Philosophy and Religion

The Woke Right Did Not Start With the Woke Left

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Right Wing Woke
(image source)

In my recent post about Donald Trump being an authoritarian dictator, I linked to an article by Jonathan Rauch discussing the woke right. The article claims that the right has gone woke because they learned this tactic from the woke left, stating:

The notion is not that the far left and far right share the same politics or goals. Rather, it is that the far right has adopted, partially on purpose but mostly through osmosis and convergent evolution, claims and strategies that parallel the far left’s.

This is incorrect. The right has been woke since at least the late nineteenth century, likely much earlier.

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Expertise, Meritocracy, Pseudo-Intellectualism, and the Problem of Testimony

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The vast majority of what people “know” about any given subject they only know because someone told them, or they read it in a book or online, or heard someone talk about it online. The point being, we get our knowledge from what philosophers call the testimony of others. This worked out well in our hunter-gatherer past, when a member of a tribe knew everyone else in the tribe. Person A knows that person B is someone capable of or knowledgeable about X, and so person A can trust person B with telling them about X.

In much larger societies, such as in modern nation states, many, if not most, of the people we run into online and in our daily lives will be strangers, or at the very least not people we are intimately familiar with. This means that much of what we are told comes from strangers, who are usually themselves relaying information they were told from yet other strangers. Since we don’t know if these strangers know what they’re talking about, humans have come up with various means of lending their testimony legitimacy and trustworthiness.

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The Crisis of Meaning and the Assumptions of Political Christianity

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Fairly recently there has been somewhat of a resurgence of appreciation for religion, and Christianity in particular, among public intellectuals. The idea seems to be (and this is one I’ve harped on before) that secularism has failed to give anyone a sense of meaning or purpose – humanism does not fill the “god-shaped hole” that everyone has – and in fact has only engendered political extremism as a poor substitute for that sense of purpose we all seek. As such, the thinking seems to go, we ought to turn back to what worked for thousands of years, to religion, and Christianity in particular. Are these political Christians onto something?

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Do Numbers Actually Exist?

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Many people will attest to their dislike of math. Yet, it is difficult to navigate the modern world without it. We routinely mentally count and calculate distances, times, speeds, weights, volumes, money, various objects we come across, and other everyday things. When talking about numbers that are associated with units (meters, minutes, grams, liters, dollars, etc.) it seems fairly straightforward what the numbers are referring to out there in the real world**, but what do the numbers themselves actually refer to?

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Consciousness, the Brain, and Josh Rasmussen’s Counting Problem

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Consciousness Counting Problem Joshua Rasmussen
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Consciousness is one of the biggest philosophical questions we know of. David Chalmers says that consciousness has two issues: the easy question of consciousness and the hard question of consciousness. The former, while not easy per se, is much easier than the latter. The easy question has to do with everything that neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and so on, all pay attention to with questions such as: what are the neural correlates of perception, memory, belief, cognition, emotion, intuition, behavior, etc. and how can they be manipulated? How does thought/perception occur and how does it go wrong (e.g., cognitive biases, perceptual illusions)? How do thoughts/perceptions influence behavior? How are thoughts and behaviors shaped by biology and culture? Is the brain like a computer? And so on. These are all questions that we are relatively certain can be answered within the purview of these fields. Even if it is difficult to find the answers, we can be confident they have answers that will eventually be discovered. The hard question, however, is essentially this: how is it that non-conscious physical matter can give rise to conscious experience?

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You Do Not Have Free Will

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What is the first animal to come to your mind when I ask this question? I bet at least one animal comes to mind. But why did the animal you chose come to mind? Why did, say, a blue spotted salamander or box turtle or naked mole rat come to mind when I asked the question? You might reply that it is because it was the animal you chose to think about, using your own free will. But was it, though?

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Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali Right About Christianity?

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To the delight of many Christians and the chagrin of many atheists, the activist and (former) atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has declared herself for Christianity. Some atheists and Christians seem quick to point out that her article does not explicitly say she accepts Christian doctrine about Christ dying for our sins, resurrecting, the hypostatic union of the trinitarian God, and so on. Her article is more about politics and resisting Islamism than spreading the Good News. She does say, in the last paragraph, that she attends church, which is likely a good sign that she does accept (or is coming to accept) the Christian doctrine. But is she right to convert to Christianity?

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The Case for Moral Nihilism

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Does morality exist? What would it even mean to say that morality exists? And if morality does not exist, then how can there be moral progress (e.g., how can we say that it was moral progress to end slavery)? These are meta-ethical questions, in other words, not questions describing or prescribing what one ought to do, but questions concerning whether describing or prescribing what one ought to do is even coherent.  I will examine these questions, and more, in this post.

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Effective Altruism, Consequentialism, and Longtermism

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Effective Altruism Sam Bankman-Fried
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Since early November of 2022, when the cryptocurrency exchange FTX went bankrupt, there has been growing criticism of a movement for which Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), founder and CEO of FTX, was a sort of mascot: effective altruism. Broadly speaking, this is the idea that people should take a rational approach to charitable efforts, rather than a sentimental approach. Empathy can lead us astray, appealing to our cognitive biases, like the availability heuristic, recency illusion, mere-exposure effect, the streetlight effect, and others. A touching story about a single person can move us to act better than any statistics about the suffering of millions. As such, instead of following our emotions, we should seek to get the most bang for our buck with our charitable efforts, i.e., save the most lives and do the most good with our donations of time, money, and resources. This means that the problems we address, and the means of addressing those problems, should be considered rationally and scientifically, going based on what the numbers tell us will do the most good, even if it doesn’t immediately give us that fuzzy feeling we achieve from helping the single person with the touching story. Since the downfall of SBF, this philosophy has garnered some criticism, often with what seems like more than a hint of schadenfreude.

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The Impossibility of a Successful Leftist Revolution

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A hallmark of conspiratorial thinking is that even disconfirming evidence can be interpreted as confirming the theory. If, for instance, all evidence points to an election having been fair, the theorist will think “aha! That’s exactly what the nefarious conspirators would have us believe!” thus demonstrating, in their mind, the truth of the theory. The Marxist critique of ideology (which, in the Marxist sense, means that part of the superstructure in which ideas that legitimize the current economic order are engineered), and more particular the cynical ideology of Slavoj Žižek, appears to be just such a conspiracy theory.

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What is Authenticity?

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Authenticity is a somewhat ambiguous term, and yet many believe it to be very important. People strive for their own authenticity while admiring it in others. In modern times, authenticity tends to mean something like “being who you actually are on the inside” in a way that clears away the corrosion of social expectations to reveal the perfect gem of our authentic selves. But is it really that simple? What does it even mean to find some hidden inner authentic self? Is this even a helpful way of conceptualizing authenticity?

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Sanctity and Purity

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A few days ago I wrote a post about the origins and nature of morality where I talked a bit about the Moral Foundations Theory. The 5 + 1 moral foundations are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, with liberty/oppression as a potential sixth. Jonathan Haidt, one of the progenitors of Moral Foundations Theory, says in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultures tend to rate care/harm and fairness/cheating high while downplaying, or even ignoring, the others (except perhaps liberty/oppression, if we include it). In his book, Haidt defends the other three of the main five foundations. But it has me wondering if abandoning them, primarily sanctity, is a good thing or not.

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What is Morality?

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ethics philosophy
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Philosophy is, broadly speaking, divided into three general categories: metaphysics (what is the nature of existence and reality?), epistemology (what is knowledge and how is it possible?), and ethics (what is the nature of good and evil and how should people live their lives to accord with what is good?). It’s this latter one that tends to have the most practical impact on people’s lives. Indeed, things like business ethics, governmental ethics, medical ethics, bioethics, and so on are where the rubber really meets the road. Yet, they still fail to answer the very basic question of “what is good?” and “how should I live my life?” for our everyday, mundane situations.

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What is Truth?

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truth and fake news
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It’s been in vogue to say that we live in a post-truth society (never mind that this is making a truth-valued statement). Fake news, wokism, QAnon, standpoint epistemology (i.e., “my truth”), distrust of institutions and experts, postmodernism, social media echo chambers, internet algorithms, Donald Trump, bias in mainstream media, secularization, and so on have all been viewed as the death knell of Truth by some subset of the population or another within the past couple decades or so. But what do people mean when they talk about truth or the truth? Are people talking about the same things? Let’s look at this a little deeper.

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Free Will and Gender Identity

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One of the reasons that belief in free will persists is because it so vividly feels like we have free will. This intuition is better than any philosophical, scientific, or religious argument for or against free will. We believe ourselves to have the ability to freely take actions of our own volition, despite much scientific evidence that our preferences, desires, and even behaviors are biologically and culturally determined.

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What is Equality (and Equity)?

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In recent years the difference between equality and equity have been discussed more and more. Equality is taken to be the idea that people have equal opportunity while equity is the idea that people (ought to) have equal outcomes. In the former, it means there should be no legal or political impediment to someone entering the market, whether that’s the buying and selling of goods and services or of one’s labor. The latter, equity, says that things like racial, sex/gender, and economic disparities need to be corrected through legal and political policies. But are these the only notions of equality?

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The Anti-Dialectic and the Nihilectic

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dialectic Hegel Marx

The dialectical method, popularized by Plato’s characterization of Socrates, and then updated by Hegel and Marx, is often thought of as a three-step process: person/group A proposes a thesis P, person/group B offers an anti-thesis that contradicts it ~P, and then there is a synthesis of the two that results in a new thesis Y. Hegel introduced the idea that the thesis contains within itself its own antithesis, that a thesis contains contradictions that must be worked out in a process that repeats through multiple aufheben until we arrive at the Absolute. Marx took this and applied it to history: the material conditions of an age contains its own contradictions that must be worked out in a process that eventually leads to a classless, stateless utopia known as communism.

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A Metamodern Argument for Designer Babies?

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designer baby

I have written a very lengthy review of The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One (Metamodern Guides), by Hanzi Freinacht. Because it is so lengthy, it will probably have very few people who read the entire thing. But an argument I made in my review of the final chapter is something interesting that I thought deserved some of its own consideration, and so this post is adapted from my review of the final two chapters in The Listening Society. Keep in mind that although it is not a necessary requirement to have read my review of all the prior chapters to understand this post, it would be helpful.

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