ABC of Politics: Blame

I was reading a piece by a friend mourning how politicians never admit they are wrong. And that set me to thinking. Why not? Why don't politicians admit when they are wrong? I realize that politicians are not like ordinary people that can just say, sorry, I screwed up. Not that anyone ever likes to admit being wrong or take the blame.

It's obvious really.

It starts with this: there is no politics without an enemy. The corollary is that a politician is always fighting an enemy. And when you are fighting an enemy you are in a battle of life and death. You cannot just say: "aw shucks, we screwed up."

If something goes wrong with the Emperor of China, it is said that he has lost the Mandate of Heaven. So it's the end of him, the end of his dynasty, and a Time of Troubles until the next emperor appears and crowns himself with the Mandate of Heaven.

Put it this way: Imagine that President Roosevelt had said, on December 8, 1941, that "gee fellas, we really screwed up the intelligence, allowing a Japanese naval fleet to steam half way across the Pacific and attack our naval base at Pearl Harbor. Better luck next time." If he had done that he would have had to resign.

No, instead President Roosevelt rallied America to arms, starting with: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941— a date which will live. In infamy." And went on to win the biggest war in world history. That's how a political leader acts. That's how a political leader must act.

But most questions in this life are not a matter of life and death. But still, a politician never admits a mistake, and never takes the blame.

So the question becomes: what questions should come under the care of politics, given that politics requires an enemy, and treats every issue as a matter of life and death?

Or to put the issue another way, when we consider the question of an enemy, there is the fact of conflict, extending "to the real possibility of physical killing", according to Carl Schmitt. Just who among the people with whom we interact deserve to be named and treated as enemies?

Or suppose that we have misinterpreted someone else's action as an act of malevolence, when it was just an act of selfishness?

And that is the key to the question of why a politician can never admit a mistake and stay in office. Because politics is about the enemy, and action against the enemy involves the possibility of conflict and "the real possibility of physical killing," a mistake in politics is always colored by the possibility of killing someone that didn't deserve to be killed, or "one of ours" being killed for nothing.

If a politician identifies an enemy and it turns out that the so-called enemy is really our friend, then the politician is a monster.

If a politician sends our young men out against the enemy, and it turns out it was all a mistake, then that politician is a monster.

If a politician sends our young men out against the enemy, and the enemy beats them, then the politician is a monster.

So, a politician can never admit a mistake and take the blame. Because if he has made a mistake he is a monster.

And he is history.

So, politics should only be involved in issues where the leader cannot admit to being wrong, because the issue is a matter of life and death about which we must fight to the death right now or get annihilated, where doing nothing and making a mistake amounts to the same thing: oblivion.

Everything else we should resolve in a free and good-natured discussion of the issues among equals.

Self-Creating Universe 8: Making Sense of Life

Clarke develops the idea of emergentism as a worldview, in the sense of the German notion of Weltanshauung, a narrative, or "conceptual scheme," that attempts to bring the aspects of existence into a unifed story about the meaning of life, and to rediscover the sense of the sacred in a reintegration of the art and humanities with the sciences. 

But what do we value most in life: what do we regard as sacred. For Clarke, the emergentism that understands 'human persons as agents and self-creators is a reflection  of the sacredness of nature itself as a self-organizing, self-creating cosmos". It re-enchants the disenchanted universe of the old materialist-mechanical model. Instead of the pessimism of Christianity and Sin and the Fall, we can take heart in a view of "this emergent world of unending creativity as sacred" with the idea of "God" as our name for creativity in nature. But what of destruction and death? There is a a complementarity between creation and destruction, and the notion that we fight against violence and evil is a sign of "moral and religious emergence."

How does emergentism speak to the moral life, about "the good life, about ethical principles, about human morality, about rights and wrongs, justice, honesty, and compassion?" Clarke proposes to develop an "autopoietic ethics," self-generating and self-developing. If human life is self-creative, so then can human ethics.

But does that pitch humans into nihilism, where everything is permitted? Clarke thinks not, asserting that even traditions developed with God's authority "we are still the creators and interpreters" of God's authority. We do not become altruistic by "learning rules or commandments... but by becoming altruistic persons". It presupposes a "long and often agonized 'conversation of mankind', an "ever-developing "communicative rationality." Is this just egoistic "self-realization"? Clarke thinks not; we are social beings in a network of interdependence genuine self-realization means the self-realization of all beings. However, this is not easy, as the critics of both Marxist equality and liberal freedom demonstrate. Perhaps the Green philosophy, with its vision of "close affinity with the natural world" is a better approach, with "adaptive, self-regulating systems" rather than command-and-control. But does this approach extend beyond the human species? Yes, but not too far. Clarke feels that his approach to morality aligns with Buddhism and the Tao.

Now Clarke moves on from the moral life to the spiritual life. What does that mean in an emergent philosophy?

Next: Emerging Futures.

Self-Creating Universe 7: Making Sense of Human Nature

How do we understand human nature, our "being-in-the-world from an emergentist perspective"? And that obviously, has to do with our notion of human consciousness, and our notion of human "freedom." The idea is to get beyond the old question of free will vs. determinism. Can emergentism throw new light upon human "free will?" Clarke proposes to develop a model to understand human action "as a natural, albeit non-reductive, emergent phenomenon."

Clarke proposes to develop his idea based upon the notion of human agency, that humans make choices in the world not just consciously, but "in terms of our biological inheritances, languages, social customs, and external circumstances and demands." And, human agency is understood "not only   in personal terms but as a collective process... as nations, tribes, families, businesses, or teams."

We humans like to think of ourselves as special, but Clarke identifies agency-like behavior in almost all living things. Thus the idea of "protoagency" in living things as basic as "a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient" that seems to "act on [its] own behalf and [is] able to detect and respond appropriately to both nutrients and threats". Thus agency could be an emergent property of living things that becomes more complex with more complex living things.

Clarke does not want to think of agency or free-will as "random and unpredictable" but rather as "the production of order by means of human agency, individual and collective."

But how does agency work, since agency is a top-level property of living things, while science generally likes to explain the complex in terms of the less complex? The answer is to assume that emergence works from the top-down as well as the bottom-up. This applies at the social level too: it is not possible to understand the operation of society purely from the behavior of individuals. Society clearly affects individuals. This "downward causation" also applies to the mind-body question. Mind and body must be connected and mind must have an influence on body.

In understanding the behavior of a human agent... we need to take into account different levels of understanding -- physical , biological, psychological, and spiritual.

Yet we are also an unity "in which these different levels overlap."

So Clarke proposes a view that "one level of phenomena or type of property... is dependent upon another level... while at the same time not being reducible to it." And that applies to the interdependence of mind and matter. 

Another vexed question is the question of "purpose," that seems obvious in a world created by God, but problematic in an naturalist presumption. Clarke thinks it is better to talk about "function" rather than "purpose." And the same applies to the notion of "progress." Clarke decides to reject a teleological tending towards some "ideal goal" while accepting that there seems to be, in the emergent understanding of the universe, some sort of "urge to create" that seems to move towards "more diverse, complex and self-ordered beings."

And then there is the question of morality. Is morality, and our understanding of morality, progressing? And does the concern about violence, "our horror of wars," and "famine, disease, poverty and injustice" might be regarded as "indications of moral and religious emergence." On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe, as with Kant, it helps "to proceed as if something has a purpose" even if it doesn't.

How about extending purpose and functions to values? Wittgenstein says that the world is the totality of facts; Sartre says that values are a creation of our "subjective conscious freedom;" Whatbout the "fact-value" debate? Can we achieve a "naturalization of ethics?"

There is Darwin proposing that pre-human species display a kind of "protomorality." Others show that many animal species have a sense of fairness, empathy, and help others in distress. And there seems to be an evolution in this, not just from apes to humans, but also within the human species, as in the evolution of the common law, that combined a connection with tradition with "constant reflection and adaptation." There seems to be a kind of creatvie emergent order, where values are concerned.

Next: Making Sense of Life.

Self-Creating Universe 6: Making Sense of Emergentism

What is emergentism? Is it a Theory of Everything or a "ghostly last stand for metaphysical mysteries?" Paul Davies thinks that "emergentism is a new scientific paradigm;" Imre Lakatos thinks of it a "progressive research programme," meaning that it is fruitfully combining together in various fields that is "going somewhere and it gaining support on the way."

Clark's notion is that, while emergentism falls short of a unified model of science, at least provides a consistent language "applicable to a whole range of phenomena" with concepts such as "dynamic systems, chaos, complexity, and self organization." It seems to be a comfortable compromise between unified theory and Paul Feyerabend's notion of "anything goes." And that influences the experience of scientific enterprise: not as crystalline, but a human discourse "involving a converging practice and mutual influence between our best theories in science."

And perhaps its very uncertainty and unpredictability brings into question the eternal dream of "ultimate certainties and universal foundational principles" and that is a good thing.

But how emergent and creative is emergence? There are two explanations: the weak explanation is that "living beings [only] appear to be relatively independent of their chemical constituents." Living things are just a consequence of their complexity. The strong explanation is that, say, in the emergence of life, there is something that is "irreducible" to "nonliving entities." Some thinkers limit this to consciousness versus non-consciousness. But Clarke prefers a general idea that we can't reduce new phenomena to its constituents. It is just useful to "make sense of nature as being driven by... a creative principle."

There's a problem with this, that it seems to contradict the idea of entropy, that the universe is running down from order to chaos. The argument is that living things are not like steam engines, but can export disorder into the environment and import order from it. They "dissipate" entropy, or used-up energy, into the environment. According to Ilya Prigogine

such processes of transformation, of self-organization and self-creation, lead to the formation of new system which are not apparently or readily explainable in terms of preceding conditions or constituent microscopic processes.

Thus, "small fluctuations may iterate and kick-start an entirely new transformational process. Such "turbulence" may lead to new organization or to "disintegration and disorder," e.g., creation of a new species or extinction of an existing species. This goes beyond traditional Darwinian natural selection theory to propose change by random mutation and adaptation to propose "self-creative, emergent processes," for random mutation by itself should lead to disorder.

Another way to think of this is in the notion of "play" or "playful variation on old ideas," a breaking out of "rule-bound or goal-directed behavior." The point of it all is that it accounts for chaos and creation in purely naturalistic terms. No need for something higher or supernatural.

Another speculation is that "the spontaneous formation of new kinds of order might be explainable in terms of quantum coherence" as suggested by quantum theory. But Clarke doubts whether this applies or explains emergence. Self-organizing phenomena -- especially humans -- "are not strange in the way that quantum processes can be strange."

But is an explanation of emergence in sight? Probably not. It is likely that the current "unpredictability of emergent complexity" demonstrates the primitive state of our state of knowledge, or ignorance, rather than the way nature works.

Clarke raises the question whether emergence is "description" rather than "explanation," but then decides, with references to Newton and Einstein and Wittgenstein, that all science is description, the "how" rather than the "why." The "why" is for theology.

How does emergence relate to fundamental concepts of philsophy like "being?" Does emergence mean new levels of knowlege, or new levels of being. Clarke argues that emergence doesn't really fit any of the previous accounts of reality. It does not assume all the world is "matter," nor does it divide the world into two, material and mental. Clarke argues that

[Emergentism] runs counter to both monistic and dualist philosophies, and in their place offers instead a dynamic, process model in which being comes to be understood, not in terms of unchanging qualities or features or essences, nut rather of continual change punctuated by relative equilibrium.

But is he saying that emergence means something coming out of nothing? Not quite, he suggests: not "a "something for nothing" but a "more from less,"that the potential is there, but not yet realized.

What about God? Does not the concept of emergence suggest the present of a creative intelligence in the universe? Recently, the concept of "intelligent design" in nature has been advanced, and a number of people have questioned the adequacy of Darwinian evolution to accont for the "'irreducible complexity' of living beings." But Clarke would rather not go down that path.

We can now see that the astonishing coherence of the universe, clearly evident at many levels, is not a static or eternal one, but is a highly complex dynamic process, one in which harmony, disharmony, order, and chaos are complementary performers and transformers over deep time.

In other words, we don't know. 

 Next: Making Sense of Human Nature

Self-Creating Universe 5: Acts of Creation

"Creativity is a key idea in all facets of emergentism." Something new and unexpected occurs.

Out of chaos comes order and out of order comes life, and out of life come the "ten thousand things".

Karl Popper speaks of creativity as the greatest riddle of cosmology, "that the universe is in a sense creative." 

Creativity, the word, first appeared in English in 1875. Now it is a fashion: everything has to do with creativity. On the one hand it is associated with accelerating changes in science and business competition and in responding to challenges. On the other hand it is criticized by the left as being elitist and imperialist. Philosopher Roger Scruton called it "a fad for self-indulgent exhibitionism".

But Clarke wants to connect the interest in creativity with the relevance of emergentism.

In the old days, only God could be creative, and to talk about humans as creative was to trespass upon God's work. But then Spinoza suggested that maybe nature could be a "self-activating agent," and Coleridge proposed that nature was "one connected whole... a living being rather than a collection of parts... with creative powers within itself." 

This ties in with Kant, who wrote about each part of an organism producing the other parts, "so that it will be both an organized and self-organized being. And in his Critique of Pure Reason he "painted a picture of human knowledge in which the mind actively constructs the world" with the rational mind involved "in the shaping of knowledge." Thus, also, the artist in not "primarily an imitator, but a creator." Thus Wackeroder who portrayed "the artist as a priest who cooperates in the divine creative act"; Schelling pronouncing art as "a holy, creative, elemental power of the world." Then Fichte and the idea of self-creation: "I am wholly my own creation."

Thinkers in the 19th century developed the notion of self-creation. Marx argued that we create history with our labor; John Stuart Mill wrote that we are like a tree that grows and develops itself. Even Samuel Smiles that "self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual." Then there is Nietzsche: we "must take upon ourselves the task of self-creation" as man "become a work of art." Thus the physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop who sees us opening ourselves to "a kind of deep, inner creativity that is woven into the very fabric of nature."

In the 20th century thinkers have zeroed in on the idea that language is the agent of creation. Thus Noam Chomsky wrote that "The normal use of language is... a creative activity." Thus Freud and later psychologists looked at the potential for understanding "irrational forces locked up in the unconscious" through the talking cure. Or Jung proposing "transformation of the self" through the "creative dialogue" that leads to individuation. We can alter our states of mind by working on the brain, So, with Fromm, man's existence is "a problem he has to solve." Or Foucault considering that "one's life become a work of art." And this is experienced by some as a "democratization of the spirit" with people creating their own spiritual goals and methods. Thus the ex-Dominican priest Matthew Fox who moves theology towards the "cultivation of the sacredness of creation." And the celebration of the creative work of women down the ages, "whether as mothers, workers, or artists."

The idea of creativity moves from individual minds into movements. Thus Toynbee saw a civilization as "a dynamic, self-organizing entity" and revolutionary movements took the ideas of Marx and attempted "the creation of a new kind of humanity. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s sought to create a new kind of consciousness, "to wake up and discover, even to create, our new selves." The point is that they experience creativity as not just for God or a "few privileged individuals" but something in which everyone can participate.

Natural science is experienced as "one of the great cooperative creations of modern times" and in Thomas Kuhn as revolutions when a prevailing paradigm is transformed by "a new set of assumptions and terminologies." In Karl Popper the paradigm notion becomes the social interaction of evaluation and the possibility of the "falsifiability" of a theory by others.

The postmodern movement has a different take on creativity, reacting perhaps against a "totalizing" notion of the creative individual as a "transcendental subject." One way to approach creativity differently is to experience creativity as "play," and out of play come stories and narratives, "not as a mirror of the world but as something extra and unpredictable emerging from it," as Derrida puts it. So, "meaning is never closed but always deferred." And this is allied to the notion of reality as socially constructed that goes back to Kant. Thus creativity is a "conversation of mankind" rather than the brilliant "all-embracing world view."

Of course, some thinkers want to "depreciate the idea of creativity." But at least emergentism allows for the creation of new ideas without "divine mysteries" and other authoritarian structures.

Next: Making Sense of Emergentism

Self-creating Universe 4: Emergence of Consciousness

Although we take it for granted, the "conscious human mind" is "perhaps the most complex of emergent phenomena": our "conscious inner self." And the "origin and nature of consciousness" has been continually debated in the modern world. Materialism and positivism tend to want to marginalize consciousness as "an epiphenomenon, a rather odd by-product of the brain."

Whatever it is, human consciousness includes awareness of the external world of "colors, sounds, smells," shapes, pleasures and pains. And the inner world of "sensations and images." Then arises "the world of mind and thought and spirit, the sense of self".

William James introduced the notion of "stream of consciousness," the constant flow of "thought, feeling, sensation". And he pointed out that our "rational consciousness" is but one form of consciousness. We now understand "altered states of consciousness, including visions, hallucinations, trances, lucid dreams, and mystical and near-death experiences" that were once thought of as manifestations of God or the devil or madness.

Yet we think of ourselves as a "unitary self," the whole universe of experience that we reduce to "I am." William James called this the "essential unity" of consciousness, and Kant wrote of "a transcendental unity of apperception."

[W]hile the doors of ours senses open up to a plural world of sights, sounds, and feelings, our minds make sense of these by drawing them together and synthesizing them into a unified whole.

This sense of unity is linked to the notion of "agency", the capacity we seem to have to "steer and direct our actions." At the same time we tell a story about ourselves and seem to be "self-creating."

We need a "natural history of consciousness" to link the "unique qualities of consciousness... with its origins in the womb of nature."  But meanwhile, we seem unable to connect the fact of our material selves with the experience of our conscious selves. Why do we have consciousness? In other words, what role does consciousness have in evolution?

Clarke proposes four characteristics of consciousness:

1. Although it's not material, it is still a natural phenomenon.
2. Animals have consciousness, not just humans.
3. The brain and consciousness are connected.
4. But brain and consciousness are not identical.

The question then arises: where did consciousness come from? Does everything have a "mind-like quality" be it ever so primitive. Clarke finds the idea hard to square with the notion of creation in the Big Bang. Still, it certainly seems that consciousness emerges out of something less developed, as vision is present in some animals as "light-sensitive cells," and then develops into more improved and specific vision. Perhaps consciousness is like that. 

Clarke divide consciousness into two: sensibility, the "power of sensation" of the world and also "the internal world of the body." For instance, pain, for pain is not "one of life's misfortunes" but the way that we avoid and minimize injury. And then there is the sensation of sex.

But consciousness is also integrative.

[V]arious primitive sensations are collected and integrated into the faculty of extended awareness in a way that is beneficial to the whole organism.

One obvious advantage of integrated consciousness is the ability of an animal to deal with "hostile threats". And it is self-organizing. 

But how does consciousness evolve? Clarke looks at "typically human forms of consciousness" and how they evolve as "self-organizing phenomena" and how there seems to be a "growing autonomy of consciousness."

First, there is creativity. Karl Popper calls this the ability to deal with new and unexpected situations: flexibility.

Then there is language. And we are not just talking about human language, but the ways in which other animals, such as ants and bees, communicate to one another.

Then there is self-awareness. And humans seem to have a radically different kind than animals, and involves the ability to construct a narrative about ourselves, past, present, and future.

And then the question arises: how far can consciousness go? Clarke proposes the idea of an extended mind that reaches out and makes contact with the rest of the world out there. He means "altered states of consciousness" and out-of-body experiences: "a sense of being at home in the universe." Can this extension of consciousness be comprehended by science? We shall see.

Next: Acts of Creation

The Tea Party and Misinformation. And COVID

Everybody knows that the worst thing in the world is misinformation about the science of COVID. And misinformation should be firmly suppressed. Because people will die.

So I got a bit of a surprise reading a piece by Melissa Mackenzie on Donald Trump and the Tea Party. Trump is generating the same kind of energy as the Tea Party, she writes.  And Mackenzie was there for the Tea Party: "I covered the Tea Party for years all across the country... Tea Party rallies are where I met and covered Andrew Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and many other notables." 

What was the Tea Party?

Tea Partiers basically divided along two lines: There were the small government types who wanted to be left alone. This faction was made up of small business owners. Women started the Tea Party organizations on behalf of the businesses they and their husbands ran. They protested taxes and big bailouts of banks. They thought the bailouts were grossly unfair since small businesses weren’t rescued. They wanted no rescues. They wanted fewer taxes and regulations.

The second part of the Tea Party was folks who hated the big bank bailouts because they felt that if the government was going to help anyone, it should be the individual. These are the populists. They felt Social Security was a right. They often believed in socialized medicine. They were many times socially liberal. 

I want back and checked my blog posts in 2009 to 2010 when the Tea Party was in the ascendant. First of all, the movement was organic. Second, there certainly were a lot of women organizers. Third, Tea Partiers were definitely against reform of Social Security and Medicare. 

But you may have notions that the Tea Party was racist and funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, I didn't mention race or Koch until well into 2010, when Tea Partiers were accused of shouting racist epithets at John Lewis as he and other black congressmen walked to the Capitol for a key vote on Obamacare. Later on I mentioned the Koch brothers. So you can see that "someone" was injecting race and Koch into the political square. Then there was the accusation of "astroturf" that I wrote about first in June 2009. Actually, it's likely that by June 2009 the Koch brothers had got involved.

Who do you think is doing the misinformation on the Tea Party origins? I wonder.

On the other hand, I'd say, the Tea Partiers were misinformed on the bailouts for bankers. Sorry kids; it's the science. The central bank is the lender of last resort and we really can't allow a cascade of banks to go broke. And we know why: 1929. In a biography of Andrew Mellon, David Cannadine write that:

In 1929, there had been 659 bank suspensions, a figure easily within the normal range for the decade, and through October 1930, there were a similar number of collapses. But in the last sixty days of the year, 600 banks closed their doors, beginning with Louisville's National Bank of Kentucky, and culminating in New York, where the Bank of the United States closed its doors o December 11.

Hmm. let's check the St. Louis Fed. It has the following table.

Year	Bank Suspensions
1928	498
1929	659
1930	1,350
1931	2,293
1932	1,453
1933	4,000
1934	57

Dear God. I had no idea how bad it got. Notice 1933: I call that a suspiciously round number.

Whaddya want? Stop bank bailouts or lose all your savings? By the way, one of the reasons for the bank failures was that people were allowed to borrow up to 90 percent of stock purchases on margin. In the 1930s they changed the rules so that you could only borrow 50 percent of a stock's purchase value.

But then they created Fannie Mae so that people could borrow lots of money on houses.

Let's look at bank failures in the 2000s, with data from FDIC so we can compare the Great Depression with the Great Recession.

Year	Bank Failures
2007	3
2008	25
2009	140
2010	157
2011	94
2012	51
2013	24

But, of course, the depositors in the Great Recession were covered by FDIC. And I presume that failing banks were usually picked by another bank in a nice cuddly deal with the regulators.

Only one problem: silly little Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008 because he whined that he didn't have the legal authority to bail 'em out. Ben, oh Ben.

So whaddya want? Banks bailed out or lose your savings? Plus, of course, in the 2000s, in accordance with government policy, people could borrow up to 100 percent of the value of a home. And the government was particularly interested in the number of loans granted to people of color: got that you racists?

But here's my point. What is the truth about the Tea Party, and about the issues that Tea Partiers rallied to protest? What's information and what's misinformation?

Yes, it was monstrous that the government bailed out the banks and not mom-and-pop businesses. Only, the government really needs to bail out failing banks otherwise the credit system collapses. So the Tea Partiers didn't really understand what was going down.

It is monstrous that the government encouraged low-down mortgages. But if it does then it must, it absolutely must, bail out failing banks.

But where are the social media searching for misinformation on the Great Recession and on government subsidies for mortgages?

And where, dear media and social media, are you on the constantly changing party line from government on COVID science versus COVID misinformation? Do you have timelines on your fact-checking sites to keep track of all that? Or is it all too hard? Because math.

See, the way I look at government and banks and government and pandemics is that in both cases government makes gigantic mistakes that it tries to cover up.

And the problem with that is that when things go wrong the truth never gets out. Because it is too painful for the ruling class to admit to.