we call the human mind, is constituted in such a way as to cause confusion between mere matter and energy and something else we call mind.
+
+2. Mind is an epiphenomenal or emergent property of certain arrangements of matter and energy. There is mind, in the way that there is music from a strummed guitar, or the shape of a sphere visible in a spinning gyroscope. So, it's not an illusion, but it's not "real" either, in the sense that it has no 'substance' apart from the functioning of the human body.
+
+3. Mind is a real unique property of certain classes of living things, primarily humans. Human beings on earth are the only things in the entire universe that manifest this property, and it seems to be fundamentally different from the nature of everything else in the universe, but there's no explanation for why it should exist in any beings, let alone humans, except by accident or supernatural intent (i. e., just another word for soul or spirit).
+
+4. (a) Mind is a real and ubiquitous property of the entire universe. Though it manifests in humans in a particularly extravagant way, it is still present in some primitive or fundamental way, in all matter. (b) Alternatively, mind is (as Berkeley's Hylas would have put it) the "substratum" or necessary beginning of matter and energy in the universe, so that it may not be manifest in all things in the universe, but has the potential to appear under the right conditions. In fanciful terms, we live in "a mind-shaped universe".
+
+My thinking on this has shifted a lot in the last few years. I have begun to think that some variety of 4 is the best option, because it has the pleasing quality of unification without reduction, and offers a potential explanation for the religious or mystical intuition. But, what is a "mind-shaped universe"?
+
+The late author Douglas Adams provided atheists with an entertaining metaphor with which to dispute the "intelligent design" position:
+
+Imagine a puddle of water lying in a pothole. "My, my", it says, "this pothole is remarkably comfortable! It is entirely form-fitting to all of my particular folds and creases, nooks and crannies. This pothole must have been made specifically just for me!"
+
+Of course, the point of this image, is to get us to see that it is the water that conforms to the pothole, and not the other way 'round. Likewise with the human being: the universe appears "perfectly tuned" to us, but in fact, it is *we* who are perfectly evolved to survive within it.
+
+Many atheists see this argument from metaphor as a body blow to the intelligent design position. Perhaps they are right. My point here is not to dispute intelligent design, but to raise a much bigger problem, for those of us who [at one time or another would] call ourselves atheists, and want to use this argument.
+
+On the purely naturalist/materialist view, the universe is matter in motion, and nothing more. There are certainly complex and unusual things that can arise from the way matter moves about, but ultimately, it is reducible to just that. This view explains things like molecules and planets relatively easily. The universe on this model, just is a "planet shaped" universe (to extend Douglas Adams' metaphor).
+
+But there is something in this supposedly planet-shaped universe that isn't very planet-shaped. Namely, minds. So, if we want to say that the universe just is planet-shaped, then we have a bit of an inexplicable miracle on our hands.
+
+There is another option. Perhaps the universe is not planet-shaped, but *mind shaped*. If mind-shaped, it would make sense that at some point, conscious minds would arise within it, capable of comprehending it and thinking about it. But what are the implications for folks like us? Pretty serious, actually. It means the universe itself is somehow discernible. Which implies some sort of metaphysical discernibility woven into its basic fabric (out of which we could rise). And that implies either that the universe itself is intelligent, or possibly, that the universe was crafted by an intelligence.
+
+What is that? What 'stuff' makes intentional consciousness possible, if not that (whatever it is)? Bishop Berkeley would have argued only another greater intentional consciousness could. I e., God. But the argument only supports a possibility, not an actuality -- let alone a necessity. On the other hand, if there is no intelligence 'stuff' (only matter in motion), what miracle produces it anyway?

content/post/a-poem-about-words.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: "A Poem About Words"
+date: 2008-04-21T15:18:00Z
+tags: []
+topics: ["philosophy", "poetry", "language"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+A short free-flow poem I wrote a long, long time ago:
+
+>  *Words beg their commission from a hidden king, whose graces they resent. Emissaries, soldiers, courtiers, troubadours, and priests, they are sent forth from his castle to bid the world take heed of him. For without their tireless march, the master would suffer alone in his windowless tower, dark, brooding, and voiceless. But without his strength, those flickering lights of mirrored meaning would themselves go dark.*
+

content/post/anxiety-and-control.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: "Anxiety and Control"
+date: 2020-03-28T15:50:09Z
+tags: ["stoicism", "control"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "the-stoic|/img/the-first-stoic.jpg|Epictetus" >}}
+
+One of the things the stoics get right, is the insight that there is little an agent has any real power to influence. Even where it seems there is a great deal, that control is largely an illusion drawn from an overzealous interpretation of our experience of collective agreement.
+
+When I was young, I wasn’t particularly interested in who or what I could control, for its own sake. But I was interested in control over the world, insofar as it was an instrument to control over my own destiny. Many influences seemed to be constraining what was possible, including my parents, the requirements of public education, and my own peers. But there was one avenue of exploration that yielded very satisfying results: computing.
+
+I did everything I could to master electronics, and then computer programming, because it was apparent to me that this single device would be the key to control over my own life - how, exactly, was beyond my thinking at the time. And, in the end, it turned out to be an unwinnable arms race. As soon as you’ve mastered one platform, or one language, or one technology, or one engineering approach, along comes another, and you have to start all over again. My desire to control the world, even if only for my own sake, was like frantically trying to build sandcastles right at the edge of the surf. Every 2 or 3 minutes, a heavy wave would come in and wash all my hurried attempts at a structure back into the sea.
+
+It is easy to see this anxiety play itself out on a grand scale, in western society now. Over the weekend, I re-watched Idiocracy via Dave Rubin’s watch party, and the one thing that really struck me, seeing it again, was its expression of anxiety over the reliance on experts. It is startling to realise just how much dependence we have on each other, in the name of control over the vagaries of reality — and how much resentment there is, in that dependence. Everywhere now, we rely on the goodwill of technical experts in highly specialised scientific, medical, and engineering fields, to provide us with the knowledge needed to survive and thrive in a world so complex that I suspect even Newton and Einstein would struggle to keep up. At the same time, everywhere there is suspicion and resentment centred around this dependence. We fear everyone from the local auto mechanic to the government health expert, because of how much perceived control these people have over us. Even politicians themselves suffer this fear. Many try to sound like experts themselves, or stoke the resentment of experts in order to shift the locus of control to themselves.
+
+But, control over what, exactly? Sure, we all have plans and goals. But to what extent do the satisfaction of those things constitute who and what we are (or, for that matter, our happiness)? Certainly, aspirations like large scale agriculture have been positively transformative for humans, and descending into a Brawndo world with dying crops and decaying infrastructure is not to be wished for. But this is where the stoics come in. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet: nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Setting aside the moral nominalism for a moment, the point here is really a *psychological* one. The angle of approach we take to the fortunes that grace themselves in our lives, ought to be one of detached gratitude. Even as a temporary thing, a material improvement is an improvement whether it endures or not. But the question is, fortunate for what? Improvement to what end?
+
+I think the Buddhists go too far with this thinking. They carry the logic to its absurd conclusion: want is suffering, so don’t want. The stoics have a better approach: want, but suffer only in the belief that the unsatisfied want is a punishment, rather than merely an accident of circumstances of which we have little or no capacity to control — even basking in the vastness of our technological complexity. This pandemic situation is a perfect expression of this. The happy man is not the man that refuses to live his life, on account of the possibility that a pandemic will simply flip the chessboard on him. The happy man is the man who pursues his goals, but understands that sometimes the world will put him in situations that have nothing to do with his own goals, and the challenge is to adapt.
+
+Getting back to the idea of control, a good analogy of what I’m trying to say here, is the difference between a doomsday prepper and a skilled craftsman. The former attempts to freeze out risk, by buffering himself against it. This can only last for as long as supplies last. It is a mindset of consumption and grasping scarcity. The latter, on the other hand, needs to keep very little on hand because he knows that wherever he goes, his skill will supply him with whatever his needs are. It is a mindset of *expanding value*, because it is not merely about self-sufficiency, but a shared contribution to a community. Thus, in a round-about way, the stoic view is also the more naturally communitarian view — and one that is more in line with human nature, as social primates.
+
+But the minute this fellow sets about to make himself into a craftsman, he is necessarily making himself into an expert in that craft (whatever it may be). An expert that others will rely upon for his skill (perhaps, at making furniture, or at administering medicines, or whatever). What makes us so fearful of that expertise in the modern economy? Is it the disconnection that telecommunications ironically enables, as it expands digital contact? Is it a natural limit to the size of tribes? Is it the dynamic between politics and the free market? Maybe it’s all of these things, or none of them. I’m not sure. In any case, It’s something to think about.

content/post/baby-hitler-and-trollies.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: "Baby Hitler and Trollies"
+date: 2020-03-23T15:30:37Z
+tags: ["ethics", "politics"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< youtube VWORnVSz9Io >}}
+
+It has become fashionable today, to make all thought experiments of the moral dilemma variety, about murdering the infant Adolf in his crib. Why?
+
+Stephen Fry wrote a fascinating little book called "Making History" ( https://kek.gg/u/fr6Y ) which argues deftly in dramatic form, the point that you have no idea what the outcome of your action will be, and may in fact lead to an even worse circumstance from where you started.
+
+Fry's book offers an interesting twist on the murder question. Rather than murdering the infant, what if you were equipped with a potent drug that, when slipped into Papa Hitler's drink, rendered him impotent and resulted in no Adolf pregnancy to begin with? Would you be willing to do that?
+
+Ben Shapiro may have had a bit more difficulty with that moral dilemma. But it's an interesting twist because it narrows the dilemma. Instead of trading murder for murder (the killing of an infant, versus the killing six million jews and gypsies), you're offered the opportunity to prevent the latter without any actual killing at all, just a minor inconvenience to Adolph's father.
+
+The point of Fry's thought experiment is not to find out at what point you'd no longer be squeamish about trading evil-for-evil in order to attain some good. Rather, it is to question whether it is even justifiable to expect a good at all -- and, secondarily, to ask us to question what sort of responsibility we could possibly have for the events of history, as individuals.
+
+The Baby Hitler scenario is an obsession today because it represents an alienated portion of our own selves. The portion that appears most dangerous to us. The portion that asserts individual self-mastery, risk-taking, and the nagging anxiety of free will, in a world that demands conformity and self-annihilation, in exchange for survival. We have to kill Baby Hitler, because he is the goat onto which all the sins that the group can see, can be projected.
+
+Insisting on preserving Baby Hitler is thus insisting on the death of the group self, and the preservation of that alienated self. It is the acceptance of responsibility for that alienated self, come what may. Leaving Baby Hitler to his life, is suggesting that he need not have made the choices that he did make (he 'could have done otherwise', in philosophical-speak) -- which implies the same for ourselves.
+
+Ben Shapiro isn't the first to raise this question in public, and he won't be the last. Hitler, ironically, has become the archetypal hobby horse for the fear of our own capacity for evil.

content/post/bork-on-liberalism.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: "Bork on Liberalism"
+date: 2020-04-05T17:01:04Z
+tags: ["liberalism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "robert-bork|/img/bork.jpg|Robert Bork" >}}
+
+The following passage is a section from the introduction to Robert Bork's famous 1996 book, "[*Slouching Toward Gomorrah*](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Slouching-towards-Gomorrah-Robert-Bork/dp/0060573112/)".
+
+------
+
+>Modern liberalism is very different in content from the liberalism of, say, the 1940s or 1950s, and certainly different from the liberalism of the last century. The sentiments and beliefs that drive it, however, are the same: the ideals of liberty and equality. These ideals produced the great political, social, and cultural achievements of Western civilization, but no ideal, however worthy, can be pressed forever without turning into something else, turning in fact into its opposite. That is what is happening now. Not a single American institution, from popular music to higher education to science, has remained untouched.
+>
+> In one sense, decline is always with us. To hear each generation of Americans speak of the generation coming along behind it is to learn that our culture is not only deteriorating rapidly today but always has been. Regret for the golden days of the past is probably universal and as old as the human race. No doubt the elders of prehistoric tribes thought the younger generation’s cave paintings were not up to the standard they had set. Given this straight-line degeneration for so many millennia, by now our culture should be not merely rubble but dust. Obviously it is not: until recently our artists did better than the cave painters. Yet if the doomsayers are always with us, it is also true that sometimes they are right. Cultures do decline, and sometimes die. The agenda of liberalism has been and remains what historian Christopher Lasch called an "unremitting onslaught against bourgeois culture [that] was far more lasting in its effects, in the West at least and now probably in the East as well, than the attack on capitalism..." Making capitalism the explicit target became an unprofitable tactic when the case for the only alternative, socialism, collapsed in ruins. But capitalism cannot survive without a bourgeois culture; if that culture is brought down, so too will capitalism be replaced with one or another variety of statism presiding over a degenerate society.
+> 
+> Modern liberalism is powerful because it has enlisted our cultural elites, those who man the institutions that manufacture, manipulate, and disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols…universities, churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), foundation staffs, the “public interest” organizations, much of the congressional Democratic Party and some congressional Republicans as well, and large sections of the judiciary, including, all too often, a majority of the Supreme Court.
+> 
+> This, it must be stressed, is not a conspiracy but a syndrome. These are institutions controlled by people who view the world from a common perspective, a perspective not generally shared by the public at large. But so pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is important to understand what modern liberalism is and what its ascendancy means...
+> 
+> The wonder is that the culture of liberalism triumphed over conventional middle-class culture so rapidly. One would have expected rejection of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism by those whose interests would be damaged by them or whose idea of a good society was offended by them. Instead, resistance has been mild, disorganized, and ineffective. This suggests that the supposedly oppressive “Establishment,” without realizing it themselves, had already been eaten hollow by the assumptions that flowered into modern liberalism. When the push came in the Sixties, an empty and guilt-ridden Establishment surrendered.
+> 
+> But why now? Liberalism has been with us for centuries; why should it become modern liberalism in the latter half of this century? The desire for self-gratification, which underlies individualism, has been around since the human species appeared; why should it become radical individualism in our time? The desire for equality, in large part rooted in self-pity and envy, is surely not a new emotion; why has it recently become the menace of radical egalitarianism?
+> 
+> The complete answer is surely not simple, but a large part of the answer surely is. Liberalism always had the tendency to become modern liberalism, just as individualism and equality always contained the seeds of their radical modern versions. The difference was that classical liberalism, the glory of the last century, was not simply a form of liberalism but an admixture of liberalism’s drives and the forces that opposed those drives. As the opposing or constraining forces weakened and the drives of liberalism increasingly prevailed, we were brought to our present condition, and, it must be feared, will be taken still further, much further, in the same direction. Then a culture whose increasing degradation we observe will have attained ultimate degradation, unless, of course, we can rebuild the constraints that once made liberalism classical liberalism. A consideration of the nature of those constraints and what weakened them is not encouraging.
+> 
+> Men were kept from rootless hedonism, which is the end stage of unconfined individualism, by religion, morality, and law. These are commonly cited. To them I would add the necessity for hard work, usually physical work, and the fear of want. These constraints were progressively undermined by rising affluence. The rage for liberty surfaced violently in the 1960s, but it was ready to break out much earlier and was suppressed only by the accidents of history. It would be possible to make a case that conditions were ripe at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth but that the trend was delayed by the Great War. The breaking down of restrictions resumed in the Roaring Twenties. But that decade was followed by the Great Depression, which produced a culture whose behavior was remarkably moral and law-abiding. The years of World War II created a sense of national unity far different from the cultural fragmentation of today. The generations that lived through those times of hardship and discipline were not susceptible to extreme hedonism, but they raised a generation that was.
+> 
+> Affluence reappeared in the late 1940s and in the decade of the 1950s and has remained with us since. Despite complaints, often politically motivated, about the economic hardships endured today by the American people, it is blindingly obvious that standards of living, even among the poorest, are far above any previous level in this or any other nation’s history. Affluence brings with it boredom. Of itself, it offers little but the ability to consume, and a life centered on consumption will appear, and be, devoid of meaning. Persons so afflicted will seek sensation as a palliative, and that today’s culture offers in abundance. This brings us to the multiple roles rapidly improving technology plays in our culture. America was a nation of farmers, but the advance of technology required fewer and fewer farmers and more and more industrial workers. The continuing advance required fewer industrial workers and more white collar workers, and eventually still more sophisticated workers of a kind that made the term “white collar” seem denigrating. Hard physical work is inconsistent with hedonism; the new work is not. With the time and energy of so many individuals freed from the harder demands of work, the culture turned to consumerism and entertainment. Technology and its entrepreneurs supplied the demand with motion pictures, radio, television, and videocassettes, all increasingly featuring sex and violence. Sensations must be steadily intensified if boredom is to be kept at bay.
+> 
+> A culture obsessed with technology will come to value personal convenience above almost all else, and ours does. That has consequences we will explore. Among those consequences, however, is impatience with anything that interferes with personal convenience. Religion, morality, and law do that, which accounts for the tendency of modern religion to eschew proscriptions and commandments and turn to counseling and therapeutic sermons; of morality to be relativized; and of law, particularly criminal law, to become soft and uncertain. Religion tends to be strongest when life is hard, and the same may be said of morality and law. A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion.
+> 
+> The most frightening aspect of the march of technology, however, is the potential for reshaping human beings and their nature through genetic science. No one can predict what the full consequences of that technology will be, but horrifying prospects can easily be imagined. There seems no possibility that this technology can be halted…whatever scientists can do, they feel they must do…and little likelihood that the ability to reshape humans will not be used.
+> 
+> As will be seen, the possibilities of technology in all of these areas…from lightening work to providing ever more degenerate entertainments to reengineering humans…are far from exhausted. And it is impossible to imagine that the rapid advance of technology can be halted or even significantly slowed. Radical egalitarianism also seems likely to continue to advance, although some of its manifestations are now being resisted politically for the first time in years. The simplistic notion that if social processes were fair, all races and ethnic groups and both sexes would be represented proportionately in all areas of endeavor dies hard. The absence of equality of results is taken to mean that equality of opportunity has been denied and must be remedied with coercive action to produce equality of results. Then, too, the spread and triumph of the democratic ideal leads, irrationally, to the belief that inequalities are unjust so that hierarchical institutions must be democratized. That leads to demands for corporate democracy, for student participation in running universities, and to criticism of the Roman Catholic Church because its doctrines do not conform to whatever it is that a large number of the laity prefer. The idea that democracy and equality are not suited to the virtues of all institutions is a hard sell today.
+> 
+> Demands for greater or complete equality seem to have other sources. Boredom plays a role here as well. It is impossible, for example, to observe radical feminists without thinking that their assertions of oppression and victimization, their never-ending search for fresh grievances, are ways of giving meaning to lives that would otherwise seem sterile to them. Self-pity and envy are also undoubtedly factors, as are the prestige and financial support to be had from pressing their claims, but I tend to think that the search for meaning plays a prominent and perhaps predominant role in many forms of radical egalitarianism.
+> 
+> A crucial factor in the creation of liberalism and its gradual transformation into modern liberalism has yet to be mentioned: the rise of intellectual and artistic classes independent of patrons toward the close of the eighteenth century and their subsequent growth in size and prestige. For reasons to be canvassed in chapter 5, these classes tend to be hostile to traditional culture and to the bourgeois state. They powerfully reinforce and mobilize the forces pressing towards radical individualism and radical egalitarianism.
+> 
+> The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests that we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. Those translate into a modern version of bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion while people are coarsened and diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex.
+> 
+> Having spoken of liberty and equality (in their modern, radical forms), it is time to complete the triad by mentioning fraternity. It is no mere rhetorical device to use the slogan of the French Revolution, for liberty, equality, and fraternity are enduring aspirations, and dilemmas, of humans in society. The desire for fraternity or community is inevitable in a social animal, but that desire is condemned to frustration, to be a wistful hope, anywhere modern liberalism holds sway. Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups. Social peace and cohesion decline as loneliness and alienation rise. Life in such a culture can come close to seeming intolerable.
+> 
+> A fragmented society, one in which a sense of community has disappeared, is necessarily a society with low morale. It displays loss of nerve, which means that it cannot summon the will to suppress public obscenity, punish crime, reform welfare, attach stigma to the bearing of illegitimate children, resist the demands of self-proclaimed victim groups for preferential treatment, or maintain standards of reason and scholarship. That is precisely and increasingly our situation today.
+> 
+> Perversely, modern liberals seek to cure the disease of a politicized culture with the medicine of more politics. More politics means more clashes between interest groups, more anger and division, and more moral assaults upon opponents. The great danger, of course, is that eventually a collectivist solution will be adopted to control social turbulence. Turbulence is not limited to political and cultural warfare; it is increasingly a phenomenon of violence in streets and neighborhoods. If society should reach a chaotic condition of warring groups and individual alienation, a condition in which even personal security is problematic for a majority of its people, authoritarian government may be accepted. Worse, a movement with transcendental principles, not necessarily benign ones, may promise community and ultimately exact a fearful cost.

content/post/buckley-on-conservatism-and-modern-realities.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: "Buckley on Conservatism and Modern Realities"
+date: 2020-05-10T18:15:40Z
+tags: ["buckley", "liberalism", ]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "bill-buckley|/img/buckley.jpg|William F. Buckley, Jr." >}}
+
+From: "[Up From Liberalism](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Liberalism-William-F-Buckley/dp/161427925X/)" (1959), William F. Buckley, Jr.
+
+>There is no conservative political manifesto which, as we make our faltering way, we can consult, confident that it will point a sure finger in the direction of the good society. Indeed, sometimes the conservative needle appears to be jumping about as on a disoriented compass...
+>
+>...Still, for all the confusion and contradiction, I venture to say it is possible to talk about “the conservative position” and mean something by it. At the political level, conservatives are bound together for the most part by negative response to Liberalism; but altogether too much is made of that fact. Negative action is not necessarily of negative value. Political freedom’s principal value is negative in character. The people are politically stirred principally by the necessity for negative affirmations. Cincinnatus was a farmer before he took up his sword, and went back to farming after wielding some highly negative strokes upon the pates of those who sought to make positive changes in his way of life...
+>
+>...I mentioned in the opening pages of this book that what was once a healthy American pragmatism has deteriorated into a wayward relativism. It is one thing to make the allowances to reality that reality imposes, to take advantage of the current when the current moves in your direction, while riding at anchor at ebb tide. But it is something else to run before political or historical impulses merely because fractious winds begin to blow, and to dismiss resistance as foolish, or perverse idealism. And it is supremely wrong, intellectually and morally, to abandon the norms by which it becomes possible, viewing a trend, to pass judgment upon it; without which judgment we cannot know whether to yield, or to fight.
+>
+>Are we to fight the machine? Can conservatism assimilate it? Whittaker Chambers once wrote me that “the rock-core of the Conservative Position can be held realistically only if Conservation will accommodate itself to the needs and hopes of the masses—needs and hopes which like the masses themselves, are the product of machines.”
+>
+>It is true that the masses have asserted themselves, all over the world; have revolted, Ortega said, perceiving the revolutionary quality of the cultural convulsion. The question: how can conservatism accommodate revolution? Can the revolutionary essence by extravasated and be made to diffuse harmlessly in the network of capillaries that rushes forward to accommodate its explosive force? Will the revolt of the masses moderate when the lower class is risen, when science has extirpated misery, and the machine has abolished poverty? Not if the machines themselves are irreconcilable, as [Whitaker] Chambers seems to suggest when he writes that “...of course, our fight is with machines,” adding: “A Conservatism that cannot face the facts of the machine and mass production, and its consequences in government and politics, is foredoomed to futility and petulance. A Conservatism that allows for them has an eleventh-hour chance of rallying what is sound in the West.”
+>
+>What forms must this accommodation take? The welfare state! is the non-Communist answer one mostly hears. It is necessary, we are told, to comprehend the interdependence of life in an industrial society, and the social consequences of any action by a single part of it, on other parts. Let the steel workers go on strike, and spark-plug salesmen will in due course be out of work. There must be laws to mitigate the helplessness of the individual link in the industrial chain that the machine has built. What can conservatism do? Must it come to terms with these realities? “To live is to maneuver [Mr. Chambers continues]. The choices of maneuver are now visibly narrow. In the matter of social security, for example, the masses of Americans, like the Russian peasants in 1918, are signing the peace with their feet. I worked the hay load last night against the coming rain—by headlights, long after dark. I know the farmer’s case for the machine and for the factory. And I know, like the cut of hay-bale cords in my hands, that a Conservatism that cannot find room in its folds for these actualities is a Conservatism that is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy.”
+>
+>Indeed. The machine must be accepted, and conservatives must not live by programs that were written as though the machine did not exist, or could be made to go away: that is the proper kind of realism. The big question is whether the essential planks of conservatism were anachronized by the machine; the big answer is that they were not. “Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms [says Mr. Chambers]. That is what Conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles. And, of course, that results in a dance along a precipice. Many will drop over, and, always, the cliff-dancers will hear the screaming curses of those who fall, or be numbed by the sullen silence of those, nobler souls perhaps, who will not join in the dance.” We cliff-dancers, resolved not to withdraw into a petulant solitude, or let ourselves fall over the cliff into Liberalism, must do what maneuvering we can, and come up with a conservative program that speaks to our time...
+>
+>...Conservatism must insist that while the will of man is limited in what it can do, it can do enough to make over the face of the world; and that the question that must always be before us is, What shape should the world take, given modern realities? How can technology hope to invalidate conservatism? Freedom, individuality, the sense of community, the sanctity of the family, the supremacy of the conscience, the spiritual view of life—can these verities be transmuted by the advent of tractors and adding machines? These have had a smashing social effect upon us, to be sure. They have created a vortex into which we are being drawn as though irresistibly; but that, surely, is because the principles by which we might have made anchor have not been used, not because of their insufficiency or proven inadaptability...
+>
+>...How can one put the problem more plainly? ...Can one make homemade freedom, under the eyes of an omnipotent state that has no notion of, or tolerance for, the flavor of freedom?
+>
+>Freedom and order and community and justice in an age of technology: that is the contemporary challenge of political conservatism. How to do it, how to live with mechanical harvesters and without socialized agriculture. The direction we must travel requires a broadmindedness that, in the modulated age, strikes us as antiquarian, and callous...
+>
+>...Conservatives do not deny that technology poses enormous problems; they insist only that the answers of Liberalism create worse problems than those they set out to solve. Conservatives cannot be blind, or give the appearance of being blind, to the dismaying spectacle of unemployment, or any other kind of suffering. But conservatives can insist that the statist solution to the problem is inadmissible. It is not the single conservative’s responsibility or right to draft a concrete program—merely to suggest the principles that should frame it...
+>
+>... I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free....

content/post/for-whom-the-pot-clanks.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: "For Whom the Pot Clanks"
+date: 2020-04-19T17:30:48Z
+tags: ["christianity", "secularism", "social contagion"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "sociology", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "pot-clankers|/img/pot-clankers.jpg|Pot Clankers" >}}
+
+During the collective neurosis that is this coronavirus quarantine, it has become customary in the Anglo-American west, to stand outside at 8PM once per week and bang pots in gratitude for the work of the various healthcare institutions of our countries. This, I think, has implications that extend far beyond the annoyance of watching everyone marching mindlessly in unison for reasons they barely understand.
+
+When I was a boy growing up in Chicago in the 70's and 80's, attending church on Sunday was a near-ubiquitous phenomenon. It might be the case that your block was randomly littered with Irish or Italian Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians. But one thing you could be certain of, was that, between 9AM and 1PM on any given Sunday, you would only find those people by looking in their respective churches.
+
+How are these two observations related? Let me try to explain.
+
+Here in the UK, religious practice and its concomitant Christian belief has plummeted to record lows. In the US, a similar phenomenon is taking place, only over a much slower and longer period of time. The consequence of this in the UK, is that churches and chapels all over the country have gradually been shuttered, sold off to developers, or (and I say this with the gravity it is due) converted to mosques. Meanwhile, the people themselves have not lost their fervor for ritual practice, community engagement, or their thirst for meaning. They've simply shucked off the one institution that offered the best opportunity for a structured outlet for it. Instead now, they chase the rituals of various political causes. For example, lying down on the roads in front of Westminster, to protest the environment, or the conservative government, or bras, or whatever -- or bang pots together at 8PM on a weeknight, in worshipful praise of the NHS.
+
+The sociological phenomenon is not my main point, however. The change in the form of ritual observance is a mere quibble, by comparison to the radical transformation in the *content* that has colonized society along with these new rituals.
+
+When I was attending Catholic mass as a boy, it's true that almost nobody had a good answer for why we were there. The appeals offered to me were either sentimental platitudes, or demands for conformity. This did not mean there was no good answer, and we'll get to that shortly. The point here, is that even as far back as 30 years ago, people had become clouded and confused not just about what they were doing, but *why* they were doing it. The Sunday ritual had become just that, and only that. An empty Sunday ritual. I now think this is one of the reasons why ecstatic Protestant evangelism took off in the 80's. Entrepreneurial pastors recognized the enervated state of the spiritual lives of the society, and intuited that this was a market niche that could be filled. In a sense, they weren't wrong about that (and the success of American mega-churches certainly stands as a testament to it).
+
+In any case, what exactly had been lost, thirty-five years ago, that my own parish priest and parents could not articulate? In a nutshell, it is the answer to the question, "to whom, do we owe our lives"? This question may seem surprising, at first glance. Appalling, even, if you have the libertarian sensibilities of an American. Why, I don't owe my life to anyone! I am sovereign in my own right! "You're not the boss of me!", as the line in the song goes. Ah, but from where did that sovereignty come? What is the ground upon which your self-sovereignty rests? It cannot merely be a flat assertion. Because, then, any contrary assertion could negate it. There must be an adjudication of opinions.
+
+Traditionally, that adjudication rested with the church. What it offered as an answer, was the metaphysics of Genesis and John, and the theodicy of Christ. We owe our lives to God, because he is the ever-present logos that sustains all of existence itself, and we redeem that debt (both metaphysically and morally) through the the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. All of this is arguable, of course. And, we've been arguing about it for just about two thousand years, now. But the point is, that the sacred rituals we engage in as a society, are meant to remind us of the nature and source of our moral worth as human beings; and the Christian institutions that were built up around those sacred rituals, were meant to reinforce that understanding, and give it structure in our daily lives. The form of our beliefs is an expression of the content of our beliefs.
+
+Which gets me back to the pot-clanking. We have largely abandoned the metaphysics and the theodicy of Christianity, and the expression of this abandonment is visible not simply in the decay of its institutions. It is present in the willy-nilly scramble now taking place, to find substitutes. This blind search is incredibly dangerous, because what we land on eventually, could be way worse than nothing at all. In the UK, at least, the NHS has clearly replaced the Anglican Church as the institution that adjudicates the question of to whom we owe our lives. The answer it gives, is the state healthcare system.
+
+The Brits, at least, have engaged in a grand equivocation beginning with the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Happiness is pleasure, and pleasure is derived from well-being, and well-being is meted out by the good graces of the state -- and the modern instantiation of this beneficence, is the NHS. In other words, they have equated *moral condition* with medical condition, and the NHS has gladly accepted the role of doling out both the necessary deliverance, and the concomitant redemption. To be free of disease, just is to be free of sin.
+
+This is powerfully dangerous stuff. One of the advantages of the Christian story, was that it was ultimately about reconciling power with love. God is great, so the story goes, not because he has the power to smite his enemies, or confer privileges on his friends, but precisely because he is willing to refrain from using that power, in an act of utterly selfless love for the sake of his creation.
+
+The new model does not do this. The state is great, precisely because it holds the power of life and death over us all. A power expressed in institutions like the NHS, precisely because we can no longer distinguish health from virtue. The religious impulse to purity, that is partially driving the willingness to obey the lockdown, would have found a home in things like confession and baptism in the Christian faith; and the religious impulse to sanctity, which would have found its expression in the ringing bells and hymns of the church service, in a spiritually healthier age, is now expressed in rituals like the pot-banging we do every week, in pious gratitude for the beneficence of the NHS.
+
+I for one, miss the church bells.

content/post/freedom-and-its-betrayal.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: "Freedom and Its Betrayal"
+date: 2020-03-29T15:55:08Z
+tags: ["freedom", "Rousseau", "enlightenment"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "isaiah-berlin|/img/isaiah-berlin.jpg|Isaiah Berlin" >}}
+
+The following is from Isaiah Berlin's book, "[Freedom and It's Betrayal](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Freedom-Its-Betrayal-Enemies-Liberty/dp/071266842X/)", wherein he has some very mean things to say about Rousseau ;)
+
+> *In theory Rousseau speaks like any other eighteenth-century philosophe, and says: ‘We must employ our reason.’ He uses deductive reasoning, sometimes very cogent, very lucid and extremely well-expressed, for reaching his conclusions. But in reality what happens is that this deductive reasoning is like a strait-jacket of logic which he claps upon the inner, burning, almost lunatic vision within; it is this extraordinary combination of the insane inner vision with the cold rigorous strait-jacket of a kind of Calvinistic logic which really gives his prose its powerful enchantment and its hypnotic effect. You appear to be reading logical argument which distinguishes between concepts and draws conclusions in a valid manner from premisses, when all the time something very violent is being said to you. A vision is being imposed on you; somebody is trying to dominate you by means of a very coherent, although often a very deranged, vision of life, to bind a spell, not to argue, despite the cool and collected way in which he appears to be talking. The inner vision is the mysterious assumption of the coincidence of authority and liberty. The coincidence itself derives from the fact that, in order to make men at once free and capable of living with each other in society, and of obeying the moral law, what you want is that men shall want only that which the moral law in fact enjoins. In short, the problem goes somewhat as follows. You want to give people unlimited liberty because otherwise they cease to be men; and yet at the same time you want them to live according to the rules. If they can be made to love the rules, then they will want the rules, not so much because the rules are rules as because they love them. If your problem is how a man shall be at once free and yet in chains, you say: ‘What if the chains are not imposed upon him? What if the chains are not something with which he is bound as by some external force? What if the chains are something he chooses himself because such a choice is an expression of his nature, something he generates from within him as an inner ideal? If this is what he above all wants in the world, then the chains are no longer chains.’ A man who is self-chained is not a prisoner. So Rousseau says: ‘Man is born free, and yet he is everywhere in chains.’ What sort of chains? If they are the chains of convention, if they are the chains of the tyrant, if they are the chains of other people who want to use you for their own ends, then these are indeed chains, and you must fight and you must struggle, and nothing must stand in the way of the great battle for individual self-assertion and freedom. But if the chains are chains of your own making, if the chains are simply the rules which you forge, with your own inner reason, or because of the grace which pours in while you lead the simple life, or because of the voice of conscience or the voice of God or the voice of nature, which are all referred to by Rousseau as if they were almost the same thing; if the chains are simply rules the very obedience to which is the most free, the strongest, most spontaneous expression of your own inner nature, then the chains no longer bind you – since self-control is not control. Self-control is freedom. In this way Rousseau gradually progresses towards the peculiar idea that what is wanted is men who want to be connected with each other in the way in which the State forcibly connects them.*
+

content/post/oakeshott-on-being-a-conservative.md

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+title: "Oakeshott on Being a Conservative"
+date: 2020-05-03T17:36:52Z
+tags: ["conservatism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "michael-oakeshott|/img/oakeshott.jpg|Michael Oakeshott" >}}
+
+Michael Oakeshott, "[On Being A Conservative]( https://andrebartholomeufernandes.com/on-being-conservative-by-michael-oakeshott/)" (Excerpts):
+
+------
+
+> "...[the general characteristics of the Conservative disposition] center upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, 'Verweile doch, du bist so schön', but Stay with me because I am attached to you.
+
+> If the present is arid, offering little or nothing to be used or enjoyed, then this inclination will be weak or absent; if the present is remarkably unsettled, it will display itself in a search for a firmer foothold and consequently in a recourse to and an exploration of the past; but it asserts itself characteristically when there is much to be enjoyed, and it will be strongest when this is combined with evident risk of loss. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss..."
+
+> "...To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances..."

content/post/pansychism-is-a-red-herring.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+title: "Pansychism Is a Red Herring"
+date: 2020-04-03T16:49:27Z
+tags: ["panpsychism", "theism", "consciousness"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "theology", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "panpsychic|/img/panpsychic.png|The Panpsychic" >}}
+
+As I've progressed in my study of physics and metaphysics over the last 5 years, I've gradually come to realize that we're all whistling through a kind of graveyard. I don't know when it began or who started it, exactly, but on thing is for sure: we really don't like thinking about it.
+
+What am I talking about?
+
+Well, the journey for me, really began (ironically) with the philosophy of science. You see, modern science is committed to a belief that the world is *explainable* all the way down (as the saying goes). In other words, there is an inherently intelligible order to nature that functions as the first major premise of every scientific argument: the world behaves according to reason. And, even if we cannot fully fathom the reasons for some particular phenomenon now, still *in principle* it is possible to discover them all eventually.
+
+Why is that important?
+
+Well, as I've mused about in the past, I have become convinced of a dichotomy in the way that we think about the universe. We have divorced ourselves from it, in order to concoct a story about a lifeless machine that was wound up like a clock and set into infinite motion at some point in the distant past by who knows what, but we are powerless to know now, and so, shouldn't bother to care. But this narrative relies entirely on that initial divorce. The fact of the matter is, the universe *is in some sense, intelligent and self-conscious*, because it contains intelligent, self-conscious beings. Namely us. But, before you accuse me of a genetic or composition fallacy, there is a deeper point here that needs to be made.
+
+For a time, I was taken by the idea of panpsychism. On first blush, it appears to offer an intriguing answer to the problem of consciousness as a property of reality. The variety of panpsychism that makes the most sense to the scientist is what I now (tongue in cheek) like to call "Berkeleyan Atomism" (because its not one big mind, but a gazillion tiny little minds). In a nutshell, this form of pan psychism argues for a kind of "proto-consciousness", as a somehow detectable property of all sub-atomic particles. The job of the scientist, is to devise some sort of test that would either confirm or deny the presence of said property. The theory once confirmed, would include an explanation for how all these elemental consciousnesses combine under the right circumstances to amount to an active human intelligence. This theory has the advantage of being almost entirely physicalist, following the model of particle physics for an explanation, and most importantly, pushes the God question back again, one more time.
+
+And that's really the point, here.
+
+Even if this version (or any version) of panpsychism were in fact true, it wouldn't answer the philosophical question. Which is, *why is it the case*, that the universe is in fact intelligent and intelligible, as opposed to simply being a lifeless clockwork? All panpsychism does, is offer a fascinating and entertaining story about how that intelligence is constituted into particular beings. It doesn't answer *why it's there at all* (in whatever form).
+
+This is why, for all my objections to his theory of Forms, I think Plato was more on-point than Aristotle when it comes to the fundamental "stuff" of reality. Berkeley, in his own way, understood this, too. And, in their own way, the panpsychists also understand this. But the difference between Berkeley and the panpsychists, is that the latter can't admit it to themselves.

content/post/philosophy-hypocrisy-and-failure.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: "Philosophy Hypocrisy and Failure"
+date: 2020-05-04T17:44:51Z
+tags: ["marx", "socialism", "intellectuals", "hypocrisy"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "the-school-of-athens|/img/school-of-athens.jpg|The School Of Athens" >}}
+
+A moment of synchronicity occurred for me, yesterday morning. A Twitter user I follow fairly closely, tweeted about the decrepit state of Karl Marx's character (borrowing from Paul Johnson's famous book, ["*Intellectuals*"](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intellectuals-Marx-Tolstoy-Sartre-Chomsky/dp/0061253170/) ), and argued that Marxists would all invariably turn out like him. At nearly the same time, one of my fellow philosophy students on the University of London student Facebook group posted an apocryphal story about how pedantic and brittle Wittgenstein was toward his hosts the Keynes, and implied that this was what it meant to be an analytical philosopher.
+
+I find these declarations fascinating. I remember once having similar thoughts about Ayn Rand. Her philosophy was very explicitly about living according to a blend of Kantian rule-following, and Aristotelian praxis virtues (although, I am certain she would object to this characterization). This would result in a life of ecstatic goodness and beauty, according to her. But, if you know anything about the following she gathered in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s, you'll know that the attempt to realize the dream quickly became a self-induced nightmare, and a predictable tragedy in many ways.
+
+My point here, is not simply to point the finger of *J'Accuse* at Rand, or even Marx. That's not really interesting. Rather, it is to ask the question: how do we know when a systematic philosophy is actually worth its salt? The examples I've brought up here, have smuggled in a basic assumption which I shall now make explicit: to what extent is the philosopher's *own life* evidence of the worthiness of his theoretical system?
+
+It is, admittedly difficult to completely separate Rand from her Objectivism, or Marx from his Communism -- or, for that matter, Plato from his Republic. Though Plato did not end up pursued by an angry mob at the end of his life (like Socrates or Aristotle), he did make a tragic attempt to install a philosopher-king tyrant in Syracuse. He was convinced by Dionysius I's brother-in-law Dion to train him as a philosopher-king, and to help him to usurp Dionysius II, who was politically weak. But the attempt ended in Dion's eventual banishment from Syracuse, and he was subsequently assassinated in 354, after attempting to invade Syracuse from his banishment post.
+
+There is an orthogonally similar question that has arisen a lot, in the 20th century. Namely, what "progress" does philosophy make? Scientists like to ask this question, because they can ostensibly point to all of the material comforts that are the fruit of 300 years of the Baconian scientific method, and engineering principles. The implication in this question, is the charge that, not only are philosophers failing to live their own doctrines successfully, they haven't even been able to show any successes in the way that broader society lives.
+
+This accusation raises a whole set of new questions, which I won't address here. The point I want to stress is simply that science is claiming to have a *method for adjudicating* the efficacy of systems of philosophy. They think they can tell us when a system of philosophy is valuable: *what has it produced, that has been of any use*? The standard of utility might seem like an obviously good one, initially, but it is a disastrously flawed one, once you start scratching the surface. Utility is determined by purpose, and purpose by values, and values by a process of introspection, negotiation, trial and error. In other words, by *philosophy*. So, they end up in a circular refutation of themselves. Still, the instinct to point to some empirical measure is a good one, I think. And, though I think the whole "well-being" rubric is a misguided one, there is still something like that, which I am referencing when I criticize either Objectivist or Marxist projects.
+
+Returning to the individual philosophers, it seems to me as well, that condemning a system of philosophy on the grounds that its inventor failed to live up to his own principles, is misguided -- at least, in part. Having matured to adulthood enough to be able to pen a system of philosophy (such as Plato's Republic, or Hegel's Dialectical Materialism, or Rand's Objectivism), requires having lived through decision-making that would likely be condemned by the system. Some obvious examples of this problem, might be the whole English theory of human rights. Having evolved over four centuries, beginning with Runnymede, is it really any wonder, that it wasn't until the American Civil War, that we were willing to completely accept that the principle applied to all men?
+
+So, when Jefferson wrote this in the Declaration of Independence, was he a hypocrite for also maintaining a stable of slaves? Perhaps. Probably, even. But the question here, again, is not whether we should condemn Jefferson for his hypocrisy. Rather, is whether it necessarily diminishes the validity of an ideal, that it's advocates were themselves unable to live up to it. The same goes for both Marx and Rand. Is American democracy a failure, because Jefferson kept slaves? Is Communism a failure, because Marx exploited his housekeeper? Is Objectivism a failure, because Rand's study group turned into a cult? All of these ideals could indeed be failures. But not for this reason, I think.
+
+Where does this leave us? If we can't condemn The Republic because Plato is easily manipulated by the powerful, and we can't condemn Communism because Marx was a lascivious ne'er-do-well -- but we also cannot condemn these systems entirely on empirical grounds, without appeal to some philosophical framework of epistemology and ethics that we're bound to accept in the process of making an evaluation -- it seems we have a conundrum on our hands.
+
+If you were looking for an answer to this conundrum, my apologies. This shower thought was mostly a ramble, rather than a sustained argument. But I hope it offered some good food for thought...

content/post/preparation-not-triage.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: "Preparation, Not Triage"
+date: 2020-04-07T17:20:19Z
+tags: ["pandemic", "lockdown", "emergencies"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics", "sociology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "masked-man|/img/masked-man.jpg|Masked Man" >}}
+
+It's been just over a month since my employer sent me home with my laptop and a headset, and just about three weeks since Boris told us all (in the UK) that we had no choice but to stay home.
+
+In that time, thousands have flocked online to start video channels, podcasts, and other collaborative projects. Many existing independent media producers have shifted their content, and now talk almost entirely on topics related to the quarantine and the virus.
+
+Meanwhile, I have plodded along at roughly the same pace (although, admittedly, slightly accelerated), producing exactly the same philosophy content I've always produced, without even so much as a hint of a face mask. Why have I not bothered to discuss Coronavirus, China, bat soup, the quarantine, totalitarian lockdowns, toilet paper, or any of the other tangentially related topics? Why have I not tried to offer some palliative "angle" from Stoicism, or Existentialism, or Platonism, or Christianity?
+
+Good question. Setting aside the obvious (that I'm letting a good crisis go to waste), the more fundamental answer, albeit argued from analogy, is that philosophy is not medicine - it is nutrition. Once you've gotten to the point of liver failure, counseling you on temperance would be ineffectual at best, churlish at worst. That is where we are now, as a society. What is needed is heavy medicine and field triage hospitals. That is not what I offer, and I cannot pretend to offer it. Being of sound mind is absolutely an asset in this environment, to be sure. But you get to a state of soundness, not by ingesting an emergency Epictetamol pill, or getting a quick needle jab of Existenticilin, but by exercising the mind regularly, through reading, introspection and discussion, in preparation for times when a level head is necessary.
+
+Though Plato's ultimate conclusions were disastrously wrong, his instinct was bang-on: a political class well versed in philosophy, art, literature, and science, and politicians well equipped with a capacity to reason well and use rhetoric effectively, is essential to any healthy society. Still, all the wise philosopher can do, is make those resources available. The political class must be of decent enough character to begin with, in order to want to avail themselves of it. It cannot be forced. This was Aristotle's insight. No amount of grousing and screaming by philosophers from twitter is going to transform Donald Trump into Cincinnatus, or Joe Biden into Marcus Aurelius, and no think piece in the NY Times is going to be able to offer sufficient consolation for the situation we find ourselves in now -- except, perhaps, to suggest that, if and when we find ourselves out of this situation, we ought to pay more attention to philosophy...
+
+But, perhaps I'm being to hopeful...

content/post/sentience-as-a-moral-ground.md

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: "Sentience as a Moral Ground"
+date: 2020-05-08T17:54:58Z
+tags: ["sentience", "moral worth", "justice"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "sentience|/img/sentience.jpg|Sentience" >}}
+
+In a [Psychology Today interview posted today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/science-and-philosophy/202005/is-harming-animals-ever-justifiable), Stevan Harnad has this to say, in response to criticisms over his equating The Holocaust with animal slaughter. I'm going to set aside his All Capital Letters Defense Of His "Eternal Treblinka", and instead, focus on his argument defending "sentience", which as we'll see, is only barely an argument:
+
+>  ...The Holocaust is Humanity’s Greatest Crime Against Humanity. But the Eternal Treblinka we inflict on animals is Humanity’s Greatest Crime. The difference is obvious: Jews were slaughtered because they were Jews; animals are slaughtered for the taste. For the victims, it makes no difference.
+
+> Slaughtering humans is illegal, most humans would never do it, and most are against it. Slaughtering animals is legal and most humans support and sustain it. The only basis for moral status is sentience (the capacity to feel). It is morally unjustifiable to cause harm except in the case of conflict of vital (life or death) necessity for survival. The horrors that humans inflict on animals today are not inflicted out of life or death necessity. Their motivation is not Darwinian but hedonic.
+
+> Sentience can never be “proved,” even in humans, because of the “other minds problem.” Some of the research on sentience is to provide evidence that animals are sentient, i.e., that they can feel. But most scientists already know, from the evidence, that all vertebrates and probably all invertebrates can feel. The research on sentience is about what they can feel and do.
+
+> Whether organisms can feel, only becomes a genuine scientific question in simple organisms that lack any nervous system, such as microbes and plants...
+
+------
+
+There are really only two statements of philosophical import in this entire passage, and they come one right after the other:
+
+> "...The only basis for moral status is sentience (the capacity to feel). It is morally unjustifiable to cause harm except in the case of conflict of vital (life or death) necessity for survival..."
+
+For the uninitiated, having a "moral status" just means that judgments of write and wrong, and good and bad, would reasonably apply to people who act in any way toward anything with it. So, for example, rocks have no "moral status", and therefore, judging people for bashing rocks is unreasonable.
+
+But the interesting question here, is two-fold. First, why should having the capacity to feel grant one "moral status"? What about the capacity to fly, or the capacity to breath underwater? Or the capacity to regenerate limbs, or even, to reason? Why are any of these properties ruled out, but sensation is not? It's the same problem Everyone who studies ethics long enough has: how do you cross the fact-value chasm? The fact that animals and men both have sensations isn't enough. Harnad never addresses this. He just asserts it.
+
+Second, Harnad goes a step even further than this. He says not simply that sensation is what grants "moral status", but that it is the *only* property that grants "moral status". Ruling out the possibility that reason or flight, or liquid respiration could *ever be considered a candidate* for "moral status". How is that the case? On this standard, there can be no hierarchy of values. A mollusk would have roughly the same "moral status" as a kitten or an elderly woman or your daughter. Even if we were to concede a "harm principle" ethic, there is no reason why we should have to accept Bentham's dictum of equal value for all. Harnad never defends this. He just asserts it.
+
+Third, it is ironic that Harnad should defend a moral principle grounded in pain (which is what he means by "harm". He slides between the two fluidly, in the interview), but then condemns men for consuming animals for "hedonic" reasons. Even if we accept that hedonism is "bad", and that our motivations are purely hedonic, it remains an open question why my pleasure oughtn't come at the expense of the cow, because he hasn't justified why I should think that moral value could only ever be distributed absolutely equally amongst "feeling" beings.
+
+One objection that would be leveled immediately by either of the two in this interview, is that I should read Harnad's work, for the answers to all my questions. But, of course, for anyone who's put any effort into studying ethics, the "harm" arguments are already quite well known, and he hasn't offered anything here to indicate that he diverges from them in substance. The question of to whom, and how much of my energy I am going to devote to study, hinges largely on them saying something I hadn't already heard before.
+
+But the bigger problem, is that almost nobody in the general public *has* devoted a great deal of time to the study of ethics. So, articles like this one, published in venues read by casual laymen, have the effect of intimidating people into silence, or functioning as an argument from authority for those who already hold a strong similar position. It's not clear what the solution to this problem is, except to say that we need to work on getting people skilled at critical thinking.
+
+I realize I've drifted far afield from the original focus of this post. So, I'll just bring it to a close here by saying that I don't discourage you from reading Harnad (if he's even got a popular volume available). But just to read folks like this carefully.

content/post/the-barometer-of-the-soul.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: "The Barometer of the Soul"
+date: 2020-03-31T16:06:35Z
+tags: ["aesthetics", "music", "art"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "musicians|/img/musicians.jpg|The Musicians" >}}
+
+When I was in my twenties, I loved listening to great performances of the Tchaikovsky, Bartok, and Mendelssohn violin concerti. I was captivated by the pathos of the music, and admired the passion and athleticism of the artists performing them. Conversely, I used to dread, as a choir singer, the plodding, predictable clockwork of the baroque masters: Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.
+
+Now, I am in my mid-fifties, and the tables have turned. Whenever I listen to the Bartok or the Mendelssohn, all I can hear are braying donkeys and the screeching trucks of a subway train. Likewise, in the choir which I now participate, I absolutely relish the baroque works. They seem both more textured and intellectually complex than the Romantics, but also more soothing and introspective.
+
+I can't quite put my finger on what this shift in aesthetic preference signifies. But I have some ideas. Romantic era art tends toward the liberation of the self, the veneration of nature, and toward grand political aspirations. Examples of this abound. But we need look no further than Beethoven's 9th symphony and the poetry of Schiller which inspired it. Much of this music is meant to evoke a kind of yearning beyond the self; something of which only unbounded self-expression is the means to attain it. Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky were, in their own way, beckoning toward the twentieth century, where personal, social, and political aspirations would all merge into one great technological orgasm of human perfection.
+
+This, it seems to me, is at the heart of why Romantic era music would appeal to the young (even if only, this young person). At that age, the highest value is self-assertion, and the satisfaction of desire. Spiritual longing is inextricably bound up in the physicality of maturation to adulthood, and to such a person, the passions are evidence of the soul's health. For as humanistic as Romantic era music is, therefore, it is also highly religious (though, I would never have admitted it in my twenties).
+
+Baroque era art, on the other hand, tends toward the methodical perfection of an already well-ordered system. The artist's task is to find creative and expressive ways to exploit the perfections of the system, for the benefit of all. Baroque era music is in some sense extremely Greek (in the philosophical sense), in addition to being explicitly liturgical. It is mathematically precise, and is often laden with layers of textured meaning in the form of subtle numerological and biblical references. The idea of this music is to put you in a *state of mind*, rather than provoke a passion (although it can sometimes do that, too).
+
+In a world awash with chaotic influences, and where most of my youthful passions have indeed subsided, the music of the Baroque just "makes more sense" to me, now. It is difficult to put into words, which is why I have found myself appealing to metaphors like donkeys. But this is really the beauty in art forms like music. They are a language expressing notions of experience that, it turns out, cannot be fully captured by the low-resolution medium of words alone.

content/post/the-choice-of-pilate.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: "The Choice of Pilate"
+date: 2020-04-06T17:11:06Z
+tags: ["jesus", "pilate", "belief", "choice"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "theology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "jesus-and-pilate|/img/pilate-and-jesus.jpg|Jesus Faces Pilate" >}}
+
+The story of Christ's betrayal and crucifixion involves the Roman empire. The fifth presiding governor over the territory of Judea incorporating the Hebrew tribes, was Pontius Pilate. Pilate is often quoted in undergraduate philosophy for asking Christ, "what is truth?". He's also often cited in pastoral homilies for his choice to "wash his hands" of the guilt of Christ's crucifixion.
+
+For most, this is thought to be the central moment of choice in the Pilate story. Does he give Jesus over to the crowd, or does he risk a riot to spare him? But I think this is only half the story. You see, Pilate had another choice to make. One much more momentous, and one that made his hand-washing inevitable, once he took it.
+
+Pilate was not an especially evil or vicious man. He had an intuitive sensitivity to justice and seemed to be able to sense the goodness in Jesus. That said, Pilate's loyalties were already set. He was a servant of Tiberius, and a loyal Roman. And this is where I think the real choice is made by Pilate.
+
+At the last supper, Christ tells his disciples that one of them will betray him. When it came round to Judas, he asks, "Is it I, Rabbi?", and Jesus responds, "So, say you." This is important, because what Jesus is telling Judas, is that his question betrayed the confession already written on his heart. Judas put it into the form of a dishonest question.
+
+Fast forward to Jesus' interview with Pilate. Pilate asks him, "Are you the King of the Jews", and Jesus' response is: "So, say you". This time, the dishonest question revealed not Pilate's tacit knowledge of a fact about Jesus' status. But, rather, the knowledge of the choice that he would face, if he would honestly explore the question of who Jesus really is. Pilate already has his master, and taking Jesus seriously would ultimately mean breaking that oath. This is the choice Pilate faces.
+
+Even as a purely secular matter, this is an active issue for Pilate, and this gets us back to the washing of hands. Pilate recognizes that there is something profoundly good about this Jesus, and that the crowd is about to commit an incredible injustice in their zeal. With the choice to not take Jesus seriously, and to refuse to consider the possibility that he actually is the Christ (wherever that consideration led him), Pilate freed himself to shirk the responsibility for choosing the man's fate (would that it was his, to begin with; Christ's fate was already a matter of God's will... but that is a different topic).
+
+There are several places in the Bible where Jesus warns us that we cannot serve many masters. Pilate is the final exemplar of this maxim, and the archetypal warning to us all of the choice we face, if we are to actually believe.

content/post/the-dysfunctional-self-dichotomy.md

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+---
+title: "The Dysfunctional Self Dichotomy"
+date: 2020-03-17T15:10:25Z
+tags: []
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "dichotomous-self|/img/dichotomous-self.jpg|Competing False Selves" >}}
+
+The world today seems divided into two camps: those seeking self-satisfaction, and those seeking self-denial. I think both of these attitudes toward life are mistaken, but an inevitable reaction to the evacuation of virtue from the center of our moral lives.
+
+The **self-satisfaction seekers** are those who have elevated into the place of virtue, a kind of incontinent pleasure drawn from the unimpeded exercise of the will. These people valorize freedom, only insofar as it serves the satisfaction of the self, whatever that happens to be in the moment. Freedom, for them, is liberation of the will. The post-modern impulse to deny the reality of history, of culture, and even of biology, all center around a disconnected will that longs to spread itself over existence like a blanket.
+
+The **self-denial seekers** are those who elevate asceticism and want as a kind of masochistic pleasure, in place of virtue. These folks valorize such things as responsibility and duty, only insofar as it serves to frustrate any self-expression. Freedom, for them, is dissipation and self-indulgence, and therefore must be subordinated to some other practical virtue like duty. The post-modern impulse to demand conformity and exact revenge, while outward-directed, are demonstrations to the self, of what it must obey.
+
+I have long held the belief that moral self-justification is the engine of the world. Nobody does what they do thinking to themselves "this is the wrong thing, so I should do it", or desiring to do wrong for its own sake. Both of these varieties of people yearn to know that they are good, and lacking any method for determining it, they substitute distorted notions of pleasure into the place of prominence that belongs to virtue.

content/post/the-identity-metastasis-machine.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: "The Identity Metastasis Machine"
+date: 2020-04-01T16:36:13Z
+tags: ["social media", "narcissism", "social contagion"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "sociology", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "the-schizophrene|/img/schizophrene.jpg|The Schizophrene" >}}
+
+When I was a boy in middle and high school, there were lots of other kids who, during one year were stoners, and the next, were computer nerds; one year were jocks, and the next, were stoners; one year were D&D geeks, and the next, were into cars. This is as it should be. Your tween/teen years should be fluid. They should be a point in time in your life, when you experiment and play with different ways of being. They should be an opportunity to determine what kind of person you want to be when you're done with your teens.
+
+At the risk of outing myself as one of those elderly curmudgeons who complains about "kids these days", there is something else rather important about when I grew up in the 1970's and 1980's. Namely, there was no internet, and of course, no social media. The only place one could "broadcast" an "identity", was within one's own circle of friends, or at most, through the A/V club or drama class, where one might earn a reputation throughout the school. Changing schools was basically akin to the witness protection program. Nobody knew who you were, and you could become anyone you wanted to be. When you finally left school and went to work, all your childhood hijinks disappeared in the vapor of old memories, and that was that. In other words, the cost of experimenting was very low.
+
+I am profoundly grateful that the internet did not exist when I was a tween/teen. It afforded me the freedom to fuck up, without the need to apologize to the entirety of western society for it. It suffered me the patience and tolerance to pass through periods of ignorance, prejudice and helpless rage without having to worry about the real human damage my naive and ill-conceived outbursts and attitudes might have on an entire planet watching me. What's more, it gave me the elbow room to shape a personality that offered me many social opportunities and challenges, but left me comfortable in my own skin. There was no public expectation of linear success, or that I was having a consistently interesting and fulfilling existence. I could be boring and annoying sometimes, and it didn't matter.
+
+None of this is true anymore. Today, children are more plugged in than ever before. From the age of 5 or 6 years old, children are the constant target of a globe-spanning competition for their attention, and their loyalty. They are pushed and pulled by social forces far beyond anything anyone my age would ever have been expected to cope with. And, increasingly, they are expected to present a public face that even the most seasoned professional entertainers would have a hard time maintaining. Along with this, they are expected to already be absolutely certain about who and what they are, and to present that identity consistently, on threat of a kind of social ostracism that wasn't possible 25 years ago.
+
+Many young people have stridently and very publicly committed themselves to radical causes, and fringe belief systems, in the past. But most of these folks have had the luxury of abandoning their rashness, when the business of living an actually productive life became the priority. But today, as soon as you have a strong opinion, the first thing to do is to get on Instagram, Snapchat, or Youtube, and proclaim it to the world. And as soon as you do that, large groups of like-minded consumers of social media, and serious social and political organizations swoop in like vultures to outfit you with the scaffolding required to prevent you from ever again changing your opinion on the matter. This is especially pronounced in the area of gender and race today, but it could easily apply to any topic of broader social interest. Any attempt to explore a significant question, and to express an opinion about it, makes you a candidate for recruitment and regimentation into an army of believers. What kind of human being am I? What are my values? What is my attitude toward life? Who should I love, and how? What should I spend my efforts on? All questions that would have been personal philosophical conundrums, open to exploration and experimentation, are now political choices, in which any vacillation is viewed as tantamount to treason.
+
+I was particularly struck by one young Youtuber (left anonymous here, on purpose). This girl says she is seventeen, in the video I watched. In it, she insists that she is now a 'boy', and that everyone is a transphobe, but just doesn't realize that they are. Maybe this is true, maybe not. But, what's going to happen if, in her senior year of high school, she decides she's "not into trans anymore"? In effect, she cannot do this, now. The internet will see to that. She will be forced to reckon with a passing juvenile attitude about life for pretty much the rest of her life. The choice she has made to select this particular set of prejudices as the ones she exposed to the internet, means that this is the set of prejudices she will have to either apologize for, or double down on, for the rest of her life. Is this really the world we want to live in?
+
+I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle. I don't even think we should, necessarily, try to. But I have to admit a lack of optimism (and perhaps a lack of imagination), when it comes to thinking about what this means for human social evolution.

content/post/the-meaning-of-christmas.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: "The Meaning of Christmas"
+date: 2020-03-24T15:39:06Z
+tags: ["christmas", "parmenides"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "theology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "christmas-meaning|/img/the-promise-of-christmas.jpg|The Promise Of Christmas" >}}
+
+If you live in the west for any serious length of time, you become familiar with the story: Mary has an audience with an angel, who tells her she is to become a mother. God visits her, and pronounces her the mother of the Son Of God. She and her oddly accepting husband Joseph head off into the desert to be counted in Bethlehem, where the boy is born in a manger, and proclaimed the savior of the world.
+
+If you’re an atheist of the modern stripe, then you’ll also be familiar with the common objections to this: comparisons to gods in similar myth traditions, comparisons to stories of Caesar Augustus’ birth, and empirical questions like, “can a woman become pregnant without being inseminated?”
+
+But asking the empirical and comparative questions is missing the point of this myth (if it is one). The point of Mary’s virginity is not one of Jesus' moral purity or his lineage, or even its miraculousness (which is what most of these ancient myths are about). Rather, it is an important component of the Christian understanding of reality. Jesus (at least for the Catholic Christian), is the embodied center of both a redemption theodicy, and a metaphysic. The Christmas story is a mytho-poetic attempt to answer the famous Parmenides problem (even though the ancient Hebrews would not have understood it in those terms). Let me briefly try to explain.
+
+On the one hand, you have God. According to Catholic catechesis, God is not just “a being”, like a tree, or a planet, or a really powerful alien. God is being itself. God is the word we put on infinite, unchanging perfection. On the other hand, you have creaturely existence. Finite, constantly changing, and by implication, ultimately imperfect. This dichotomy poses a problem. How do infinite perfection and finite imperfection connect? To put it more simply (and to borrow Parmenides’ language): How could God possibly know about us, and how could we possibly know about him?
+
+Mary is the vessel within which the finite and the infinite come together. Christ, according to the Catholics again, is the co-extension of the divine perfection of being as such, and the vulgar finitude of humanity in particular. This is why they say he is not a hybrid but both fully human and fully divine.
+
+To take this a step further, if we also take God to be some sort of divine intelligence, as is implied in the language of Genesis and the opening of the gospel John, and we want to continue to assert God’s perfection, then the Christ myth solves another problem. If God does not know his own creation (from the Parmenides problem above), then he is imperfect. But the knowledge he’d be missing is not in the sense of objects of his will. Rather, it would be to know it as a subject of creation. The life of Christ would give God access to the subjective experience of a finite being’s birth, maturation, suffering, and death. And, it is in this form of knowing, that we find the theodicy of redemption. But that’s a story for another time.

content/post/the-motherhood-pandemic.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: "The Motherhood Pandemic"
+date: 2020-04-02T16:43:47Z
+tags: ["feminism", "intersectionalism", "anti-realism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "Sociology", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "mother-nature|/img/motherhood.jpg|The Nature of Mothering" >}}
+
+The rational self-aware consciousness has equipped the human ape with a profoundly effective shield against the vagaries of natural insults against mammalian biology such as exposure to the elements, biological parasites, disease, and hunger. We are able to conceive of and build shelters and beds; imagine and create clothing, armor, and tools. And, now, we are able to engineer the effects of biology itself, to defend against bacteria and viruses.
+
+But, this impulse to escape the cruel bonds of mother nature, has taken us to heights we never imagined possible, say, a thousand years ago. Having harnessed electricity, coal, and oil, we have constructed for ourselves a world in which there are almost no fetters left. The consequence of the industrial revolution, is that virtually all agricultural and domestic tasks have been relegated to the workings of various pieces of machinery; and, the advent of the bio-sciences has resulted in near-liberation from the mammalian burdens of siring and rearing offspring.
+
+I say near-liberation, because it is the one thing we actually cannot escape as biological creatures. Someone has to make the babies, and then *raise them* .
+
+It is in this context, that we arrive at our present social condition, in the west. Since the turn of the last century, the typical answer to the challenge just raised has been, 'well, then, let it be someone else'. But liberation movements like feminism have never been wholly satisfied with that answer. For those who see the human race as a kind of collective super-organism, liberation is never complete until every atom of this oppressed super-organism is liberated. That includes liberation from procreation.
+
+But, this has actually given rise to a fascinating distinction. Feminist ideology does not oppose the biological function of baby-making, per se. What they oppose is *motherhood*, as a consequence of that activity. The former is, for them, a liberatory behavior. The latter, an oppression imposed by either nature or society. For the feminist, pregnancy is a sort of benign physical disfigurement resulting from the pleasurable activity of sex, that - if left untreated - will metastasize into the full-blown disease of *motherhood*.
+
+And you can see this attitude beginning to permeate the broader culture, today. Rather than venerated for accepting the duty, motherhood, in its various forms, is treated as something for which the individual *afflicted* ought to be pitied and sympathized. Pregnancy is an illness, and motherhood is its expression as a *chronic syndrome*, made worse by the normalization of a "patriarchal culture", whereas, like any disease, the goal should be to eradicate it.
+
+The implications of this, for our species as a whole, should be readily apparent. And this gets us back to that rational, self-aware consciousness. Taken to its extremes, it seems this feature of human biology is the one thing that is both the source of our greatest success, and potentially, our ultimate doom. The feeling of escape from the limitations of physical form that the mind provides us, likewise equips us with a desire to seek that escape in ever-expanding ways. The final stage of that search, could actually end us as a life-form.

content/post/the-origin-of-causality.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: "The Origin of Causality"
+date: 2020-03-06T14:58:00Z
+tags: ["causality", "change", "order", "metaphysics"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+Why does causality work? (OR: What is change?) Modern physics offers a powerfully sophisticated description of the behaviour of matter, including extremely complex maths that gives us highly reliable predictive power.
+
+But, when you peel back the layers of that onion, what you find are wispy metaphors and "placeholder" terms at the core. The most popular, of course, are the terms "energy" and "force". But, what is that? The common example of billiard balls provides a good illustration. Setting aside how the motion came to be in the first place, for discussion's sake, imagine that one ball strikes another. The other ball, of course, itself begins to move. Physics calls this a transference of kinetic energy, but all this means in plain terms, is that ball A gave ball B the ability to do the work of motion.
+
+What I want to know, is not how that transfer took place. There's plenty of science available to explain that. What I want to know, is *what was transferred*? Conceptual tags are not enough. Aristotle posited a layer of metaphysical reality called "Prime Matter" (or "substrate" in some translations), that is the undifferentiated foam of reality, out of which all change is possible. He may be right about that, if we equivocate that with the Quantum "foam". But the question remains: what is in that foam, that motivates the world (whether in local cases, like the billiard balls, or in the global sense of 'change' itself)?
+
+This is where we step off the precipice.
+
+If you're a materialist or a scientist, you'll probably want to say there is no question to ask, here. That the properties of reality just are, and that's all. If that includes change, then so be it. If you are an idealist of the Berkeley variety, you'll want to say that the capacity for continuous change is just the reality of God's mind in motion. The Aristotelian doesn't go quite as far as Berkeley, but still would argue that God is the arche of all change, continuously across time. The "Prime Mover" is prime, in the sense of being "at the bottom of things", rather than just "at the beginning of it all".
+
+It's difficult to imagine a third option, here. On the one hand, we're forced to accept an axiomatic irrationality at the core of reality, because if the source of change cannot be explained, then it's irrational by definition. On the other hand, we're compelled to adopt what is essentially a mystical truth, in an immaterial power that imbues reality with its motive force. However, this mystery is one that leaves open the possibility of a rational explanation, if we accept the first step.
+
+That's a giant if.

content/post/three-approaches-to-the-problem-of-desire.md

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+---
+title: "Approaches to the Problem of Desire"
+date: 2020-03-05T14:45:01Z
+tags: ["desire", "buddhism", "hedonism", "aristotle"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+It seems to me, that the problem of desire has three plausible attitudinal responses:
+
+1. The hedonic approach: there is a never-ending supply of desirable things, and life is best lived by pursuing them all. Want is sated when all desirable things have been had. The goal, then, is pleasure at all times, as an equivalent to happiness.
+
+2. The ascetic / Buddhist approach: the things to be desired are never-ending, which means there will never be a time when all desirable things are had. This means that want will never cease, and that leads to suffering. The goal then, is to rid ourselves of desire, and in so doing, free ourselves of the anchor of the body, which impedes the pursuit of true happiness.
+
+3. The Aristotelian approach: The things to be desired are those things that contribute to the actualization of excellence. Desire is neither a good in itself, nor an evil in itself. It is a habit to be mastered. The goal, is to want the right things, at the right times, in the right way, and for the right reasons. Knowing what those are, requires an effort of mastery, and the tutelage of a mentor. Happiness is achieved in looking back on that work, and finding it excellent.
+
+The Aristotelian approach is by far the most complex and difficult to understand. But it is the most appealing. The rub is in how we come to know what the good is, and what actualized excellence is. The entire discipline of moral philosophy has spent millennia pondering just that problem. The fact that we still do not have a confident answer to these questions is not evidence that they cannot be answered. Rather, they are evidence of just how hard it is, to answer questions of this nature. In the meantime, we work with the clay we've been given...

content/post/three-kinds-of-philosophers.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+title: "Three Kinds of Philosophers"
+date: 2020-03-30T16:02:02Z
+tags: []
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "three-philosophers|/img/three-philosophers.jpg|Three Philosophers" >}}
+
+I have been thinking a bit about what a philosopher is, and in the tradition of Aristotle, have naturally been drawn to try to categorize them. It seems to me that there are three distinct roles for philosophy: Analysis, Interpretation, and Speculation.
+
+The analytical philosopher is driven, as Simon Blackburn describes, to "give an account" of the universe and our experience of it - to reduce it, or explain it in simpler, more precise, or more fundamental terms. He is a reductionist, at heart. Examples: Descartes, Russell, Freud, Quine, and Aquinas.
+
+The Interpretive Philosopher is the opposite of the analyst. He is driven to synthesize understanding, from the component parts provided to him, by the analyst. He offers new ways of experiencing old phenomenon, orthogonal perspectives, or a broader view of our experience of reality. Examples: Spinoza, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Augustine.
+
+The Speculative Philosopher is the fiction writer. He uses what the other two provide, but goes beyond them both, imagining the implications of their work, and imagining worlds not yet even encountered or conceived by them. Examples: Voltaire, Rousseau, Huxley, David Lewis, Philip K. Dick, Dante.
+
+It is often complained (by mainstream science, mostly, these days) that "philosophy makes no progress". Many philosophers have attempted to attack this charge directly, providing justifications and explanations of "progress" in philosophy. I think this is a mistake.
+
+Think of philosophy as gold panning, and the three kinds of philosophers as different kinds of gold panners. Their job is not to "make progress" in the field of speculating. It is simply to sift through as much of the earth as they possibly can, to find gold nuggets. They search the hills, the wilderness, and the running streams, using a variety of simple tools (for, simple tools are really the only good ones, in this endeavor), and when they find gold, they store it up and then convert it into something even more valuable: capital for projects.
+
+Philosophy is sometimes described as a "stellar nursery" or "seed bed" for the sciences. This is only partially correct. The sciences are indeed projects that have arisen out of the capital store of philosophy. But a better way to see them, is as carrying on aspects of the tradition of philosophy. Going back to the metaphor: the projects are an extension of the panning efforts, and not just effects of them. If there were no projects, the accumulated capital would just be sitting fallow. If there were no panning, there would be no projects extending the work.
+
+In the end, the goal of philosophy is not just knowledge, but understanding (aka 'wisdom'). The sciences provide only one aspect of that endeavor. Philosophy provides the raw materials, the capital, and a simple set of tools. Science uses those to extend in one direction (fact). Religion used to extend in the complementary direction (value). But this has largely been abandoned or ignored, in modern times. In the west, we have relinquished the quest almost entirely. In the east, they have calcified around ancient dogmas that no longer serve the good, but tribal politics instead.
+
+At times, both science and philosophy have tried to fill the gap vacated by religion. Both have failed, I think (though, at least philosophy made a conscious effort, with the tools available). Some (like Hitchens) have suggested handing the task off to classical literature. This is like asking a dead woman to marry you. No, there needs to be some sort of revival of religious life. But it needs to take into account both philosophy and science, if it is to succeed. The three need each other.

content/post/three-views-of-truth.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+title: "Three Views of Truth"
+date: 2020-03-07T15:02:04Z
+tags: ["truth", "metaphysics", "meaning", "logic"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "truth-meanings|/img/meanings.jpg|Truth and Meaning In Language" >}}
+
+I think there is a lack of subtlety in the modern debate around meaning and truth. People struggle with ham-fisted dichotomies and adversarial arguments that never go anywhere, because of this low resolution notion of meaning. I want to suggest that we think of meaning in three different ways, and that each of them has a context and a scope that is appropriate to that distinction.
+
+### VALENCE
+
+Valence is the truth value of a proposition. You may disagree with this (and we can certainly debate it), but I take the metaphysical realist position that truth is necessarily bivalent. Which is to say, I take Dummett's argument that realism necessarily entails that propositions are - and can only be - true or false. Whether that truth value can be assigned on the basis of "evidence transcendent" means is also a debate for another time. Suffice to say here, that I am committed to both 'rational' (a priori) truth, and 'sensible' (a posteriori) truth, and I think we can indeed call our awareness of those valences 'knowledge' of the truth. All of this demands a great deal more explication. But the point here, is just to briefly identify and define the first form of meaning.
+
+### INDEXICAL / INDICATIVE
+
+Indexical/indicative meaning is the substantive content of words and statements. It amounts to those objects of thought and experience to which parts of speech refer, regardless of the valence assigned to the statements. A statement need not have a positive valence (need not be true) in order for its individual terms to have meaningful referents in context. The present king of France may or may not exist, and he may or may not be bald. Still, we all understand the words constituting the statement. If we did not, assignment of valence would be impossible. On this point, at least, the positivists were right. Statements that assign a valence to statements may be indeterminate at some point in time, but they can never be indeterminable in principle. This is a special case indicative, which is the only instance of the valence form of meaning within the indexical form.
+
+### SIGNIFICANCE
+
+Meanings of the significance class fall into two sub-categories: normative, and imperative. They are the meanings of "practical reasoning". NORMATIVE: this form of meaning is the kind in which statments carry qualitative judgments, whether aesthetic or moral. This form of meaning seems orthogonal to factitious truth, and appears to be multi-valent, as opposed to binary. This is another question that must be left unfinished here. Can a judgment of 'good' or 'bad' be assigned a truth value? I would again argue yes, on the ground of moral realism, but a defense of this position will have to wait. IMPERATIVE: This form of meaning is one in which statements carry calls to action, either implicit or explicit, as opposed to assertions about objects. The epic of Theseus, the Ten Commandments, your student handbook, and shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, all have imperative significance. They are also, to varying degrees, capable of bearing indexical meaning (by implication). However, like normative statements, they are less amenable to assignments of valence.
+
+Some will argue that meanings of significance are not meanings at all, if they cannot all be necessarily assigned both complete indexical values, and a definite valence (this is the strong positivist position). I think this is a mistake. To begin with, just because we struggle to assign meanings (of any type), does not mean it is impossible in principle. Second, the indexical and valence values may be difficult to determine because - as in the case of moral judgment - we simply haven't invented a satisfactory theory and methodology for doing so yet. Lastly, from a common sense empirical standpoint, its just obvious from the way people respond to statements of significance, that the meaning is real. It is our task, as philosophers, to figure out how and why.
+
+One last point on this topic: while there are connective threads running through all three of these categories of meaning that suggests a kind of hierarchy or dependence relation, it is not my intent to suggest that all meaning can ultimately be reduced to a valence assignment. Instead, while some meaning can be reduced, what I mean to suggest is that statements must be analyzed at the level that satisfies our need for an explanation (explanation being another concept I will have to address at another time). So, some statements may depend on valence, but will not be intelligible without an indexical or a significance analysis. And, of course, as I've already mentioned, several forms of statements of significance cannot be analyzed at the level of valence in any case.
+

content/post/toleration-and-free-association.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: "Toleration and Free Association"
+date: 2020-03-22T15:26:53Z
+tags: ["toleration", "liberty", "illiberalism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+Regarding an issue raised in the [Dave Rubin Yasmine Mohammed interview](https://rubinreport.com/post/39280/yasmine-mohammed-full-interview):
+
+One particular point raised by Dave sticks out for me. He asks a few times, whether "liberalism is too soft" on radical ideologies nestled within the boundaries of its political realms. The question is never really engaged directly. But indirectly, there are many points in this interview in which toleration of illiberalism is called into question, as a general policy (either social or legal). This is something that should really be considered carefully, and not just left by the side of the road, as we move on to other things.
+
+It seems a paradox, that the liberal commitment to liberty obligates liberal states to refraining from interfering in the internal activities of illiberal citizens (and the groups they form to promote their goals and interests) within its jurisdiction. Or, at least, obligates it with a burden of justification, at moments when it does wish to violate the principle of liberty, in order to intervene.
+
+It is the latter thought, that is interesting. It suggests that there is actually no paradox here. Instead, it points to a possible confusion over what the highest valued principle is, in a liberal state. To say that there could be a justification for violating the liberty principle, is to say that there is an appeal available to something more important than liberty. What principle would adjudicate over the suspension of the principle of liberty? Whatever that is, would become the top of the value hierarchy for liberals.
+
+There have been numerous suggestions over the last two centuries. Mill's Harm Principle is probably the most famous. Roughly, that the state is only justified in interfering when a harm has taken place, defined as anything that might impede the pursuit of happiness, or slightly more concretely, as anything that might do damage to an interest. The problem with this standard, is two-fold. First, it's paternalistic. It does worse than just subordinate liberty. It opposes it, in favor of something like "protection" or "security". Second, it is notoriously vague. Depending on how such things as "interests" and the "pursuit of happiness" are defined, it could license government intervention into just about every aspect of one's life. This would also obliterate any distinction between individuals and the groups to which they belong. And, what's more, where this principle has been applied legally in the west, we can see that the wanton application of this license has been disastrous at times.
+
+Another possibility, is to be found in the principle of free association. This principle has two advantages. First, it is consistent with the principle of liberty - individuals should be free to associate with whomever they like. Second, it offers a possibility of being practicably enforced by courts. Essentially, the principle of free association would permit illiberal practices of a wide variety are to be tolerated in a liberal state, only insofar as membership in the illiberal group is shown to be fully voluntary. Toleration then hinges on what is meant by a ‘voluntary’ association. Brian Barry argues that the voluntariness of an association can be gauged by the kinds of costs that are incurred by the member of a group at the point he is separated from it. Would an organization be imposing and excessive cost on an individual by ending its relationship with him? So, the issue is one of costs of disassociation. Barry clusters costs into three categories: Intrinsic, Associative, and External. The first category would include such things as the threat of damnation on an excommunication by the Catholic church. The state cannot and should not do anything to ameliorate this kind of cost, since it can have nothing to say about the internal doctrines of a group, or their metaphysical implications. The second kind of cost would arise out of legally permissible behaviors such as shunning or boycotting of the rejected member. Here, the state could intervene in some situations where the cost burden of the severed relationship is determined to be both material and onerous for the ejected member. But only to affect a state of voluntary separation. A divorce settlement might be one analogy. The final form of cost would be a burden imposed illegitimately as a consequence of the disassociation, and in a context that warrants consideration of other rights. For example, being fired by a Catholic employer for having been excommunicated. This may be remunerated through anti-discrimination employment law. In all cases of the third kind, however, the state is intervening not to punish illiberal practices, but rather to ensure that a fully voluntary separation has been affected, as interpreted as a cost burden. Where external costs are incurred, the separated individual is to be compensated, in order to insure the voluntariness of the separation. Occasionally, this will mean that groups must bear the burden of cost of separation from separated members. But that would just be the price of living in a liberal society.
+
+But even this principle suffers from a serious problem. It is a problem that haunt's Mill's utilitarianism as well, interestingly enough. Namely, what do we do about children? During Yasmine's interview with Sam Harris (a few months ago), she described in excruciating detail, just how involuntary her induction into the Muslim faith was, and just how terrifying and oppressive her parents could be. Her's, along with Megan Phelps, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others, are probably extreme examples. But, even if we look at other things that are more "mundane", the question of how voluntary they could be is still dubious. For example, Jewish circumcision or Catholic baptism (the baptism question is why the Anabaptists existed). How does one quantify in cost, the price paid by children who don't want to be pressed into the service of an ideology? On the other hand, what would justify forcibly removing children from parents or groups that engage in what are obviously illiberal practices? And so, we're back to square one.
+
+I don't know if there's a good answer to this problem. It could be there is no answer. If that's the case, perhaps the paradox isn't just a paradox, but a foundational flaw. Perhaps the pragmatism of Burkean Conservatism has a wisdom that can inform this issue...

content/post/two-forms-of-totalitarianism.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: "Two Forms of Totalitarianism"
+date: 2020-03-26T15:45:13Z
+tags: ["fascism", "communism", "individualism", "collectivism"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "totalitarianism|/img/totalitarianism.jpg|Totalitarianism" >}}
+
+Fascism is a form of tribalist totalitarianism. A traditional particularist tyranny, which privileges a core ethnic identity, and views the individual as an 'organ' in the 'body politic', which must conform in order for the organism to succeed. Where the individual rejects "the body", he will, after the fashion of Rousseau, "be forced to be free". History tends toward the ascendance of the most righteous organism, in this view.
+
+Communism is a form of universalist totalitarianism. A non-traditional, quasi-scientific tyranny, which privileges a wholistic "rational order", above ethnic identity, nationality, or any particular feature of individual identity. Where the individual is given any regard, it is merely as an atomic component of a mass. History tends toward the unification of all organisms, in this view.
+
+The reason why the latter seems to fascinate us most, today, is because of our penchant for scientific determinism, which gives the idea of communism a certain superficial credibility by analogy to scientific explanations of causal necessity. Both forms of political organization deny the importance of the individual, but fascism seems to transfer the idea of the individual onto a local collective identity, while communism rejects all particularism.
+
+The liberal response to this, is to attempt to revivify enlightenment notions of the self, and the dignity of the "sovereign" individual. But this is also incomplete, and unsatisfying. The end result of the absolute libertarian ideal can be just as alienating and destructive, as the end result of either the absolute collectivist ideal. It's the ultimate horseshoe.
+
+The American system - a fusion of the enlightenment individualist ideal, with various forms of religious communitarianism - seemed stable at first. But even this has proved unstable over time. Even setting aside the pressure from communist and socialist ideology, the American state, and its citizens, have radically circumscribed their notion of the free individual, from its initial ideal conception, encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence.
+
+Dismissing this analysis on the basis of circumstantial "corruption" or "perversion" of the ideal simply makes my point more vivid, and is to miss the forest for the trees. It is precisely the problem that the ideal is not conforming to reality, that we must re-evaluate the ideal. Absolutist individualism has sustained numerous valid critiques, which have yet to be addressed politically. Absolutist collectivism, in both its forms, at this point is self-evidently untenable to anyone sane. So, what is left?
+
+I do not think a merging of collectivism and individualism is the right way to think about this. Blending milk and Pepsi doesn't make a new drink. It makes an undigestible mess. Rather, there must be some narrow path between the two, which we have yet to navigate. I'm not convinced secular communitarianism is a good answer to that question, either. But I'll take that up elsewhere.
+
+There must be some third axis we're not seeing, that will allow us to escape the linear dichotomy of individualism vs collectivism (in all its forms). Maybe the answer is not a static model at all, but some sort of temporal framework, in which we move in and out of various groups over time, assuming different degrees of individual responsibility as we do.

content/post/what-is-a-community.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+---
+title: "What Is a Community?"
+date: 2020-04-04T16:54:39Z
+tags: ["social media", "fandoms", "locals"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "psychology", "sociology", "technology"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< fluid_imgs "community|/img/community.png|The Community" >}}
+
+I have been thinking about this a lot, since joining Locals. There are two approaches to this, in the common vernacular. First, the naive answer, which is that a community is roughly synonymous with a professional affiliation or a social association. Like being a member of a legal bar, or being a "Cubs Fan", or an alumnus of some university. Second, there are the sociological definitions, which distill "community" into a set of shared abstract properties, like "interests" or demographic characteristics, such as the "community of python developers", or the "LGBT community".
+
+There is something fundamentally wrong with these notions of "community". They all boil down to *set collections* of identified individuals. Membership in a community need require nothing more than the possession of the necessary properties that get you classified into the requisite sets. This is why sociologists will tell you that you "belong" to many "communities". Because the property of being a sports-ball fan puts you in one automatically, and the property of being a particular color or nationality automatically puts you in another, and the property of having a particular skill puts you automatically in yet another, and so forth.
+
+As much as I enjoy the Aristotelian process of taxonomic categorisation, it is precisely this activity that betrays the modern notion of "community" as bereft of any real meaning. Denatured from both particular circumstances, and a normative character, "community" is just a substitute term for an abstraction imposed upon a collection. I reject this view of community. A community is not a taxonomic class definition. It is a group of human beings with a very specific set of traits in common among them. Namely, *intimate personal relationships, that entail particular moral duties*. Duties like loyalty, compassion, and courage. Duties that constrain what is possible for the individual, but also focus the individual's efforts, and give his activities a natural meaning.
+
+This view of community implies yet another step. In short: what is going on here online -- and on most of the internet -- is *not* in any serious sense, a community. There are indeed lots of people with shared interests sharing the products of their efforts with each other online. But they are not sharing *themselves*. This distinction is important. What I post here on Locals every day is not *me*. It is a product of who I am, but not who I am. What's more, the set of people with whom I share *myself* is constrained not only by my choosing, but by a physical limitation. Genuine intimate relationships are only really possible,*in person*. Everything else (particularly online) is a sort of simulacrum, and most of that, is devoid of any moral imperative. Here online, you need only engage with the *effects* of who I am. You need not worry about my attitudes, my involvement in the affairs of men, or even my health. All of that can be distilled into a casual report, easily dismissible for convenience sake.
+
+What this means, in practice, is that a "community" is really only possible where physical proximity is possible, and only in small numbers. Because this is the only means available to us for proper human relationships. We are primates, not astral beings. Some, like Roger Scruton and Alasdair Macintyre, even argue that an emotional connection to local places is also necessary. But the central point here, is that community entails emotional attachment, and emotional attachment functions as at least one of the necessary but insufficient bases for moral duty. Neither of these things is actually possible without physical proximity -- which is not possible, online.
+
+So, where does that leave us, online? I'm not quite sure. But the efforts thus far to produce something like "community" online have largely ranged from laughable, to downright dangerous. And, before anyone attempts to condemn me for bucolic fantasy projections, let me clarify. I'm not suggesting we all throw away our laptops and phones, and return to the land. What I'm saying, is that we need to find a way to reconcile the local with the distant, and simply calling the distant a "community", is not enough.I have been thinking about this a lot, since joining Locals. There are two approaches to this, in the common vernacular. First, the naive answer, which is that a community is roughly synonymous with a professional affiliation or a social association. Like being a member of a legal bar, or being a "Cubs Fan", or an alumnus of some university. Second, there are the sociological definitions, which distill "community" into a set of shared abstract properties, like "interests" or demographic characteristics, such as the "community of python developers", or the "LGBT community".
+
+There is something fundamentally wrong with these notions of "community". They all boil down to *set collections* of identified individuals. Membership in a community need require nothing more than the possession of the necessary properties that get you classified into the requisite sets. This is why sociologists will tell you that you "belong" to many "communities". Because the property of being a sports-ball fan puts you in one automatically, and the property of being a particular color or nationality automatically puts you in another, and the property of having a particular skill puts you automatically in yet another, and so forth.
+
+As much as I enjoy the Aristotelian process of taxonomic categorisation, it is precisely this activity that betrays the modern notion of "community" as bereft of any real meaning. Denatured from both particular circumstances, and a normative character, "community" is just a substitute term for an abstraction imposed upon a collection. I reject this view of community. A community is not a taxonomic class definition. It is a group of human beings with a very specific set of traits in common among them. Namely, *intimate personal relationships, that entail particular moral duties*. Duties like loyalty, compassion, and courage. Duties that constrain what is possible for the individual, but also focus the individual's efforts, and give his activities a natural meaning.
+
+This view of community implies yet another step. In short: what is going on here online -- and on most of the internet -- is *not* in any serious sense, a community. There are indeed lots of people with shared interests sharing the products of their efforts with each other online. But they are not sharing *themselves*. This distinction is important. What I post here on Locals every day is not *me*. It is a product of who I am, but not who I am. What's more, the set of people with whom I share *myself* is constrained not only by my choosing, but by a physical limitation. Genuine intimate relationships are only really possible,*in person*. Everything else (particularly online) is a sort of simulacrum, and most of that, is devoid of any moral imperative. Here online, you need only engage with the *effects* of who I am. You need not worry about my attitudes, my involvement in the affairs of men, or even my health. All of that can be distilled into a casual report, easily dismissible for convenience sake.
+
+What this means, in practice, is that a "community" is really only possible where physical proximity is possible, and only in small numbers. Because this is the only means available to us for proper human relationships. We are primates, not astral beings. Some, like Roger Scruton and Alasdair Macintyre, even argue that an emotional connection to local places is also necessary. But the central point here, is that community entails emotional attachment, and emotional attachment functions as at least one of the necessary but insufficient bases for moral duty. Neither of these things is actually possible without physical proximity -- which is not possible, online.
+
+So, where does that leave us, online? I'm not quite sure. But the efforts thus far to produce something like "community" online have largely ranged from laughable, to downright dangerous. And, before anyone attempts to condemn me for bucolic fantasy projections, let me clarify. I'm not suggesting we all throw away our laptops and phones, and return to the land. What I'm saying, is that we need to find a way to reconcile the local with the distant, and simply calling the distant a "community", is not enough.