You have me completely beaten on the beret. Smooth, very smooth.

And I apologize: I should have said “reason” rather than “logic.” In fact, that’s a good way to express the failure of 20th-century philosophy: it was the triumph of (formal) logic over reason.

In other words, like so many other fields (such as mine, computer science; and of course economics), philosophy was overrun by a Raspailesque horde of second-rate mathematicians. The result was arguably formal, and formal anything beats informal anything else in the kingdom of the bureaucrat. It was also of no use to anyone. In fact, it had negative value, because it displaced actual thinking.

As for my evilometer, it needs no calibration at all.

The US today is the greatest success of civilization, period. But this proves nothing. If in 1989 the US and its European satrapies had never existed, the DDR would have been the greatest success of civilization. But it still would have been just as idiotic and corrupt.

In other words, the US’s tragedy is that it has no America to compare itself to. If any of the liberal Western states of the 19th century had survived into the 1990s with its structures of law, trade, learning and government intact, the analogy DDR:US as US:X would seem obvious. Since none did, the analogy seems – to a pragmatist – ridiculous. But how can anyone’s ethical verdict depend on such an accident of history? Or are your ethics pragmatic, too?

Country X could be anywhere. Even the France of Napoleon III would probably do, in a pinch. But I’m assuming that, since you are a libertarian, you agree with me that central North America would be a very different and considerably improved place if the Great Society, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the Civil War, and hopefully the Federalist period, had never happened.

If this assumption is wrong, perhaps you should consider a different word for your intellectual affiliation. I suggest “nationalist,” “federalist,” or, of course, “progressive.” Isn’t the New America Foundation just across the street?

Obviously, empirical observation – unless we play the little game of defining hypothetical abstraction as “empirical” – can tell us nothing about what an Articles of Confederation America would look like in 2006. I’m afraid actual thought may be required.

All these mistakes proceed from one fallacy: the conflation of economic progress and technical progress. This keeps us on topic, because “economic growth” is a mixture of exactly these two orthogonal qualities (plus a third, population growth).

Economic progress is liberalization, pure and simple. It is also called globalization. Its reverse is centralization, parochialization, etc.

Technical progress is the discovery of new methods of production. Unlike economic progress, technical progress is difficult to reverse, though it can happen (for example, in the fall of Rome).

Economic progress stimulates technical progress. But technical progress has its own internal structure. It is a serious fallacy to measure economic progress by technical indicators, especially if we use absolute rather than relative comparisons.

For example, that we have iPods and HDTVs in 2006, and we didn’t in 1706, does not tell us that the legal and economic structures of North America in 2006 are vastly superior to those of 1706. (In fact, I’d say the truth is the opposite. But then, I’m a libertarian.)

The hallmark of the 20th century is the combination of enormous technical progress with a mixture of economic progress and reversal. As in the DDR, the combination of technical progress and economic reversal can sometimes appear as overall progress.

Productive methods in the Eastern bloc definitely advanced during the Communist period. It was much slower than in the West. But compared to any time before the Industrial Revolution, it remained impressive. And had the West not provided a yardstick of the possible, the DDR’s mandarins could easily have passed its sluggishness off as natural “maturity.”

What failures are our mandarins passing off as maturity? Is Microsoft our Robotron? If we restrict our brains to the approved positivist procedures, we’re not even allowed to guess.

In particular, it’s worth noting the late Communist predilection for supporting their consumer economies with massive loans from more economically advanced countries. Doesn’t sound familiar at all, does it?

As for table-pounding intellectual stagnation, you repeat the familiar myth that all reason is equivalent to theological hairsplitting. I suppose that somewhere in your expensive education, you were probably taught that Socrates is not a cat.

I’d take another look at that phrase “wholly convinced.” From someone perceptive enough to note his own susceptibility to absolutist thinking, it may be a warning sign.

Sorry about the scribbled-on, scanned-in PDF. I still recommend it. K-L was not exactly a libertarian, but I suspect he had more things in his philosophy than either you or I.

You have me completely beaten on the beret. Smooth, very smooth.

And I apologize: I should have said “reason” rather than “logic.” In fact, that’s a good way to express the failure of 20th-century philosophy: it was the triumph of (formal) logic over reason.

In other words, like so many other fields (such as mine, computer science; and of course economics), philosophy was overrun by a Raspailesque horde of second-rate mathematicians. The result was arguably formal, and formal anything beats informal anything else in the kingdom of the bureaucrat. It was also of no use to anyone. In fact, it had negative value, because it displaced actual thinking.

As for my evilometer, it needs no calibration at all.

The US today is the greatest success of civilization, period. But this proves nothing. If in 1989 the US and its European satrapies had never existed, the DDR would have been the greatest success of civilization. But it still would have been just as idiotic and corrupt.

In other words, the US’s tragedy is that it has no America to compare itself to. If any of the liberal Western states of the 19th century had survived into the 1990s with its structures of law, trade, learning and government intact, the analogy DDR:US as US:X would seem obvious. Since none did, the analogy seems – to a pragmatist – ridiculous. But how can anyone’s ethical verdict depend on such an accident of history? Or are your ethics pragmatic, too?

Country X could be anywhere. Even the France of Napoleon III would probably do, in a pinch. But I’m assuming that, since you are a libertarian, you agree with me that central North America would be a very different and considerably improved place if the Great Society, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the Civil War, and hopefully the Federalist period, had never happened.

If this assumption is wrong, perhaps you should consider a different word for your intellectual affiliation. I suggest “nationalist,” “federalist,” or, of course, “progressive.” Isn’t the New America Foundation just across the street?

Obviously, empirical observation – unless we play the little game of defining hypothetical abstraction as “empirical” – can tell us nothing about what an Articles of Confederation America would look like in 2006. I’m afraid actual thought may be required.

All these mistakes proceed from one fallacy: the conflation of economic progress and technical progress. This keeps us on topic, because “economic growth” is a mixture of exactly these two orthogonal qualities (plus a third, population growth).

Economic progress is liberalization, pure and simple. It is also called globalization. Its reverse is centralization, parochialization, etc.

Technical progress is the discovery of new methods of production. Unlike economic progress, technical progress is difficult to reverse, though it can happen (for example, in the fall of Rome).

Economic progress stimulates technical progress. But technical progress has its own internal structure. It is a serious fallacy to measure economic progress by technical indicators, especially if we use absolute rather than relative comparisons.

For example, that we have iPods and HDTVs in 2006, and we didn’t in 1706, does not tell us that the legal and economic structures of North America in 2006 are vastly superior to those of 1706. (In fact, I’d say the truth is the opposite. But then, I’m a libertarian.)

The hallmark of the 20th century is the combination of enormous technical progress with a mixture of economic progress and reversal. As in the DDR, the combination of technical progress and economic reversal can sometimes appear as overall progress.

Productive methods in the Eastern bloc definitely advanced during the Communist period. It was much slower than in the West. But compared to any time before the Industrial Revolution, it remained impressive. And had the West not provided a yardstick of the possible, the DDR’s mandarins could easily have passed its sluggishness off as natural “maturity.”

What failures are our mandarins passing off as maturity? Is Microsoft our Robotron? If we restrict our brains to the approved positivist procedures, we’re not even allowed to guess.

In particular, it’s worth noting the late Communist predilection for supporting their consumer economies with massive loans from more economically advanced countries. Doesn’t sound familiar at all, does it?

As for table-pounding intellectual stagnation, you repeat the familiar myth that all reason is equivalent to theological hairsplitting. I suppose that somewhere in your expensive education, you were probably taught that Socrates is not a cat.

I’d take another look at that phrase “wholly convinced.” From someone perceptive enough to note his own susceptibility to absolutist thinking, it may be a warning sign.

Sorry about the scribbled-on, scanned-in PDF. I still recommend it. K-L was not exactly a libertarian, but I suspect he had more things in his philosophy than either you or I.

I really don’t think Quine was Derrida without the beret. In fact, Quine wore a beret.
http://www.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant/Quine.gif

Funny how the century that “rejected logic” saw more advances in logic than all previous centuries combined.

In any case, it is curious to accuse one of the last centuries greatest deductive logicians with a failure to appreciate deductive logic. Though, true, Quine’s semantic indeterminacy ideas are rather “postmodern”. But that’s what’s wrong about Quine. Get rid of his behaviorism and his description theory of reference, and we’re A-OK. Positivism is dead. Long live positivism!

I submit that fixation on deductive reasoning from allegedly apodictic truths is a way of avoiding the much more difficult work of developing reliable methods of inductive inference, and developing the corresponding virtues of mind. Axiom-and-grind is a recipe for table-pounding intellectual stagnation.

Sorry about the .doc!

I really don’t think Quine was Derrida without the beret. In fact, Quine wore a beret.
http://www.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant/Quine.gif

Funny how the century that “rejected logic” saw more advances in logic than all previous centuries combined.

In any case, it is curious to accuse one of the last centuries greatest deductive logicians with a failure to appreciate deductive logic. Though, true, Quine’s semantic indeterminacy ideas are rather “postmodern”. But that’s what’s wrong about Quine. Get rid of his behaviorism and his description theory of reference, and we’re A-OK. Positivism is dead. Long live positivism!

I submit that fixation on deductive reasoning from allegedly apodictic truths is a way of avoiding the much more difficult work of developing reliable methods of inductive inference, and developing the corresponding virtues of mind. Axiom-and-grind is a recipe for table-pounding intellectual stagnation.

Sorry about the .doc!

Do you mean that the poor must live in high crime areas, surrounded by those who have abandoned all hope of achieving a comfortable lifestyle through legitimate means? If so, then I agree somewhat.

It wasn’t like this 50 years ago, when I was a child. I started out life in poor neighborhoods. We weren’t burdened by crime or by neighbors who resented my father’s climb into the middle class.

Do you mean that the poor must live in high crime areas, surrounded by those who have abandoned all hope of achieving a comfortable lifestyle through legitimate means? If so, then I agree somewhat.

It wasn’t like this 50 years ago, when I was a child. I started out life in poor neighborhoods. We weren’t burdened by crime or by neighbors who resented my father’s climb into the middle class.

Linking to a Word document! Tsk, tsk.

Failing to make a distinction between deductive and inductive thinking is simply a matter of wordplay. It’s this sort of intellectual pathology that has convinced most intelligent people in this century that philosophy doesn’t matter and they don’t need to learn it. It’s Derrida without the beret.

Perhaps the whole universe is running on a quantum computer. One can certainly define it as such. But when you kiss a girl, you kiss a girl, you don’t collapse her wave function.

Surely you’ll agree that it’s a curious coincidence that the century which rejected logic was also the century of the State. How convenient a trope positivism has proved! How pleasant for the status quo that any syllogism which could demonstrate its corruption can be rejected as an unprovable hypothesis, which is impractical to test and hence will never be tested!

I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on a phrase you used earlier, “armchair philosopher.” Perhaps you could clarify as to what seating arrangements you consider appropriate for the practice of philosophy. An Aeron? A Louis Quinze? Or are you of the peripatetic school? Or, as I suspect, is the converse of “armchair” simply “licensed?”

There is a very straightforward way to liquidate the United States. Treat it as an ordinary corporation, not a divine institution, and proceed according to the common law. Its liabilities are its bonds and its entitlements. Its assets are its physical plant and its rights of taxation, whose closest medieval analogue are the rights you own when you own a serf. And its shares can be divided in some proportion between its voters and its current managers, hopefully corresponding to their actual influence in practice.

I love phrases like “space of feasible alternatives.” It trips lightly off the tongue of the DC libertarian. Who is otherwise distinguished by his utter inability to grasp the lesson of Boromir.

If you look at the history of the Eastern bloc, you notice a curious fact. Right up until the end of, say, East Germany, the reformers kept appearing. The new Dubceks and Nagys, men like Egon Krenz. They had their dreams of socialism with a human face. With them in charge, of course. And there were plenty of intellectuals who were ready to hop on the wagon and follow them.

But instead, the whole thing just disappeared. Pfft.

Here is the big secret about the (post-Stalin) Soviet system: everyone was a reformer. Everyone wanted to work within the system in order to improve it. Many talented and energetic people were attracted by this task. Kieslowski’s film Blind Chance (now available on DVD) is a wonderful chronicle of this process.

These people are mostly all still alive. And I’m sure most of them are smart enough to regret the fact that they worked as shills for a giant criminal organization.

Of course, democracy is different. We have elections, they didn’t, so we are good, whereas they were evil. There are no Brezhnevs in DC. I must be looking for a completely different couple of droids.

One of the many errors that people who criticize Washington make is to assume that all the problems of the system are the result of it having the wrong leaders. Or the wrong employees, or whatever. Since I grew up as a Federal dependent, I am not subject to this comforting delusion – I’m aware that almost all the people who work in the machine, both formal employees and contractors such as yourself, and even the actual politicians, are intelligent and cultured people with only the best of intentions. I hope this explains my belief that it’s the organization itself that must be liquidated.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps “liberal democracy” really is the end of history. Perhaps the US Constitution really was divinely inspired. Who can know these things? But before you take this one to the bank, you might want to read this.

Linking to a Word document! Tsk, tsk.

Failing to make a distinction between deductive and inductive thinking is simply a matter of wordplay. It’s this sort of intellectual pathology that has convinced most intelligent people in this century that philosophy doesn’t matter and they don’t need to learn it. It’s Derrida without the beret.

Perhaps the whole universe is running on a quantum computer. One can certainly define it as such. But when you kiss a girl, you kiss a girl, you don’t collapse her wave function.

Surely you’ll agree that it’s a curious coincidence that the century which rejected logic was also the century of the State. How convenient a trope positivism has proved! How pleasant for the status quo that any syllogism which could demonstrate its corruption can be rejected as an unprovable hypothesis, which is impractical to test and hence will never be tested!

I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on a phrase you used earlier, “armchair philosopher.” Perhaps you could clarify as to what seating arrangements you consider appropriate for the practice of philosophy. An Aeron? A Louis Quinze? Or are you of the peripatetic school? Or, as I suspect, is the converse of “armchair” simply “licensed?”

There is a very straightforward way to liquidate the United States. Treat it as an ordinary corporation, not a divine institution, and proceed according to the common law. Its liabilities are its bonds and its entitlements. Its assets are its physical plant and its rights of taxation, whose closest medieval analogue are the rights you own when you own a serf. And its shares can be divided in some proportion between its voters and its current managers, hopefully corresponding to their actual influence in practice.

I love phrases like “space of feasible alternatives.” It trips lightly off the tongue of the DC libertarian. Who is otherwise distinguished by his utter inability to grasp the lesson of Boromir.

If you look at the history of the Eastern bloc, you notice a curious fact. Right up until the end of, say, East Germany, the reformers kept appearing. The new Dubceks and Nagys, men like Egon Krenz. They had their dreams of socialism with a human face. With them in charge, of course. And there were plenty of intellectuals who were ready to hop on the wagon and follow them.

But instead, the whole thing just disappeared. Pfft.

Here is the big secret about the (post-Stalin) Soviet system: everyone was a reformer. Everyone wanted to work within the system in order to improve it. Many talented and energetic people were attracted by this task. Kieslowski’s film Blind Chance (now available on DVD) is a wonderful chronicle of this process.

These people are mostly all still alive. And I’m sure most of them are smart enough to regret the fact that they worked as shills for a giant criminal organization.

Of course, democracy is different. We have elections, they didn’t, so we are good, whereas they were evil. There are no Brezhnevs in DC. I must be looking for a completely different couple of droids.

One of the many errors that people who criticize Washington make is to assume that all the problems of the system are the result of it having the wrong leaders. Or the wrong employees, or whatever. Since I grew up as a Federal dependent, I am not subject to this comforting delusion – I’m aware that almost all the people who work in the machine, both formal employees and contractors such as yourself, and even the actual politicians, are intelligent and cultured people with only the best of intentions. I hope this explains my belief that it’s the organization itself that must be liquidated.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps “liberal democracy” really is the end of history. Perhaps the US Constitution really was divinely inspired. Who can know these things? But before you take this one to the bank, you might want to read this.