Posts Tagged ‘knowledge’

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A Defence of PoMo in Politics

April 19, 2017

I’ve seen a few articles recently in which people seem to be blaming Postmodernism for ‘fake news’ and Donald Trump, and for a departure from Enlightenment principles into ‘darkness’. This seems rather a stretch to me.

One of the problems with this position, is that it sees both the enlightenment and post-modernism, as single movements, when they are quite pluralistic: Derrida, Baudrillard and Foucault for example, do not have a common project, other than in the sense that people writing at the same time in a similar tradition have commonalities.

I would further suggest that many apparent tenets of post-modernism actually share similarities with people in the enlightenment, and come out of other recognisable modernist sources such as anthropology, linguistics, physics and so on. Cynically, post-modernism as a whole has little interest in the British Enlightenment, because it makes it seem less original as a movement.

Many of the movers of the British enlightenment, which is the Enlightenment I am most familiar with, after a lot of arguing came to what I would claim is the entirely justifiable conclusion that ‘Reason’ was not enough, and that reason without reference to the real world could lead to complete fantasy. If your axioms/assumptions and obvious statements where wrong your conclusions would be wrong. Hence ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘alchemy’ moved into what we call science, in which, as far as possible, statements had to be checked against reality in front of trustworthy, knowledgeable and critical witnesses.

It’s position is we cannot assume things to be true in advance. That will mislead us.

Now, let’s move to a patch of Foucault arguing with Chomsky:

… you can’t prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realization of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilization, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and that one can’t, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should — and shall in principle – overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can’t find the historical justification.

Foucault’s remark is entirely within keeping with these mainstream British Enlightenment Principles – where are these ‘rights’ that people keep talking about? Are they not enshrined in, and derived from, particular political structures – which as Adam Smith, no less, pointed out are there to defend the propertied and the powerful? It may be that the discourse is not entirely consistent, and can be turned against itself. Rather surprisingly Foucault seems to assume the system must be completely harmonious and self-reinforcing, rather than possibly incoherent. But, even if the system is not incoherent, that does not mean ‘rights’ exist. You would need to show Foucault a historical example of this in action before he might agree to the process working. We are all familiar with the remark attributed to Einstein “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” – this is more concise and more general than Foucault, but the meaning is similar. We need to change our reason to solve problems.

Likewise Foucault insists that knowledge is intertwined with power. Who would argue that Religion has not been intertwined with power and challenges to power, and the same seems true of science and economics? We know that commercial science is not always as accurate as independent science. That is why some of us fight for academic funding to be determined by academics rather than corporations, and why others want funding and work conditions to be determined by corporations or corporate principles. To deny this relationship between power and knowledge, seems to be to deny a basic political truth, of which Voltaire and Diderot were not unaware.

I’d also argue that power is intertwined with ignorance, I’ll probably expand that point elsewhere, but it should lead us to caution. Burke’s ‘conservative’ defense of British Tradition against revolution and ‘free markets’ is based upon a distrust in reason, and a trust in the empirical complexity of reality. We may not perceive everything which is going on, or how it all interacts and hence the system needs tending carefully not disrupting ‘reasonably’ according to our fancies. The same kind of proposition is found in functionalist anthropology acting as a defense of ‘native’ societies against colonial disorganization – it foreshadows systems theory, which is vital for understanding ecologies and social interactions with ecologies.

Now as it happens, both Hume and Berkeley disrupted this empiricist stand by showing from empiricist principles that we have no direct access to reality, only to our imagining and habits, or to the imagining done by God in Berkeley’s case. Of course there was the ‘common sense’ reaction to these positions, but it was always within this wider framework as discussed. Reason is not supreme. And a belief in the supremacy of reason leads you to serious misunderstanding of human social functioning.

Derrida further illustrates how this failure of reason and understanding can occur through language. One of his main claims to fame is the infamous argument that there is nothing outside the text. For me, this seems to be saying that humans give things meaning immediately – we treat things as ‘texts’. I don’t know why people get upset with this proposition. To some extent, science is about trying to remove the meanings we give things immediately and giving them meanings which are more in accord with their nature. But we are always prone to bend them to our inner psycho-cultural meanings. And the more obscure, or threatening, the explication of science the more this bending will occur. Climate change denialism, can be seen as a triumph of hope and common sense against reality.

Derrida also takes the ‘context dependence’ of meaning seriously. Meaning is delimited by context. That is a fairly standard linguistic understanding. Furthermore, context is unstable; different people bring different contexts to the same ‘texts’, consequently meaning is unstable. If we add difficulties of cross cultural understanding, historical shifts in the meanings of words and so on, then this shift in context and meaning becomes even more of an issue. We may be reasoning from assumptions which are mistaken interpretations of some previous work.

This is fairly obvious to literary critics. Any relatively complex text will have an almost infinite number of interpretations; although it may not have every possible interpretation – as I commonly say the number of people who seriously argue that Hamlet is about the mating habits of African elephants is remarkably small. However, no valuable text is exhausted of meaning by any particular reading. I also don’t know why this proposition often seems to be considered a terrible thing, as it seems necessary to any kind of understanding of understanding.

Indeed one of the problems with understanding Trump and the Trump movement, is that the contexts brought to bear on understanding it’s statements are extremely different; they are so different that people in the same cultural group cannot understand each other. Refusal to accept context dependence, means that much commentary is framed in terms of the stupidity of others, and such statements help to further the separation and lack of understanding and communication.

These positions seem, to me, to be fundamental starting places for political analysis, along with understanding how economic and political ‘truths’ get propagated through organs of power, and they are not hindered by post-modern thought.

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Diagnosing Trump

March 19, 2017

Another Vital Post from John Woodcock. This time on the pointlessness of diagnosing Trump. Basically John’s argument is that diagnosing Trump “generate[s] a sense of knowing who Trump is and what he is likely to do on the basis of his ‘clinical profile’. This sense of knowing who Trump is, psychologically or clinically, thus gives us a dangerously false sense of getting a handle on what is going on right now.”

Diagnosis is therefore dangerous. We need to see with “fresh eyes”

So some continuation of this idea.

The circumstances of the world are unique and are not reflected in past history. We cannot predict the consequences of events, or actions, at all. It is also true that the world is a set of complex systems and is inherently unpredictable.

What makes the situation different, is that we have never faced this confluence of crises. They are crises which provoke existential crisis in us, and may possibly end ways of life as we know them quite catastrophically. We, as humanity, face being completely uprooted.

Despite the impossibility of predicting exactly what will happen, there is always the possibility of predicting trends. Trump is, I think, ‘trendable’. However, it must be remembered that Trump is not alone he has a whole group of people reinforcing his tendencies, supporting his acts, fearing him, and feeding him the “right” information. That is what makes him particularly dangerous

So far I’ve found Trump and his collective relatively predictable going by his past history, but the intersection of that past history with current events is hard to fathom, and will possibly get harder to fathom as it goes along. Of course Trump and others may become more monstrous as he proceeds and fails.

Trump supports established big business and attacks ordinary Americans. He aims to remove anything that hinders the power of business to destroy, or increase the wealth they remove from the system. He supports anything that will increase his own wealth, and seems happy to make money out of the Presidency (as with Mar-a-lago). His is a government of billionaire crooks for billionaire crooks. .

He also wants to be seen as tough and a ‘strong man’. He wants his own way in everything public. This is vital, and feeds into the billionaire thug routine. He resents those who think they know better than him, or say he cannot do something. He will seek scapegoats for his failures and seek revenge on those scapegoats.

He will probably start a war, or series of wars, as his policies break down, so as to maintain the illusion of strength. It is no surprise he makes increasing military spending (which also transfers taxpayers’ money to the corporate sector) a priority, despite the fact that the US already spends more on the military than the ten to twelve next highest spending countries put together. Nuclear war is a possibility – he has already suggested it to solve the problems of the Middle East. Who it is, that he will declare war upon is much harder to decide.

He will do nothing to stop ecological breakdown, indeed he will be more likely to speed it up as that shows his power and marks the Earth permanently with his name.

Trump and his cronies (it is not Trump alone) push us further into the crisis, and it is up to us to resist while knowing our resistance will encourage him to go further.

That is the first paradox.

We need “fresh eyes” to see this.

There is another paradox. Trump is not a reforming radical as he, and his supporters claim, he is the same old Republican fraud. However, he does not have the same constraints of past Republicans.

So we cannot hold the possibilities within constraints. The crises ridden system would probably not allow this anyway. We cannot rely on our past assumptions about US governments. We might have been able to assume that while Reagan would risk nuclear war, his government would behave “reasonably” in other ways. With Trump’s government we have no assurances.

We need fresh eyes to see, that do not block our perceptions of trends in ‘heroic’ specialness, and do not suppress paradox.

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Science and uncertainty….

March 3, 2017

Most forms of human knowledge are fallible.

Despite this, it may need to be recalled, that everything we know about the global despoliation of nature comes from scientific work.

It is scientific work that shows us that ‘nature’ is a vast set of interactive systems, essentially powered by the sun and, occasionally, by global thermal energy.

It is science which shows us that we are dependent upon other people, that we share as part of our nature, and that we compete as part of our nature. The individual only exists because of the group. We are shaped by, and shape cultures (collective ideas, feelings and habits). We emerge from the collective interaction.

It is science that shows we are related to many other Terran life forms, and depend on the interactions of other life forms. It is science that shows us our bodies and minds are fractious colonies.

Science shows us that natural systems are inherently complex and unpredictable in detail. Natural systems are unstable and subject to contingency and accident. They eventually escape human ordering, although we can disrupt them.

Science shows us that eventually, at particular times, there are natural limits. It is capitalism and developmentalism which insist these limits can always be overcome, and hence are prone to lead to lead to disaster

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When did the Righteous start attacking Science?

February 28, 2017

Its probably complicated. It probably began with religions resisting evolution, to increase their inerrancy, and to avoid change. They could argue that by challenging religious accounts of the world and its development, science had become immoral. Then it moved into commerce. Business resisted being put to extra costs when science discovered health problems with their products. Smoking, for example, became branded as a right, a freedom, its health consequences denied.

So, it became relatively common to attack science for commercial and ideological purposes long before it became mainstream amidst the righteous. Indeed the right used to champion military and commercial science as the way of the future, just as much as the left.

However problems also arose from science, with scientists talking down to, and at, people, and arrogantly assuring them that their fears about technological projects were misplaced. The failure of official science was marked by the disasters of thalidomide, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the racist studies of infection, and so on. Commercial science, in particular, was governed by profit, not accuracy or safety. Then there was the use of science as a death machine – agent orange, napalm, nuclear weapons and so on – with little recompense to those damaged by it, or threatened by it. There were constant changes in medical recommendations, and a relatively high level of iatrogenic disease (disease generated by medical techniques). Consequently, even more people felt alienated from a science which affected their lives and which they had no input into.

Then, another big move occurred. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the State had expanded to include not only all men with property, but propertyless women, black people and so on, and by the late sixties and early seventies, ordinary people were active within that State, demanding equality, services and the end to elite authority. The righteous panicked.

Samuel Huntington wrote about this “democratic distemper” or “excess of democracy” in his report to the Trilateral commission on The Crisis of Democracy. The power of the people who should have power was being disturbed, chaos was emerging. His recommendation was to encourage voter apathy – to get people out of participating in the State.

This was achieved by encouraging distrust of government, so there was no point in people getting involved. The after events of Nixon was used to promote this idea of government as inherently corrupt, as was the Vietnam war. The free market was to be trusted rather than political action. Money and business were marks of virtue, everything else was pretense. You were to look after yourself and avoid government ‘interference’. You got out of politics that could impact the ruling class and just guarded your personal property. Even government action which looked like it might help you, was ‘interference’ and to be distrusted. This abrogation of participation and action, was portrayed as part of the way to end elite authority, with the only elites in this view being left wing or governmental – wealth was not a thing that defined elites or marked power differentials. Hence the eager funding of libertarian think tanks. This meant removing the knowledge we have about social action from the public domain. Social ‘science’ (such that it was) was declared to be interfering and communist etc.

These ideas promised to deliver liberty and prosperity for all. They couldn’t and didn’t.

We have had 35 to 40 years of them, and they have never delivered. Wages became stagnant, wealth was distributed to the rulers, social mobility collapsed, the State was used to impose restrictions on ordinary people, people became more alienated from governmental processes, commercial media saw their job as largely supporting this order, rather than any alternative, as they were part of the corporate class.

Growing failure meant scapegoats had to be found. It was said to be the fault of immigrants, the fault of intellectuals, the fault of minorities, the fact that we had not got 100% free markets. Anything but the fault of the ideology itself, or behaviour of the corporate class. Once it became clear that science implied that the social order was coming to an end through environmental destruction, it became important to attack science to continue the arrangement and entrench the power of the elites.

The attack made use of techniques pioneered by tobacco, religion, libertarians, and so on. It fitted in with the official ideology, by making your freedom the freedom to be anti-science and anti-the-authority-of-knowledge. It supposedly demonstrated your ability to think against the grain (as it agreed with the ruling ideology). It allowed political action and involvement against those who criticised the elites. It gave people some sense of importance in the alienated world they lived in….

It helped save the power of the rulers for a bit longer, and they gamble that they will be rich enough to ride out the coming troubles, as money gives you everything…. at least so they think.

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Spirituality in the Anthropocene

February 26, 2017

I keep reading and hearing people saying, or implying, that what we need is a spiritual approach to fix the problems we face. I hear this a lot in the Depth Psychology community in particular.

I think this is fundamentally wrong. Spirituality is not automatically a solution, and ‘rationality’ is not always a problem. Human knowing is very often fallible, irrespective of its source, and this should be remembered, otherwise both spirituality and reason become props for the ego, its limitations and defence, rather than ways of accessing knowledge or relatedness.

The potential problems with spirituality seem as important to me, in terms of our ecological problems, as is the use of science or technology to ‘control’ nature.

For example, in Western and many other traditions, spirituality has been used to deny the reality of nature, or used as a means to get out of nature or to diminish nature. Christianity and Islam have both taught that our true life is elsewhere. It is not in nature. Nature is a snare, at best a distraction to be mastered. Reality is found after death.

Intensely spiritual people can believe and intuit strongly that everything is in the hands of God, and that humans can do nothing to hurt the cosmos. They can be both calm and beautiful as they destroy the world. They could for example, think it is their duty to cut down forests and destroy fertile fields to bring forth their temples, unaware of what they are doing, or even condemning those who protest as heretics or unspiritual. They can be passionately devoted to killing people or animals as sacrifices to the Gods.

Perhaps one of the most harmful ideas ever proposed, is the spiritual idea/experience usually associated with Plato, that the real is perfect and unchanging and not of this world. This may completely alienate people from any engagement with life and the natural world as it is, as that is constantly in flux, birth, death and decay. The acceptance of such an idea, and the spiritual practices around it, may mark our initial separation from Nature, and our attempts to control it rather than live with it.

There is nothing inherent in spirituality which leads to a beneficial interrelationship with natural processes. Spirituality can impose a hostile order on the world as much as any reason.

Similarly, while we may want to forget, war can be intensely a matter of spirituality. Not just for zen samurai, Vikings, Nazis, shaolin monks, warring Tibetan temples, jihading Muslims, Crusading Christians, and Aztec warriors gathering sacrificial prisoners, but to ordinary people who may frequently tell you that they felt more alive, more connected and more meaningful when the war was on. Not all people feel this way, of course, some live in terror and die in agony. However, this aspect of spirit should not be forgotten.

People can see the position put forward here as an attack on valuable experiences. However, I want to suggest that ‘peak experiences’ or ‘spiritual experiences’ have little to do with ‘spirituality’. They are, in some ways, frequently ‘mundane’, they seem to happen irrespective of whether a person is particularly spiritual or not. They might imply connection, or simply the sheer strange presence of something different from yourself. Spirituality has little to do with this, and is more like a theory of everything or an approach to the world.

Whatever it is, spirituality is often assumed to be good, and in opposition to whatever is bad – many people seem very confident of that. Indeed, contemporary spirituality is often defined by opposition. It is opposed to logos, it is not science, it is not reason, it is not materialism. People also seem to assume that logos, reason and so forth have the dominant position in the world, and are therefore responsible for the destruction we observe. However, even a brief look at our politics should lead to that particular theory being cast aside. Reason, whatever its failings, is not even vaguely dominant. If it was then we would be seeing some attempts to deal with climate change. Science is largely captive to State and commercial interests.

Given the oppositions people set up, it becomes too easy for spiritually aligned people to say science is the problem, and spirituality is the solution, when they may well be both parts of the problem and solution. The Sacred and the Profane are perhaps not separate… Personally I was relieved to discover that anthropologists decided this distinction was not present in many societies.

Historically, spirituality has grown up alongside (and with) logos, science, materialism, reason; and similarly they grow out of it. As mutually dependent, both ‘sides’ are as responsible for our problems as anything else.

Jungians might be expected to sit with these opposites, rather than to declare one side responsible for harm and the other good. We might find that both are necessary, to correct the other, or we might find that we discover something new.

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Western Mind II

February 5, 2017

I’m still cautious about characterising groups of people as having a particular mind, as in statements about Western Rational minds or whatever. As I’ve said previously this rationality does not seem much in evidence, amongst more than a very small segment of the population.

However, my main point is that Western Rationalism is historically, and still, a religious/spiritual position.

If we want to date its arrival (which is a highly suspect process), it probably comes with Thomas Aquinas, who was initially suspected of heresy.

Aquinas’ position, in so far as it can be simplified by me, is that the human mind is an image of God’s mind, and therefore functions similarly to God’s mind and can understand that mind within limits.

Aquinas also argued that God, being perfect mind, was not arbitrary but coherent, and that logical thought could show truth about God and creation.  In this he was influenced by Aristotle and the Islamic recovery of Aristotle. The accuracy of our logically worked out claims about God and the universe was a product of the accuracy of our premises, and some of those premises came from faith or revelation, and some premises were obvious to all. God did not hide deliberately from creation. God could be reached by logic and human endeavour.

Scientia was the working out of logical consequences from our premises, as best we could. It was secure knowledge, or knowledge that was as secure as we could gain. If our premises were true, then so would be our conclusions.

This position has become known as scholasticism. It often embraced an earlier idea, that explanation should be simple, and should rely on the minimum number of premises. Ultimately an aesthetic choice lies at one of the hearts of rationalism.

Scholasticism appeared to became a dominant paradigm, although the Church still admitted the Augustinian tradition that God was not constrained and could constantly intervene and change things if He so chose. God was ultimately beyond human comprehension. Mysteries were present and inevitable.

The Church also accepted the ideas that God was love and available to all who were focused on Him, as exemplified by St Teresa and St Francis – however it was always suspicious of these people; they tended to be unpredictable. Franciscans were ordered to work for the inquisition to keep them in line.

The mystical tradition is, in many ways, anti-nature. Resolution of earthly sorrow comes with death and/or the journey to heaven. The earth is to be left behind. Many western mystics joyfully died relatively young. This leaving earth, is despite Jesus healing bodies, which might imply bodies had some significance, and despite the promise of the resurrection of the flesh on Earth at the day of judgement. Strangely scholasticism can be more pro nature, seeing God as symbolized in nature, or nature supported by emanations from God, or as present in the mind of God (Mathew Fox’s dialogue with Aquinas Sheer Joy, is good on this.)

Politically these ideas had consequences. The rational and the mystical spiritual traditions are democratic, possibly a little anarchic. If you can persuade others of the rationality of your truth, then you can do so. Any previous truth is vulnerable to a better argument or demonstration. Truth was no respecter of persons. The mystical says God speaks to everyone, and everyone is equal in this respect (we are all sinners) although has to agree to be vetted, as Teresa’s writings were vetted and sometimes suspected of heresy.

However the faith tradition is always a matter of interpretation, you have to have the right faith and this is decided, usually by a group of old men, who then enforce this on everyone, as it is vital for everyone’s spirits/souls. Only a few vetted people can participate in these discussions. This spiritual route tends to be authoritarian. It is the force that vets the other traditions.

In the background we have alchemy. Alchemical practice tends to be based on experience in the spirit, imagination and material. It is not so much logical as empirical. Logic breaks down in alchemy as you can see in some texts. Alchemy is not authoritarian, there are no groups of alchemists enforcing orthodoxy; it is largely a matter of individuals and small groups working with texts that are incredibly hard to understand and yielding to nature.

Empiricism is often opposed to rationalism, as it does not claim you can work things out in advance – its stronghold was in chemistry and medicine, where practitioners don’t know if stuff will work or not, until it is tried. Empiricism is taught by nature, or by an oscillation between nature and psyche, not by logic.

Protestants tended to break with rationality. They were faith dependent, and in the early days heavily authoritarian (apart from the mystical free spirit types). They heavily attacked scholasticism which they saw as justifying catholic authority not their own, and of course of misunderstanding the importance of faith. The post crusades Islamic position also tends to be faith based rather than ‘rationally’ based. The tendency of this tradition is to fossilization (we try to replicate the past and its rules according to authority) or widespread splintering in which faith becomes a matter of experience and mystical aspiration arising from a text (more like sufism, but the protestant splintering is much more public).

One consequence of this breakdown was trying to find certainties to base faith upon to try and heal the social breaks. What became science probably grew out of this endeavour. It tried to avoid theological conflicts by leaving the soul and mystical experience to religion. The soul of the scientist was to be level headed and ‘sober’. It was not supposed to be ecstatic. It took over the idea of the logicality of creation from the scholastics and merged it with the empiricism of the alchemists. Empirical events confirmed the correctness of scientific logic and the glory of God. Science was supposed to be determined by nature and humble before nature. Nature was the arbiter, although there is another stream which speaks of mastery of nature, which appealed to Empire builders, although the language usually used of dominion and mastery comes from Christianity.

Lots of people began to observe nature with an intensity that was possibly new to this part of society, gathering insects, counting worms, drawing birds and plants and so on. Science leads to romanticism, both as continuation and as reaction.

What science achieved was an anti-rationalism. The cosmos was revealed to be larger, smaller and more multifarious than anyone had suspected. The universe was for all practical purposes infinite; vast beyond human conception. The micro-verse was full of small creatures to an extent also beyond human conception. Even the ordinary level revealed the multitude of different species of insects. If God created the cosmos for humans then this God was a God of massive excess. For some people this massiveness meant they could no longer see the universe as home. It was not rational to see humans as special. This excess was revealed by empiricism, humble observation and letting the universe speak.

In any case, the majority of people followed their local traditions as always, generating endless fractioning.

In this situation, scientists could not avoid normal human usages of imagination or mysticism, but by the 20th Century they generally did not talk about it, although it is worth noting that our interest in dreams was born in what Freud and Jung insisted was empirical science.

Similarly, our knowledge of climate change comes through science, through comparison of data, and imaginative application of theory. It does not come through intuition or the spirit. People of the spirit have generally been slow to acknowledge the problems and have been major opponents of recognition, especially those with authority over faith.

All of the approaches described here, which constitute a massive simplification in themselves, are spiritual in the sense they imply a transforming relationship to a wider sphere/field, and are not confined to the individual. They are also rational and irrational, empirical and non empirical to varying extents

One way to characterise the Western Mind, to the extent that it exists, is as mess; as mixtures of all kinds of incompatible ideas, attitudes and processes. It is never coherent – and that is probably a good thing. It varies with groups and with individuals.

Even if one tradition becomes temporarily dominant and likes to pretend it is ‘master’, the others just get on with life and make challenges for their own dominance.

Sometimes one tradition is announced to be ‘master’ simply so it can be blamed for everything that went wrong, in an attempt to force people to choose its main competitor.

Saying there is a Western mind, or whatever, deletes this multiplicity, including the part that is critical of whatever is singled out!

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Western Mind? I

February 5, 2017

Maybe its just me, but I keep hearing people blame the scientific mind or science itself for our problems.

But is the “Western Mind” ‘scientific’? Do we have such a Mind? Is it *one*? Can it be called ‘scientific’? People may confuse a technologically dense society with one in which people think ‘scientifically’.

I suspect only a relatively small proportion of the population have a scientific mind. This is partly because it takes a lot of training, and partly because America has just voted for a person who is hardly rational, seems fairly emotional and unobjective (unable to separate his desires from reality – ie he can only loose if someone cheats), does not seem to believe that the world is stable (given he can contradict himself in a matter of minutes, with no sense of a problem), and believes that endless pollution is a cause for celebration.

It seems unlikely he would have been voted for by people with ‘scientific minds’, so we can assume a fair proportion of the population does not have such a mind.
If so, then the scientific mind may not be that important for us socially, or for our personal understandings of the world, even if science gives us lots of tech.

Let us assume that we have other types of mind as well – these may well be brought forth in different circumstances – that is, we may all share more than one of them. So, not trying to be exhaustive – and these are caricatures, just like the ‘scientific mind’ is…

There might be the ‘capitalist mind’. In this profit and wealth are the only virtues. Accounting and market value are used to measure morality. Economic activity can and must expand forever as any curtailment of profit increase would be evil. Pollution is a problem which has nothing to do with emitters; it is your problem if it distresses you. Everything in live is competitive. You either win and are good, or loose and are a failure. Wealth marks winning.

There seem to be at least two types of religious mind active in the US.

In one God is a bad tempered, vengeful old guy who punishes people harshly for even minor infractions. Often the punishment lasts forever. The cosmos is basically hostile and tricky until you are dead. Sex is definitely out unless it involves marriage and even then its dubious. Some practitioners believe that when you are *saved* by declaring your faith you are saved, you can embrace the capitalist mindset and be ok. ‘Science’ is an enemy. Most people are enemies. The mindset sees itself as under attack, but with God behind us, our enemies will be made to suffer. The only purpose in talking to enemies is to convert them – you can learn nothing from them.

In the other religious mind, the universe will always give you what you want if you think properly. There is no reality other than what you think. You don’t need to do anything for anyone, other than think nice thoughts at them to be virtuous. All your desires are spiritual and it is ok to enter the capitalist mind set, as long as you are spiritual about it. Everyone who thinks something is wrong is simply delusional and thinking badly; keep away from them. I have to think well. I must think spiritually, or else it will all fall apart.

If these descriptions of three extra ‘Western Minds’ are vaguely accurate and in ourselves, then perhaps we need to carry out some multi-logue with all these mindsets to find out what parts of them are parts of us? so that we don’t think that the earth is endlessly consumable, or that there is no reality but our thought, or that God won’t let bad things happen to us if we don’t have sex.

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Intelligence as Obstacle

January 3, 2017
Given evolutionary theory, then all intelligence must have developed to deal with ‘real world situations’ and problems, and that these situations and problems include the exploratory capacities of bodies, the effects of interaction with other bodies and the range of sensory inputs available.

Such a position does not mean that intelligence is transparent or accurately perceives the world, just that it has been good enough to get its holders through previous evolutionary paths. It may not be good enough for current and future problem solving.

Some evolved intelligences may have built in ‘pitfalls’ which were useful in dealing with previous problems, but generate significant problems later on, which the intelligence is vulnerable to and incapable of recognising. The intelligence may not perceive the consequences until they accumulate and it is too late, or path dependence is too established for easy change.

I’m going to suggest that ‘intelligence’ is not primarily an essence or an ability, but a set of embodied tools, models and filters of information. The first step in any intelligence is to filter out the relevant features of the situation, out of the infinite things it is possible to notice.

The tools an organism can use, make up its capacity for intelligence, and may influence the ease with which the intelligence is used.

My argument is that established tools can get in the way of ‘functional intelligence’, and as a further obstacle for humans and probably for other creatures as well, tools are often cultural and bound into power relations, so certain tools can be hard to use, or communicate.

Tools, also, generally have bodily material results – which include things like wealth and power/status/respect – they become part of social conflicts and so on, and thus difficult to use effectively.

I suspect something like this is happening with ‘technological’ development/climate change at the moment. Perhaps, we were roughly competent up until steam engine time, but since then we have multiplied our destructiveness, and not improved our basic tool set/intelligence.

That plenty of people do see the problems, yet nothing effective is done, is one good reason for questioning our cultural intelligence. After all life is at stake here. If we know that a series of events spells ‘doom’ (of some sort) and we cannot do anything effective, then our intelligence, for dealing with the situation (in this case produced by our intelligence) seems limited.

Yes reality will hit people in the head eventually and disrupt them, but that still does not mean anything will be done, or anything effective will be done – or perhaps even noticed. The official intelligence may well prevent it.

It could be said that reality is hitting us back already, and its not having much effect. Feedback is still not entering the intelligence tool system…..

We can hope that the incompetency is cultural and organizational, and can be overcome, simply by fighting against current modes of organization and reward – but as powerful people benefit from the incompetence’s of those organisations, it will be hard.

The ideas of complexity and symbiosis, as described in previous posts, may provide some elements of that new set of tools.

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Information mess again

December 11, 2016

In information society, communication and information function almost entirely in strategic terms. The primary point of communication is not to convey reasonable accuracy, but to participate in persuasion and political struggle. This is a standard feature of communication, but in information society it appears magnified. Certainty and loyalty to information, and the groups supporting it, not only provide status and marks exemplary membership, and helps to filter the huge amounts of information people have to explore, it provides apparent order, and allows immediate action. Accuracy of particular pieces of information can sacrificed to victory, or to the more fundamental principles that a group stands for. This means that all information and principles a group clings too can be sacrificed for loyalty. Principle A can be asserted (when it fails), by justifying and holding on to principle B, and Principle B likewise by justifying and holding on to Principle A. Coherence is not required, so if principle C threatens something disliked and threatens principle B, it will only be applied to the disliked idea. The group eventually lives in a fantasy world, because there is so much ‘good’ information.

Furthermore, given these priorities, there is no need to check accuracy. Statements which appeal to group biases, can be promoted and spread with great speed. They become more available and easier to find – hence bad information drives out good.

If information which could refute a ‘dearly held position’ comes from a political outgroup, then it is easy to claim that information is biased and geared to what are perceived as that group’s political interests. The more the information, or the informer, contradicts our political position or status, the more it can be condemned and vilified – we do not trust outsiders as their information would disorient us. The more information comes from a recognised insider the less checking it will require. Hence increasing polarisation.

As an example, a member of the Trump team made it clear that they would not be engaging with ‘politicised’ information about climate change from NASA, by which they meant information which they did not like politically. What is not your politics seems politicised. Similarly, if Trump had lost the election and it seemed that Russians had hacked in favour of Clinton, then it is hard to imagine that he would not be declaiming about it and demanding a recount or fresh election. But given it is the opposition, he can be demanding that the opposition quieten down and accept his victory, and that the stories are completely fictional.

Admitting “we are wrong”, or that “we may have benefitted from Russian hacking, and this is bad” produces loss of claims to information certainty, navigations, political power and status, and will be denied, just as climate change is denied, or the failure of corporate power to produce general prosperity is denied.

Power is based in information and persuasion as much as it is based in being able to persuade people of those with power’s capacity for violence.  If there is no belief in the ‘legitimate’ basis of power, then it will eventually start to dissipate.

The end point of these processes is where groups use their power and certainty to supress even discussion, as in Australia where the climate-right has just stopped the government from even thinking about some ways of dealing with climate change. In their view allowing the discussion of climate change and emissions costing was to show disloyalty to the party.

This is not a right only phenomena of course, but it seems particularly pronounced there at the moment, perhaps because their main policy is promising that if corporate and market power was increased, general prosperity would follow, and it clearly has not.

If we think we are certainly right, then we are probably caught in similar processes, so the first step is always a degree of scepticism that is open to the possibility of the other being corrector than yourself.

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Trump and the Magic of Information

November 12, 2016

President Trump’s victory will have massive consequences in the Anthropocene age, and I’ve been suffering a lot of criticism, and dismissal, from friends over the last year or so for predicting a Trump victory. Now it’s all over, I guess it’s time to explain the logic of the prediction, when people might even listen. My basic point is that to understand Trump’s victory, you have to understand how information and knowledge works in contemporary Information Society.

Most of the theory is argued at greater length in Disorder and the Disinformation Society: The social dynamics of information, networks and software. Routledge 2015.

1) The first point is simple. Information is primarily about power and persuasion. It is about shaping the world another person perceives and getting them to see themselves in a particular way, so as to act in a particular way. Information is not primarily about truth, but about magic. Repeated items, from respected sources, become taken as truth and create perceived reality.

More subtly we can conceive communication as operating on a continuum between: a) an attempt to use accuracy as a tool of persuasion and b) an attempt to persuade through deception. Even the most abstract science aims to persuade people of its truth and to change their behaviour accordingly. Persuasion is part of communication. Whether it is relatively accurate or relatively deceptive is not always easy to tell, and depends upon the contest involved. People may be more prone to deception in some circumstances than others. If they think the persuasion is a matter of life and death, or the people they are persuading are beneath them or potentially dangerous, then it probably becomes easier to persuade by deception.

I shall later on in this blog piece, suggest that information is about self-identity and magic. If you can persuade someone of the truth of the matter, then you change their sense of self and change their behaviour. A good persuader is a kind of magician.

2) There is too much information to uncover it all. Consequently need “truth filters”. People filter information by general knowledge (other already accepted information), and by group identity and processes of belonging. Group identity means that people who are perceived as being part of the group, or exemplary in the group are trustworthy. What they say, or information they pass is considered likely to be true – especially if it reinforces group identity. In the Information Age good information is often drowned by easy to process information that meets the requirements of group identity.

3) When Trump got involved the election was never going to be about accuracy, but about magic and his puissance, or his status as a ‘man of power’ able to carry people along with him.

4) Both candidates have a long term media history, which shapes the general knowledge people have to filter (or ‘frame’) information about them, and hence whether they are likely to listen to them or not, and how they evaluate them.

Clinton has been smeared for over 30 years by the mainstream media. Unfounded accusations have been reported and discussed repeatedly. The Republicans have spent millions trying to convict her of anything. In this cause they have made the accusations a public and repeated (and therefore ‘verified’) part of public discourse. She is their number one villain, and the media has played along – in general giving small coverage to her victories, or any of her achievements. You may have to be a fanatical Hilary fan to know anything good about her. Everyone else ‘knows’ she is suspicious, and criminal. At certain levels, the lack of criminal convictions proves that she is a form of superpowered evil, who escapes repeatedly (like Batman’s Joker or Poison Ivy). She is a strong evil woman; she is a witch.

Trump on the other hand has a long-time mainstream media coverage depicting him as a powerful, successful all-American businessman. His very name is promoted as an icon of luxury and success. He can sometimes seem a bit of a buffoon, but that humanises him and makes him a regular guy. In the US, business is generally conceived of as good, with successful business people almost always portrayed as having massive special and inherent talents which set them apart and make them a success – even the ruthless ones are ‘colourful’. In this filtering Trump become superhuman. A veritable god. Everyone who knows a little about Trump will know he is a great success, a triumph of the American Dream. You have to work much harder if you want to uncover the trail of failures, dark deals and privilege – this is usually hidden in the boring business pages, where some form of accuracy actually counts.

At a mythic level, or the level of ‘general knowledge’, the campaign was being fought between crooked Hilary and hero Donald or, if you prefer, an evil woman and an exemplary man. Gender was important.

5) Information is political and forms selves. As said previously, information is filtered by group identity and makes group identity. How people classify themselves, is part of the way people construct their self identity with others and in opposition to others.

In Information Society people tend to form ‘information groups’, which are based upon their identities and general knowledge. The purpose of the information group is to filter and gather information together; this reinforces group cohesion, and group and personal identity. It is a necessary artefact of information society with huge consequences.

The group can, and often does, ‘protect’ people from the information possessed by other groups – it helps shield members and provide arguments to show how evil the outgroups are; to block flow and attempts at communication. These groups may overlap, but they tend to fall into exclusive categories.

The strategy of getting people worked up about how evil the outgroups are, and not letting them hear the views of real outsiders, is a good marketing strategy and is employed by some media outlets to keep and capture their audiences (aiming for profit reinforces lack of accuracy). It makes disloyalty hard. It reinforces group identity, and keeps people fixated on hearing what they want to hear to make sense of the world. Again, it keeps people ‘engaged’ and inhibits them from questioning the reality of what they read or watch.

6) This occurs for both left and right groups. However, the right is much better at manipulating it – and this is the source of their magic.

They rigorously police speech, and make sure people are on target and repeating talking points. It is amazing how quickly the same meme will be everywhere on the right, giving it the appearance of inevitability and truth. They are not frightened of encouraging rage, because that keeps people engaged and unlikely to actually converse with outsiders. They drive out outsiders, or make them scapegoats.

Repetition and reinforcement creates perceived reality. Eventually everyone just knows Clinton is a criminal and should be jailed, even if they are not sure what for, or reiterate that she was responsible for things that she has been cleared of or was never involved in. Her innocence in any one particular disconnected case does not prove she was innocent of all the charges (there are so many). General knowledge becomes personal knowledge.

The Republican party also could run memes in their groups to see which were likely to take off, and they did nothing to correct memes they knew where untrue if that brought them party loyalty, anger against Democrats and votes. They manipulated the system successfully, at the cost of not having policies based on reality – but fantasy has a greater pull (as it often does with sex, for example). The Democrats seemed constrained by an ideal of truth, and ideal of politeness (although this was the rudest election I’ve seen from the left- the relatively closed information group was having an effect, and groups are polarizing or defining themselves by opposition.)

People on the Democrat side, don’t find it easy to be as isolate. They generally, have to have to be involved with at least mildly right wing media, as the corporate sector controls the media, and pays for the media through advertising. Supposedly Left wing media does not have such a ‘closed box effect’  in the same way; it gives light right views, seeks balance etc. This media emitts plenty of pro-corporate right wing material – it seems ‘left’ because, in comparison with the mainstream right media, it’s not completely without a moderate perspective. However, this has also meant that the left have tended to accept the comfortable idea that neoliberalism was ok in principle, and that fighting it was problematic or extreme. The Right, in its more isolated media, managed to both promote corporate dominance and denounce its consequences.

7) Information groups tend to manufacture scapegoats to help form unity

These scapegoats can be blamed for all the ills of the world, and attacked/sacrificed, while keeping group members pure and unified. The scapegoats of a group, exemplify what its members must not be, if they wish to stay members. Treatment of scapegoats often functions as a threat to would be dissenters. You know what happens if you behave like them, or show sympathy to them. Scapegoats are often said to be from information outgroups.

On the right you have a range of choices to suit your placing; blacks, latinos, migrants, commies, liberals, godless liberals, wicked liberal business people, educated liberals, liberal women, femininazis, Hillary Clinton, or the interfering State.

Pro-democrat information groups tend to scapegoat the uneducated, or the really wealthy. In the US, few really believe that wealth is bad, so that position has little appeal, and the first simply proves the right’s point about educated elites. The left has no effective scapegoats to blame or sacrifice, so their groups are less tight, less bonded, less passionate and less integrated.

8) The faults of exemplars appear small

If a person is defined as exemplary of an ingroup, then their faults tend to be ignored or diminished in respect for their apparent virtues. Indeed faults may be seen as ‘things-everyone-does’ even if you don’t know anyone as bad as the exemplar. By becoming presidential candidate Trump, with his supposed business ability, was able to become an exemplar of the ingroup, and his faults excused – even if most Republican men and women would be horrified to meet an ordinary person who contemplated grabbing their daughters, or who appeared unable to tell the truth or make a consistent story. If a person becomes an exemplar of an outgroup (as Clinton did for Republicans, and Trump does for Democrats) then their faults become exaggerated and obscure their virtues – having anything openly to do with them shows massive disloyalty.

Clinton could never get herself defined as an exemplary Democrat, because of the mainstream media’s promoted general knowledge about her, and because many Democrats wanted a more obviously radical candidate – as said previously, you had to work to find Clinton’s positive record. This helped make her faults more visible to everyone, and lowered enthusiasm for her amongst nominal supporters, and this feeds into point 13 below.

9) Falsehood is expected

People in information groups are also not frightened of making up fiction, which sounds plausible or persuasive. If caught out, the groups will either ignore the failure, reiterate their falsehood more strongly, forget it for a while and repeat it later, accuse the revealer of unspeakable crimes, or say that everyone lies and the outgroup members are much worse. Once issued, a pleasing falsehood can separate from its refutation and easily be re-accepted.

People play the game that they know information is likely false. Everyone can say they are suspicious and smart, while accepting ingroup crap. This move effectively reinforces the idea that their opponents lie constantly, but they are clever and can see through this, as well as see through the few lies in their group. This keeps people loyal and on topic.

That Donald Trump made unreliable statements, was secondary to him making pleasing statements for his followers. He was also vague enough for his lies to be justified or ignored, should they ever become a problem. It also appears likely that because his followers did not expect him to tell the truth, they could select out the statements which were pleasing to them as being true and dismiss displeasing ones as strategic lies. Given Trump’s insistence on success, and the media’s promotion of his success, this made Trump an almost blank canvas for fantasies of success whatever the differences in how success might appear to his various audiences.

Being wrong involves a loss of status in this information world. So not admitting being wrong or failure is a mark of strength – of puissance if you like

10) The right pulls together. The left factionalises

The right have been pulling together for years. There should be nothing in common between libertarians and Christian fundamentalists, but they get on to keep power. The Christians have been taught to accept capitalism as part of Christianity. White supremacists can also get on with libertarians and non-racist Christians for the sake of power. There has been an effort to promote solidarity (often through scapegoating marked outgroup members), which is missing on the left. Partly there is no need for consistency in a political ideology. Different points can be wheeled out for different audiences. A party can argue for liberty one day, and authority the next.

Because Trump was centred in right wing media, the general informational and identity group pull would be for those who felt Republican to move towards cementing their loyalty towards the Republican party. Very few Republicans who had anything to lose really disowned Trump, when it came down to it; they joined in with their own side. Despite his lack of religion, Evangelicals supported him because the Republican party is their sole power base, he was not the evil witch and was a man who held the right opinion on abortion. No other issue was allowed to matter. They have a long history on this as well.

Followers of Bernie Sanders appear not to have done the same (I suspect Republican provocateurs stirred up dissension between Clinton and Sanders supporters; certainly there was a lot of rather peculiar fighting going on). Many people on the left could not bring themselves to say “I don’t like Clinton but Trump is so bad I have to vote for her”. Whereas, on the right, “I don’t like Trump but I won’t let Clinton get in”, seems to have been common.

11) Trump’s communication style fits in with this basic paradigm of communication

Trump stays on topic: “Make America Great Again”, “I’m a success. I can solve these problems”, “Things are bad and I’ll fix it”, but he is rarely specific. People can agree with him or think that what he says is good, but he produces few splits amongst his audience by elucidating matters of detail. He does not say what a “Great America” involves, which could cause disputes. He does not say how he will solve problems. He repeats himself frequently, as with “Crooked Hillary”, where he makes the unfounded charge part of her name, part of her out-group identity. This reinforces the ‘general knowledge’ people have, and creates the ‘crookedness’. Similarly dwelling on “success”, as an undefined category when attached to himself, appeals to all audiences who want to absorb their own success from him. He makes himself a ‘man of power’. People talk of his ‘genius,’ – another suitably vague term loaded with meaning.

He, and his audience by proxy, engage in magical evocation. He makes his audience passionate, angry, involved, entranced. He attacks the scapegoats he borrows from their information groups. He is the strong man who will protect his audience from the nightmares he evokes. He motivates anyone prepared to respond to his key trigger words. He creates his temporary reality, and carries an audience to their reality in which he becomes central.

His campaign speeches are dislocated, rambling and hypnotic messes. They quite possibly derail any attempt at rational, evaluative or critical thought. They repeat his memes endlessly and vaguely.

On the other hand, Clinton goes on and on, believing in truth, planning and inclusion. Consequently, people in her audience argue about little things with her. They may get the impression they disagree with her a lot, she seems to have no sense of who to blame, or of who her ingroup is, so they don’t know what they are fighting against. So while you can’t altogether trust her, Trump says “a lot that makes sense”.

12) Fictional Demographics generated by information groups

Pro-Democrat people frequently told me that nobody could vote for Trump because he was clearly a manipulative braggart who knew nothing, despite similar facts not stopping people from voting for Bush Jr. twice. However, they could say this because they were in their own information world in which this was impossible. Not in reality. People would say women would not vote for Trump, but pictures from his rallies were full of women. People said that educated people would not vote for Trump, when a few minutes on facebook in right wing groups would have shown them otherwise. Trump’s potential demographic was always bigger than Democrats seemed to suspect, because the people they knew who were not going to vote for Trump anyway, were not going to vote for Trump.

13) Non compulsory voting

If people generally disliked Clinton, for no particular reason, they would not feel compelled to vote for her. However, Trump voters were passionate. They would go out and vote, and organise others to vote. There might be a whole body of people who had never voted who would vote for Trump. This discovery of previous non-voters was incredibly unlikely for Clinton, because of the general knowledge about her. That Clinton had a machine, simply reinforces the idea that she was compelling people to vote, not allowing spontaneity. Without voter enthusiasm, and with the general doubt about Clinton, she risked being lost beneath passion of Trump’s magic.

14) Surveys were undecided

Pro-Democrats would repeatedly point to surveys. However they nearly always forgot to report that sometimes these surveys showed huge levels undecided voters – say in the region of 25%. Unless one candidate is more than 25% ahead of the other, such a survey tells you nothing. If surveys two months out from the election still have huge numbers of undecided voters then that should worry people, but it didn’t – they took their reinforcement from their information group, not the data. People decided not to accept the uncertainty, or work with it, but to resolve that the uncertainty did not matter.

15) Surveys are not accurate anyhow

Old Anthropological issue. Particularly, if people think you are official, they will tell you what they think you want to hear. In general they will not tell you the truth if there is much of a chance they will be blamed or ridiculed for it.

When Clinton had been portrayed as the face of the system, then the likelihood people would lie or misdirect about their intentions towards her is huge. There was a large possibility that most of the undecided people had already decided to vote Trump, or were inclining that way.

16) Conclusion

Trump was a master of informational magic. He may not understand how it works, but it uses it to persuade and involve people, to shape their view of the world, through vague impressive terms, without giving them handholds to criticise him. The effectiveness of this technique is is reinforced by the dynamics of information in Information Society.

Information is primarily about persuasion, making groups, reinforcing views of the world and persuading people to act. It is only about ‘truth’ or accuracy in specific, and often hard to maintain, circumstances. Eventually, false information will cause upset and unintended consequences, but that may well be less important to those using it, than its socially more pleasing and empowering aspects.

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