Karl Popper Defines "Rationality"

Everyone is all in favor of "reason" and contemptuous of the other guys that substitute "feelings" or "faith" or "bigotry" for reason.

What we really mean is that "our" account of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the correct one, the rational one, but the other guy... Well, he's probably living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Karl Popper is famous for the idea of "falsification." He argues that unless it is possible to test your theory against real-life data then it's not a theory but just a narrative.

By the way, he has nothing against narrative. Man "can invent stories, fairy tales, myths." But when a myth can't be tested...

Not that there's anything wrong with narratives. It's just that a narrative isn't science.

In Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In defence of interaction, adapted from a series of lectures given by Popper at Emory University in 1969 and published by M.A. Notturno, Popper develops his ideas. 

He has two Big Ideas to present. The first is the process of scientific discovery. It goes like this:

1. A theory has a problem.
2. Propose a tentative revised theory.
3. Test the theory.
4. Wait for the next problem.

The second Big Idea is his "Three Worlds" notion. It goes like this

World 3: the products of our human minds.
World 2: our mental states or processes.
World 1: physical states or processes.

When he says World 3 he means both scientific theories and actual physical products of the human mind such as windmills and temples and jet airplanes.

But at the end of the book, in the last lecture, titled "The Self, Rationality, and Freedom," he defines "rationality."

I mean by "rationality" simply a critical attitude towards problems -- the readiness to learn from our mistakes, and the attitude of consciously searching for our mistakes and for our prejudices. Thus, I mean by "rationality" the attitude of conscious, critical, error elimination.

Simplified, I would say that Popper sees reason and rationality as a process rather than a framework.

And, he says, we humans can only deal with one or two mistakes at a time. We cannot sweep the whole of knowledge-so-far in the trash and start with a blank sheet. So, "our criticism cannot tackle more than one or two problems or theories at a time". But, "there is no problem or theory... that is immune to being made  the object of our critical consideration."

Then, he attacks what he calls "the myth of the framework," the idea that two people cannot have a fruitful discussion unless their world-views are pretty much in alignment. On the contrary, he writes, dealing with someone with a significantly different "framework" can be really productive and interesting. But it does require both sides to admit to themselves that they might be wrong.

Finally he critiques the notion of "self-expression," that

the quality of the work we do depends on how good we are. It depends only on our talents, on our psychological, and, perhaps, on our physiological states.

Popper regards this as sick and wrong. That's because he regards all successful theory and knowledge as "objective knowledge" in his World 3. The point is that all scientific knowledge is a public thing. It is a monument that is pushed out into the public world. Then either you, or someone else, critiques it and tries to improve it. I suppose that the point is that if you make a scientific discovery it might be because of your astonishing talent. Or it might be because you got lucky and "noticed" something that nobody else did.

Either way, once you have created a new theory, it is back to the drawing board and on to the next thing. 

Karl Popper: The Emergence of Criticism

Karl Popper is famous for his notion of falsifiability. La Wik:

Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments.

Or, as my guy F.S.C. Northrop wrote: "knowledge begins with a problem," or when existing theory doesn't work in a particular situation. In his Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper Bryan Magee explains things thusly.

The old model of scientific method was:

1, observation and experiment; 2, inductive generalization; 3, hypothesis; 4, attempted verification of hypothesis; 5, proof or disproof; 6, knowledge.

According to Popper, it goes like this:

1, problem...; 2, proposed solution, in other words a new theory; 3, deduction of testable propositions from the new theory; 4, tests... observation and experiment; 5, preference established between competing theories.

Actually, I describe the process a little differently, as 

1. Problem with the old theory;
2. propose a new theory;
3. Make predictions;
4. Survive attacks on new theory. 

Until a new problem emerges. And it will. And I think that my description of the problem is better than Magee's. Maybe you have a better idea.

But then Magee goes on to say how radical this new approach is, not just in science, but in life. He calls it "the emergence of criticism."

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

There is One Truth, and you'd better not mess with it, peasant. 

But let us be fair. There was a very good reason for that in the days Before Science. Supposed you, Farmer Joe, changed the routine of farming that had successfully brought food for the table to your household. What's the odds that your brilliant idea is wrong, and your family starves?

We can see how this works in the recent COVID experience. The government and its bureaucrats decree what is going on and what to do about it. Any disagreement is banned by the media as "disinformation."

Nothing new here.

But we live in a critical age. Magee:

Popper believes that... the first schools to not only permit criticism but encourage and welcome it were those of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece... This spelt the end of the dogmatic tradition of passing on an unsullied truth, and the beginning of a new rational tradition of subjecting speculations to critical discussion.

In the old days, if society had a wrong theory, the whole society would die. Under the new dispensation, where criticism of existing theory is permitted, the wrong theory dies instead of society.

It is important to understand how radical this is: to allow heretics and intellectual rebels to argue their point. Humans are not programmed that way. We want to believe in the truth of our religion and our way of life, and it is extremely frightening to allow an open discussion of competing ideas. 

So Popper explains the emergence of Marxism. Marxism is a religion that pretends to be scientific and to predict, with scientific precision, that society will trend towards a perfect world because Marx claims to have discovered the "Natural Laws of capitalist production...  [and to] lay bare the Economic Law of Motion of modern society." You could call it the last stand of Newtonian mechanics.

It is natural, Magee says, for the modern "emergence of criticism" to inspire an opposite faith, in the One True Marxism. That's because the responsibility of searching out the best path to the future is terrifying, and most of us would rather leave the heavy lifting to the priests and the politicians.

Only, of course, if we leave everything to the priests and politicians, then when they are wrong we will all die. Hey Mao! How yer doin' pal?

Popper argues that the culture of criticism requires that we go forward piecemeal. We discover a problem, we propose a solution, we find it works, sort of, but not quite, so we admit our error and revise the solution. It's all very messy, and we humans don't like mess.

Indeed, I argue, the problem with churches and governments and hierarchies is that the leader is not allowed to admit a mistake. In the recent retreat from Afghanistan you can see this operating. President Biden cannot admit that his plan to withdraw was an absolute clown show.

It's not just that Biden made mistakes; the point is that social leaders down the ages have never been able to admit mistakes. The problem is nicely illustrated in the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven. If things start going wrong in China it is a sign that the emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and that means the end of the dynasty.

That is the old world.

But in the new world we accept that things are going wrong all the time, that we will be butting up against the limit of our knowledge all the time. But that's OK. It's not the end of the world. In the new order we try to figure out what went wrong and come up with a better idea, and try it out.

In a way, the Apollo 13 disaster shows us the modern can-do spirit in action. Two days into the flight in 1970 an oxygen tank in the Service Module failed, and this meant that there wasn't enough oxygen to sustain the crew in the Command Module. What happened next is that a team back on Earth went into a room with all the equipment available on the spacecraft and figured out how to jury-rig life-support for the crew long enough for them to return to Earth.

In other words, "Houston We Have A Problem" is the very essence on the modern culture of criticism and adaptation. We something goes wrong we don't all start pointing fingers at each other. Instead we figure out a way to solve the problem, and when anyone comes up with an idea, we test it to see if it will work.

Tell that to the politicians and activists.

There's a piece in Unherd today that acts as a corrollary to this. "Life is one big status game" is about how people always listen to socially dominant people, and how people are always taking advantage of social dominance to beat up the peasants with virtue-signaling. This is Old World.

New World is that techy nerds are out there in Nowheresville thinking up whacky ideas, and that every now and again one of them comes up with a whacky idea that works.

New World is adapting to climate change rather than completely changing energy use in accordance with a grand plan of Building Back Better from the rich guys in the World Economic Forum.

New World is ten thousand different schools trying out how to educate kids, rather than slavishly following the latest One Size Fits All No Child Left Behind ukase from on high.

Capitalism Isn't Accumulation. Get It?

Because I've been reading around Marxist economics recently I have developed an allergic reaction to the word "accumulation." Marx and his epigones are always using the word in respect of capitalism, as in:

Primitive Accumulation: Marxists say this started with the enclosure of land and the expulsion of the resident population to create a landless proletariat. OK. Good point. Only it wasn't the capitalists that did this but the feudal nobles who, upon being disarmed by the absolute monarchs, kicked the peasants off their land because they couldn't use them as soldiers any more. By the way, Sir James Steuart, quoted by Marx, was a mercantilist who believed in a ban on the export of gold and silver (thus encouraging their "accumulation.")

Capital Accumulation: In Marx's notion (from La Wik), 

capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits.

Do you see the problem here? Marx and his epigones assume that capital accumulation is simply a mechanical or hydraulic operation. You pump your profits back into the economy and it accumulates as more profits. But it's not that simple.

Let us start with the profits from an investment. What should the capitalist do? Should he spend the money on a yacht? Should he reinvest it in his existing business? Should he put the money into creating a new line in his business? Should he start a completely new business? Should he invest the money in stocks and ETFs? If so, which ones? Should he invest the money in government bonds? The point is that his profits from this year do not just "accumulate." They must be spent or invested in a good idea, a good idea that works. To talk about this as "capital accumulation" completely misses the point.

Over-accumulation: According to the Marxists "A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy" and this is what causes capitalism to self-destruct and lead to socialism. I think that what he means here is that opportunities for profitable investment tend to reduce over time, leading to a crisis of capitalism.

Of course, there is a grain of truth in this. A General Motors may grow itself into the biggest automaker in the United States, but then what? What does it do for an encore? What does it do when the profits in auto-manufacturing start to level off and even decline? What does it do when business turns down and it can't afford to pay the above-market wages its workers have come to regard as their birthright? What does it do when the talent of its CEOs and managers reverts to the mean? 

We see this all the time in business. Any big corporation tends to be tuned up to do one thing. And then the world changes. And the corporation drops out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 top corporations.

OK. Enough about Marx. Let's talk reality, and the reality is that accumulation has nothing to do with the case.

"Intangible Capital:" The naked truth about capitalism is that that it bares the facts of human cooperation. Nothing is guaranteed; nothing works forever; even hard work isn't enough; good luck doesn't go on forever. You must serve the consumers or go broke.

And the biggest fact of all is the fact in the World Bank's study of capital: "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" Guess what: in the advanced nations, 80 percent of "capital" is so-called "intangible capital."

In other words, if you want to understand "wealth," the biggest part of it is not "natural capital," like oil or gold or silver or land. It is not "produced capital," like factories and industrial plants. It is the knowledge and know-how, the "intangible capital" that humans carry around with them between their ears.

Let's create a little table from the World Bank's Appendix 2 on the Per-Capita Wealth of Nations in 2000.

National Capital in $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Capital
Iran	$14,105	$3,336	$6,581	$24,023
Ireland	$10,534	$46,542	$273,414	$330,490
United States	$14,752	$79,851	$418,009	$512,612

Yipes. Notice how our three candidate countries all have about the same amount of "natural capital." But that don't mean nothing. Hey, "produced capital" ain't beanbag, but it is still second tier. The only thing that matters is "intangible capital."

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Chuck old chap. And the same to all you Marxists and lefties and all the ships at sea.

Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules

Everybody says that they are in favor of logic and reason: St. Thomas Aquinas; the rational Enlightenment; conservatives. Even radical lefties say that modern capitalism and liberalism is all a lie because the truth is that capitalism and liberalism are all about oppression.

Now comes Roger Kimball with a piece in American Greatness on "Science!" He starts with statement that the two great scientific fraudsters, "the egregious Michael “hockey stick” Mann and St. Anthony “mask theater” Fauci, have recently received gratifying comeuppances." About which we can all agree. But then he starts attacking all my favorite guys:

[Paul] Feyerabend maintained that science is no more cognitively privileged than (for example) astrology, voodoo, or necromancy. The “only one principle that can be defended,” he wrote in Against Method, “. . . is anything goes.”

[Thomas Kuhn.] According to Kuhn, [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,] scientific truth is “paradigm relative.” For example, what was considered true under the Ptolemaic view of the solar system differs from what we, having read Copernicus, believe. 

[Karl] Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery made the curious argument that the distinguishing mark of a scientific theory was not (as everyone used to think) that it was verifiable by empirical evidence. On the contrary, Popper argued that a theory was scientific to the extent that it was “falsifiable.” 

Well, I think all three are right and Roger Kimball is wrong.

Feyerabend: The point here is that the record of the last century or so is that a new theory always busts up the assumptions of the reigning methodology. Maybe just a little, maybe a whole lot. Newton was based on absolute space and time; Einstein said that space and time are relative.

Kuhn: His argument is that the reigning princes of science will always defend the old ways. Only when the old generation dies off can a new "paradigm" get a foothold.  Of course this applies to everything. The current 80-year-old princes of the Democratic Party are about to retire and the Dems will only then complete their paradigm shift to lefty wokism.

Popper: The point of "falsification" is that if your theory explains everything it isn't useful. Climate change is an example. Everything that happens, from extreme weather to hurricane frequency, is said to demand that we stop using fossil fuels. Genuine science makes predictions upon which the theory stands or falls. The famous example of the 1919 confirmations of General Relativity is an example, including the "Perihelion precession of Mercury" -- which could not happen according to Newtonian theory -- and the "Deflection of light by the Sun" of a star that was close to the Sun during a solar eclipse. If these experiments "falsified" Einstein's equations instead of confirming them, it would have been "back to the drawing board."

The point that these three scientists are making is that every scientific theory is a stitch-up, good enough for government work. But once you start trying to apply it to more and more situations, then you are likely to find that, at some point, it doesn't work. The most obvious case is Newton's mechanics. It works at Earth scale. But when you get out into the universe, then it doesn't predict close enough.

And when scientists have to explain their anomalous results with things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that is a "tell" that "Houston we have a problem." Nothing shameful about that: happens all the time. Here is an article that proposes that the "dark matter" explanation arose because scientists used Newtonian gravitation instead of relativity to model the behavior of galaxies. (Waat? Really?)

Now, my belief is that to understand what is going on here you need to understand the German Turn in philosophy and knowledge -- and Feyerabend and Popper were both born Austrians. Kuhn? He was Jewish American with a German name.

I have a lot to say about the German Turn, but it starts with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Prussian. He wrote that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. When we humans experience light hitting our eyes we process and interpret that light in our brains, and out of that processing we create an image of the world we are seeing.

For instance, I am sitting at a table. Hey, what more do I need to say? Well, if I wanted to construct a table, then I need to know more about the construction of tables, about materials, about tools, and so on. And if I were to use metals in my construction I would have to learn about the mining and smelting of metals. Behind what George Lakoff calls a "basic level" object hides an infinity of possibilities.

My argument is that Kant's theory of things-in-themselves and appearances set off the German Turn that leads directly, do not pass go, to relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are ridiculous at a "basic level."

So, whatever you believe, I suggest that you take the notions of Feyerabend and Kuhn and Popper, and ponder them in your heart.

Now, we conservatives and nationalists tend to ridicule the left and its "critical theory." Writes Andy Ngo in Unmasked, "Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth?" But the critique of objective reality and truth doesn't just come from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Kant's masterwork was titled "A Critique of Pure Reason."

My point is that if we want to own the future and banish lefty rubbish from the face of the Earth "we" need to understand "critical theory" from Kant to Kuhn and then go beyond it. That's Sun Tzu: To beat your enemy you must first understand him.

And this begins with admitting that there is no such thing as "objective reality." All realities are constructed, in our minds.

At the Intersection of Math and Politics

There's terrifying piece at Quillette about the intersection of math and leftism by Greg Ashman: "Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-old Conflict." It is, if you like, the argument between people that want to teach kids to understand math, and "those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization." And never mind what it means.

Now, of course, the "understanding" crowd are saying that forcing kids to memorize and practice is, as my cousin says, "colonizing the curriculum," and marginalizing the human way of learning, especially the non-western approach to knowledge.

The point is that, if things like learning to talk can be achieved without explicit teaching and rote memorization, why not math? Ashman:

Humans have been speaking to each other for a long time and long enough for evolution to act on the process of children learning their mother tongue. In contrast, writing and symbolic math are only a few thousand years old at best and for much of that time have been the preserve of only a tiny proportion of the human population. There simply has not been sufficient time for us to evolve natural ways to learn to read or do math through immersion.

In other words, little babies are programmed to learn to speak; they are not yet programmed to learn math. 

The article made me think about things we learn where explicit teaching and practice are required and just accepted. Let me count the ways:

1. Learning a musical instrument. You have to practice to make perfect. Unless you are Mozart.
2. Learning to dance. It takes about two years to learn Argentine Tango so you can just lead it unconsciously. And you practice it till it becomes second nature. Then you can wow all the girls.
3. Learning to fly. Pilots are taught to practice emergencies, because you do not have time to think when something goes wrong.
4. Boot camp. Soldiers need all kinds of skills to be second nature. To stay alive.
5. Acting in a play. You need to learn your cues, your lines, your blocking, and it needs to become second nature.
6. Mental arithmetic. It helps to know that "1 minus 4 is 7 carry one" -- instinctively, never mind why. Much faster than counting on your fingers.

Need I go on?

Maybe this explains "white privilege." Whites -- i.e. everyone except Africans -- have been doing writing and math rather longer than Blacks from West Africa. And it shows. No fair!

Note, by the way, that Brahmins from India and the Chinese seem to have no problem in the math department. In fact, I'd say that the Chinese people are probably better at math than your average pimply white soyboy. And I explain that by a couple thousand years of Mandarin examinations.

Or, as a guy from Taiwan explained to me, on the subject of teaching literacy in the East Asian character system: the way they teach literacy is that each student has to learn 20 characters a day. Or they get beaten.

What I wonder is what will happen, One Fine Day, when the clients of the liberals wake up to the fact that lefty politics is all about lefty educated gentry feeling good about themselves. Lefty politics has almost nothing to do with helping minorities and "oppressed peoples."

Do you think they will descend into a rage that outdoes the Viking "beserker" rage? Or just say: "much as I hate to say it, my liberal patrons just aren't as caring and compassionate as they like to think."

Understanding Gender Madness

Guess what! The schientists at the New England Journal of Medicine are proposing that “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people.”

Well, that settles it. The worst thing in the world -- after systemic racism -- is harm experienced by "intersex and transgender people" from the bigotry of transphobes. To paraphrase Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), "if we reduce harm to just one intersex/transgender life..."

But what I want to know is: who is the boss here? I should have thought that the interests of ruling class bureaucrats and administrative Pooh Bahs would come before the interests of the woke radicals. And the more finely graded the data that our rulers have about us, the more wisely they can rule us. But what do I know? Perhaps this is a deeper thing than I can understand.

Maybe as the Biden administration sets forth on its glorious war on climate change and systemic racism, the honor of marching in the vanguard will properly be exchanged between the Imperial Guards Regiment of Administrators and Experts and the Battalion of Intersectional Activists of the Global Guards. These high-status guards regiments tend to be very touchy about the honor and vanity of protecting the monarch. I dare say that back in the day there were a lot of heated words exchanged between guardsmen of the various guards regiments about the size and the shape of their shakos and busbies and bearskins.

Now, I have explained the whole procedure of the left's critical theory stuff, about how it is really a mutton-headed misunderstanding of the whole German Turn in knowledge inaugurated by Kant's notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, driven mainly by a primitive yearning for the good old days of the Age of Politics. Not to mention the tremendous fun of rape-age and pillage in the good old days of the Vikings. I have categorized my critique of the left into the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, and the Left's Errors. And sometimes, when I'm all confused, I just categorize as Liberal Oppression.

One important thing not to be left out of this analysis is George Lakoff's analysis in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. See he says that we initially categorize the world using "basic-level" categories like "dog" and "table." We become expert at this by age 2. But then we get sophisticated, and understand that "dog" is a kind of "animal." But the further we get away from the basic level, the more questions arise, for instance when we are dealing with a form of life that seems to be part animal and part vegetable.

You can see how the gender bender thingy fits into this.  Boys and girls are "basic-level" categories. You know which is which by the time you are 2. But, as you learn more, you get to realize that boys and girls are alike in a lot more ways than they are different. I mean, when you get down to the X and Y chromosomes, you get the notion that the only different between men and women is that out of the total of 46 chromosomes, men have one that is different and that women don't have. Such a tiny difference!

And the point of the "basic-level" category is that it is just an appearance that we humans, from an early age, learn to differentiate. These basic level categories seem to be significant for us at a basic level. But maybe not. And if you are a creature with X-X chromosomes but experience yourself as a man, well, why not?

And how dare -- How Dare -- transphobic bigots suggest that such "intersex and transgender people" are living in a fantasy world!

Mind you, some people might object to the "allies" of "intersex and transgender people" making gender-binary people feel "unsafe." After all, don't believers in traditional morality have their rights too?

It's all very well to invoke Mrs. Patrick Campbell's rule of "do whatever you want but don't frighten the horses in the street." Unless, of course, you are a street urchin and the best fun in the world is frightening the horses in the street.

But the point of moral rules and science is ultimately the survival and thriving of the human race. I mean, the whole point of climate change politics is that, unless we act now! Well, something. And the whole point of traditional gender-binary and traditional morality is that it happens to be the way we get children on the ground and survive to the next generation.

So, if we are going to have carbon taxes and stop the production of fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030 and stigmatize skeptics as "climate deniers," because climate change, then maybe we should likewise apply force and name and shame and shun people that don't seem to be too serious about getting the next generation on the ground.

C'mon man! We don't know whether carbon pollution will lead to the end of civilization as we know it, but sure as heck-fire we know that if everyone became "intersex and transgender people" then humans would be outta here in less than a century.

Science, Climate Change, Politics, Prophecy and Reason

California Governor and nephew of Nancy Pelosi Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order to ban the sale of fossil-fueled powered cars in California in 2035.

Because the science of climate change demands it.

Over at UnHerd.com they have an article suggesting that only by harnessing the power of Nationalism will the world be able to tackle climate change.

Because the disconnected politicking of left and right can't do the job. We need to act as if we were fighting the Nazis or the Commies.

Or take the wonderful City of Seattle Council that has overridden the veto of Mayor Jenny Durkan and made "a down payment" on defunding the police with a reduction of 100 officers in the upcoming fiscal year.

Because, as Marx wrote, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Just because Revolution, Baby, failed in the Sixties doesn't mean it won't succeed today!

What is going on? Why are these politicians doing all this stupid stuff?

Fear not. I have the answers right here.

First of all we must recognize the nasty bind in which today's politicians find themselves. Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe -- external and internal enemies -- in the present emergency.

Or as I say it in my Maxims: "The only warrant for government power is an existential peril."

But, that was for the old days, the tribal days, when the men of the tribe had to be ready to foil the neighboring tribe's dawn raid. What do you do when the threat of invasion and conquest has diminished to a nothing?

You make it up. That is what climate change is all about. That is what systemic racism is about. Because if there weren't any climate change or systemic racism to worry about we wouldn't need our brave political leaders leading us into battle against the evil giants.

Yes, but what about the science?

OK. Here is where I am going to lose you. Science is nothing more than Prophecy. Oh, it is very good prophecy, much better than divination and the entrails of a goat. But science is still prophecy, meaning it makes predictions about how stuff in the world moves and shakes and changes from moment to moment and day to day and eon to eon.

But isn't science all about logic and reason? Yes indeed. But did you know that humans invented logic and reason to manage their social relationships, and especially their lies? Sorry, I forgot to save the link. But here is another look, "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Hugo Mercier that argues that humans reason in order to argue and persuade: 

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade... Skilled arguers... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Actually, it was not that long ago that the philosophers descanted upon logic and reason in their coffee houses completely separate from the mechanics across town that made the clocks and the carts and the cathedrals. And ne'er the twain would meet. Until they needed really accurate clocks for global navigation and the mind-guys got together with the clock-maker guys and the European adventurers conquered the world.

The only point of science is to help predict the future, which may be anything from predicting the flight of a cannonball to predicting whether a bridge will fall down. But if you are an engineer you will know that engineers always build in a "factor of safety" when designing a building or an airplane.

Now, this notion of science as prophecy is built into what I call the German Turn in modern knowledge. It begins with Kant saying that we can't know things-in-themselves but only appearances. He was responding to the canceled Hume's dictum that there is no such thing in human knowledge as cause and effect, but only correlation. Just because a building fell down right after a raven flew across the face of the moon doesn't mean that the raven caused the building to fall down.

The German Turn reaches its peak with Jung saying that, for all our conscious knowledge, we are still mostly programmed by unknown "archetypes" in our unconscious, the primordial instincts that kept us as a human species alive for millions of years, and other living species for hundred of millions of years.

What does a living thing need, most of all? It needs to have some glimpse of what happens next, so that it can react in time to make a kill of a mega-fauna or dodge the spear or the bullet. And then whatabout next week? Whatabout next year?

That is what Prophecy is all about. Generally, once a prophetic tradition gets a hold of human minds it becomes an orthodoxy, enforced by the powerful and their priests. Notice that a prophetic tradition does not necessarily have to have a track record, just that influential people support it and enforce its doctrine.

This even extends to science. That's what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was all about. A new scientific theory doesn't just come along and everybody agrees with it. The new theory -- or "paradigm" -- is not just a harmless idea; it proposes to humiliate the supporters of the old theory. It threatens jobs and reputations in academia. So it really doesn't succeed until the old generation dies off. Best of all, the new theory should make a prophetic prediction: like the prediction of General Relativity that light is bent as is comes close to a very massive object like our Sun.

You can see why climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic are like catnip to politicians. The politician really has nothing to do unless there is an existential peril requiring bold action. The world is coming to an end and we will all die! Unless we act now! There is a new plague and we will all die! Unless we all act now. And this is not just the politician acting up. He is activating Jungian "archetypes" deep in our unconcious.

Do not underestimate how vital and powerful these archetypes are. Writing in 1936 Jung said in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onwards millions of warriors ready for death -- why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. (p.48)

So it is not surprising that politicians lurch towards any existential peril as a warrant for political power; that well-born young men and women throng the streets in mostly peaceful protest, that scientists go with the program and advocate for the hot thing that gets the grants, and that nice liberal ladies throng to the meetings of the latest prophet. 

The thing is to jump off the prophetic train before it transports us to disaster. But how?

Humans and Reality: the New Science of Categorization

For a while now, I have been slowly reading George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Well, that's a mouthful!

I had previously read his Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. It get into notions like "strict father" and "nurturant parent" moralities. 

But the big point is that we humans are not rational, logical scientists. We are animals, social animals, and our brains are coded to live -- survive -- in the world. Like other animals.

George Lakoff is a linguist, and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is about linguistics, about how we humans came to realize that the traditional notion of categorization, handed down for a couple thousand years from the Greek philosophers, that we categorize things abstractly, is wrong. Here is how he describes the "classic theory of categories" as "abstract containers."

From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought [to] be well understood and unproblematic. They were understood to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they have certain properties in common.

In fact, we are all taught to believe this. I suppose it has to do with our worship of logic and reason. We logical reasoners observe the world and mentally put things into the right boxes. Because logic.

All wrong, says Lakoff. In fact, beginning with the work of linguist Eleanor Rosch, our categories reflect our human embodiment. She noted that, in fact, things are not either "in" or "out" of a category, but graded.

Rosch... demonstrated that categories, in general, have best examples (called "prototypes")[.]

In other words, we humans use categories "to perceive, to form mental images, to learn and remember, to organize things learned, and to communicate efficiently."

And, it should be added, animals do this, and we humans have been doing it long before we created our modern cult of reason.

Let us illustrated this with Wittgenstein, who got deep into the idea of a "game." There are all kinds of games, from ring-around-the-rosy to chess. But what really is a game, the prototypical idea of "game?" Says Wittgenstein:

Someone says to me "show the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game."

Yes, Ludi. Stop teaching the kids to gamble! That's not a good idea of a game!

So what Lakoff is saying is that categories are not abstract but coded into our bodies and our brains and our culture, as part of survival etc. And what we categorize at a "basic level" are the common objects of daily life: things like "dog" "cat" "chair." But this is just the basic level: we categorize dogs as representative of "animal" and chairs as representative of "furniture." Thus this sort of hierarchy: 

    

Superordinate	Animal	Furniture
Basic Level	Dog	Chair
Subordinate	Retriever	Rocker

 

Guess what. Human children learn to categorize at the basic level by age 2, and are pretty good at it by age 3. At age 4 they start to show skills at the subordinate and superordinate levels.

But, it is at the edges that things start to get complicated. For instance whatabout birds?

[Rosch's] experimental ranking shows that subjects view robins and sparrows as the best examples of birds, with owls and eagles lower down the rankings and ostriches, emus, and penguins among the worst examples.

Yes. When we go to the zoo we are amused by ostriches and emus and penguins. Because they appear exotic to us.

 

You can see from this that humans do not categorize things in the world as if they were philosophers and scientists. They categorize things in ways that are useful and meaningful them in their daily lives. 

Actually, when you look searchingly at science, it has followed the same paradigm. For instance Linnaeus puts "genera" at the center of his classification system as "'practical units of classification' upon which all biologists should be able to agree."

The same thing happens in modern physics, especially beginning with the problem of light. Was light made out of particles or waves, typical basic-level categories? The problem for all of us, where modern physics is concerned, is that basic-level categories and notions are not adequate to describe our notions of the micro-level of quantum mechanics and the macro-level of general relativity and the presumed vastness of the universe. So we have sophisticated math to do it for us. But when physicists are talking about physics they adapt ordinary concepts from daily life as metaphors for the impossible things going on at the macro and micro level. Or they show how sophisticated they are by using names like "quark" from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

All of which reminds us that the universe is nothing like it appears to us through our senses and our human-concocted categories. Which goes back to Kant and his declaration that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances.

But notice that our modern physics has a Creation Myth, called the Big Bang, and it has all kinds of theories about what happens at the end of the universe, as humans have always had all kinds of theories about the end of times, and "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in general.

So scientists are humans, after all.

The Problem with Our Gentry Experts

The biggest scandal coming out of the Wu Flu epidemic is the Nursing Home Scandal. It appears that many states set as policy that COVID patients released from hospital should be transferred to nursing homes.

Now everybody is saying that this was cruel and heartless of Govs Cuomo in New York, Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania, and Karen Whitmer in Michigan. But they are wrong.

Back at the beginning of the Wu Flu epidemic crisis "experts agreed" that the big problem was that hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients. Why did they think that? It was because "scientists agreed" from their reading of epidemic models that there would be millions of COVID cases. 

President Trump responded to this judgement of "experts agree." He sent two US Navy hospital ships to the two biggest US cities, New York, and Los Angeles to help avoid, or at least reduce, the demand on hospital beds.

Only, it turned out, the computer models on which the "scientists agreed" were wrong. The demand on hospitals was about ten percent of the forecast.

But nobody thought to change the policy with regard to nursing homes, not until thousands of nursing home patients had been infected with the virus. So, it turns out, the overwhelming majority of COVID deaths in blue states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been elderly residents at nursing homes.

The problem is not that New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan had a cruel policy to send COVID patients to nursing homes to recuperate. The problem is that they failed to adapt their policy fast enough in light of the reality that hospitals were not going to be overwhelmed.

Now, I get the feeling, reading about the WuFlu thingy from day to day, that our lefty media seems to think that science and expertise is a "thing." Listen to the experts, they say, and wait to be told what to do.

But if you have read the books that I have read, you might think that knowledge and science and expertise are not Holy Writ, but a fudge. They are useful, but not divine.

See, what I have come to believe is that the Universe is way more complicated and hard to understand than we can imagine, or ever can imagine. Our knowledge and our science of which we moderns are do proud is but a paltry attempt to understand the daunting complexity of the reality. 

Moreover, we do not accumulate knowledge in a noble and sophisticated attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We create knowledge because we have a problem. Indeed, as F.S.C. Northrop wrote many moons ago, "knowledge begins with a problem." If there is no problem, there is no need for knowledge, and no need to leave off wiving and thriving and partying.

This means that the point of knowledge is simply that it is a way to take the data flooding in every moment and decide which data is important and which data should be a guide for action and what action is warranted, given the data and the interpretation based on knowledge and science.

The best understanding of this process is the OODA loop, a concept developed by a USAF pilot, Col, John Boyd.

When you are fighting a battle -- against another army or against a virus -- you are continuously going through a process of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And the faster and the better you can do it, the quicker you will defeat your foe -- or avoid defeat.

But our educated Gentry seems to think of knowledge and expertise as a static thing, a status thing -- better left to the experts. It is rather like the old days of computers. You would punch up your deck of cards and submit them to the computer operator, who would stick the deck in the card reader and return your results from the printer, all in good time, peasant.

And, of course, the folks in an expert bureaucracy are not in the game of action; they are in the game of status. They acquire their education and their degrees and their titles not because they want to solve problems but because they want status. We see this with the transgender Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine taking time out from the vital task of fighting Wu Flu to reprimand a media person for "misgendering" her.

First things first!

Or whatabout the current riots and looting in Minneapolis, in response to the death of a suspect under arrest. How come the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota didn't act in minutes to fill the streets with policemen and, if necessary, the National Guard, or failing that the NRA, with a show of force to stop the rioters?

I will tell you. It is because modern progressive politics is not about protecting people or taking action, it is about moral posturing.

And we moderns know better. We know that the way to get things done is through the market and its price signaling and its rewards for the guy that solves a problem, any problem, before the next guy. The market doesn't care what college you went to, what degree you got, what your title is, or what your race is. It just cares about what you have done for the consumer lately.

You can see that many of the Democratic politicians are really at sea in the current epidemic. They did not go into politics to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, again and again, but to sit upon a golden throne, make pronouncements, and receive the adulation of their courtiers.

I suppose this is true of all mature political and religious and cultural regimes. Everyone is completely engaged in the proper practice of the ritual, and has completely forgotten the problem that the ritual was invented to solve.

With the virtue of hindsight we can say of the Nursing Home Scandal that someone in the health bureaucracy below the exalted rank of Governor or Health Secretary needed to have the responsibility and authority to act on nursing homes.

Guess what. The Germans figured that out a century ago in the carnage of World War I. Given the chaos of battle and the fact that everyone was hunkered down in the trenches hey realized that they needed to push responsibility down as far as possible and empower junior officers and NCOs with the responsibility to act, based on their individual knowledge of developing local events. Thus Gen. Hans von Seeckt proclaimed his intention

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier. 

How many of your modern experts are completely"verantwortungsfreudig?"

And then there is the advice of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain at the turn of the 20th century, on the question of experts.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Lord Salisbury was notable for conducting foreign policy out of his back pocket and completely ignoring the foreign policy experts at the British Foreign Office. 

Humans are Ruled by Public Opinion, Not Science

Everybody says they are on the side of science. But the other guys are led by superstition.

Then there are the guys that say they believe in logic and reason, while the other guys are ruled by their feelings.

But I think it is pretty clear, from the experience of the last two months of Wu Flu, that humans are ruled by the notions that are in the wind, particularly the notions that are being ventilated in their particular ideological bubble.

For instance, what I would call the standard line of the epidemiologists, that in any epidemic, you eventually need to get to "herd immunity" was all very well in the abstract, but when politicians got the word -- from flawed epidemiological models -- that millions might die unless we "do something" they opted, from President Trump on down, to do something, from canceling flights from China and Europe to closing bars and restaurants and schools and "non-essential" businesses.

And beaches!

How much science was involved in all that? Not much, I would say. (OK the science of telephoto lenses was involved in the beach closings). Why so little science? Because humans are not driven by science and logic and reason but by memes, maxims and aphorisms floating around social media and amplified by news media and politicians.

And this is not scandalous. It is because humans live and act in the here and now, and cannot spend half their lives researching the evidence and the science. They conduct their lives using notions they got from their parents, from their peers, from school, from media, from politicians. And most of the time -- almost all of the time -- it works pretty well.

This is most obvious if we think of the higher animals that don't have the conceit of a "conscious mind" or science and reason. How do they live? Yes, how do they live without our triumphant reason and science? Well, they do OK. They go about their business as we do, and if something unexpected happens they stop what they are doing and deal with the unexpected. Exactly as we do.

And when you think about it, this animal behavior is exactly what we do. We putter about in our routines as unconcernedly as seagulls, and then stop dead in our tracks if something unexpected happens. Do we then apply science and reason? Not really. If anything we call up our friends, or we turn on the news, or we take a look at social media. And then we act, or don't act. So, how much reason and science went into that? Not much? Exactly what you'd expect from social animals; we take our clues from our fellow social creatures.

Now in the United States in the present time we also take our cues from our political tribe. Liberals and experts are clearly going big time for an administrative solution with rigid rules and instructions from on high and nobody moves without permission. Conservatives and small-business people are clearly more in favor of people making their own decisions about what is appropriate.

And hanging over all is the basic instinct that government is there to protect us.

But there is another thing that comes out clearly to me, that a lot of what we call "science" is really thinly veiled prophecy and divination. Would you be insulted if I suggested that modern science is really the heir to religious prophecy and fortune-telling. La Wik:

Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand.

Am I right, or am I right? The point about science is that it is a very systematic method "with which to organize... facets of existence." But it is also true that it is much easier to predict the trajectory of a moon rocket than the behavior of a modern consumer. Or to predict the future, or the stock market, or elections. Or an epidemic.

Should we be discouraged that opinion rules and not science? Not at all. Opinion is really processed science, knowledge boiled down to maxims and rules of thumb. The better they are, the more people  will adopt them. But there is still, and will always be, a "marketplace of ideas," where people pick and choose what rule of thumb should work for them.

In the best of all possible worlds, the good ideas will win out in the end, and the bad ideas will fall by the wayside. And so they do, in the end.

But in the meanwhile, people are really attached to the ideas that they have adopted, and it often takes a real blow to the solar plexus, metaphorically speaking, before people will abandon a particular rule of thumb that isn't working out so well.

As we see every day.

Knowledge - Table of Contents

The Question of Human Knowledge

1. All Politics is Reactionary
   But we got the most amazing Great Enrichment in history
   
   
2. The Counter-Revolutions of the Modern Age
   Communism-socialism and environmentalism for a start
   
   
3. Maps of Meaning: The Why and Who of Jordan B. Peterson
   He had a voice inside that couldn't go with the lefty rubbish
   
   
4. Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like
   It means becoming a lefty victim
   
   
5. The Grand Narrative of the Postmodernists
   And a grand narrative to oppose their grand narrative
   
   
6. Humans Demand Good vs. Evil
   When you don't know everything, you get emotional
   
   
7. But First Humans are Tribal
   The capitalist/libertarian world view is not enough, because humans are tribal
   
   
8. The Alt-Right Takes Out After Jordan B. Peterson
   Peterson isn't defending the Christian culture and the nation state
   
   
9. Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning." It's a Start
   Can we emerge from our need for safety to the challenge of the Sacrificial Hero?
   
   
10. The Big Issue: Reason vs Emotion
    We humans got where we are today with instinct, emotions, and "affect"
    
    
11. Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!
    Can the three peoples make sense of modern psychology?
    
    
12. At Jordan Peterson's Road Show
    We all see the world through the lens of our values
    
    
13. Emotion Rules the World, Scientists Say
    The left's attack on bourgeois virtues goes against science
    
    
14. Yes, There is Objective Truth, Only We Don't Know It
    And we shouldn't assume that we do know it
    
    
15. We Must Bring the Past Back to Life
    Because our lefty friends have murdered it
    
    
16. My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense
    Yes, my common sense understands why lefties are going crazy
    
    
17. When the Scientists Disagree, Don't Panic
    But people hate to change their beliefs
    
    
18. Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality
    There are no facts, only interpretations
    
    
19. Humans are Ruled by Public Opinion, not Science
    Don't worry: opinion is just science reduced to rules of thumb
    
    
20. The Problem of Our Gentry Experts
    They don't know how to act

Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality

For some time I have been reading people that tell me to forget the conceit of logic and reason. Everything in the world is "affect," or feelings.

Except that when I have a "feeling" it is the rising to consciousness of an event that took place in my pre-frontal cortex up to seven seconds ago. And the fact that I have a feeling is because, after the chaos of sense impressions bombarding my body, something unusual has tripped an alarm that has brought this something to my consciousness.  What is going on here?

What is going on is that the Freuds and Jungs -- and latterly Jordan Petersons -- peddling this stuff all go back to Nietzsche.

In The Will to Power: Book Three: Principles of a New Evaluation Nietzsche blows everything apart.

For instance, "everything of which we become conscious is a terminal phenomenon, an end", in other words the opposite of our common belief in understanding the world through "thinking, feeling, willing!"

Or this: "'inner experience' enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the individual understands". Thus, "'to understand' means merely: to be able to express something new in the language of something old and familiar."

Or this:

There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of "subject and object," but a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience)--

Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power-- 

In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it.

See what he is up to? That everything that we "think" and "feel" and "know" about the world is an epiphenomenon that wells up out of our body and its six senses and its sensors and its ganglia of nerves and brain cells and who-knows-what as part of its project of staying alive. And we really do not have a clue what is going on!

Whatabout the "ego" and the "subject" and "facts?"

There are only facts -- I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations... 

[Even the] "subject" is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.

"It is our needs that interpret the world." And we better hope that our interpretation is correct. This time.

Here's a concept that I find useful:

Everything that enters consciousness as "unity" is already tremendously complex: we always have only  a semblance of unity.

What is going on here? I think that it reflects our modern knowledge -- call it the paradox of our modern knowledge -- that things are a lot more complicated and a lot weirder than we ever imagined, and that we ever could imagine.

One of the things that helps deal with this unsettling thought is this piece from Nature in 2008: "Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers."

Because if that is true, that stuff is going on in what we call the "unconscious" that the "ego" knows nothing about, then what other stuff is going on that we know nothing about?

Here is Nietzsche on "words:"

We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word "I," the world "do," the word "suffer":-- these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not "truths."

I guess Lewis Carroll knew all about this when he had Humpty Dumpty opine on "words."

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

But Lewis Carroll -- real name Charles Dodgson, academic and mathematician -- was not a student of Nietzsche; he wrote Through the Looking Glass in 1872, and Nietzsche was writing his late stuff in the 1880s. But the question is: were Charles Dodgson and Friedrich Nietzsche swimming in the same intellectual pond?

Because, when Humpty Dumpty talks about "which is to be master" is he not talking the same language as Nietzsche's Will to Power?

When the Scientists Disagree, Don't Panic

There's a piece in Quillette about the problems with straight Darwinian evolution. It seems that, based on the assumptions of "random mutation and natural selection" as a complete explanation of the evolution of living things, supposed events like the Cambrian Explosion, when tons of new species evolved in a few million years, could not have happened. But if simple Darwinian evolution doesn't explain the Cambrian Explosion -- or the relatively rapid development of any new species -- then there is a problem.

Now I read that there the a problem in cosmology. Back in the day scientists used "the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) -- the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang" -- to compute the Hubble Constant, the measure of the rate of the expansion of the universe. But more recently scientists started computing the Hubble Constant from "supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids." And the value of the Hubble Constant using this method is different from the value obtained from the CMB. So that's a problem.

As they say in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic!

This is the way of all advances in science, or rather, all human knowledge. It starts with a problem, that current knowledge can't explain everything. The "problem" is always experienced as a scandal by the supporters of the current theory, whether we are talking about biology or cosmology or philosophy or the welfare state.

And, of course, this reaction is central to the argument of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn saw the sciences as going through alternating periods of normal science, when an existing model of reality dominates a protracted period of puzzle-solving, and revolution, when the model of reality itself undergoes sudden drastic change. 

Kuhn argues that science is a social undertaking, and that supporters of various theories form communities of knowledge, and that the members of such communities resist any change in the status quo, and thus the only way that the paradigm changes is when the old generation dies off.

Now I think it is pretty obvious that there is something at work in the evolution of species that is not understood by Darwin's theory. Hey kids! That's OK. When we resolve the problem with new knowledge it will be amazing! The problem, of course, is that Darwinism is the basis for modern atheism, so our atheist friends are desperately afraid that a revision of Darwin's theory would undermine their world view and throw them on the waste-heap of history. I understand their fear.

Again, I argue for people to relax. That's because my understanding of "god" is that God is the extremely cunning human resolution of the knowledge problem. We humans need to know the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in order to give meaning to our lives and create moral frameworks for our societies. But we don't know "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" because our knowledge of the universe is incomplete. Therefore we have to compensate for our ignorance by creating a likely story about God and the Creation and so forth. When new knowledge comes along we have to revise our likely story. No Problem!

On this view the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is just another likely story that extends our current knowledge back as far as we dare. If we have to change that likely story when we create new knowledge to resolve the two different Hubble Constants, No Problem! Chances are that the new theory will not throw existing science in the wastebasket but limit its application in time and space. And the new theory will doubtless open exciting new vistas unimaginable today.

If we have to change the likely story about the evolution of life to accommodate problems like rapid creation of species and their evolution, No Problem. I'm sure that some sort of evolution will persist, but it will not be quite as simple as we thought. And the new theory will likely suggest that living things are more amazing and remarkable that we could ever think in the old days.

But there always is a Problem, because people hate to have to change their religion and their understanding of reality and the meaning of life. That's because people invest their whole human identity in their religion, their faith, and the position in society that they have obtained through the practice of their faith.

Oh Well. Just Don't Panic!

My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense

One of the complaints of conservatives is the death of common sense. Logic and reason and common sense are what we assume inspired the Founders when they rebelled against the Brits to form this more perfect union.

And, we complain, the lefties have declared "War on Common Sense." Thus, Robert Curry in American Greatness:

Political correctness is quite simply a war on common sense. It is a war by the elites on the common people and on the shared understanding of basic realities of life that has made it possible for us to rule ourselves under the Constitution. Once this common-sense understanding of reality has been vanquished, it is “mission accomplished” for the Americans who reject America.

I would have agreed 100% with this 20 years ago. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been showed by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

And, of course, our Constitution and political culture in the United States was based on the truth, the common sense, of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. So began for me an intellectual journey in which I made my way through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and now finally Nietzsche and Jung.

I still think our lefty and politically correct friends are wrong, as Curry does, but not because they are opposed to common sense and logic and reason. I think they are wrong because I believe that the German Turn does not invalidate the British empirical philosophers, but puts a new layer on knowledge on top of it, in the same way that relativity does not replace Newtonian mechanics completely, but only when dealing with astronomical distances and speeds close to the speed of light.

See, the "common sense" of the politically correct is that there is not one correct view of life but that diffferent cultures experience a different view of the world. It's all relative and uncertain.

And indeed modern science argues that all living things must choose, from the overwhelming amount of data pouring in through the senses, which data is important to them.

Prior to the Germans we Anglo empiricists thought there was mind, and matter, and common sense to put it all together. But actually Hume, the skeptic, noted that we cannot, for instance, justify the notion of cause and effect. Just because some event comes after another does not mean the first event caused the second. It is our faith -- in science, in Newtonisn mechanics, in common sense -- that connects the two.

Then Kant came along and questioned everything. Never mind cause and effect, he said. Really we cannot know things-as-they-are. All we know is what comes in throught the senses as sense impressions, and the theories we spin in our mind to make sense of it all. It is my belief that this radical notion, that really we are making it all up, leads directly to Einstein's relativity, do not pass Go. Because Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as openly assumed in Newton's mechanics, but relative.

Do you see the amazing thing here? By casting loose from the notion of absolute space and time and matter vs. idea and believing that we know reality we humans made the most radical step forward ever in understanding how the Universe works.

Another thing that got moving in the German world was modern psychology. By the time we get to Freud and Jung we are saying that our conscious mind is just a tiny thing riding on the top of a fathomless unconscious. That really we are not conscious rational actors, but mostly the slave of our unconscious instincts. I recently read that scientists have discovered through brain scans that our mind makes its decision to act about 1.5 seconds before we experience the decision in our conscious mind.

Now, I believe in "common sense." It's just that my common sense is built upon all the work of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung. I walk around the world realizing that my eyes are seeing far more stuff than I am aware of. It's just that my mind ignores 97 percent of the visual information and only concentrates on what it thinks is important. That could be a problem if I am stopped at a stop sign and my visual processing system fails to notice a car coming up in the corner of my eye. Indeed the whole modern concept of "situational awareness" understands that the processing of information in our brain is a tricky thing. And they say that at 79 your situational awareness starts to make such a serious decline that over-79s get involved in lots of "failure to yield" accidents at stop signs. Roll on driverless cars!

Now, I think that my journey, from the common sense of the British empiricists to the common sense of the post-Jungians is a glorious and liberating thing. Because it means to me that I can understand all the people in the world that have a different view of common sense than I do. And I have the conceit that I know where they go wrong. So I can forgive them, the poor little dears.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to show how it is perfectly natural and physical that people are different. The People of the Subordinate Self are workers and peasants; they think the world is run by vengeful gods and lords and political bosses. They do not yet know science. The People of the Responsible Self are citizens, that live and work in the city. They believe in a God that created the world and then told humans to get on with it, and he'll judge our performance on Judgement Day. Thus is pays Reponsibles to develop science and laws and stuff to make sense of the world and act responsibly in it. The People of the Creative Self are people that realize that humans are like gods, they can create the world anew, and change the Law, and even dream of a world of perfect justice.

But, if the People of the Responsible Self treat the People of the Subordinate Self like slaves and use them up as slave workers in satanic mills and slave plantations and factories with child labor then they are monsters. That is what Marx was talking about. Actually, the People of the Responsible Self were not that interested in driving slaves; that's why they abolished slavery just about at the moment that lefties first appeared over the horizon. They were OK with giving the workers rights and giving them the vote. So everything is now copacetic on the border between the Responsibles and the Subordinates.

However, if the People of the Creative Self treat the People of the Responsible Self as racist sexist homophobes, and declare them to be deplorables, and create politcal regimes to deliberately oppress and dis-empower Responsibles then they are monsters. And that is exactly what Stalin and Mao did, and plenty of Creatives to this day have failed to utterly deplore and condemn this great crime of history.

Yes, lefties, the People of the Responsible Self may be a bit slow, and bigoted and superstitious, compared to the woke, the educated, the evolved folks like you. But they still have a right to live according to their lights. Just as you chaps insisted, back in the day, that the workers had a right to live according to their lights and demand their rights even if it was mighty inconvenient to the bourgeoisie.

The point of any knowledge or world view is: does it help me understand the world? I say that my "common sense" helps me understand why lefties are going bat-shit crazy right now.

The lefty world view says that lefties are involved in a sacred project to "bend the arc of history towards justice." Obviously anyone that tries to stop this process is a monster and should be named and shamed and ostracized and fired from their job and deplatformed from social media. And yet, Donald Trump and his deporables!

Do you see how it makes complete sense that liberals would be beside themselves right now? Call it a Failure of Prophecy. By now, all the old racist sexist homophobes were supposed to be a thing of the past. And yet here we are, with a president elected by the votes of white working class deplorables in the old industrial states that liberals once loved and revered.

How could this have happened! What is going wrong! Obviously, the only thing to do is to redouble our efforts to bend the arc of history towards justice and suppress all the hate speech and toxic masculinity and extremism and fake news from whacko sites on the internet. This sort of reaction is normal. It is explained by Leon Festinger et al. in When Prophecy Fails and also by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution as the Reign of Terror that revolutionaries enact when their revolution fails to transform society in ein Augenblick.

See how my world view enables me to understand the Trump Derangement Syndrome of our liberal and lefty friends? My world view must be a good one, that's what I have to say.

And there is this. The world seems to be one religious outburst after another, when some religious group prophesies the end of the world unless we act now. As in socialism and as in climate change. But the overwhelming majority of people, most of the time, just want to get on with life, wiving and thriving and raising a family and pursuing happiness. When these two cultural forces clash then you are going to see some fireworks.

And by the way, that is why our Founders decreed a separation of church and state. So that religious fanatics could not seize the reins of state. Hey, I just came up with this maxim:

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

And the problem with our liberal and lefty friends is that they are mixing their politics of big government with their religion of bending the arc of history towards justice. History tells us that nothing good comes of uniting religion and government.

Let us end with a word from Nietzsche, who suggests in The Gay Science §292, to preachers of morals that they deprive the best things of honor and worth by praising them all the time.

Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden.

That way, writes Nietzsche, you might win over the only people that matter, the heroic.

Well, that's a thought. Maybe our liberal and lefty friends are making the case for tolerance and good fellowship by demanding absolute conformity to woke morality and lock-step conformity. 

We Must Bring the Past Back to Life

I was down in the Peoples Republic of Fremont, Seattle -- where we Seattle-ites have our statue of Lenin -- and I went by Ophelia's Books, because Lady Marjorie had given me a gift card.

Truth is, I had put off going to Ophelia's for months, because Fremont, but I found that it was not a hopeless lefty tract store, but an excellent little used-books store. I got a book about Trollope's later novels, and also The Death of the Past by J.H. Plumb.

Really, it was another proof of God's existence, because I have been needing to encounter such a book for months, if not years.

The book argues that the old kind of history, that is really an ideological justification of the current ruling class, has gone away because now we have professional historians that are dedicated to telling us how it really was, as opposed to how glorious our rulers are and how they are descended directly from Moses or Achilles.

The book was written in about 1968, from a series of lectures that Plumb, a Cambridge don, had given in NewYork. It was, I propose, about the last moment that anyone could talk about the end of history as regime apologetics.

Plumb was the son of a factory worker in Leicester, England, but went to a "grammar school," a kind of school in Britain that was famous for plucking talent out of the masses and giving it an education and that was murdered by lefties in the Sixties. But Plumb was a faithful lefty all his life. In his book he celebrates how the Enlightenment substituted facts and research for the naked special pleading of history down the ages. But, he admitted, something was lost when the narrative of where we came from gets abandoned for facts, facts, facts.

To say that the past has died, I think, misses the point. The past was deliberately murdered,  and murdered by chaps like Plumb, who sneered at Macaulay for spicing up the Enlightenment faith in  "progress" with Whig history and jingoism.

In doing so he provided the bulk of the British nation with a usable past, by which they could ease their consciences in the present and look with optimism towards the future.

But the professional historian will have none of that:

Crude ideological interpretations, Marxist or nationalist, conservative or liberal, religious or agnostic, providential or progressive, cyclical or linear, are a violation of his discipline and an offence to his knowledge.

Many conservatives take a parallel view, when we talk about our "facts and logic" as opposed to liberal "emotion." We imagine that we are the reality guys, and the left is the fantasy department.

How is that strategy working out? The fact is that, since 1968, the left has seized control of the past and murdered the old narratives of Christianity and of nation. And that is why I wrote in 2016 that my "gentlemanly conservatism" was dead.

Now the left dominates the landscape with its narrative of good and evil: the good and noble activist that is engaged in a life and death struggle with the racist sexist homophobes in order to lead the helpless victims of racism and the patriarchy and hate to the Promised Land.

If professional history has a role today, under the unjust rule of the left, it is to fill in the blanks to prove just how oppressive and unjust the old religious, white, oppressive patriarchy was. Indeed everyone in the academy knows that they had better echo the ruling class narrative about activists and victims, or else.

Notice how the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax fits into this culture. The activism/victim culture is hungry for tales of hate, and young heads full of mush are only too glad to supply them.

It is noticeable to me that Plumb's history of the world ends with Marx and Darwin. There is nothing about Nietzsche, or Freud and Jung, or the quantum mechanical revolution in physics. That makes him ill-equipped to deal with the modern world in which the certainty of Newtonian mechanics is replaced by the uncertainty principle, and the facts, facts, facts, of Gradgrind are replaced by the notion of Jordan B. Peterson that you see facts through the lens of your values. Or the notion that the primary function of the brain is to filter out all the non-essential signals coming in and only notice the important stuff. You hope.

The future belongs to those that own the past, just as George Orwell said:

Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.

So we cannot let the past die;  we cannot let  the left murder our past. We must revive our narrative of the past, and it must be a narrative that takes the narrative of the left head on and demolishes it.

Of course, I realize, most of my writing is precisely about that. My reductive Three Peoples theory is a narrative about the present world as a natural and cooperative combination of creative people, responsible people, and subordinate people that directly takes on the left's narrative of conflict and oppression. My Great Reaction maxim is an attempt to marginalize the left's narrative by stating that socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, and identity politics is neo-tribalism.

In taking up Jung I am embracing a narrative that the experience of the past through archetypes is programmed into our unconscious, and that a narrative about the past is the most natural thing in the world. Indeed, the whole notion of the unconscious is a narrative that says that the past lives in us a lot more than we think.

In taking up Nietzsche I am advancing the narrative that the creative life is a lot more than the crude and narrow option of creating new and just political order, as the left thinks, but an incredible difficult hero's journey of stumbling around in the unconscious on the border between order and chaos hoping for inspiration.

And Plumb's The Death of the Past helps me see the desperate crudity of the left's oppression narrative: the insulting idea that America is a cesspool of racism, and sexism and hate, the America that legislated special status for non-whites, non-males, and non-heteros. Really, what planet are you living on, lefties?

The truth is that our lefty friends are living a lie. We might adapt the old nursery rhyme:

The south wind doth blow
And we shan't have snow
So what will th'activist do then, poor thing? 

This is not the worst of times; it is the best of times. But unless it is the worst of times our lefty friends have nothing to do: no-one to blame, no victims to lead, no injustice to protest.

Except the many injustices that lefties themselves have visited upon the innocent deplorables of this land. 

Yes, There is Objective Truth, But We Don't Know It

Vox Day has a thoughtful riposte to my review of his Jordanetics. He says that Kant was wrong:

And the only thing you need to know about Kant is that he was wrong, completely and utterly wrong. His entire life's work was an unnecessary attempt to square a philosophical circle. The objective truth exists regardless of our ability to correctly perceive it at any given point in time.

Well, yes. The objective truth, or Kant's ẗhing-in-itself, presumably does exist independently of our ability to perceive it. But Kant's point is that, whatever really exists, we don't know what it is, and cannot directly know it, the things-in-themselves, because we only experience appearances. The immense cunning of Kant's idea (whether it is right or wrong) is that we should never assume that we have arrived at a complete understanding of anything. All we ever know is that we have a pretty good grasp of things, thus far. Hence Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And the fundamental fact of our time is the notion from Werner Heisenberg that the 20th century physics revolution means that the really real, deep down at the micro level, cannot be described by every-day notions by which we talk about the every day world as we experience it moment to moment. So we have to fake it with the likely stories of atoms and quarks and stuff by which we try to understand the math through metaphor.

Nor does Vox Day put any faith in Jung:

And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad. That's not you make sense of the world. That's not how you make sense of anything.

In my view, all Jung is doing is starting with the notion that all religions and all accounts of the really real are the accounts of blind men encountering an elephant. It's a trunk. It's a big flappy ear, etc. But what is it, really? Well Jung -- and Peterson -- say that all religions are attempts to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, given the state of human knowledge at the time. Therefore they are reprising the same old themes, but shining a new light as human knowledge and expertise expands.

I was talking to a math-whiz acquaintance a few months ago, and opined that in due course the physicists would come up with a theory of reality that goes deeper than quantum mechanics and its present account of energy and mass. He agreed. So what is objectively real? What we know today, or what we will know tomorrow?

And that is, for me, the meaning of Kant. He is just saying: don't think that you've got the final word on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Just remember that all we know are sense impressions and the story we have made up to make sense of them. Assume that the thing-in-itself is still a mystery.

Whether the real is real, or just an phantasm, no human can go far wrong by accepting that he still has a lot to learn.

For me there's a bigger thing going in with Kant and Jung and Peterson. And it is this. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," through thinkers like Kant and Jung, and even Peterson, are starting to develop a theory of the meaning of life, the universe and everything that can show up the left as the shallow, reactionary, and cramped movement it is, that makes a god out of politics and power, instead of going beyond politics and the lust for power, given that the market economy has provided a means where humans can negotiate practically everything through trust and exchange rather than battle to the death over the exclusive right to a food-growing patch of land, which has been the fate of mankind since the dawn.

I think that ideas like my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion of the sacrificial hero in Jung provide a means of developing a higher and better concept of human meaning than the cruel leftist faith in politics and force, and a better way of showing up its barren world view as an utterly futile and foolish fantasy.

And I think that Jordan B. Peterson's revival of meaning for the life of the responsible person in 12 Rules is a first step.

Emotion Rules the World, Scientists Say

One of the universals of our time is that both sides of the political battlefront insist that they are on the side of reason and logic, while the other guys are for feelings and emotion.

For instance conservatives offer the constitution and limited government as the acme of logic and reason, while the left with their "living constitution" are just trying to legislate their feelings. But liberals regard "nationalism" as a tribal atavism that appeals to clan loyalty, while ignoring the reality of centuries, millennia, of patriarchal and racial hegemony and domination.

In reality there has been a two-century-long argument about reason vs. emotion that is best represented by the two intellectual movements we call the Age of Reason and the Romantic Rebellion.

Crudely, the Age of Reason argued that wouldn't it be nice if we could all get together and discuss things rationally rather than through religious fanaticism, and the Romantics argued that all the important things come not from reason but creative inspiration.

Very good, you reply. But what do "scientists say?" Thank you senator. I'm glad you asked.

I am presently reading Matt Ridley's 1996 book The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. In it he assembles a ton of science on cooperation, starting with the question of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the development of the winning Tit-For-Tat strategy for iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Well, it turns out that there is something better than Tit-for-Tat, which assumes you know nothing about the other person beyond their actions in the game. In fact when humans are acting in the world they are not going blind, but know the other person's reputation. And humans are very good at looking at another person's face and judging their honesty and reliability.

In other words, interpersonal relations are not just a question of the rational interplay of actions, but are guided by emotional and instinctive judgements.

The point of all this is that cultural values like the reputation for honesty and virtue are not just the detritus of the age of superstition or leftovers from Newtonian mechanics, but real, ongoing cultural goods that make human life better, both materially and spiritually, and also reduce the negative stuff of conflict and mayhem. Successful societies feature these cultural values and habits.

So, to get straight to the political point, the left's attack on all these so-called "bourgeois virtues" is something that goes against "science." But you knew that.

OK. So what is the bottom line here? I think that it is to change the basic world-view of our time and illuminate that the problem we are called to solve is not to battle against hegemony and injustice but to promote trust and virtue. The "science" of human behavior seems to suggest that, once you have rolled back gross domination and hegemony then you can dial back the force and allow a hundred flowers of trust and virtue to bloom, because trust and virtue are incredibly beneficial to humans, both individually and collectively.

And we need to look again at "who benefits." When the problem to be solved is hegemony and domination then, of course, the key problem is "who rules," who brings the right force to bear so that hegemony and domination are rolled back. But when the problem is to give space and opportunity to trust and virtue then the question of "who rules" recedes into the background and the individual development of character and virtue comes to the forefront. The culture of "who rules" obviously is the culture of a group that wants to be a ruling class. The culture of character and virtue is the culture of people that want to contribute individually to the whole, not as master, nor as slave, but as a responsible or creative person devoted to contribution and competence rather than dominance.

The point of the culture of competence, of trust and virtue, is that it is not necessarily logical and reasonable, but emotional. For whatever we determine by intellect and by reason we implement by habit and training so that it becomes "second nature."

Only, of course, it is reason and consciousness that is "second nature" and instinct and emotion and the unconsciousness that are the first nature.