65 Comments

1. JBR:

It would be interesting to know if the Times became much more negative in these areas around say January 2001.

Jan 7, 2005 - 7:49 pm 2. ambisinistral:

Newspaper science coverage is atrocious. Reporters tend to hear what they want to out of a study, and once a bogus gets printed it can enter the folklore and circulate for years.

However, they aren’t the only folks who screw up when it comes to science. An oldy but a goodie.

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:02 pm 3. ambisinistral:

Ooops, screwed up the URL.

Link

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:03 pm 4. ambisinistral:

Arghh…

Link

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:04 pm 5. richard mcenroe:

In How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy And Found Inner Peace, Harry Stein writes of a female NYT science “writer” whose recurring bugbear is the scientific uselessness of the male of any species. Why do males still exist? What possible purpose can they serve?

Not of course, that this is limited to the NYT. I remember watching NBC news on Sunday a couple years back when they had finally confirmed the existence of planets around another star. The NBC “science correspondent” (and you could tell he was supposed to be a heavyweight journalist because they let him on the air with a paunch and a receding hairline) listened to the NASA rep explaining where these planets were, how many light years away from our solar system they were, how important this discovery was, and then the heavyweight science guy leaned in and asked, “So what are NASA’s plans for exploring these planets?”

You looked into the NASA guy’s eyes, and you saw the cue ball sink straight into the corner pocket. He was still looking at the “science reporter” when they went to commercial.

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:26 pm 6. Barry Dauphin:

OT-I think the double whammy is about to happen regarding the tsunami response. The NYT’s David lugubrious Sanger (he should run a funeral parlor instead of trying to analyze events) was on Washington Week (January 7) still talking about the slow diplomatic response of the Bush Administration (meanwhile on planet earth people are literally being helped by less talking and more doing). He will keep talking about that until he (or another NYT flunky) writes the next piece of “wisdom”, namely that more people die each month from malaria or diarrhea or AIDs than from the tsunami, so why are we spending so much money in South Asia instead of…

I know this isn’t technically science reporting (although related to science), but it’s the same trend.

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:41 pm 7. chuck:

It is precisely a sense of optimism that I value in stories from the science fiction golden age. Stories these days are like as not woe is me first person singular diaries of literary suffering. Depressing as all get out. It is not as if unhappiness reflects a deeper view of the world, though some seem to think so. Something is definitely missing: optimism, adventure, possibility. Why?

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:56 pm 8. truepeers:

Seligman gets a lot of publicity for his idea that it is time to move beyond studying mental illness and figure out what makes people happy. This makes a lot of sense, but as far as I can tell the focus is still on the individual “psyche” as if the things that make our minds tick can be found, or isolated, simply in individual minds, and not among them in the paradoxical world of linguistically-mediated human interaction.

In other words, I hope the social scientists assimilate more from the traditions of the humanities with their focus on the paradoxes of language and culture. But there is a good reason why not to do so at the moment. The humanities, for what, 40-50 years?, have been suffused with “theories” that are all about resentment, about criticism or deconstruction of “the system” or authority in one guise or another. It is rather simplistic to target the NYT for an intellectual disease that pervades the academics and journalists of the western world. We are in desperate need of a paradigm shift and so I salute people like Seligman who are taking steps in this direction, though he might begin by questioning more deeply the “liberal” assumptions of his class of people.

Personally, I have a lot of hopes that the blogosphere can help engender a whole new type of human conversation centred on the affirmation of life. I believe happines comes from having a good human self-understanding (not simply focussed on one’s “self”, but on the paradoxes of our needing to distinguish how we are all the same and all different), which allows for a faith that works in the real world, that allows one to affirm life in a confident but not naive manner.

Jan 7, 2005 - 8:58 pm 9. Brian:

They’re still stuck on high modernism – Freud and Jung and Bertrand Russell and Margaret Mead and that Golden Bough guy and so on – the Woody Allen reading list in other words. Their holy trinity is Positivism, Relativism, Determinism. It’s the Age of Anxiety, man.

I hope I don’t sound needlessly Ayn-Randian, but their dippy out-dated politics are largely a consequence of their dippy out-dated philosophy. (Plus a little Mandarin class-interest, of course.) Their whole worldview has failed the test of time, made predictions which didn’t come true, but they just won’t let go of it.

BTW, if any of you know someone who has trouble with depression, Seligman’s book Learned Optimism is highly recommended.

Jan 7, 2005 - 9:08 pm 10. truepeers:

“Something is definitely missing: optimism, adventure, possibility. Why?”

Chuck, might I suggest it is because optimism, possibility, etc., imply transcendence, and to value them requires one have an anthropological (and I don’t been narrowly academic, I mean human self-) knowledge, a human science or religious faith that puts one in touch with the workings of the transcendent world of language and the sacred.

Gil Bailie over at the Cornerstone Forum is one guy trying to do this.

http://www.cornerstone-forum.org/

Today he has this for his quote of the day:

“What was invisible to the thinkers of the Enlightenment [is] equally invisible to those postmodernist relativists and perspectivists who take themselves to be the enemies of the Enlightenment, while in fact being to a large and unacknowledged degree its heirs.” – Alasdair MacIntyre

What is invisible to both is a scientific or religious understanding of why humans have been religious from the start. When you know why humans are religious while no animals are, then you are on the road to understanding happiness and how to affirm life, whether as a believer or not; or so I hope.

Jan 7, 2005 - 9:18 pm 11. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

I think there may be another factor behind the pervasive feeling of pessimism one gets from reading the NYT. My sense is that this newspaper is largely written for, and perhaps by, people who are 3rd generation or later in fairly successful families. Someone earlier in their family tree made it fairly big, and they are more or less coasting.

As the Martian said in one of Heinlein’s stories: My fathers have labored and I am weary.

Jan 7, 2005 - 9:20 pm 12. maryatexitzero:

I was just reading this article about the biological reason for the existence of spite in the animal world :

Spite is a tricky enough issue for biologists working on bacteria, wasps and gene frequencies, let alone for playwrights dealing with the intricacies of human social behaviour. Take bacterial suicide-bombing: Why should an E. coli bacterium go to the bother of blowing itself up to release toxins that kill its closest competitors when it kills itself in the process?

Part of the answer is that the spiteful gene can proliferate in the martyr’s clonal relatives. But it also requires very intense competition on a local scale to allow sufficient benefit to accrue to those kin. Therefore, spite tends to occur in parasitic species, where host resources are limiting, and where the sphere of competition is confined to the host organism rather than the whole population…

.. this relationship between competitive scale and cooperation (or lack of it) has some intriguing implications. What happens, for example, when mankind perceives that we are outgrowing our host?

One of the great things about humans is our capacity to increase the effective size of our host planet as required. Known oil reserves are increasing, not diminishing; as our population has expanded, so has our ability to feed more people. As one commentator puts it, the stone-age did not come to an end because we ran out of stones

Today, however, we seem to be doubting our ability to continue this process. We are bombarded with scary stories of diminishing resources, be they rainforests, oil, clean air or water. Combine this with fears over population growth, and the take-home message is that there is not enough of anything to go round. All of which chimes with the increasingly popular view of humans as a virus, a plague – as, well, parasites. As agent Smith tells Morpheus in The Matrix, ?Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.?

Environmentalists would perhaps argue that publicising worst-case scenarios spurs people into action. But the question is: what sort of action will it spur us into? Will it make us more inclined to cooperate to sort out problems, as environmentalists no doubt intend, or will it push us in a different direction – one that is detrimental to our collective survival?

There seems to be an awful lot of negativism and spite around lately. This NYT article, and this article in Yahoo, which begins:

PATONG BEACH, Thailand – Many believe the tsunami that devastated this tourist hotspot and killed thousands had one positive side: By washing away rampant development, it returned the beaches to nature.”

..are just the examples that I?ve seen today.

Jan 7, 2005 - 9:39 pm 13. truepeers:

maryatexitzero,

maybe we should be questioning scientists who would use a human concept like spite to “characterize” the violence of the biological, especially microbiological, world. I would suggest there is something fundamentally different between the enraged animal and the resentful human; one is demonstrating a hard-wired response, the other something that is culturally mediated. And we all know which one carries around the spiteful grudge in his head, year after year.

The sickness of the environmentalist who can see a positive side to the Tsunami wiping the beaches clean of the human is simply resentment, a specifically human disease you will not find in the animal world. You cannot take most environmentalists seriously, precisely because they have so little human self-understanding of their own resentment, where it comes from and why indeed it is something that is growing all the more over time with the expansion of consumer society, as evidenced by our current epidemic of depression. But there has always been an alternative to resentment, love, which is also a specifically human phenomenon, not to be confused with the affections of animals.

My Bailie link above is one place to start if this idea appeals; another is:

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/

Jan 7, 2005 - 10:04 pm 14. chuck:

Many believe…

Ok, how many? This is just the sort of idiocy that makes me raving mad when I read these stories. Who the H*ll does the reporter think he is to say such things as if they were deep truths. Honestly, some days I think we should just take these guys out and drown them.

Jan 7, 2005 - 10:05 pm 15. Dishman:

“Let me out, let me out, I am hope.”

Combine all this with the way much of MSM follows the NYT (Goldberg, Arrogance, p266), and you get:

Pinch Sulzburger, The Destroyer of Hope.

Jan 7, 2005 - 10:15 pm 16. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Take a look at what it takes to get a Masters in Journalism from Columbia. Not a single true science course is required (because pseudoscience courses can be used to meet the requirement).

Reporters are generally clueless about science. They don’t understand the theoretical methodology, the actual way that plays out, or the subjects under discussion. They tend to be innumerate in any scientific sense, unlikely to even understand scientific notation, much less have an intuitive feeling of what orders of magnitude are. They go for the sexy quote.

Some scientists and activists understand this well. As a result, they can push their favorite theory as if it were a long established truth. They can then use their automatically conferred “authority” as scientists to propose their “solution” to the related problems.

The worst science reporting is generally about the environment, because the scientists themselves in that field tend to be activists, and the whole area is politicized. If the New York Times say something about global warming, it means absolutely nothing. Same about almost all publications.

And this same level of nonsense applies to so many fields. Because medicial issues are important to people, reporting in that area is also abominable (or is it abdominal?).

Finally – a general rule: any field of study that has the word “Science” as the noun is not one.

Jan 7, 2005 - 10:15 pm 17. Terrye:

I know a Scotsman named Alex who is very very smart and we were talking about something like this recently.

He said he felt a great deal of the anti Americanism and all the naysaying that springs from it is the desire to call the other guy wrong. It is knee jerk and thoughtless and has no long term view. He said this same tendency is seen in science reporting. People are always finding fault and doubting, it is what they do.

And John is right about journalists, they have no practical experience, I saw that when I farmed. They would blow off without any idea whatsoever of what they were speaking about.

Jan 8, 2005 - 3:37 am 18. David Thomson:

Speaking of Catherine Johnson and science. I strongly recommend reading “Animals in Translation : Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior,” the book she co-authored with Temple Grandin. It has taken me longer than expected to finish this fine work because of the vast amount of new insights Iíve learned about the animal kingdom. It’s a must read.

Jan 8, 2005 - 4:00 am 19. HA:

Roger,

A fascinating article, and in my case a timely one in light of a recent experience I had at work.

At work I like to post articles and/or editorial cartoons regarding current events outside my cube. These articles generally trash the UN, the French, John Kerry or the Democrats. For the most part I consider these articles to be at least a little provocative.

I figure a good Mark Steyn column accompanied by a Cox and Forkum cartoon should get people’s blood flowing. I expect that I’ll trigger some conversation or come in one morning and find the articles ripped down. I expect SOMETHING, but I get little or no reaction.

However, last week I posted this article by Radley Balko entitled “2004: The Good News.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,142872,00.html

I didn’t consider the article to be provocative in any way. Yet when I came in one morning this week, someone had felt compelled to scrawl “ALL LIES!” in large letters with a blue highligher across the top of the page. I found it curious that of all the things I post, an article on GOOD NEWS actually provoked an angry response.

And now I know why. For some people, good news is actually provocative. You can trash the UN, John Kerry or France. But whatever you do, don’t bring good news.

Jan 8, 2005 - 4:19 am 20. Fausta:

Re: ridiculous tsunami theories and absurd science, I highly recommend a visit to Junkscience.com, which also has their 2004 Top Ten ìMost Embarrassing Momentsî of 2004: List Spotlights Dubious Achievements and Irresponsible Claims Made by Health and Environmental Scientists

And Learned Optimism is an excellent book.

Jan 8, 2005 - 7:42 am 21. Brian:

The ancient Greek god of faultfinding was a guy called Momus. Athena once decided to build the most beautiful palace in the universe, so she did. Then Momus came along and pointed out that it didn’t have wheels to move it away from undesirable neighbors.

“Momus is the Greek deity of mockery, faultfinding, scoff and (un)fair criticism. He is also the patron of writers and poets.”

Heh.

Jan 8, 2005 - 7:50 am 22. Silicon valley Jim:

I think that Seligman’s observations are very wise. My mother has observed that she hates watching the news because “there’s no good news anymore”. Now, my mother was born in 1921. She lived through the depression, although her father was one of those who continued to earn a good living during it. She lived through the second world war. During those time, though, she didn’t think that there was no good news. Times are much better now, but the Times isn’t (sorry, couldn’t resist). She was born into a world with no antibiotics, no polio vaccine, the presence of smallpox, and the constant threat of tuberculosis, plus many other terrible things that are, by and large, no longer problems. But it’s been only during the past twenty-five years or so, that she’s thought that the news has been all bad.

And let me, as somebody who has had a problem with depression for perhaps forty years and has given thanks every day since June 1989 for the invention of Prozac, echo the recommendation for Learned Optimism.

Jan 8, 2005 - 8:07 am 23. Charlie (Colorado):

“Chuck, might I suggest it is because optimism, possibility, etc., imply transcendence, and to value them requires one have an anthropological (and I don’t been narrowly academic, I mean human self-) knowledge, a human science or religious faith that puts one in touch with the workings of the transcendent world of language and the sacred.”

Um, wow. “The transcendent world of language and the sacred.” That sure sounds like it means something.

I wonder what?

“When you know why humans are religious while no animals are, then you are on the road to understanding happiness and how to affirm life, whether as a believer or not; or so I hope.”

Uh, say what? How do you know that animals aren’t “religious”? Because they don’t build churches? They don’t build orphanages either, but they certainly adopt orphans on occasion.

“…maybe we should be questioning scientists who would use a human concept like spite to “characterize” the violence of the biological, especially microbiological, world. I would suggest there is something fundamentally different between the enraged animal and the resentful human; [uh, I don't think an exploding E. coli is a very good example of an enraged animal] one is demonstrating a hard-wired response, the other something that is culturally mediated. And we all know which one carries around the spiteful grudge in his head, year after year.”

Uh heh. ‘Nother city boy. I knew an old sow hog who could have pretty well demonstrated the essential silliness of this notion.

Other than the confusion between “rage” and an E. coli, and the confused notion that animals don’t transmit certain things “culturally” (if you’ve never lived around large mammals much, and don’t have cats or dogs, you’ll have to look up Imanishi’s work on the moneys of Koshima, but I promise you this is not a very plausible argument at this point) … well, actually, other than that, there’s not much to argue with. Or about.

Jan 8, 2005 - 8:12 am 24. Charlie (Colorado):

As the Martian said in one of Heinlein’s stories: My fathers have labored and I am weary.

“Ordeal in Space.” One of the Future History stories.

This should probably worry me.

Jan 8, 2005 - 8:14 am 25. Charlie (Colorado):

Finally – a general rule: any field of study that has the word “Science” as the noun is not one.

As a Computer Scientist, I should resent this.

Jan 8, 2005 - 8:15 am 26. DanM:

Damn, I love this Blog……

It can make my day (no sarcasm). From an excellent post by Roger on MSM (NYT) bias to the deeper meaning of life – spiritually and ecumenically. It moves from politics to anthropology without a skip in logic – which in my mind is the REAL truth.

Sorry about the vanity post. I couldn’t help myself.

Jan 8, 2005 - 9:35 am 27. Rick Ballard:

Why shouldn’t the science reporting at the NYT reflect the ideological leanings of its editorial politburo? An institution dedicated to the advancement of a cause (perhaps especially, a failed cause) will tend to employ those willing to make sacrifices for the advancement. True propaganda organs focus on higher truths and if the term “science” must be bent into something unrecognizable, well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

One really shouldn’t expect the patients in an institutional hospice to approach the world with joy. There may be days when the words “resting peacefully” and “had a good night, for a change” give the patient some comfort but after all, their current focus must be on the cool consolation of the grave rather than on the sound of the lid slamming on the dustbin.

Perhaps it’s best to let the Times rot in peace. Generally, autopsies aren’t performed until the patient is pronounced dead. That may not occur for another twenty years and there is no hurry. Pinch will make sure that no new cures are tried and hopefully he’ll pump every inherited nickle the entire family has into maintaining the hospice.

Jan 8, 2005 - 9:52 am 28. Connecticut Yankee:

Rick Ballard

Judging from the new issue of Business Week Online, the autopsy may be closer than we think:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_03/b3916001_mz001.htm

(Link courtesy of Gerard at American Digest): see his own comments at http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/004893.php)

In a revealing moment, the Executive Editor of the Times, Bill Keller, explains the core thinking at the top of the Times:

“When I first became an editor here in 1995, somebody upstairs on the business side explained to me the basic business philosophy of the Times …. What most papers do when they want to extend their reach is they go out and interview all the people who don’t subscribe and say, ‘What would you like?’ and then they try to dumb down or spice up their paper to pander to that audience. That’s what produced the kind of McNuggetization of a lot of local and regional papers in America. The Times ‘ approach was exactly backward. What they did is focus on the most loyal subscribers and identify their characteristics. And then they went out and tried to find more people who are like those people.”

With all the money and effort that has gone into finding more ‘people like us’ coming up increasingly short, it just may be that, at long last, the New York Times has found all the people like them that there are.

Jan 8, 2005 - 11:29 am 29. richard mcenroe:

Charlie(Colorado) I knew a waterfront dog that held a grudge against one sailor for ten years, when the swabbie would be away for months at a time. He always remembered to take a bite whenever he came back.

Fred Pohl writes about Ohio racehorses in his biography who had been “stimulated” to give urine samples with an electric prod “…and the one thing you knew: if you ever approached one of those horses with a urine collector, he would try to kill you.”

Animals can hold a grudge like a Belfast Irishman when it suits them.

Jan 8, 2005 - 11:33 am 30. notthisgirl:

I know that Roger has several times mentioned that he is an optimist, and that went along with being a Liberal.

I’ve never been able to understand this combination – and that the combination even existed. Having come from the Right-side of the aisle (although I consider myself more toward the center), my experience with Liberals on a personal level, and the Media as a whoe – has been “sky-falling” mentality. I don’t consider that an optimistic thought process. One only needs to visit DailyKos to see that there ain’t much positive going on in their minds.

A surley, whiney, spiteful, and vengefull reaction to Republicans winning anything, or doing anything positive is, I think, a good barometer that Liberals are not optimistic people.

Maybe “real” Liberals are more Conservative than they think – and the sour-grapes-guys are just tantrummy partisan Democrats?

Frankly, I’ve only met *one* Liberal that I’d consider optimistic during my lifetime (mid-40’s here).

Jan 8, 2005 - 12:12 pm 31. truepeers:

Charlie C, thanks for calling me to account. I am indeed a city boy but I have always lived with cats and dogs and love animals. Still, I respect them for being in some, not all, ways fundamentally different from us. These are big questions and we can only start the conversation here.

How do I know that animals arenít religious? Well, letís stick to how I conceptualize religion for the moment; you might consider an animal adopting an orphan something religious, I donít, which is not to say that maybe humans with deep religious concerns are not more inclined to care for orphans.(For better or worse, orphans figure commonly in our myths, which is another interesting question…)

I have come to understand religion in anthropological terms. I think there are good reasons for doing so, even though Iím certain there is much about animals to which I remain ignorant. Leaving aside the mystery of God, I contend it is humans, both atheists and believers, not any animals, who conceive of, and talk to (at least the believers talk, though remember, there are no atheists in foxholes) God(s). Even if one day we all become devout atheists (not likely), the concept of God will not become meaningless; we will still have to deny our belief; and so some will still ask, like me, why is ìGodî an anthropological fact? And whatever facts and mysteries about animal communications, emotions, behaviors you can show me (all of which I will find fascinating and am not inclined to belittle), I am still going to point to religion ñ talking to/with god(s), or a sacred Being however conceived – as being something animals donít have.

What would act as evidence for this claim? Here we have to consider questions of how we categorize the different forms of language and social organization. Animals certainly have forms of communication; but is there something fundamentally different about human language? I think so. There have been people who have painstakingly taught human signs to chimpanzees; the chimps can indeed learn to use some, but absent the humans they show no social needs to initiate, or to continue developing such language. We, however, cannot hope to survive without continually innovating in language and culture (which is why I think we discovered/were given/invented religion and symbolic language in the first place). We have signs that are not merely indexical like animal signs presumably are – e.g. food over there – but signs whose purpose is clearly related to our distinctive needs regarding social organization – e.g., that fruit over there is sacred, do not touch it; or, that fruit is sacred, no one can touch it until we make a sacrifice to the gods, though as part of the ritual we will all get our fair share of the fruit in which the sacred Being is presently incarnate. Sounds nonsensical? maybe, but then you explain human religions, sacrifice, and irrationality.

What does our language and religion do for us (I believe the two emerged at the same moment in time)? They create forms of social organization that I think you will not find in the animal world. These are minimally conceived in terms of a sacred center and desiring periphery. In our present discussion, the NYT is at the center of our collective attention; and the rest of us constitute a desiring periphery expressing our alienation from and resentment in relation to the centrality of the MSM. How is this different from an animal hierarchy with its top dogs, etc.? First of all, the norm in animal hierarchies is that competition for positions in the pecking order, i.e. an individual animalís ìresentmentî of his inferior position, is played out in contests that pit one against one. You will not find all the pigs bitching about the MSM, though you certainly may find one that has a grudge against you in particular (leaving aside, for the moment, the question of how her grudge is differently constituted and remembered than my grudge against the lies of certain authority figures).

However, I understand there is some rare evidence of all-against-one violence in the animal world, I think particularly in the primate world. The question remains, however, is this violence remembered in the sense of being ritualized, or institutionalized in language, so as to be the basis for constituting a new and continuing kind of social organization that goes beyond the one-on-one relations more characteristic of the pecking order? There is no obvious evidence for this, outside of the human. While we are often tempted to see ritualistic or cultural behaviors among animals, it is certainly not obvious that they do it with any frequency and complexity; so the question remains, why is it that humans clearly need religion and symbolic language to survive with each other, while even our closest primate cousins have, at most, a very minimal culture, where much of what we may observe might still be conceived in terms of hard-wired behaviors?

I donít think this blog is the place for long essays, so I will shut up for the moment. But one last word: of course exploding E coli is not a good example of an enraged animal, but the notion that it demonstrates ìspiteî was so queer to my way of thinking, that I had to make a more plausible animal analogue for human spite. Your sow is better, and we have all known intemperate cats and dogs, but donít expect them to march on Washington any time soon.

Jan 8, 2005 - 12:24 pm 32. Dishman:

Ahhh.. I was liberal and optimistic.. when I was 10 (34 now). It seems that the Left has essentially lost optimism. Maybe that’s a major factor in The Pendulum. I have an image of waves surging this way and that, powered by optimism and hope. Without hope, there is no hope.

On another subthread, it seems to me (from my experience and others here) that spite is a common emotion for life, whereas it’s forgiveness that is human. That’s not quite right, though. I’ve had cats forgive me. Perhaps forgiveness is something that only domesticated animals (including humans) really have.

I think we need Catherine Johnson here.

Jan 8, 2005 - 12:24 pm 33. PeterUK:

The modern liberal left,I say modern because they bear little resemblance to their historical namesakes,demonstrate nothing so much as the psychopathy of ennui.Many have achieved utopia but have no idea what to do with it now they have got it.

Obviously, it would not do to extend utopia to the lower orders,think of queues for the restaurants and the parking problems,intolerable!

So what to occupy themselves with between,therapy,lunch,shopping and this evenings dinner party arrangements,for those so exalted it could not be anything trivial.

It must be irksome that their busy schedules prevent them from actually running the world,but they can of course criticise those that do whilst waiting for the next dinner course or their hair to dry.

The revolutionaries had a word for it,degenerate.

Jan 8, 2005 - 12:26 pm 34. Rick Ballard:

notthisgirl,

If one posits that at the center of a liberal’s concerns is a desire for “social justice” and a more egalitarian society then isn’t pessimism justified when 90% of the goal has been reached with the remaining 10% insusceptible to change? Perhaps the pessimism comes from the fact that the iron laws of diminishing returns dictate ever increasing effort (including constant redefinition of ends) for ever more worthless objectives?

Can anyone argue that the if the main end of liberalism was a more egalitarian society, then that end has been achieved to the extent that a knowledgable individual transported from the 18th century would find current American society (with its acknowledged faults) a comparative miracle of egalitarianism? Or, perhaps, todays liberal is less concerned about establishing an egaliatarian society and much more concerned about who should hold the reins of power controlling a society that they have worked so hard to level by pulling the better down? Think of the bitterness that watching power slip away must engender. To have ruined so much and have so little to show for it might make even me a pessimist.

BTW – I consider Roger to be one of those liberal who worked with a generous heart and a clear conscience ( still a bit dangerous, though – unintended consequences etc).

Jan 8, 2005 - 12:42 pm 35. Terrye:

The problem with liberals is that they think the wealthy are responsible for all the bad in the world, they love to rail against the injustice of third world poverty but they don’t think the west should interfere with other cultures. They work at cross purposes.

In other words if the problems of poverty in the Arab world are our fault should we place sanctions on them until they establish modern economies? Of course not, we have no right to foist our values on them.

But that is what liberals are all about…foisting their values on others. Whether it be economic and developmental aid or human right projects we are interfering. So we can either be stingy or cultural oppressors or both. Therefor we are always in trouble and there is always something to bitch about.

Jan 8, 2005 - 1:12 pm 36. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Rick…”(if) at the center of a liberal’s concerns is a desire for “social justice” and a more egalitarian society then isn’t pessimism justified when 90% of the goal has been reached with the remaining 10% insusceptible to change?”

I think that for most of today’s liberals, the ennui and pessimism we have been discussing has very little to do with policy issues, and everything to do with their personal situations. Some of them are what I call the “intellectual lumpenproletariat”..people who bought into higher education, got graduate degrees, and now are working at Starbucks…and bitter about it. Some of them, on the other hand, are actors, trial lawyers, tenured professors, etc, who are angry that their personal success does not give them more influence over the direction of the overall society. And some of them, as I mentioned earlier, are 3rd or 4th generation scions of successful families where the effort has already been made and they can think of nothing important to do.

I am sure there are also many liberals/progressive who are more concerned about policy issues than about their personal issues, but I think they are now a minority.

Jan 8, 2005 - 1:46 pm 37. truepeers:

“In a world becoming more and more free of traditional restrictions on ambition, all sought to be treated according to their self-esteem only to discover they are being treated in accordance with their self-hatred.” – Leo Braudy

Jan 8, 2005 - 2:21 pm 38. PeterUK:

What is missing from the modern liberal left is the leavening of educated, skilled artisans and those of real learning which shot through the Enlightenment like lodestone.

The coffee houses were alive with the exchange of new and various ideas,inventions and theories.Now the elite is a segregated inward looking class with only one intellectual tool,politics.

Since most of them have no practical experience at making anything work,the only recourse is the greater application of politics and when this doesn’t work throw on another bucketful.

The concept that principle is always circumscribed by the practical never occurs to the elite because they have never had to be practical.

BTW,Matthew Parris has a very good piece on Africa in the Times 8/01/05.Well worth reading it all.Seems to have some relevance.

Matthew Parris in Ethiopia

CAN a ruler ever be in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people? The age-old question, with the numberless tales it has spawned of princes moving disguised among their people or messiahs passing unnoticed through the crowd, pressed itself on me as I made my way through the fortified gates of the Addis Ababa Sheraton in Ethiopia eight days ago. Armed guards in pith helmets conducted a bomb search on cars as we drove through into another world: of landscaped gardens dotted with plastic palm trees in primary colours (ironic) and old-fashioned British red telephone boxes (to make rich visitors feel at home).

Here Tony Blair stayed when he arrived last year for a summit to promote the launch of his Commission for Africa. I was calling at the Sheraton to e-mail last weekís column. Briefly I entered Mr Blairís planet. Music tinkled, glasses of iced drinks clinked, Westerners ó tourists, plutocrats and men and women of affairs ó in bright casual clothes drifted between swimming pool and souvenir shops as uniformed porters hovered ready to help with the smallest bag. Outside there was an illuminated fountain in a pool built from Ethiopian marble. At the entrance the air-conditioned Mercedes-Benzes of the wabenzi ó the African elite ó awaited their masters.

Jan 8, 2005 - 2:34 pm 39. PeterUK:

Not sure if the link will work.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-1430084,00.html

Jan 8, 2005 - 2:37 pm 40. Catherine:

The TIMES has been ever thus.

I once memorized a line from a rave review of an Anita Brookner novel in the TIMES: Brookner, the reviewer said, was a master at creating ‘miniature portraits of attenuated lives.

That’s the TIMES’ creed.

Miniature portraits of attenuated lives.

Years ago I developed my own Rule of Thumb for what ails the TIMES: the Manics went to California, the Depressives stayed in New York.

Having lived in both places now, I stand by the statement. Creative people in NYC have a depressive culture and outlook. They’re completely different from Hollywood types.

e.g.: let us recall the paint job on Roger’s patio!

That is a SO CAL color scheme.

People are still wearing black in NYC. (I had a friend in Studio City, a writer-producer, who used to call New York types “people in black,” or PIBs for short.)

As to the TIMES’ science writing, I like it myself usually, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a scientist tell me he or she thought it was good. (Though I’ve tended to feel sympathy for the TIMES writers when I’ve heard this!)

Jan 8, 2005 - 2:56 pm 41. Catherine:

Funny thing with Seligman & his book Learned Optimism around here.

I read it years ago, and took the optimism test in the back, along with my husband.

I had assumed my husband, who is a sunny guy in manner, would come out as optimistic.

I’m kind of the designated pain in the you-know-what around here (true at least 50% of the time, unfortunately) so I was expecting to get dinged as the negative one.

It was exactly the opposite.

I tested as highly optimistic, and he tested as fairly pessimistic.

A lot of the reason I left the Democratic Party was the negativity and defeatism.

I remember years ago, a cartoon about the Mondale-Reagan election. (It was Mondale, right? Good Lord.)

Anyway, there were two panels, a Democratic panel, and a Republican panel, both showing a couple at breakfast.

In the Republican panel the wife was saying, “Have a good day, dear,” and listing all the terrific things she would be doing with her day.

In the Democratic panel the wife was saying, “Have a good day, dear. I’m off to get my abortion . . . ” followed by a list of hideously depressing, soul-destroying errands & tasks that would take up the rest of the day.

I was a Democrat at the time, but even I thought it was funny.

That was probably a sign.

Jan 8, 2005 - 3:06 pm 42. Catherine:

Thanks for the link to BUSINESSWEEK!

Jan 8, 2005 - 3:06 pm 43. Charlie (Colorado):

Ah-hah, I thought I sensed a Chomskian in here somewhere. (Not in the political sense, just the linguistic.)

I didn’t mean to suggest that adopting orphans was necessarily a sign of religiosty, just that by analogy the lack of orphanages wouldn’t mean that animals weren’t capable of feeling affection or maternal feelings toward orphaned animals.

As to the rest, well, it seems the core issue is a notion that there is something essential as opposed to accidental in the differences between symbol processing by humans and (other) animals. I’ve had this argument more than once, and I think it comes down, for me, to the same question I always ask Intelligent Design advocates: tell me how, by experiment, I can distinguish between the opposing hypotheses?

In this case, you say “…whatever facts and mysteries about animal communications, emotions, behaviors you can show me (all of which I will find fascinating and am not inclined to belittle), I am still going to point to religion ÔøΩ talking to/with god(s), or a sacred Being however conceived – as being something animals donÔøΩt have.” And I’m asking “how can you tell?”

Jan 8, 2005 - 3:13 pm 44. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Regarding the “animals” thread…C S Lewis wrote a fascinating speculation on what it’s like to be an animal (a bear, to be specific) which I excerpted here:

http://www.photoncourier.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_photoncourier_archive.html#105985629657399108

Jan 8, 2005 - 3:41 pm 45. Rick Ballard:

Photoncourier,

Wrt your hypothesis concerning policy vs personal, I simply don’t have the close contact with enough liberals that would be necessary for me to form an opinion. Another factor may be that faith in Reason can easily lead to logical constructs whose result is a belief that all effort is utter futility. Faith in God, a Higher Power, Intelligent Design, etc. gives rise to hope. Faith in Reason gives rise to Chomsky.

The truly ugly thing is that many whose faith lies with Reason have no idea that they have arrived at their beliefs through faith. Just a tiny epistomological problem never truly addressed prior to the French Revolution, and afterwards, well there was the Reign of Terror and then Napoleon and then Comte and St. Simon strongly denounced examinations of the roots of their theories while Marx strongly denounced giving any thought to practical implementation of his theories because it would imply a lack of faith in the historical inevitability of the foreordained outcome and then Sulzberger Sr. et al ad infinitum fell into the trap and here we are at a point of idiocy more clearly foretold in the beginning than anyone of the liberal persuasion will admit.

Given the history, why shouldn’t liberals be pessimistic?

Jan 8, 2005 - 4:17 pm 46. Terrye:

Speaking of the NYT, I was looking at LGF [man they are kinda rough] and they had a link to a Times piece in which the author stated that Fatah is dedicated to a two state solution. This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder. Their constitution makes it plain they are devoted to the destruction of Israel, said constitution is available online.

Jan 8, 2005 - 4:27 pm 47. Brian:

Rick Ballard: Faith in Reason gives rise to Chomsky.

Hmmmm. Reading through this, one finds little evidence of “faith in Reason”. Quite the opposite really.

Speaking of Chomsky, one of these days I’m finally going to sit down and read through this damned thing.

Jan 8, 2005 - 4:29 pm 48. Catherine:

I’m supposed to be teaching math, and haven’t followed the thread well enough to know if this is on-topic or off, but I found a statement I liked in the TIMES this week.

It was in the SCIENCE TIMES (!) . . . an article asking scientists what they believe that they can’t prove.

Here is one that makes a direct, causal connection between religion & the development of science:

David Myers

Psychologist, Hope College; author, “Intuition”

As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:

1. There is a God.

2. It’s not me (and it’s also not you).

Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.

And that is why I further believe that we should

a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!),

b) assess others’ ideas with open-minded skepticism, and

c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.

This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse.

I was a huge fan of the X-Files back when it was on (and am still) and I always felt the fact that they had chosen to make the scientist, Scully, also be the one with religious faith made sense.

But I could never say why it made sense to me.

I think David Myers’ observation captures it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

Jan 8, 2005 - 4:39 pm 49. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Rick..I just don’t see that much evidence that today’s “liberals” (or “progressives” to use the term they generally prefer) have much faith in reason. These are often people who believe in magic crystals, think it’s dehumanizing for people in Africa to get electricity, attack logic and science as “tools of the patriarchy” etc etc.

Jan 8, 2005 - 5:11 pm 50. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

I’m just about willing to bet that you (and Charlie (C)) have eidetic memories. Have you ever tested for it?

Brian,

I’m not quite catching your point. Unless a few of those fellows have professed a repudiation of Reason (based of course, upon a logical rationalization). I’ll cheerfully acknowledge a lack of depth in my examination of existentialism or post-modernism. I’m still trying to work out whether Luther actually had good reason to approach the Reformation in the manner in which he did. Anything much later than the Scottish Enlightenment (including portions of the French Endarkenment) is probably beyond my ken. I just happen to have waded through enough Chomsky to be able to assert that IMO he is a great fraud who indulges in bafflegab to an extent that Sartre, Derrida and Foucalt would all probably admire, were they still theoretically sentient.

My definition of faith is belief in a concept that is non-falsifiable. Perhaps I should have clarified that in my initial comment.

Jan 8, 2005 - 5:13 pm 51. Terrye:

Catherine:

That is interesting.

I agree that religion can teach humility, but some would say it is not humility but guilt.

However to me there is no one so arrogant as the people who believe they have all the answers.

Jan 8, 2005 - 5:13 pm 52. PeterUK:

Rick,

Do you not find that for a liguist,Chomsky writes such bloody awful English?

Jan 8, 2005 - 5:51 pm 53. Rick Ballard:

Peter,

What I’ve read of him seems to be deliberately unintelligible. There are at least ten PhD’s who comment regularyly on this board and they all write with a simplicity and clarity that makes Chomsky’s scratching seem a mud puddle by comparision. My take is that he is just baffling them with bullshit.

Jan 8, 2005 - 5:58 pm 54. truepeers:

Oh God, Charlie, I am not a Chomskyian in any way. But I’ve had that reaction before. One talks about the origin of language or anthropological generativity and people want to make this connection. But Chomsky’s idea of the origin of language seems as wrongheaded as his politics. I’ve never studied the man, and I only know him from commentaries; but/so I’m not interested in going further.

I think Rick Ballard has it about right: faith in reason leads to Chomsky. What is objectionable is that Chomsky seems to think the ‘reason’ he exemplifies is inherent in human language; he has little sense of how the abstract, decontextualized metaphysics articulated in the declarative sentences he so adores could have evolved historically. He has no sense of how we only have modern reason because we first have the problem of religion and a need to figure out the paradoxical ‘mind’ of God. But I don’t have time now to make this argument well.

Here’s what I wrote in response to an anti-Chomsky commentary on the Front Page web site a few weeks ago:

“Chomsky argues that once the brain had sufficiently evolved to allow for human language, language emerged, uneventfully, in something pretty much like its present, mature form. If you believe this, you are playing his deeply flawed, ahistorical, game. What Chomsky does not grasp is that the origin of symbolic language must have been at the same time the origin of religion and of a new form of communal organization. His moral and ethical failings no doubt stem from this point. Symbolic language is quite different from an indexical sign that an animal might use to point to food. [I should have explained this better, as I hope did today in my previous posting, above] Symbolic language could only have emerged in a communal event where the sign was collectively witnessed, remembered, and reproduced – otherwise there is no way to explain how the symbol’s effect or meaning could be shared and renewed over time.”

This idea of language emerging in a memorable, ritually reproducible, event is key, and, Charlie, I hope to be able to get back to it in responding to your question of how can you tell the difference between animal and human language.

But it is anticipated in what follows.

I then went on to quote from a column by Eric Gans, whose hypotheses regarding the origin of language I find most compelling (where my ideas are coming from):

“Recent research into the workings of the brain, some of which has been remarked on in these Chronicles, has gone far toward understanding how language functions in the individual language-user. But that the word “tree” in my brain is instantiated by a set or “node” of neurons connected on the one hand to mental images of trees and on the other to the sounds,… and the letters T,R… does not mean that the word is a “thing” in my brain. The very nature of the circuitry makes the word more a “disposition” than a thing; but the crucial point is that a sign cannot be understood as existing a la Herder in a single mind.

“As soon as its existence is thus defined, it becomes no more (pace Chomsky) than a Skinnerian association. What makes language more than a reflex is that it exists as a mode of communication among separate individuals. On this point, I am happy to cite a prominent theoretician of mimesis and language origin–one who, sad to say, seems unaware of GA:

“The integration of morphophonological addresses into a larger descriptive system is an inherently social activity, and one is tempted to predict that this process could not be confined within the isolated brain; that is, one should not expect to find the `language acquisition device’ that Chomsky predicted entirely inside the individual brain. Rather, the emergence of language depends on a community of brains in interaction.” (Merlin Donald, “Preconditions for the Evolution of Protolanguages,” in The Descent of Mind, Michael Corballis and Stephen Lea, eds.,

Oxford UP, 1999), p. 150)

[Gans continues] “To the extent that the word “tree” “exists,” it does so not in my brain but within the collectivity of English speakers. Any private associations I may develop with the word can become part of the word’s meaning only if they are communicated to and repeated by others. There is no simple limit to what a word communicates; even the most rigorously defined meanings are “fuzzy.” That is the result of the way signs exist: changes of meaning in one mind do not instantly propagate themselves to other minds. For this reason, Locke warned of the danger of assuming that others use words with the same meaning as ourselves. But the point of language is not to arrive at absolute transparency but to defer violence; the originary sign designates not a rigorous concept but the sacred source of this deferral. Materialists are likely to tax this conception with mysticism. There is, they claim, no such thing as “the word `tree’” only individual sounds and marks–and trees. That a group of people associate a set of these sounds or marks with mental images of trees is no different from Pavlov’s dog associating the bell’s ring with dinner.

“What is my answer to these objections? That ontologies–monist, dualist, or what have you–are not determined objectively on the ground; they reflect whatever distinctions the ontologist considers essential to his model of the world. Just as human beings are “just” collections of quarks, so words are “just” sounds. But the materialist dismissal of dualism jettisons, along with the ghostly soul, the specificity of human language and culture. This is less easy to do when one has made the connection between, on the one hand, the soul and the family of ideas associated with the sacred, and, on the other, the phenomena of language and “secular” culture. Just as ideas are now thought to reside in the brain not in specific neurons but in interactions among neurons, so do the signs of language and culture exist not in individual minds but in the interaction among human beings.”

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw194.htm

Someone responded to my Front Page posting with this:

“Chomsky himself submits an idea similar to your last statement:

“Just as ideas are now thought to reside in the brain not in specific neurons but in interactions among neurons, so do the signs of language and culture exist not in individual minds but in the interaction among human beings.”

“He certainly doesn’t posit it as an end itself but talks of how it would be possible for language to acquire such a form. The reference eludes me at the moment… He seemed to regard it as a rather uninteresting idea if I recall correctly. (blech – cold fish)?

Jan 8, 2005 - 6:58 pm 55. PeterUK:

Rick,

I just put it down to English being a foreign language to him.He speaks the same way it must be terribly confusing for him.

I have noticed that language is a bonding device,members of families often have nonsense words that only they use to signify things.

Jan 8, 2005 - 7:24 pm 56. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Charlie

Back to the mundane. Computer Science is a fine example of my principle.

How many computer scientists are their (by title)? I’m one. You’re one. There are zillions.

But what are we really?

I’m an engineer. I use various principles to build things related to computers (hardware and mostly software). No science there.

Some computer scientists are really mathematicians. These are the folks with the abstract algebras – off playing with formal linguistics, etc.

While it is possible to do science in the realm of computers, Computer Science rarely has anything to do with it.

Jan 8, 2005 - 8:28 pm 57. LarryD:

Since we’re getting into the psychological analysis of progressives, I post my own hypothesis. Progressives are often Narcissistic. I’m not claiming that they suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but many of them do show a lot of the traits.

I speculate that Progessivism provides a ready rational for their central illusion, their grandiose self image. Thus Progrssivism both attracts people who wave a strong narcissistic bent to begin with, and encourages that bent.

And amoung the narcissistic traints is pessimisim.

To quote:

Narcissists are generally contemptuous of others. This seems to spring, at base, from their general lack of empathy, and it comes out as (at best) a dismissive attitude towards other people’s feelings, wishes, needs, concerns, standards, property, work, etc. It is also connected to their overall negative outlook on life.

… Narcissists are noted for their negative, pessimistic, cynical, or gloomy outlook on life. Sarcasm seems to be a narcissistic specialty, not to mention spite. Lacking love and pleasure, they don’t have a good reason for anything they do and they think everyone else is just like them, except they’re honest and the rest of us are hypocrites. Nothing real is ever perfect enough to satisfy them, so are they are constantly complaining and criticizing — to the point of verbal abuse and insult.

… Narcissists are envious and competitive in ways that are hard to understand. … They are constantly comparing themselves (and whatever they feel belongs to them, such as their children and furniture) to other people. Narcissists feel that, unless they are better than anyone else, they are worse than everybody in the whole world.

… Narcissists are totally and inflexibly authoritarian . In other words, they are suck-ups. They want to be authority figures and, short of that, they want to be associated with authority figures. …

Jan 9, 2005 - 12:31 pm 58. LarryD:

Since we’re getting into the psychological analysis of progressives, I post my own hypothesis. Progressives are often Narcissistic. I’m not claiming that they suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but many of them do show a lot of the traits.

I speculate that Progessivism provides a ready rational for their central illusion, their grandiose self image. Thus Progrssivism both attracts people who wave a strong narcissistic bent to begin with, and encourages that bent.

And amoung the narcissistic traints is pessimisim.

To quote:

Narcissists are generally contemptuous of others. This seems to spring, at base, from their general lack of empathy, and it comes out as (at best) a dismissive attitude towards other people’s feelings, wishes, needs, concerns, standards, property, work, etc. It is also connected to their overall negative outlook on life.

… Narcissists are noted for their negative, pessimistic, cynical, or gloomy outlook on life. Sarcasm seems to be a narcissistic specialty, not to mention spite. Lacking love and pleasure, they don’t have a good reason for anything they do and they think everyone else is just like them, except they’re honest and the rest of us are hypocrites. Nothing real is ever perfect enough to satisfy them, so are they are constantly complaining and criticizing — to the point of verbal abuse and insult.

… Narcissists are envious and competitive in ways that are hard to understand. … They are constantly comparing themselves (and whatever they feel belongs to them, such as their children and furniture) to other people. Narcissists feel that, unless they are better than anyone else, they are worse than everybody in the whole world.

… Narcissists are totally and inflexibly authoritarian . In other words, they are suck-ups. They want to be authority figures and, short of that, they want to be associated with authority figures. …

Jan 9, 2005 - 12:32 pm 59. klrfz1:

I disagree that the theoretical reasons given here for the negativism of the NYT are needed to explain the phenomenon. I believe what I learned from El Rushbo at the Limbaugh Institute. Liberals are driven by emotion and use it to establish and exercise power. The emotions easiest to evoke are negative: anger, fear, sorrow. Liberals have no ideas that are able to invoke the more positive emotions: hope, awe, joy. Thought habits must play a role. I used to be a doom and gloom liberal. Now I am a hopeful and sometimes joyful conservative so I am living proof it’s not impossible to change.

I do agree that liberals today seem to be anti-reason and anti-science except where they can see a direct benefit to themselves, for example medical science.

Jan 9, 2005 - 4:03 pm 60. Brian:

It’s the idea – common among conservatives refighting the French Revolution – that reason is still the heart of modern though. I find that idea mistaken.

We are at the end of approximately two centuries in which reason was perverted (Descartes, Hegel), scorned (Kant, Hume, Marx), ghettoized (Russell, early Wittgenstein), and finally abandoned altogether (the Analysts and the Pomo crowd), leading ultimately to Chomsky and his “bafflegab”. (Love that term, by the way, and intend to steal it.)

We should be saying “the loss of faith in reason leads to Chomsky”.

Perhaps we’re defining terms differently?

Jan 10, 2005 - 5:24 am 61. Brian:

Oops. That post was directed to Rick Ballard.

Jan 10, 2005 - 5:26 am 62. truepeers:

Isn’t Chomsky like the early Wittgenstein, but just not as smart, so that C doesn’t see how he has become some variety of ‘autistic’ Jew trapped in his own lonely language games. The great revelation for Wittgenstein was the realization that language is a highly social, interactive affair full of paradoxes rooted in our competing desires whose tension and nature is beyond the grasp of the reason he worshipped in his youth.

In other words, the present terms of discussion are too simplified: the most sophisticated faith depends on the most sophisticated reason; it is only the anachronistic `Enlightenment’ mind that opposes the two. The problem with Chomskyian reason is that it is not delighted and immersed in paradox like the later Wittgenstein. It does not recognize the interdependence of faith and reason.

Jan 10, 2005 - 12:44 pm 63. Brian:

I see what’s happening, Trupeers, we have different views of what reason actually is.

The strain of Enlightenment thought you’re discussing was that which redefined the rational (if I was a consultant I’d say “repurposed”) as something along the lines of: “Scientific and mathematical propositions are defensible, while everything else – metaphysics and ethics and all that – is just guesswork”. This is the “ghettoizing” of reason that I talked about earlier, which winds up as the positivist view of Russell and early Wittgenstein. They claim to be strengthening reason, while actually cramming it into a dusty corner far from the daily work of real living.

I hold the classical view of reason – the broader view of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Maimonedes and that whole crowd, plus in our time Rand, Blandshard, Adler, and a few others: that reason is a largely verbal affair; that it may not have the exactness of mathematics, but then again why should it; that it has plenty to say about ethics and aesthetics, as well as matters scientific; and so on. (Randall’s book on Aristotle outlines my POV very elegantly.)

Becuase of this, I hold the positivist view of reason to be a sham, a strawman, an imposter unworthy of the name. And consequently I say the twentieth century was a time of reason’s retreat.

You, on the other hand, seem to take the positivist view of reason as an accurate description. Reason is indeed a crabbed and abstruse view of things, a mere totting up of factoids and figures and Ps and Qs which may be well and good for science, but has nothing to say about the spiritual side of man. And thus, reason is of dubious use, and the twentieth century was a demonstration of reason’s inadequacy.

In short: You say the positivist view of reason is true, and therefore reason is inadequate; I say the positivist view of reason is false, and therefore reason has plenty of fight left in it, if only the ref would let it back the ring.

We both think positivist reason is screwy and useless and bankrupt – and why wouldn’t we? – but you think that because of this reason must give way to faith, while I say it must return to its roots and regroup along classical lines.

How did we wind up talking about this anyway?

Jan 10, 2005 - 4:09 pm 64. truepeers:

Brian, we wound ourselves up by taking Chomsky seriously, if only as a problem in brushing off (bafflegab indeed). Anyway, thanks for your clarification. I am guilty of using `reason’ in a rather undisciplined manner since I only wanted to sympathize with Rick’s, `faith in reason leads to Chomskyí (naturally, this would be reason as Chomsky sees it); but your `loss of faith in reasonÖí makes equal good sense.

So we are largely in agreement, I think. I don’t in fact take the positivist view of reason as an accurate description; and so I don’t reject `reason’ in the name of faith. FWIW, I simply believe that building up faith and reason is one and the same project. As a fan of Aquinas and Maimonides you presumably sympathize. This reflects my awareness of the centrality of paradox: no matter how much thinking through a problem, sooner or later I am going to have to make a fateful (non)decision, and it helps to have a certain faith in humanity, in our origins and history, when doing so; or, experience suggests, I will fall into the iron cage of depression (thatís how we got started on this). Reason is to help one see the paradox as best one can; faith emerges with this vision to keep one moving without fear of paradox and least bad choices.

Where we might differ is your notion of going back to classical roots though of course I’m not sure what this means to you. I am certainly in favor of seeking self-knowledge by seeing ourselves as products of history, to which we must respond in our own time. But if the term weren’t now ruined by its recent politicization, I might say conservatives (those generally intolerant of privileging or even distinguishing means from ends) should favor neoconservatism over paleo ideas that morality and reason has all been lost in our times. Not that I am calling you a paleo. Do you take any labels?

I think it is never enough to go back to the future, if this implies valuing some classical, or any, idealized methodology over the usually banal, but least bad, outcomes of an ever freer market system. I certainly donít like all the crappy products of the postmodern market, from unthinking academic pc to pop music. But I respect the market system enough to know it is our best hope, not some idealized polis or esthetic discipline.

Nonetheless, this implies the need for yet greater reason and faith. The market system is just going to fuel ever more resentments and the culture of the future is going to have to be smarter, at least in some areas, if it is going to show us a path to peace and love and not war and self-destruction. This implies the need for advances in both anthropological and historical self-understanding which would entail both a greater reason and faith. We can be sure in a faith that human knowledge of human origins and their unfolding implications for history is one thing that clearly progresses over time; this progress must be sought and valued. In short, I am sympathetic to your accenting the verbal, but I wonder if you are thinking about a method, an end itself, or something else. Adieu for now.

Jan 10, 2005 - 6:57 pm 65. Brian:

Do you take any labels?

Johnnie Walker Black!

Adieu for now.

Indeed.

Jan 10, 2005 - 10:48 pm

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