This article is about our preference for the social Darwinian, pseudoscientific, totalitarian and infantilizing pablum of the self-help industry to the harsh truths of Western philosophy.
Excellent article. I hate New Thought philosophy, not so much for its unfalsifiability, but because it serves to pacify people to the extent that they won't even acknowledge that systemic problems (whether they be economic, social or environmental) exist, which means they never get solved. After all, morality & justice are about how things should be rather than how they are - these concepts are counterfactual by definition - which means that people who think that the world is just don't know the meaning of the word. If the world were inherently good & just, then there would be no concepts of 'goodness' or 'justice' to play with, nor would there be any need to enforce these ideals on a recalcitrant nature. If everything that happened were the result of the law of attraction, or karma, or divine providence, then there would be nothing to feel indignation over, no wrongs to right, no vision of a better world - because the world would already be perfect.
It's natural for successful people like Oprah to embrace these ideas, since we all love to take full credit for our accomplishments. But why do so many losers embrace it with equal fervor? I think the majority of New Thought believers must sense how helpless they are against the titanic forces that keep them down, otherwise they wouldn't turn to such a passive philosophy in the first place. Ultimately, it's about control. Scientists search out the real laws of the universe in order to exert control over nature while pseudo-philosophers manufacture a phony laws of attraction & karma to cope with their ignorance & helplessness in the face of a universe which, even if it were personal, would not even notice them. Blaming the environment instead of ourselves only seems disempowering because most people are too lazy or overwhelmed to examine their environment & ask questions about why it is as it is. Daydreaming is easy, while actually observing the world, forming hypotheses about it & testing those hypotheses is tedious work that rarely yields any immediate rewards.
The only thing I disagree with in this article is your belief that the universe is amoral. Schopenhauer wrote that one of the most pernicious ideas of all time is that the world has no real moral dimension to it. For him, evil was not simply the absence of good or a narrow, human prejudice, but an active, pervasive force that underpinned virtually all phenomena - it was just another word for the Will that animated all matter; and though in the past I thought this was bologne, I am beginning to see the wisdom in it. If the world were truly indifferent to good & evil, then we should expect that good behavior would be rewarded with success roughly as often as bad behavior is; but clearly this isn't the case. Violence is often more efficient than non-violence; greed is more sustainable than altruism; bullies & psychopaths attract more women & have more offspring than gentlemen and white knights; all it takes is one hawk to wipe out a flock of doves. Karma & LoA are bogus, but game theory is pretty robust in terms of evidence & utility, & game theory informs us that the universe does indeed have a moral arc, but that it curves towards Hell.
Thanks! And your comments are thought-provoking as always.
I haven't read much on New Thought, but just to play devil's advocate, I think they should be able to distinguish between good and bad, by associating badness with negative thinking and with the rejection of the divine order. So badness wouldn't come from matter's tendency to oppose divine intentions, since matter would be mindless and as recalcitrant as a donkey. But badness could originate from bad or pessimistic minds. Of course, the "New Thinker" would have to explain where these minds come from, but the point is that there would still be a basis for distinguishing between good and bad mindsets and between the different results of those mindsets.
You make a powerful case for nature's immorality, and coincidentally I'm reading some articles on Schopenhauer's view of the will. I'm pondering which view makes for the greater horror, his or more science-centered cosmicism which posits nature's alien inhumanity rather than its evil.
Remember, though, I do have a way of speaking about nature's objective badness, which is to capture it in aesthetic terms. For example, I wrote a whole article arguing that the universe is monstrous in the full sense. What's monstrous is disgusting, so there we may have a reconstruction of objective immorality.
It's just that when writing for Medium, I can no longer presuppose everything I've said on my blog, so I take some shortcuts and make some oversimplifications of my views, to make the new articles independent and comprehensible to new readers. Nature would be amoral in that whatever the best moral evaluation of nature might be, it's not going to be moral in any traditional sense. Nature's badness would be either subjective or somehow aesthetic--unless Schopenhauer makes his case.
That was an interesting article as well as a long one! I imagine it feels great to be paid for your writing, but you really are forced to summarize your thoughts when writing for Medium (I wonder why? It certainly isn't more costly like it would have been in the days of paper & ink.) Also, thanks for introducing me to John Kenn's artwork. Nature's beauty may go a long way in explaining the generaly good impression it makes on people if we consider the Halo Effect. Apparently Plato's confoundation of beauty with goodness is a near universal human trait which, incidentally, is utterly unfounded and erroneous (which makes me wonder why it's so universal. Doesn't seem like it could have any survival value for those afflicted by it; though it does benefit beautiful people.).
Concerning New Thought: it comes in many flavors; so there could be one that allows for a distinction between good and bad. Most of my information on it comes from Mary Baker Eddy's Science & Health, which I read as a teen at my aunt's behest, & the series of books by best selling contemporary authors Jerry & Esther Hicks. Eddy & the Hicks, while they both recognize pain as a subjective reality, strongly deny that anything is intrinsically, objectively bad. Eddy denies it because God is good & hence incapable of creating evil or permitting it to exist, while Esther Hicks likes to compare war, disease and child abuse to spices in a kitchen: they may not be to everyone's taste, but they aren't 'evil' in any objective sense & so we do ourselves no favors by getting indignant over them (no, I'm not exaggerating for effect, she really wrote that - though I am, of course, paraphrasing here).
Hope you are enjoying Schopenhauer. He was an idealist, though, so I think it would be impossible to square his system with Cosmicism which seems to rest on materialist assumptions. I think you would especially appreciate the section in his main work (The World as Will & Idea) dealing with aesthetics & art. He seemed to believe, with the Neo-Platonists, that contemplating the sublime, impersonal beauty of nature is a kind of yoga that can help free us from the Will. Though I practice mediation to focus my mind, I have found that when it comes to samadhi-like experiences, Schopenhauer was dead-on: contemplating the beautiful-sublime beats meditation every time.
Some might argue that since the rules of game theory only emerge from the interaction between living organisms, they cannot have the metaphysical status that Schopenhauer gave to Evil. But this seems no different from saying that the laws of physics emerge from the interactions of matter. Sure, we learn about game theory by observing social games, but the presence of said games doesn't explain their rules any more than the presence of gravity explains the gravitational constant or radiation explains the weak & strong nuclear forces. The really creepy thing about game theory - the thing that's bothered me for a while - is that originally it arose from the iterated prisoner's dilemma: a highly contrived scenario that presupposes a justice system with laws, police, judges, & trials where the defendent is presumed to be innocent, whose guilt must be established through evidence & testimony. Within that context, it's perfectly clear why criminals should be punished for cooperating with each other & rewarded for defecting: it helps the DA in his duties as prosecuter if at least one criminal will testify against the others in exchange for less time or parole; but why should these rules hold in a supposedly amoral natural world that lacks any sort of justice at all? Are we all convicts living in a massive, planet-sized penal colony?
I'm writing for Medium for a change of pace and because it seems easier there to attract new readers. It's possible to make a significant amount of money writing there, but that would be like winning the lottery. I need to summarize in my writings on Medium because I pretty much need to dumb them down to have any chance of success on that platform. I'm supposed to write shorter articles with shorter paragraphs, and they should sound more like "stories" with personal elements. In any case, I'm writing there for a new audience which won't have read my blog, so it's like starting over, which is refreshing.
I think your point about evil and New Thought certainly applies to the theodicy of Christian Science. Not sure how much that's carried into the less explicitly Christian varieties of New Thought.
The obvious problem with calling nature "evil" is that evil is paradigmatically immoral and morality is supposed to apply only to persons. Mind you, I've got another anti-Trump article coming out soon and it explains why Trump is both evil and mentally deranged. Indeed, I argue, human evil is and has always been a type of natural monstrosity (rather than anything supernatural), which is to say evil is a form of psychological subhumanity. In particular, to be evil you have to lack the capacity to care about the suffering of others. So if nature is monstrous in certain respects, and that monstrosity causes enormous suffering, nature might be evil in the same way that malignant narcissists are evil.
But there are still obvious differences. Nature's mindlessness causes both suffering and pleasure, whereas human monsters like Trump tend to cause more suffering than happiness, because they're not completely mindless (they're subhuman but not nonhuman); they're selfish and they have a sinister agenda. Nature has no agenda.
This is why the evil of nature would depend on the success of something like Schopenhauer's broadening of the notion of "will." Nature would need enough of a will to be evil, but not so much of a will to be personal or conscious. Is there such a middle ground? He compares "will" to "force" at one point, which is intriguing. The scientific concept of physical forces may rest of anthropocentrism, although I'm sure the concept has a technical, operational definition.
I'm not sure what the mystery is supposed to be with game theory. That theory applies to rational decision-makers, since it was developed to account for the interactions between the US and the Soviet Union, although von Neumann's work was earlier. Maybe it applies to certain animal species too, but it doesn't apply to nonliving parts of nature, right? The wilderness would be amoral, but the kind of rationality assumed by game theory would also be amoral, that is, instrumentalist. Game theory is related to economics and biology which likewise don't presuppose the value of any goal. The rational values are all hypothetical in Kant's sense, meaning they're relative to goals and therefore their imperatives are translatable from prescriptions to descriptions.
Well, there's the traditional distinction between moral evil & natural evil; the difference being that while moral evil implies some malevolent agenda, natural evil is just the suffering living beings experience as a byproduct of purposeless natural processes such as natural disasters & plagues. Nature isn't supposed to have an agenda nor should it be the product of one; 'final causes' were dropped from science (as well as naturalist philosophy) long ago.
Game theory has been used chiefly in economics (unsuccessfully) & politics (more successfully), true, but it's also been used to mathematically model & accurately predict the behavior of organisms who have no economy, no laws, no governments or even rational self-interest (except on a purely unconscious, instinctual level); hence I think its findings deserve the status of natural laws (or descriptions, if you find 'laws' too anthropomorphic). But if this is so, then that's a problem because game theory presupposes a final cause. The rules of the prisoner's dilemma, for example, aren't arbitrary, they are designed to encourage the participants to defect out of rational self-interest. It would be easy to create an alternative game that rewarded cooperation & punished defection, or one that favored neither defection nor cooperation. In a truly amoral, purposeless universe, the latter game would seem to be the most likely, since there would be no reason for an amoral universe be partial to either defection or cooperation.
In reality, though, unconditioal defection (or Hawk) & Assessor (defect against weaker players, cooperate with stronger ones) are generally the most stable & advantageous strategies for individual players (though not necessarily for their genes or species). The only exception to this tendency that I am aware of is when two players are in an ongoing relationship (as in a mate, friend, or business partner), in which case a variety of cooperative, but retaliatory strategies (Tit-for-tat) have been found to be slightly superior to Hawk. Tit-for-taters will always cooperate in the first round, but if that cooperation isn't reciprocated, they have a certain probability of defecting which will increase with each subsequent defection by the other player (depending on the version of Tit-for-tat). Unconditional cooperation (Dove), in which the player turns the other cheek & repays cruelty with kindness - which is what most religions would describe as the epitome of good - is the LEAST stable strategy of them all! So the very fact that the universe DOES favor some strategies over others suggests that it isn't amoral; that the strategies it favors most are those which amount to pitiless exploitation of the weak suggests that it's evil.
The preceeding chain of deductions would seem to abolish the distinction between moral & natural evils. If nature favors evil behavior over good, then that favor betrays an agenda, a purpose, a final cause which nature isn't supposed to have.
It's an interesting possibility because of its creepiness. But I think the biological application of game theory would posit only instrumental reason and the open-ended value of self-interest. Animals don't have to be logicians or scientists to be rational in that sense, since their genes program them to defend themselves. It's not obvious, then, that it's the universe as a whole that favours selfish solutions to game theoretic problems; rather, it's the animal players that evolve those solutions. The culprit here needn't be an evil will of nature, but just the genome that exploits its vehicles. That exploitation need be only amoral and mindless, not evil.
I'll look into this more, though, since I'm not as well-versed in game theory as you seem to be.
Excellent article. I hate New Thought philosophy, not so much for its unfalsifiability, but because it serves to pacify people to the extent that they won't even acknowledge that systemic problems (whether they be economic, social or environmental) exist, which means they never get solved. After all, morality & justice are about how things should be rather than how they are - these concepts are counterfactual by definition - which means that people who think that the world is just don't know the meaning of the word. If the world were inherently good & just, then there would be no concepts of 'goodness' or 'justice' to play with, nor would there be any need to enforce these ideals on a recalcitrant nature. If everything that happened were the result of the law of attraction, or karma, or divine providence, then there would be nothing to feel indignation over, no wrongs to right, no vision of a better world - because the world would already be perfect.
ReplyDeleteIt's natural for successful people like Oprah to embrace these ideas, since we all love to take full credit for our accomplishments. But why do so many losers embrace it with equal fervor? I think the majority of New Thought believers must sense how helpless they are against the titanic forces that keep them down, otherwise they wouldn't turn to such a passive philosophy in the first place. Ultimately, it's about control. Scientists search out the real laws of the universe in order to exert control over nature while pseudo-philosophers manufacture a phony laws of attraction & karma to cope with their ignorance & helplessness in the face of a universe which, even if it were personal, would not even notice them. Blaming the environment instead of ourselves only seems disempowering because most people are too lazy or overwhelmed to examine their environment & ask questions about why it is as it is. Daydreaming is easy, while actually observing the world, forming hypotheses about it & testing those hypotheses is tedious work that rarely yields any immediate rewards.
The only thing I disagree with in this article is your belief that the universe is amoral. Schopenhauer wrote that one of the most pernicious ideas of all time is that the world has no real moral dimension to it. For him, evil was not simply the absence of good or a narrow, human prejudice, but an active, pervasive force that underpinned virtually all phenomena - it was just another word for the Will that animated all matter; and though in the past I thought this was bologne, I am beginning to see the wisdom in it. If the world were truly indifferent to good & evil, then we should expect that good behavior would be rewarded with success roughly as often as bad behavior is; but clearly this isn't the case. Violence is often more efficient than non-violence; greed is more sustainable than altruism; bullies & psychopaths attract more women & have more offspring than gentlemen and white knights; all it takes is one hawk to wipe out a flock of doves. Karma & LoA are bogus, but game theory is pretty robust in terms of evidence & utility, & game theory informs us that the universe does indeed have a moral arc, but that it curves towards Hell.
Thanks! And your comments are thought-provoking as always.
DeleteI haven't read much on New Thought, but just to play devil's advocate, I think they should be able to distinguish between good and bad, by associating badness with negative thinking and with the rejection of the divine order. So badness wouldn't come from matter's tendency to oppose divine intentions, since matter would be mindless and as recalcitrant as a donkey. But badness could originate from bad or pessimistic minds. Of course, the "New Thinker" would have to explain where these minds come from, but the point is that there would still be a basis for distinguishing between good and bad mindsets and between the different results of those mindsets.
You make a powerful case for nature's immorality, and coincidentally I'm reading some articles on Schopenhauer's view of the will. I'm pondering which view makes for the greater horror, his or more science-centered cosmicism which posits nature's alien inhumanity rather than its evil.
Remember, though, I do have a way of speaking about nature's objective badness, which is to capture it in aesthetic terms. For example, I wrote a whole article arguing that the universe is monstrous in the full sense. What's monstrous is disgusting, so there we may have a reconstruction of objective immorality.
It's just that when writing for Medium, I can no longer presuppose everything I've said on my blog, so I take some shortcuts and make some oversimplifications of my views, to make the new articles independent and comprehensible to new readers. Nature would be amoral in that whatever the best moral evaluation of nature might be, it's not going to be moral in any traditional sense. Nature's badness would be either subjective or somehow aesthetic--unless Schopenhauer makes his case.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/08/is-nature-beautiful-or-monstrous.html
That was an interesting article as well as a long one! I imagine it feels great to be paid for your writing, but you really are forced to summarize your thoughts when writing for Medium (I wonder why? It certainly isn't more costly like it would have been in the days of paper & ink.) Also, thanks for introducing me to John Kenn's artwork. Nature's beauty may go a long way in explaining the generaly good impression it makes on people if we consider the Halo Effect. Apparently Plato's confoundation of beauty with goodness is a near universal human trait which, incidentally, is utterly unfounded and erroneous (which makes me wonder why it's so universal. Doesn't seem like it could have any survival value for those afflicted by it; though it does benefit beautiful people.).
ReplyDeleteConcerning New Thought: it comes in many flavors; so there could be one that allows for a distinction between good and bad. Most of my information on it comes from Mary Baker Eddy's Science & Health, which I read as a teen at my aunt's behest, & the series of books by best selling contemporary authors Jerry & Esther Hicks. Eddy & the Hicks, while they both recognize pain as a subjective reality, strongly deny that anything is intrinsically, objectively bad. Eddy denies it because God is good & hence incapable of creating evil or permitting it to exist, while Esther Hicks likes to compare war, disease and child abuse to spices in a kitchen: they may not be to everyone's taste, but they aren't 'evil' in any objective sense & so we do ourselves no favors by getting indignant over them (no, I'm not exaggerating for effect, she really wrote that - though I am, of course, paraphrasing here).
Hope you are enjoying Schopenhauer. He was an idealist, though, so I think it would be impossible to square his system with Cosmicism which seems to rest on materialist assumptions. I think you would especially appreciate the section in his main work (The World as Will & Idea) dealing with aesthetics & art. He seemed to believe, with the Neo-Platonists, that contemplating the sublime, impersonal beauty of nature is a kind of yoga that can help free us from the Will. Though I practice mediation to focus my mind, I have found that when it comes to samadhi-like experiences, Schopenhauer was dead-on: contemplating the beautiful-sublime beats meditation every time.
Some might argue that since the rules of game theory only emerge from the interaction between living organisms, they cannot have the metaphysical status that Schopenhauer gave to Evil. But this seems no different from saying that the laws of physics emerge from the interactions of matter. Sure, we learn about game theory by observing social games, but the presence of said games doesn't explain their rules any more than the presence of gravity explains the gravitational constant or radiation explains the weak & strong nuclear forces. The really creepy thing about game theory - the thing that's bothered me for a while - is that originally it arose from the iterated prisoner's dilemma: a highly contrived scenario that presupposes a justice system with laws, police, judges, & trials where the defendent is presumed to be innocent, whose guilt must be established through evidence & testimony. Within that context, it's perfectly clear why criminals should be punished for cooperating with each other & rewarded for defecting: it helps the DA in his duties as prosecuter if at least one criminal will testify against the others in exchange for less time or parole; but why should these rules hold in a supposedly amoral natural world that lacks any sort of justice at all? Are we all convicts living in a massive, planet-sized penal colony?
I'm writing for Medium for a change of pace and because it seems easier there to attract new readers. It's possible to make a significant amount of money writing there, but that would be like winning the lottery. I need to summarize in my writings on Medium because I pretty much need to dumb them down to have any chance of success on that platform. I'm supposed to write shorter articles with shorter paragraphs, and they should sound more like "stories" with personal elements. In any case, I'm writing there for a new audience which won't have read my blog, so it's like starting over, which is refreshing.
DeleteI think your point about evil and New Thought certainly applies to the theodicy of Christian Science. Not sure how much that's carried into the less explicitly Christian varieties of New Thought.
The obvious problem with calling nature "evil" is that evil is paradigmatically immoral and morality is supposed to apply only to persons. Mind you, I've got another anti-Trump article coming out soon and it explains why Trump is both evil and mentally deranged. Indeed, I argue, human evil is and has always been a type of natural monstrosity (rather than anything supernatural), which is to say evil is a form of psychological subhumanity. In particular, to be evil you have to lack the capacity to care about the suffering of others. So if nature is monstrous in certain respects, and that monstrosity causes enormous suffering, nature might be evil in the same way that malignant narcissists are evil.
But there are still obvious differences. Nature's mindlessness causes both suffering and pleasure, whereas human monsters like Trump tend to cause more suffering than happiness, because they're not completely mindless (they're subhuman but not nonhuman); they're selfish and they have a sinister agenda. Nature has no agenda.
This is why the evil of nature would depend on the success of something like Schopenhauer's broadening of the notion of "will." Nature would need enough of a will to be evil, but not so much of a will to be personal or conscious. Is there such a middle ground? He compares "will" to "force" at one point, which is intriguing. The scientific concept of physical forces may rest of anthropocentrism, although I'm sure the concept has a technical, operational definition.
I'm not sure what the mystery is supposed to be with game theory. That theory applies to rational decision-makers, since it was developed to account for the interactions between the US and the Soviet Union, although von Neumann's work was earlier. Maybe it applies to certain animal species too, but it doesn't apply to nonliving parts of nature, right? The wilderness would be amoral, but the kind of rationality assumed by game theory would also be amoral, that is, instrumentalist. Game theory is related to economics and biology which likewise don't presuppose the value of any goal. The rational values are all hypothetical in Kant's sense, meaning they're relative to goals and therefore their imperatives are translatable from prescriptions to descriptions.
Well, there's the traditional distinction between moral evil & natural evil; the difference being that while moral evil implies some malevolent agenda, natural evil is just the suffering living beings experience as a byproduct of purposeless natural processes such as natural disasters & plagues. Nature isn't supposed to have an agenda nor should it be the product of one; 'final causes' were dropped from science (as well as naturalist philosophy) long ago.
ReplyDeleteGame theory has been used chiefly in economics (unsuccessfully) & politics (more successfully), true, but it's also been used to mathematically model & accurately predict the behavior of organisms who have no economy, no laws, no governments or even rational self-interest (except on a purely unconscious, instinctual level); hence I think its findings deserve the status of natural laws (or descriptions, if you find 'laws' too anthropomorphic). But if this is so, then that's a problem because game theory presupposes a final cause. The rules of the prisoner's dilemma, for example, aren't arbitrary, they are designed to encourage the participants to defect out of rational self-interest. It would be easy to create an alternative game that rewarded cooperation & punished defection, or one that favored neither defection nor cooperation. In a truly amoral, purposeless universe, the latter game would seem to be the most likely, since there would be no reason for an amoral universe be partial to either defection or cooperation.
In reality, though, unconditioal defection (or Hawk) & Assessor (defect against weaker players, cooperate with stronger ones) are generally the most stable & advantageous strategies for individual players (though not necessarily for their genes or species). The only exception to this tendency that I am aware of is when two players are in an ongoing relationship (as in a mate, friend, or business partner), in which case a variety of cooperative, but retaliatory strategies (Tit-for-tat) have been found to be slightly superior to Hawk. Tit-for-taters will always cooperate in the first round, but if that cooperation isn't reciprocated, they have a certain probability of defecting which will increase with each subsequent defection by the other player (depending on the version of Tit-for-tat). Unconditional cooperation (Dove), in which the player turns the other cheek & repays cruelty with kindness - which is what most religions would describe as the epitome of good - is the LEAST stable strategy of them all! So the very fact that the universe DOES favor some strategies over others suggests that it isn't amoral; that the strategies it favors most are those which amount to pitiless exploitation of the weak suggests that it's evil.
The preceeding chain of deductions would seem to abolish the distinction between moral & natural evils. If nature favors evil behavior over good, then that favor betrays an agenda, a purpose, a final cause which nature isn't supposed to have.
And that just creeps me out...
It's an interesting possibility because of its creepiness. But I think the biological application of game theory would posit only instrumental reason and the open-ended value of self-interest. Animals don't have to be logicians or scientists to be rational in that sense, since their genes program them to defend themselves. It's not obvious, then, that it's the universe as a whole that favours selfish solutions to game theoretic problems; rather, it's the animal players that evolve those solutions. The culprit here needn't be an evil will of nature, but just the genome that exploits its vehicles. That exploitation need be only amoral and mindless, not evil.
DeleteI'll look into this more, though, since I'm not as well-versed in game theory as you seem to be.