Popper? I Don’t Even Know Her! — Perry de Havilland of Samizdata quips in an aside that Karl Popper’s conjectural objective epistemology “makes more sense” to him than Ayn Rand’s epistemology. Well, Ayn Rand didn’t really develop much of an epistemology (theory of knowledge). She developed the outline of a theory of concepts, and little else. In any case, the little bit of theory that she did produce has the virtue of coherence, while Popper’s epistemology is grievously flawed.

According to Popper, prior to inquiry, the probability that all swans are white is zero. If I go out and observe a billion white swans, and no swans of other hues, then the probability that all swans are white is… still zero! The same as a contradiction!!! Popper claims that positive instances can do nothing to confirm a universal statement, which is just bizarre. Most large samples of a population match the population in composition. So of course finding something out about a large sample provides some evidence about the entire class.

Popper argues that one can only disconfirm a theory–prove that it is false. But then what do you say of a theory that has been subjected to huge numbers of potentially falsifying tests, but has passed with flying colors? Isn’t not being falsified by many tests a lot like being confirmed? According to Popper, No! Then what’s the difference between a theory that has passed a lot of tests, and a theory that hasn’t been falsified because it’s never been tested? Here, Popper just punts and makes up a different word for ‘confirmation’ and pretends to mean something different by it, similar to the way that Chomsky says we don’t exactly “know” innate Universal Grammar, but we are “cognizant” of it.

Pace Popper, induction works just fine, and it works pretty much the way people intuitively think it does (i.e., The more horses you encounter, the surer your knowledge about horses in general.)

Anyway, for one of the most entertaining take downs in recent philosophy, try David Stove’s Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, which is conveniently online. The trashing of Popper starts right at the start of chapter one. Stove was a misogynist, racist, reactionary… but a good philosopher of science, and a damn fine writer. It’s just blistering good fun.

Yes. I really care about this sort of thing.

Bush as Boromir & The Shire as Anarchist Paradise — Debate has raged over at Andrew Sullivan about Bush’s counterpart in The Fellowship of the Rings. Having just completed the novel (I saw the movie, but in German, which I don’t speak), I am ready to make sagacious pronouncements!

Perry de Haviland has intelligently suggested that the ring represents the awful and corrupting power of the state. I agree. (And I cite some of the same passages as Perry.) Now, Sullivan sees Frodo in Bush, and it’s true: plainspoken, wide-eyed George does fairly emanate Hobbitude (have you seen his feet?) However, given that the ring is the state, Bush cannot be a Hobbit, for he has won his glory as a leader by marshalling of the awesome power of state force against dark enemies. Frodo seeks to destroy the ring. Bush seeks to use it for noble ends, heedless of its dangers. Thus spake Boromir, imploring Frodo to give him the ring, so as to overcome the Enemy with might:

True-hearted men, they will not be corrupted. . . We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only the strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause. . . It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him. . . And they tell us to throw it away! I do not say destroy it. That may be well, if reason could show any hope of doing so. It does not.

I’ve condensed the speech, but there’s the essence of it. The state may be dangerous, but not if my tribe, true-hearted folk, hold the reigns. We don’t wish to be dictators, only to defend what is good and true. A just cause. If it was possible to get along without the state, that would be great, but it’s not possible. So best that I run it. That’s a Bush in a nutshell. A Frodo is one who has chanced upon power, but attempts to use it only to destroy it.

Is the Shire indeed an anarchy? Yes! In the Prologue, Tolkein goes to pains to make clear that the Hobbits, while not egalitarians with regard to material goods, are egalitarians with regard to political power. They recognize no inequalities in coercive authority. Tolkein writes:

The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government’. Families for the most part managed their own affairs. . . There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the High King of Fornost. . . But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years.

Tolkein goes on to concede that the Hobbits do have a Thain, which office falls to the head of the Took family, but “the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity.” The one genuine official of the Shire is the Mayor, who oversees the post and the watch. And the police are little to speak of, being “in practice rather haywards rather than police, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than people.” Tolkein almost belabors the point that there is no coercive authority in the shire. Only when Bilbo returns with the ring is the stateless well-being of the Shire threatened.

We are made to admire the Shire and its bucolic anarchy. However, those libertarians who might take heart in the example of the Shire should heed the conditions Tolkein seems to find necessary for the sustenance of this happy situation.

Hobbits are incurious, deeply conservative and stasist: “Growing food and eating occupied most of their time. In other matters, as a rule, generous and not greedy, but contented and moderate, so that estates, farms, workshops, and small trades tended to remain unchanged for generations.” Not exactly the ambitious, creative, dynamic commercial society we tend to celebrate. Like frontier Americans, stateless Hobbits do well without legislation, but only a time-tested body of law. “They attributed to the kind of old all their essential laws; and usually the kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.” In addition, Hobbits are fascinated with family, and the Shire is small enough that almost everyone is related to everyone some way or another, and thus bound to each other with a sense of family obligation.

Generous dispositions, together with a rather unthinking respect for rules, and a recognition of others as part of an extended family, might well suffice to guarantee peace without force. But given the somewhat more individualist, ambitious and grasping nature of Men, our conditional attitude toward rules, and our society full of change and strangers, the Hobbit way to anarchist bliss holds little promise for us. For now, we can only hope that our own undisappointed Boromir, wielding his great yet essentially evil ring, can stave off corruption with Hobbit-like fortitude, so that we all may for some time remain Free Men.

Objectify Me, Please! — A main objection to porn seems to be that it “objectifies” women (and, yes, men). The force of this objection has always eluded me. We are objects, big chunks of matter moving through space-time. How can looking at dirty pictures objectify what is already an object?

Maybe I’m being a little coy. ‘Objectification’ is just a bad word. The core of the objection, I think, is not that porn objectifies, but that it de-subjectifies. When we concentrate on bodies and the pleasures they afford, we are liable to lose track of the mind within the body — the hopes and dreams, loves and fears, of the person in the lens. But still, I don’t get it. This needn’t happen at all.

Troubles with porn strike me as, you guessed it, Cartesian! My sense is that some folks just don’t feel comfortable with the fact that our minds, in some sense, just are our bodies. Nor do they understand that our subjectivity is not independent of our embodiment. We are essentially physical beings with aesthetic and sexual dimensions. And our sexual, aesthetic physicality is an essential part of our subjective experience of ourselves and our world. Thus, you can’t begin to do justice to the inner world of the person without taking into account their embodiment as sexual beings who care about beauty. If you’re not objectifying people, if you’re treating them as disembodied souls, then you’re doing violence to their lived experience.

Pictures, films, stories or whatever of people having sex strike me as entirely unobjectionable. It all depends on what you do with it. If certain kinds of bodies, or sexual acts, are arousing and pleasurable to behold, then what’s the problem in taking pleasure from it? The real nature of the inner life of the folks involved is no more pertinent than the inner lives of folks in travel brochures, or the folks who make your sneakers. If one comes to reduce all a person’s value to sexual value, then that would certainly be bad. But that’s no worse than a coach reducing his players’ value to athletic value, or a stock broker reducing his clients to their economic value. Thankfully, there is nothing in the nature of coaching or porn or financial counseling that keeps us from maintaining a realistic and compassionate conception of the whole person. Do strong objections to porn often flow from a constricted notion of what it is to be a person and a sexual being? Yeah, probably.

Personally, I like to be admired for my physical attributes, and I never feel diminished as a person when someone implies they might like sex with me. Maybe it’s because I’m a rather abstracted intellectual sort, but I often feel more visible as a person when someone is paying attention to me as a physical and sexual thing. It’s not all I am, but it’s a fair part of it, and I lose touch with it without a little help. So go ahead, objectify me, please!

Faith & Boyle-ing Nihilism — Dawson Jackson asserts that atheists have “faith that God absolutely does not exist.” This is a common claim, but it rests on an elementary confusion. Theists are ever making atheism into a strong positive conviction, like their own, but it is nothing of the sort. To believe that something exists is to rely on it in your explanation of the world. That x does not exist is an automatic and idle consequence of the absence of claims about x in your body of belief. If I believe that hydrogen plays a role in explaining the way the world works, then I believe in hydrogen. If kryptonite never enters into my theory of the world at any point, then, by implication, I don’t believe in kryptonite. I don’t go around exerting mental energy not believing in kryptonite, just as I don’t walk around trying not to wear lipstick. Not wearing lipstick is not something I do. In addition to typing, breathing, sitting, etc., I am not also not wearing lipstick, not kicking a dog, and so forth. Obviously, things you are not doing are not among the things that you are doing. If you are an atheist, then one of the things you are not doing is believing in God, but not believing in God is not thereby an ongoing activity.

Also, faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Non-belief in the absence of evidence is the opposite of faith: reason. It doesn’t take a logician to realize that opposites cannot be the same thing.

Dawson also gives us a nice quote (?) from T. C. Boyle about atheism and nihilism. I just wish to say that I find nihilism incoherent. If nihilism is the view that nothing matters, or nothing is valuable, then it’s just obviously false, and it’s hard to see how it’s even possible for anyone who isn’t suicidal to hold it. It’s better to be healthy and well than sick and in pain. It’s better to have love and friendship than loneliness. It’s true! Just try to dispute it! But then being healthy is valuable, and having friends matters. Boyle is being a dramatic idiot. He clearly believes that good prose is better than bad prose, and that success is better than failure. Maybe Boyle means that he doesn’t believe that anything matters from the perspective of the universe or that meaning is conferred on our lives by our role in some grand, pre-ordained story. Well, sure. It would be silly to believe that. But not believing in that is not what nihilism is.

Dawson accuses me of making the “ancient blunder” of conflating two things into an antithesis, but since I have no idea what that could mean, I can’t really stick up for myself on that score. I do understand “conflating two things that are antithetical.” It’s what Dawson does with reason and faith.

Interactivity Returns! — The comment feature has been reinstated at The Fly Bottle, thanks to Leo Dillon’s new version of SnorComments. So talk to me, baby!

I Don’t Really Want to be Having This Debate — But Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal also misses the distinction between total harm and net benefit. And in any case, my original point was only that questions of better require answers to questions of better for what. I have no clear idea whether the benefits minus the harms of Christianity is positive or not. My contention is only that Christianity has killed more people, wrecked more lives, and squelched more liberty than Hustler and “American Booty.” And if porn objectifies women (and men too, Christopher), one would like to hear exactly what is the harm in that, and how it is worse than burning Bruno, say, at the stake. Christopher seems also to overlook that porn provides an enormous amount of pleasure and satisfaction for millions. Is that not a cultural achievement?

I really don’t care to be defending porn, because it’s beside the point at issue with Goldberg. The point is that cultural libertarianism is not relativistic or nihilistic, and that everyone, conservatives included, have a “Chinese Menu” attitude toward culture, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Jesus & Porn, etc. — Kevin Holtsberry cites scripture in order to vindicate the value of Christianity. Well, I’m not impressed. The principles expressed by Kevin’s select passages have nothing especially to do with Christianity as such — in believing in a superpowered being from another dimension, that he was once born of virgin, died… but didn’t really, saved us from our intrinsic awfulness, and so forth. All of that is just false, and it’s bad to believe false things.

But I was thinking about the murder of heretics, providing a rationale for stripping millions of people of their natural freedoms for thousands of years, the subjugation of women, and so forth. The evils of porn are, well, just trivial in comparison. I’m not saying that there haven’t been good consequences of Christianity, such as pretty cathedrals, the abolition movement and helping to aim the light of moral judgment on the individual person. But the history is just too complex for me to make an assessment about the net benefit. However, I do think that anyone who thinks the harm of porn has been worse than the harm of Christianity either never had a Western Civ course or is delusional.

Kevin argues further that there are conservatives who do in fact argue for their values on the basis of an understanding of human nature and history. He mentions Kirk, C.S. Lewis, Novak and Neuhaus. But those are producers of exactly the kind of historical quasi-fictions I had in mind. The selective histories these thinker’s works contain are, like Marxist histories, constructs in service of ideology. And the essentialist, non-Darwinian view of human nature shared by all above is false.

Fighting the Good War on Film – Check out Michael Valdez Moses’s fascinating Reason essay on the way the recent spate of films about WWII express unfulfilled boomer fantasies.

Porn Versus Christianity — I was delighted to be quoted by Virginia Postrel in her reply to Goldberg during the late cultural libertarianism bruhaha. And I was flabbergasted to be quoted by Goldberg on NRO in his riposte. It is perhaps a dubious distinction to become known for defending the merits of pornography against Christianity, but the noble do not blanch in the face of uncomfortable truth. [Clears throat.]

In response to my points that a comparison between porn and Christian books requires a dimension of comparison (you probably don’t want to use the Bible for self satisfaction, Batsheba notwithstanding), and that the immorality of porn must be argued, not assumed, Goldberg replies:

Touché, I suppose. But doesn’t this make my point? Cultural libertarians are uncomfortable with, and quite defensive about, drawing distinctions between such bedrock components of Western civilization — in this case a little thing called “Christianity” — and the latest installment of On Golden Blonde. According to these guys, the burden is on me to explain why and how porn is worse than Christianity. I’d be glad to do it sometime (though I’m hardly an anti-porn zealot); it doesn’t sound too tough.

Golberg’s point, I take it, is that cultural libertarians are relativists or nihilists, unable or unwilling to make firm judgments about value. If that’s his point, then I certainly haven’t made it. I’m keen to make value-judgments. That my judgments conflict with Goldberg’s may appear to Goldberg to reduce them to absurdity, but we aren’t (thank God) all Goldberg. Goldberg keeps missing our (or at least my) point: judgments of value require an answer to “Valuable to whom and for what purpose?” Although I certainly believe Christianity is false, and has been far more harmful than porn could ever be, that’s not to the point. The point is that conservatives need to stop pounding tables and explain to us why their cultural preferences really are valuable and what justifies us in believing that they are. That Christianity, say, is a “bedrock component of Western Civilization” says absolutely nothing in its defense. Here’s why.

Although I certainly count myself a defender of certain Enlightenment ideals, I don’t think it even begins to make sense to fight for something so ill-defined and contradiction-laden as “Western Civilization.” My background is in western philosophical thought, and although there is, to an extent, a unified conversation that stretches over the ages, that conversation contains both truths and their contraries, and the cultural expression of that conversation contains both genuine values and genuine evils. The Inquisition, the Divine Right of Kings, American slavery, German National Socialism, and Soviet Communism are just as much an expression of “The Western Tradition” as the scientific method and the Bill of Rights. It’s absurd on its face to bundle all this together, call it one thing, and come to it’s defense.

Goldberg accuses cultural libertarians of failing to draw important distinctions of value, yet this is precisely the crime of conservatives who make axiomatic the value of an incoherent Western tradition, and then ridicule those who are careful to distinguish between what is genuinely good and bad within the tradition. Indeed, conservatives try to have it both ways — to glorify something called Western Civilization, and at the same time to criticize key strands of the tradition, such as scientific secularism (good) or totalitarian collectivism (bad), as being somehow outside of it.

Goldberg pretends to loathe grab-bag culture, but he and his ilk do it just the same when they pick Christianity over Celtic paganism and individual rights over collectivist subjugation. However, conservatives attempt to camouflage that their preferences are just preferences by constructing a highly selective narrative about “Western Civilization” that gives their preferences the illusion of intrinsic worth as necessary keystones of their fictitious cultural edifice. I’m not being postmodern here. I’m being descriptive.

Of the essentials of Western Civilization, Goldberg writes:

… some of the ingredients for Western civilization I have in mind are such categories as Christianity and religion in general, sexual norms, individualism, patriotism, the Canon, community standards of conduct, democracy, the rule of law, fairness, modesty, self-denial, and the patriarchy.

Why not Stoic mysticism, collectivism, military nationalism, absolute monarchy, slavery and the Napoleonic Code? Why don’t these go in Jonah’s grab bag?

Conservatives need to stop making up self-justifying historical quasi-fictions about “Western Civilization” and just tell us straight why we all should all value what they value. They always demur because they cannot do it. They cannot do it because they have derived their package of values from contingent emotive attachments, not from an objective standard grounded on the real, various nature of human beings. It’s not relativism or nihilism to argue that there are more legitimate human values on heaven and earth than in the dreams of conservatives. It’s just true.

Goldberg Redux — Sadly, I learned of my mention by Goldberg, and of his further ramblings, only just as I was embarking on my holiday trip and I was unable to reply. Although the topic is rather stale, by blog standards, I do want to say a few things. And I will say them tomorrow.

European Vacation – My foray to “The Continent” was great fun and provided me, by contrast, with a heightened sense of American culture. There are a few things I prefer about German norms over American. You can smoke just about anywhere and you can bring your dog just about anywhere (and you can probably let your dog smoke just about anywhere). People insist on eating breakfast. There are tits and foul language on network television. Beer as a food group. In Prague, I admired the anarchic attitude toward fireworks.

And some things about Germans are unexpectedly cute. A Christmas Eve performance piece at a very prole club in Cottbus, which featured folks dressed up as reindeer, Santa, snowmen, striking awkward poses and chanting “Kung-Fu fighting!”, confirmed the reality of endearing German loopiness of the Sprockets variety. I also like it when my lovely German friend requests intimacy in the imperative mode, e.g. “Now you will pet my hair.”

I came to better understand the complaint of American cultural imperialism. A great deal of German TV is dubbed American. Almost all the incidental music I heard in Germany and the Czech Republic was either American or British. Almost all the movies in theaters are American. I knew that American pop culture gets around, but I really wasn’t expecting this kind of dominance. Of course, it’s really not imperialism at all. It’s just that Germans don’t seem to make music, TV and film that they themselves prefer over American products. I have a theory why this should be so, but as I’m suffering jet lag, and feeling rather like I swallowed too much cough medicine, I think I’ll advance my theory tomorrow, for cogency’s sake.

I have returned! — from strange lands afar. Developing…