INFORMATION AND DEBATE:
Or Peer Review and Publication
by
Kristo Ivanov, prof.
em., Umeå University, (April 2014, version
240728-1615)
http://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/debate.html
https://ia800107.us.archive.org/9/items/Debate_201801/Debate.html
CONTENTS
1. Link
to a General Disclaimer
2. Introduction
3. Debate
in personal relationships
4. Debate
in provocation
5. Why does Jesus speak in parables?
6. Ten rules to soothe conflicts
7. Debate
in the "art of worldly wisdom"
8. Neutralizing
criticism, "Why not?" and "Constructive criticism"
9. Cronyism
and political correctness
10. Debate
as semantics vs. consciousness
11. Semantics
as socialization
12. Debate
in foundations of mathematics and logic
13. Debate
as democracy and emergent truth
14. Debate:
Catholic Church and gender ideology
15. Debate
as scientific method: "Hegelian-Singerian” inquiring systems
16. Debate as fact
nets: “Leibnizian” inquiring Systems (logical soccer)
17. Pseudo-debates
in democracy's mass media
18. Conspiracy theories (and vaccines)
19. The
type-psychology of debate
20. Contemptuous
interaction in social media?
21. Case study of psychological syndrome as type-psychology
22. Case study – The Freedom of
Will
23. Case study: Atheism vs.
Christianism and Logic as Rape vs, AI & HCI
24. Case study: the
Russia-NATO-Ukraine crisis and Israel-Hamas war
25. Pathology of type-psychology: political correctness
26. Political
theology, and theology
27 Terminal breakdown and analytical psychology
28. Terminal
breakdown and theology
29. Conclusion
2. Introduction
On occasion of my retirement in 2002 I intended to carry out in full
scale my research that had been neglected because of managerial duties, and to
summarize my experiences and reflections in one or several publications. At the
time I edited (and later updated) a sort of position
statement and letter of intent that portrayed my state of spirit.
The more I studied and reflected upon my experiences, the more I got convinced
that the main problem was not the lack of debates, books, publications,
experiences, reflections, but rather the lack of wish, will, courage, that is
"lack of time" , to
select readings, to read, to think, or to understand in depth and to act upon
knowledge that is still valid and already available. There were other signs of
reasons related to cultural crisis such as I surveyed in a paper on Belief and Reason (esp. the text associated with note
30 on "tolerance"). But it is obvious that
debates about an issue have an intrinsic value, at least initially, as an
expression of human respect or friendship including the wish to improve each
other's life, as a test of one own's arguments and as a way of trying to
understand others' and the own mind or psyche. The concept of
"argument" itself, often based on a misunderstood
and naively overvalued logic, is open to diverse problematic
interpretations within the context of an argumentation that is the subject of inquiry or inquiring (cf. ref. below).
To accept and possibly respond to a single criticism is recommendable but a
continued argumentative dialog is to be ethically expected only when
reciprocally needed, with a few true close friends (true in the meaning of Aristotle's
ethics, or of spiritual
friendship) as Plato lets Socrates affirm for his
dialogs.
This is partly analog to the situation of a physician who must have a contact
with ill people and illness in order to get a chance to understand and cure
them, or to assist with palliative care while checking his own health and
awaiting the occasion of becoming in turn old or sick, patient of another
physician and under the care of other people. Such reflexive and paradoxical
aspects of the issue are also illustrated, despite of my not being a
materialist, by the insight summarized in a quotation by the Swedish "engineer-philosopher" and Christian apologist
Krister Renard, about the big dilemma of materialism: the whole thing reminded
him of a philosopher he once read about, who wrote book after book, in which he
tried to prove that any form of human communication, including the verbal one,
is impossible. I am rescued from this conundrum by my concession that this
difficulty does not arise
in any form of
communication, but only in the context of more complex forms of debate
involving scientific method or the design
of inquiring systems (see below.)
Part of the text that follows was originally created in December 2011 as an item of my
weblog, which gradually grew in size because of
several additions that were motivated by new consecutive related experiences in
my activities and professional interactions. Eventually I perceived that, as
some other items of the blog and because of its length, it could be developed
and better categorized as a scientific paper on informatics in the sense of
having become extensive reflections on the philosophy of inquiry. In the
transition from blog to science I also changed the original title that was The meaning of "debate"
one-liners . Because of this history of formation of the
paper it retains until further notice the somewhat "bushy" implicit
structure it acquired in the blog. Furthermore, it displays a particular style
of writing, with a profusion of references and digressions, motivated by
reasons that are explained in my earlier mentioned position statement.
Let me initially clarify that this paper, as its title indicates, deals
with problems to be found in the context of debates, which in their most
infected and hopeless cases may be exemplified by, say, "war in the Middle
East and it's national agenda", in discussions
of Cambridge University rescinding offer of visiting fellowship to Jordan
Peterson, in a book by Stephen Sniegoski, as reviewed by Tim
Wilkinson, and the author's
response to the criticism directed against the book. Another
iconic example of hopelessness in debates is the more recent and popular case
(and cause) of the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson who endured to start passing the whole year 2018 debating in books and
YouTube his position about political correctness, postmodern radical feminism,
identity politics, and such. It culminated in a three hours'
interview summarizing his experiences and
reflections about the debates, soon followed other hopeless attacks, among
others one by
a former colleague of his, attack that in turn has been summarized
in social media.
.
My paper includes details such as
the academic process of peer review and publication, but in general it deals
with what a synonym dictionary may equate with discussion, dispute, disputation,
argumentation, questioning, polemic, disagreement, controversy, dissension,
deliberation, reflection, polemic or ultimately conflict, or simply conversation and dialog.
Terminological
niceties about debate and technicalities do not help to understand and practice better these terms and their
inherent difficulties, but there are some
helpful insights on the net, for instance under the
keywords <debate+technique>. The matter's complexity appears most clearly
and constructively in the history of academic disputation, in academic dissensions such as
referenced in my
account of a disciplinary jubilee of Informatics
in 2014, and in philosophy's relation to rhetoric and sophistry, as
after Plato. The latter includes descriptions of particular techniques such as apophasis, contrasted to the Pre-Socratics, especially the Sophists. All this completed by references to
"rhetoric" in my paper on East and West of
Information Systems. The problem is also exposed
historically by Arthur Schopenhauer in his classic to be recommended as a
complement here, The Art of Being
Right or in his translated original text, The Art of
Controversy. A feministic, polemical and superficial
variant of the idea is found in the widely advertised Master
Suppression Techniques [in Swedish: Härskartekniker], partly related to the "gaslight effect" or gaslighting (more below). Another less superficial but scientistic variant is exemplified
by the case of a university teaching material on Glossary of logical fallacies exemplified by the Motte-and-bailey fallacy
as applied to political correctness and opinion corridors, all based on a
misunderstood role of logic in inquiry, as illustrated by the modern drive to computerization. Technically the question is also related to the problem of statistical
outliers and
is implied by my PhD dissertation on Quality
control of Information (1972), which, in turn, was
influenced by the conceptions advanced by professor West Churchman at the
University of California, Berkeley, and were summarized in his book The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971).
More on this below.
In doing so, I disregard what I consider here as less relevant or partially
overlapping ad-hoc dimensions of the issue that are illustrated, for instance,
in Wikipedia’s List of cognitive biases, and
in G.E.R. Lloyd's book Cognitive
Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (2007). I did not muster to incorporate other interesting reports in my
text that follows, e.g. “Perseverance of
Social Theories: The Role of Explanation in the Persistence of Discredited
Information” (1980 Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 39,
6:1037-1049). Another dimension I disregard is the
detailed philosophical treatment by Immanuel Kant of "The Discipline of
Pure Reason in its Polemical Use", found in his Critique of Pure Reason, in
the part on the Method of Transcendentalism (chapter I, section 2) having,
however, struggled with some of Kant's relevant texts mainly in my Computerization as Design of Logic Acrobatics, but
initially in East and West of
Information Systems, but also in my Critical Systems
Thinking and Information Technology, in my notes in Ethics
and Politics in Design and System Cultures and Dialectical
Systems Design and Beyond. There I suggest, regarding Kant, that my
problem is not only the complexity of his thought but mainly the relation
between his Critique of Pure
Reason and his Critique
of Practical Reason that he purported to solve in the highly
problematic Critique
of Judgment. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant considers the problem of debate in
a section on "The Discipline of Pure Reason in its Polemical Use". I
will indirectly and cursorily consider that and what I consider as a failed
rationalization of the whole issue by the Critical Systems
Heuristics, in a criticism of Kant in the afore mentioned later essay on what I call
"logic acrobatics". It also underlines the conviction of “intelligent”, i.e.
logically-mathematically gifted and engineering-minded intellectuals to believe
that (logical) argumentation can dispense of any references to other
literature, while they rely upon their own “acrobatic” logical complexities as
a shield from what they perceive as the opponents illogical emotionality often
goes unnoticed that this implies that it does not matter who claims the
truth of the presuppositions in the arguments, or in other words the whole
message in Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth. Kant's
paradoxical emotionality and (therefore also political?) "democratic"
naivety is uncovered, if not noted, by P. Frierson in an article with the
symptomatic title of "Kant on mental
disorder. Part 2" (History of Psychiatry 20, 3, 2009): Kant simply
emphasizes (pp. 300-303) the necessity of testing one's judgment also by the
understanding of others, "to measure ourselves against others", to
not "hold one's own opinions to be correct without regard to the opinions
of others", to be capable "of comparing one's reason or judgement or
even sense perceptions with those of others", and considering that the
"touchstone of the understanding" is precisely the comparison of
one's own judgment with "other men's insights". That is,
well-intentioned, benevolent, pious Kantian reason, unfortunately cited by many
but understood by an exclusive “club” of very few philosophers, and ultimately
based on apparently naive "test, understand, measure, regard, compare and
compare".
I also
disregard more contemporary attempts to conceptualize the relations between
reason, reasons, motives, intuition, emotion and such, by adducing, for
instance, classical literature on modes of persuasion, as well as
on cognitive bias and in particular confirmation bias. Swedish
readers can find some relevant authors' work named or outlined in a newspaper
article by Peter Gärdenfors': Förnuftig blir bara den som möter motstånd, which can be translated into "Reasonable becomes
only who meets resistance", in Svenska
Dagbladet 29 April 2019. The authors' names are: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, William von Hippel, Robert Trivers, Jonathan Haidt , Lars Hall and Petter Johansson. One reason for this disregard is my
conviction that that such approaches should be evaluated in the light of
analytical psychology, and
that their social implications should be evaluated for their theological
assumptions, as suggested in my text on Information and Theology and in C.W. Churchman's book The Design of Inquiring Systems (see
below). An example is the following quote (presented later in this text):
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending
beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." The reason being that such
people happen to be gifted logic-craftsmen who do not know what logic and mathematics are about, but get their beliefs from unconscious
passions rather than from Christianity or the few great religions.
Finally, the particular connection to peer reviews and publication is, in
part, considered in my paper on Wikipedia Democracy, and Wikicracy (2013) and in the conclusions of my Computers as Embodiment of Mathematics and Logic that that also include considerations on
the limitations of debate.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
3. Debate in personal relationships
If
one conceives writing as the building up of a relationship between the
writer-author and the reader, I perceive the problem as being the difficulty of
creating in the Western culture's latest trends a genuine I and Thou relationship in
the sense of Martin Buber's "dialogue and
existence."
Examples of breakdowns, besides the obvious debacles of simply declaring one's
counterpart as incompetent are verbal abuses and bullying. Archetypal examples are divorces, the more so after the generation of children, where the ultimate
divorce or conflictual debate is illustrated by the last rejoinder "OK,
you are right but I want the divorce" or worse: "I don't argue, I shoot". It recalls the
most important problem of dialog and debate as introduction to both peace and conflict, as well to Carl von
Clausewitz's famous "War is merely the continuation of politics by other
means", not to mention terrorism. The latest examples of high-tech debate
breakdown seem to be represented today by the one-liners or few-liners of the
Facebook's or Twitter's blog or microblog phenomena. The contrast to Buber's I and Thou is then
illustrated by the changeover to I
and all of you, since I
cannot afford the time to write to each of you individually. And I don't care
to hear from you except for cheers or something useful or important
to me. You belong to the mass
of my mass media. The prevailing cultural climate has reached the
extreme of willfully disrupting the archetypal I-Thou relationship represented by religious
intimate conversation of a priest who assumes that he is counseling a parish's
believer. For instance, the public-service Swedish television arranged a fake
confession where a journalist played the role of a Christian believer while
recording the conversation with the priest in order to uncover and later
broadcast it as representing the political incorrect opinions of the Church
regarding homosexuality. The patent abuse and breach of a pact for a priest who
works under oath of secrecy raised for once expressions of outrage in two
newspapers (in Swedish: "Tystnadsplikten får aldrig naggas i
kanten",
Svenska Dagbladet, 30
May 2014, and "Olagligt av Uppdrag Granskning?", Dagen, 5 June 2014.)
Facebook
and Twitter, as examples of the latest debate techniques represent networked
fragmentation opposed to the systems concept, and facilitate the segmentation of
debate in isolated communities where everyone reinforces his peers (cf. peers
review) while ignoring other communities' arguments, which are superficially
twittered away. Facebook and Twitter are then some of the latest additional onslaughts of technology with hypothetical
advantages and paradoxical cumulative waste of the time that would have been
required, say, to form a personal committed old fashioned letter or even a book
with its own context or "system" of arguments that are explained away
in Twitterlike or e-mail debates: the concept of book itself is put into question. This is
accompanied by other psychosocial phenomena that historically were grasped by
the Danish social critic Søren Kierkegaard, and summarized by Prof. Richard Stivers in the book on Technology and Magic: The Triumph of
the Irrational (1999, pp. 122-124): "With the decline of inwardness and passion,
one's relationship to the other becomes concurrently that of aesthetic
possibility and ethical indifference." This also explains the general lack
of respect for the
other. Respect, as honor, are words of difficult etymology that refer to
gradually vanishing qualities such as respect for elders who embody the
otherwise praised "experiences". No place, there, for the kind of
reflections by a medical surgeon like Gabriel Weston (in Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, pp.
65, 80) about "excessive self-confidence, never stronger than in
youth" and about the long training (five years of medical school plus
apprenticeship which usually runs into decades) for awareness of one's own
limits and "to ensure the self-doubt that is part of getting older."
Likewise I can witness that the general praise of "diversity" in the
context of debates often does not reach those who happen to have multicultural
experiences of life in different countries. On the contrary I have seen contempt for, and demands for
political correctness from counterparts, especially when they are perceived as multiculti elders. Contempt is also implied
in that they can be simply labeled as "disgruntled".
One
interesting aspect of "deafness" to "the other" appears in
the fields of teaching and research when everybody prefers to engage in
"research", wants to get research funds, to write, publish, and to be
read, while claiming to not having time for the less glamorous task of teaching
or reading what others including close colleagues have written on the subject.
The latter are then requested to write "executive summaries" to spare
the time of the unwilling readers. Instead of executive summaries a philosopher
colleague of mine requests a greater "transparency" or readability in
others' writings, a non-philosophical term that seems to be seriously
recognized only in the French Wikipedia. It apparently ignores the
difference between easiness and simplicity, and it stands simply for desirable
promotion of consensus or putative intelligibility. The value of teaching what
has already been written, easily intelligible or not, is then downplayed as if
it were obsolete "old stuff" or displayed a lack of creativity and a
lesser intelligence. I know a few brilliant people in the university world who
without glamour have mainly been teaching, since they have really read and
understood the persistent value of the best writing of other brilliant minds,
both dead and alive. A thought experiment that I have recommended to myself as
well as to colleagues and students has been to reckon that the time dedicated
to the writing of a text should take at least as much time as the time of
reading it, not to mention understanding and acting upon it, multiplied by the
estimated or desired number of potential readers. I have met researchers who,
instead, prefer to get away with the self-imposed requirement of dedicating at
least as many hours to writing as to reading.
There are also popular descriptions and analyses of these phenomena in a few
research reports and essays such as (in Swedish) Lasse Granestrand's "Resa
i den twittrande klassens universum" (Trip in the twittering class'
universe, Dagens
Nyheter, 7 October 2012.) See also some more
superficial criticism as by Annina Rabe in Svenska Dagbladet, (11 September 2012.)
On occasion of my 70th and 75th birthdays, when the issue of available time and the meaning of it
all becomes increasingly acute, I tried to summarize this insight in my virtual
research summaries.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
4. Debate
in provocation
One main problem in matters of debate is the role of "divinely
sacrosanct" freedom of expression or freedom of speech,
and in particular freedom of art, in the sacrosanct
democracy that is taken to characterize Western cultures. The problem appears
whenever freedom of expression is adduced not mainly with the direct purpose of
dialog or communication but, rather, of provocation, including provocative art
that melts with the concept of anti-art. The assumption then is that provocation or "call to" will
lead to debates and introspective self-examination and attainment of deeper
insights, though this is not assumed when it comes to personal insults,
espionage, or, say, Holocaust denial that seems to be the modern
counterpart of atheism disputes such as in the career
of J.-G Fichte. A modern example of
the miserable idea of the legitimacy of outrageous provocation for the supposed
purpose of constructive debate (and artistic self-promotion) is the artist Lars Vilks and Muhammad drawings
controversy. Associated to these views is a quite common attitude of assumed
"neutral observer" of sort of gladiatorial games, where a cowardly
observer claims to be interested in raising of multiplicity of points of view
with the hope of the advent of a victorious "emergent truth" (cf. the
reference below to Tage Lindbom). After my active involvement in some academic
discussions I myself have been approached by spectators who congratulated me
while simultaneously asking me not to reveal that they had appreciated my contribution.
I have also experience of graduate students who, after earning a PhD, refrain
from making the dissertation available on the net because of fear for raising
controversies that may lead to academic ostracism or career persecutions. So
much for faith in debate and truth.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
5. Why
does Jesus speak in parables?
A parable is
described as a metaphorical analogy, and as such it is related to both metaphor and allegory,
which have been noted in the academic community through a popular book with the
title Metaphors we live by. In a book
entitled Today is God's Day - Texts for
every day of the year written (in Swedish) by Wilfrid
Stinissen, PhD, Catholic priest and Carmelite brother, there is
the following text (my translation) for the day September 2nd. I reproduce the
text here in my translation, because it also implies a way to prevent debate
based on avoidable misunderstandings on difficult matters:
The secrets of the kingdom of heaven are sacred. One
must not speak carelessly about sacred things.
When Jesus speaks to the crowds, he is aware that
people are listening to him with widely differing intentions. Some are only out
to catch him with words they can accuse him of. Others have an honest desire to
hear his teaching about the kingdom of God. And yet others have already
received his words before and now want to penetrate deeper into their message.
Jesus must speak to all of them at once. Therefore, he
speaks in parables that allow different interpretations according to the
audience's comprehension. Some do not understand more than the material meaning
of the words, while others suspect that they mean something more. Some are also
able to penetrate to the core of what Jesus wants to say.
This enigma in Jesus' parables can open you to the
riches of God's mystery. God's word is always ambiguous. It cannot be
different, because it expresses the infinite.
This is exactly what makes Bible reading so fascinating.
Each time you read the Bible, you must read based on the maturity you have
reached. In this way, you will understand the words in constantly new ways.
Every time there is a message to you at the level of development where you are
at the moment. Each time you get to delve deeper into the secrets of the
kingdom of heaven.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
6.
Ten rules to soothe conflicts
The following is my translation of part of an article
by C. Laval found in the Italian
version of September 2021 of The Salesian Bulletin, and official publication of the Salesians,
founded in 1877 and published without interruption since then. It is
publication found in different languages in the whole world, including the Americas. It
is reported that as for 2010 it was published in 56 different editions and 29
languages for 135 countries. A limitation is that it presumes the reader's and
the counterpart's respect for a Christian attitude to life as it is implicit in
the following part of its introduction, followed by the ten rules:
There is a time bomb among us and within us. It is
difficult to give it a precise name, but we all know it: anger, anger,
nervousness, annoyance, irritation, envy and above all real hatred on social
media. There are also professional haters. Many people feel overwhelmed by
hurtful words heard during any day. They consider themselves victims of people
who do not appreciate them as they deserve, who criticize them, who look at
them badly, who make fun of them.
1. The common element in all quarrels is that,
usually, none of the contenders is completely right. Furthermore, in the
majority of families, they quarrel for the same reasons, transforming family
life into a fragile armistice between one quarrel and another. The risk is that
the whole family setting ends up being based on the law of the strongest.
2. First of all you have to start in the "lowest
gear". Whoever starts in the fourth, that is, attacks the other or the
others harshly, criticizing and injuring, will not be able to come out in a
dignified way and above all will not resolve the reason for the conflict. An
argument always ends with the note it started with. Those who start screaming
will end up screaming and everyone will only be angrier. It is absolutely
legitimate to complain and focus on the problem, it is not to start with the
heavy artillery and accuse "the person". The sentences that begin
with "you" are always very dangerous: "You are the usual
unconscious ... Your trouble is that ...". It's like pressing the button
on a missile launcher.
3. Try to accurately describe the core of the
conflict, what is at stake and what different paths the parties involved take.
Be careful to hear how the parties involved present their position. Don't
interrupt others when they expose it. If you don't understand something well,
ask. Try to repeat in your own words what the other said.
4. Never ask "whose fault is it". It is
important to limit yourself to the problem of the moment and not to institute a
"Nuremberg Trial" that exposes the wrongs of life. This would only
lead to justifying and attacking.
5. In a driving school, the first thing to learn is to
brake. We must learn to make attempts at reparation and welcome them. At this
point it is possible to find a compromise: a solution that satisfies everyone
must be sought. The cornerstone of any compromise is that no one should win and
no one should be defeated.
6. Each of the two parties involved is invited to
propose a possible solution. However, it is not a question of keeping one's
stubbornness standing, not making compromises. If no solution to the conflict
is in sight, it should be admitted in plain language by saying: at the moment
we have no solution. We should recognize the failure of the dialogue, but at
the same time hoping that, in a subsequent conversation to be agreed, a
solution will become possible.
7. When you have worked out a common solution, put it
in writing and agree that everyone should stick to it. Avoid continuing to
reflect whether another solution would not be better. Choose the agreed
solution without regretting the other options. Regret would devour your
energies.
8. It is inevitable that problems exist and it is
equally inevitable that problems cause quarrels to explode. What matters is
really wanting to get out of it in an honorable way for everyone. A young lady,
instead of bombarding her husband and children with nasty remarks, in the
morning, while they are preparing to go out, has made it a habit to write down
the things that are not right for her and then discuss the list with the whole
family. Friday evening. "But first I eliminate a few voices myself by
saying" No, this is not important ", or" Probably this is my
fault." And then we talk about the rest.
9. In any case, the secret is always to respect each
other. Arguing will never change people: instead can negotiation do it, finding
common ground and ways to adapt to one another can.
10. Always keeping in mind the Bible's advice:
"Do not let the sun go down on your anger." Any conflict should end
at dinner time. For small daily conflicts it is sufficient to recite the Our Father together. With the emphasis, aloud, on "Forgive
us our debts as we also forgive our debtors". It is a very good
reconciliation ritual.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
7. Debate in the "art of worldly
wisdom"
The
art of worldly wisdom is a classic text available on the net, of a book written
originally in Spanish as Oráculo
Manual y Arte de Prudencia where prudence is supposed to be understood in
Plato's or Aristotle's sense or, more
problematically, in the Christian sense as one of the cardinal virtues. Wikipedia explains that the
book was written in 1647 (sometimes claimed 1637) by Balthasar Gracián y
Morales, better known as Balthasar Gracián, a Spanish Jesuit and baroque prose
writer and philosopher, whose writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche. It is a collection of 300 maxims, each with a commentary, on various
topics giving advice and guidance on how to be socially meaningful, and be a
better person, that became popular throughout Europe. Gracián's style, is
characterized by ellipsis and the concentration of a maximum
of significance in a minimum of form. In my own conception the book may be seen
as a Christian analog to Machiavelli's teachings, taking into account some of
the limitations of the above chapter on Ten
rules to soothe conflicts. I did find that the following maxims are
relevant advices in my context of debates (the most relevant in bold face): 43, 101, 108, 114, 135,
136, 159, 160, 172, 176, 179, 183, 210,
213, 245, 279. Here I dwell only
upon excerpts from the following four maxims as they appear in the book
(Shambala edition, 1993):
43 - Think with the few and speak with the many:
"Swimming against the stream makes it impossible to remove error and easy
to fall into danger...The wise person is not known by what he says in the
public square...The prudent person avoids being contradicted as much as he
avoids contradicting others -- though they have their judgment ready they are
not ready to publish it. Thought is free, force cannot and should not be used
on it. The wise person therefore retires into silence and if he allows himself
to come out of it, he does so in the shade and before few and fit
persons."
210 - Know how to play the Card of Truth: "For
those who can understand a word is sufficient, and if it does not suffice, it
is a case for silence."
213 - Know how to Contradict: "An affected doubt
is the subtlest picklock that curiosity can use to find out what it wants to
know. Also in learning it is a subtle plan of the pupil to contradict the
master, who thereupon takes pains to explain the truth more thoroughly and with
more force, so that a moderate contradiction produces complete
instruction."
279 - Do not respond to those who contradict you.
"You have to distinguish whether the contradiction comes from cunning or
from vulgarity. It is not always obstinacy, but may be artfulness. Notice this,
for in the first case one may get into difficulties, in the other into danger.
Caution is never more needed than against spies." [In the book's Shambala
edition, 1993, the following is a substitute for the last sentence:] There is
no such countercheck to the picklock of the mind as to leave the key of caution
in the inside lock of the door.
Having
been submitted to the situation described in the third maxim #213 above, I
escaped the burden thrown upon me by making myself conscious of having been
contradicted and thereby required a "complete instruction". I did
estimate the "subtle plan of the pupil" and his uncertain would-be
benefits, versus my costs, in my being flattered and supposedly considered a
would-be master teacher.
The
maxim #210 is illustrated by the following novel, which is my translation from
in its publication in the Italian version of The Salesian Bulletin, June 2022, p. 43. In
an apparently simplified naïve form it is intended mainly for educating
children and youngsters in Christian social interaction:
The donkey and the tiger on TV
The donkey and the
tiger were invited to a television program of cultural debates which was very
popular with the public.
The donkey said to the tiger: "The grass is blue".
The tiger replied: "No, the grass is green".
The donkey screamed louder: "It's blue!".
The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the matter to
arbitration, and to do so they called the lion.
The lion accepted the invitation and was invited to sit on a throne. The donkey
started shouting again: "Sire, isn't it true that the grass is blue?"
The lion replied: "True, the grass is blue".
The donkey rushed forward and continued: "The tiger doesn't agree with me,
she contradicts me and annoys me. Please punish her! "
The lion solemnly ruled: "The tiger will be punished with five years of
silence."
The donkey brayed for joy and left happy, repeating "The grass is
blue!"
The tiger accepted the punishment, but she asked the lion: “Majesty, why did
you punish me? After all, the grass is green ".
The lion replied: "This has nothing to do with the question of whether the
grass is blue or green. The punishment is for you, because in this way you
learn not to argue with an imbecile! "
Commentary:
There are people who are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment and the only
thing they want is to be right even if they don't. When ignorance screams,
intelligence is silent. Your peace and quiet are worth more.
My
own commentary:
Regarding the second maxim #210, it is the conclusion I drew from many debates
in my life and I hope to draw from this present essay of mine, about the
limitations and inconclusiveness of most debates. For the rest I am aware that
objections can be raised against details of these maxims but their value
consists in forcing the reader to think and meditate upon them.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
8.
Neutralizing criticism: "Why not?" and "Constructive
criticism"
It
is common knowledge that humans do not easily accept criticism. Nevertheless,
instead of outright and visibly rejecting it they find ways to shift the burden
of proof to the critic. This may be equivalent to say that all initiatives for
changes or reforms are or may be basically good or lead to improvement. If they
are challenged by means of the question of why they are good the apparently reasonable
counter-answer will be "why it is not good?". I have called this as the department of (too) easy questions
and difficult answers, and questions are made even easier when the
questioned person uncritically accepts the question because of not being aware
of its hidden premises or of the intended further use of the answer. (Standard
simple example: "have you stopped beating your wife?") Else,
objecting to the proposed changes by claiming that they seem to be bad or
should be proved to be good will be countered by the answer that "your
criticism is not constructive". If the reformer's argument was based on
superficial analogies
that suit elementary linear logical thinking the critic must painstakingly
analyze the analogy and prove where it breaks down, and that it is wrong.
Implicitly all this means an appeal to the critic to drop his priorities and
(unfinanced) take over the job and responsibility of the reformer. If not, with
the help of "statistical-political support" the critic will be charged
for being cowardly conservative, enemy of progress and innovation. Debate
becomes elementary politics where asking whether change means improvement is
summarily and wrongly classified as simple-minded conservatism.
In
a paper written in 1991 on Computer-supported
human science or humanistic computing science?, in a section devoted to
"Neutralizing criticism" I exposed some rhetorical devices that in my
experience have been used to pervert or kill debates, noticing later its
relation to the notion of Machiavellianism. I copy here below a slightly
edited part of the text without the numbered notes and the references in the
original titled above. I imitate there the style of English author, philologist
and historian C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) as represented by his book The screwtape letters
(1942). In order to reveal the dynamics of unrecognized evil, that book is
edited in the form of a correspondence going on between a young
devil-apprentice and his old devil-master, where only the master's letters with
his advices are visible, while the apprentice's answers and further questions
to the master are to be inferred in the course of his attempts to learn how to
ruin his "client" by means of devices that include the insidious WHY NOT? that evidently
deceives even its most sincere and sophisticated unsuspecting advocates such as
in a blog (in Swedish) by a professor of
Islamic Theology and Philosophy at Uppsala University. Here follows the
extensive slightly edited quotations from my paper in the words attributed to
the devil:
The process consists of eliciting the collaboration of
those who will prove that you are right. This process is only mirroring the
process of neutralizing those competitors and clients who refuse to
collaborate, and who might prove that you are wrong. This is only my way of
expressing the "fact" that reality, ideals, and truth, are socially
constructed, and that everybody has the right of trying to construct his own
reality in the same way as he has the right to specify to the seller his own
customized capital good, or consumer appliance.
First of all you must express yourself in plain
language and you must oversimplify your message by appealing to the earlier
defined Zeitgeist. This together with a policy of easy promises will make you
widely popular. In contrast, your critics or competitors will most surely have
to complicate your original message or present another one which is much less
plain than yours, in order to get forth their own point. This is a variant of
the "why not?" strategy that I formulated elsewhere, and we must
adapt it to our purposes: the basic idea is that the easier your questions, the
more difficult will be your competitors' answers. You must therefore keep the
priority of initiative, and put forth easy and "rhetorical" simple
questions or statements, leaving to others the task of criticizing them by
means of messages that necessarily will be more complicated and less understood
than yours. In the same spirit, if you have to dismiss any extensive criticism
or objection that is raised against you or your products, you must shatter its
wholeness. If you are served an extensive "system" of critical
arguments you should not try to counter it with a whole system of your own. You
must rather take the critic's attempt of creating a dialectics of systems, and
reduce it to an atomic dialogue of short and simple statements of opinions and
marginal remarks, like when answering a long letter by returning it to the
sender with some notes on its margins. You have to pick up some single easy
marginal point leaving the rest intact, and comment upon it in a fragmentary,
superficial or absent-minded way. In this way you shift over to your
discussants the time- and energy consuming burden of striving for wholeness and
systems thinking in their next argument. This is a good way of shifting
people's attention from "systems" over to "discourses",
"dialogues" and "language games". In the long run I bet you
will blow up your discussants' minds.
In the same way as you shift the intellectual burden
of proof on the shoulders of your critics, so you should also shift the
economic burden of proof. In other words, you must exploit the
"lamentable" fact that "verification of the theory depends as
much on the cost of trying to apply it as it does on other empirical
evidence" (West Churchman in
Prediction and Optimal Decision, 1961, p.331). This also means that
you can express cheap opinions of the type "why not?" that you do not
need to pay for, but are expensive to disprove. Those who cannot afford to
compete financially with you are by definition out of business. The idea is
that you get money for your pet project by promising the profitability of your
"doing". Whenever you get criticized you can respond by challenging
your critics to prove your failure or to do something better by themselves
without your cooperation and without your money or, rather, the money of your
client who profits of your conclusions. Tell them to be constructive on their
own economic premises, instead of just criticizing you in a negative way. Such
a challenge will put them automatically in the awkward position of having to
compete with you without having your resources. If they have not your money,
probably they cannot afford to prove you wrong. In this way you may succeed in
eliminating all competitors who do not share your own presuppositions and your
own profitability ethics, i.e. those who, after all, do not share our own
goals. If, against all odds, you don't succeed, don't despair. There are other
techniques for dealing in a more general way with all kinds of competitors.
Let's suppose that your conviction or opinion on a key
issue is just not shared, or it is made object of competitive criticism by
people either in private or in some forum of debate. Let's call all such
people, who can be an individual representing a group of friends, by the
generic name "Joe". My definite advice is that you do not loose time
in attempting a rebuttal of this criticism on its own "intellectual" grounds
since there are no facts but only opinions. If you are convinced that you are
right and that your success will ultimately benefit a majority of those
affected, you can construct truth - not the truth - in the following way. Under
the dictum that reality is socially constructed and that there are no
distinctions between public and private, or between science, politics and
ethics, you can transform the whole into a conflict of opinions where you try
to get democratic majority [Read more at
"Neutralizing criticism".]
A common easy alternative to the devil's strategy above is the common request
that before criticizing negatively one must carefully read and in detail take
notice of what is being criticized, not relying on secondary sources. That is:
WHY NOT take a view of the whole original source, accepting at least some part
of what is being criticized?" In view of the sheer volume of what is to be
read about the subject or taken notice of, scarcity of time and resources will
do the devil's role of letting it be.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
9. Cronyism and political correctness
Publications and peer-reviews, which are considered to be the criteria for
academic success, can also be perceived as examples of present sterile debates,
i.e. debates with editors and colleagues in ten-liners if not one-liners, often
with view on career advancement as related to academic alliances with currently
influential peers who are editors in influential journals and their
subcultures, or to intrigues or to the selling of books, journals and ideas.
Conversely, everything that may be understood as criticism of the closest peers
must be selectively silenced in order not to endanger the esprit de corps or
collective identity of the alliance. It is not necessary to go so far as to
politics in order to, justly or unjustly, perceive this phenomenon of cronyism also typically appearing in university departments
where colleagues are supposed to dampen sincere reciprocal criticism in favor
of only applause as if it they were sheer cheerleaders in sport events rather
than research. No place, there, for the kind of candid confession by the
earlier mentioned Gabriel Weston in Direct Red, pp. 16-108) about the
professional temptations of cronyism. The basic idea for a successful cronyism
career is to prioritize the avoidance of creation of enemies, and the promotion
of vulgar versions of Machiavellianism,
with disregard of Aristotelian ideas of true courage.
I myself and colleagues in various universities could early recognize among
graduate students those who would make such a rapid successful career, behaving
with exquisite meekness, far from appearing as simple smart alecks. They
apparently praised the recommendations of their old professors, which they in
fact derided or ignored as being obsolete "pet theories" with no
prospects for raising profitable research funds, and claimed that their
responding to hard arguments with opportune silence was motivated by
"respect". In this context students can be perceived by older
professors as children or grandchildren are perceived by parents in the dialectics
I described elsewhere under the label of Parents, adult children, childish adults -
Inverted identities?
A much more important and nowadays dominating phenomenon
related to cronyism is, of course, the controversial and extremely complex political correctness
or, in French, intellectual terrorism
(analyzed in a Swedish text with bibliography, by
Jan Olof Bengtsson) that I considered elsewhere in the context of my blog entry
on alleged harassments,
and in my review of a book
on organizational self-destruction authored by organizational psychologist
Howard Schwartz. Alternative expressions of political correctness appear in the
phenomena of bias and suppression in the supposedly scientific process of peer review,
deeply revered by academic careerists who aim at and brag about comparative
"statistics" on the meritorious number of their own peer reviewed
publications, but do not anymore appreciate to study the discipline of
statistics with its presuppositions, limitations and misuses (cf. Churchman's Theory of Experimental Inference.)
They prefer, then, to appeal to eclectic mixtures of so called qualitative methods
and to ignore controversial aspects of peer reviews such as exemplified in
reported historical embarrassing examples can be found in polemic battles
such as illustrated in the process of academic review , Wikipedia wars,
beyond outright criticism of the system of peer review (exemplified here, and here).
The important thing here is to note how such phenomena undermine not only
debate that turns into trivial politics, but also simple dialog that becomes a
display of daily political correctness. They become a display of fears,
struggles of power and of self-affirmation where the excellence of a scientist
is a victory of cronyism and shows up "statistically" as a superior
number of scientific publications or citations in citation impact
and citation index.
Cronies are to be added, who happen to share enthusiasm for pet theories, as
elsewhere for conspiracy theories,
whatever “theory”, “model” or “conceptual framework” should mean. As many as
50% of the published articles, however, may happen to be read by only a few
readers, or a minimum of three for each
published article: the author, the referees, and the journal editors.
That may be less than for articles that must be purposefully downloaded by
readers who are interested in the articles' subject or author, e.g. from the Internet
Archive.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
10. Debate as semantics vs.
consciousness
All this undermines communication and dialog from an ethical point of view but
still presupposes a "semantic understanding" of what others say or
write. Such a semantic understanding presupposes that semantics itself is not
from the beginnings undermined by unconscious sociopsychological agendas as
when human relationships are tinted by personality disorders such as in debates
about feminism that I considered elsewhere, in my essay on The
Illusion of Communicative Information. Richard Stivers in the earlier mentioned book on Technology and Magic (pp.
44-78) advances the insight that the semantics itself is in question because of
an ongoing decline of language in the technological society. Language decays to
Twitter-levels and coded abbreviations, far from the cultural ideals exposed in
arcane controversial articles such as (pdf) Literate
language: a wise basis for defending national sovereignity. It has to be validated by, or replaced by
images, visualization, aesthetics, and aestheticism, with the consequent
decline of capacity of thought and understanding that accompanies language and
explains the emptiness of what is written or said (cf. examples in Swedish in
the article
on vacuity by Malin Ullgren, Dagens Nyheter - Kultur, 27
June 2014, p. 2.) Stivers predicts Tweet-Facebook language when describing how
talk shows on television and radio "reduce dialog to the level os street
talk - emotional outbursts, simple assertions, and elliptic sentences".
All this while mass culture "is based on the creed that everything can and
must be made effortless and immediately understandable." Despite all this
there are research trends that in the spirit of an unconscious "Heideggerian"
aestheticism claim that it opens the way for a deeper and intuitive or
unconscious kind of understanding. Words that express this dream are the
following, abstracted from a PhD dissertation on human-experiential
design: "tangible interaction,
unconsciously executed through the computer itself will restore the primacy of
action and re-integrate the mind and the body. There should be no conscious
effort in the behaviors, because experience has already made possible the
series of right actions, but unconsciously, in that it uses the memory that our
bodies know, erasing the awareness of people as users but not as humans, and
the need of willpower to act. To be pleasant and invigorating, life should be
free of the need to always be conscious of the environment in which we
exist."
Stivers continues adducing a study conducted at the University of Texas
that found that less than half of the sample of adults could understand a
plainly written paragraph. Others found that students increasingly think in
"non-sequential and visual ways." This recalls my own late
experiences that in a e-mail containing more than one question about a subject,
or more than a subject, the answer if it comes at all, may often respond to
only one question of one subject, as if the rest of the original text had not
been read at all. Summarizing various research results Stivers observes further
that where once visual images were subject to language, now language is
becoming subordinate to visual images, and sometimes even substituted by
ideograms or Emojis. The meaning of life becomes exclusively aesthetic and now resides in
cultural experimentation as in technologically conditioned consumption,
lifestyle, and entertainment. Now we have "communication" rather than
speech, writing, literature, art; we have "relationship" or
"network" of "networked friends" rather than friends and
lovers. People think less and less in sentences and allow themselves to be led
more and more by words or at best, as I wrote, by twittered, face-booked,
e-mailed one-liners. Stivers refers particularly to the phenomenon of
"plastic words" that were defined by Uwe
Poerksen as words that aspire to be scientific or
technical but end up being amorphous, having as chief purpose to "provide
security and perform exorcisms". I myself noted that supposedly scientific
words are no longer defined. "Method", "model",
"theory", "information", "communication",
"interaction", "system", or "design" have no
longer contended definitions because of their being definitely
"plasticized", and lately have been supplanted by other still less
defined such as "conceptual framework" and, most recently
"methodical and conceptual toolbox", never mind the meaning of
concept, or the difference between tool and instrument. Or, for that matter, in
the context of technology's benefits, between growth and development.
Stivers is not alone in his pertinent reflections about language. Much
has been said about the global crisis experienced by Western societies and
about globalization in general despite of continued domination by
Anglo-American academic culture to the disadvantage of other ignored European
cultural voices. The tendency is often to view them mainly in terms of economic
consequences when the crisis actually affects all facets of the present. The
Catalan anthropologist and theologian Lluís Duch, who has devoted much of his career to think about "the
word", claims in his lectures about La Banalització de la Paraula [The Banalization of the Word], related to the book Emparaular el Món [To Bespeak the World] that our epoch has its correlate in a weakened
power to bespeak reality. He believes that there is a critical correlation in
that a trivialization of the word affects all aspects of our public, private,
and intimate life.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
11.
Semantics as socialization
Among those who are constrained to adopt old and new plastic words we find
graduate students who are obliged to get socialized into the sub-cultures of
their sub-specialties; forget about dialog and debate within specialties. In
the manuscript of a dissertation dealing with informatic digital capability,
ICT co-evolution and business strategies I found, for instance, the following
terms, which put off even specialists since they suggest the need for an
initiation and socialization into the particular sub-field of study:
conceptual
framework, theoretical framework, functional view, design & enactment,
ICT-assets & knowledge on design, conceptual tools, conceptual models, design
capital, functionality, performance, complex-unstable-dynamic environments,
strategic options portfolio, strategic foresight vs. systemic insight,
functional resources, organizational-operational-dynamic capability,
co-evolutionary perspective, and ambidexterity. The latter being the ability to
both exploit current opportunities through efficient operations and to adapt to
future exogenenous (sic) change through exploration. [And there are references
to] philosophical foundations of the work in terms of perspectives on
causality, ontology, epistemology, and critical realism.
Smart alecks and cronies
also know how to borrow into their publications terms used by their influential
disciplinary patrons. Such patrons will furthermore be found as presiding
increasingly narrow specialized subfields with inventive denominations where
the key to being published is the availability of increasingly narrow
publications, on paper or digital, made financially possible by the
"information explosion" or the explosion of the number of journals,
citations, universities, colleges, and researchers, many of them with the
inflationary title of "professors" in increasingly narrower
"disciplines". And in the context of interaction never mind about the
more subtle forms of human interaction that tend to be submerged into hateful
commentaries, harassment, and competition of popularity in terms of the number
of "friends" or "likes" on the net. Compassion, ethical
love, trust and patience are concepts that have disappeared from general
cultural discourse, as terms like honor, virtue, temperance, modesty, and
chastity. Stivers summarizes these tendencies by noting that "there is no
effective way of raising ethical questions", and this is also my own
summary as background of my position regarding "debate".
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
12.
Debate as foundations of mathematics and logic
A view of debates that is related
to the above as well as to other items such as the type psychology of debate (below) is presented in the historical discussions about
the foundations of mathematics and logic - the essence of computers - as
represented by the pioneer of mathematical intuitionism Jan Brouwer vs. the
mathematical formalism of David Hilbert and
followers in computing science. This is the focus of another ongoing work of
mine under the title of Computers as embodiment of mathematics and logic.
In the English translation of Brouwer's book Life, Art, and Mysticism (1905) that appeared in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
(Vol 37, No. 3, Summer 1996, Italian translation with
review by P. Zellini) he has the following - among other things - to say
about language (chap. 5) initiating with a statement that recalls Plato. The italics are mine in order to
emphasize the need of downplaying the hubris of those who believe in the
superior rationality of mathematics and logic as embodied in computers and
computing science, an issue to which I intend to return in a coming essay where
I also intend to relate it to the psychology of Carl Jung as an alternative to
interpretations of misogyny and to the drift toward Heideggerianism or Buddhism in certain
quarters of computing and cognitive or systems science. Now, to Brouwer,
keeping in view that the complexity of the background of the following text
requires, for a proper interpretation, the kind of theological knowledge that
is advanced, for instance, in Fr. Raymond Gawronski, S.J. Word and Silence (1995):
----
Language can only be the
accompaniment of an already existing mutual understanding. Even when two people
share the same needs and aspirations, they will be in constant danger of being
led by their uncontrolled desires into different side roads and of drifting
apart: they will suffer pain and anxiety in their struggle to keep together.
Only in the very narrowly
restricted domains of the imagination such as in the exclusively
intellectual sciences - which are completely separated from the world of
perception and therefore touch the least upon the essentially human - only
there can mutual understanding be maintained for some time. There is little
scope for misunderstanding notions such as "equal" and
"triangle", but even then two different people will never feel them
in exactly the same way. Even in the case of the most restricted sciences, logic and
mathematics - a sharp distinction between there two is hardly
possible - no two different people will have the same conception of the
fundamental concepts on which these two sciences are constructed; and yet their
wills are parallel, and in both there is a small, unimportant part of the brain
which forces their attention in the same way. This also happens when people
together fight a common enemy, together build a house or bridge, go into
business or strike a deal. Then too language will serve its purpose: that is,
to keep the wills of separate people on one path.
But ridiculous is the use of
language when one tries to express subtle nuances of will which are not part of
the living reality of those concerned, when for example so-called philosophers
of metaphysicians discuss among themselves morality, God, consciousness,
immortality, or the free will. These people do not even love each other, let
alone share the same subtle movements of the soul; sometimes they even do not
know each other personally. They either talk at cross-purposes or each builds his own little logical system
which lacks any connection with reality. For logic is life in the human brain;
it may accompany life outside the brain but it can never guide it by virtue of
its own power. [...]
Ridiculous too is the use of
language when there is an argument and people try to come to an agreement by
means of reasoning. Both parties are so much under the influence of mass
suggestion of society that they feel ashamed of appearing to be
"unreasonable", that is, to admit that they search for something
different from "the good" and "the right", that mirage of
human society. In this case language, which presumes a harmony of will, may
well be used to accompany strife and combat. But they might just as well keep
silent; they only play off their wills against each other and work on each other's
desires and fears, and the strongest man wins. [...]
In everyday life language
only makes sense as a means of holding the already harmonious wills of two
people together on one path. The belief in a reality, the same for all -
existing outside and independent of them - made society foolishly attach great
importance to "speaking the truth". Yet ""telling the
truth" is often far less effective that what is known as "telling a
lie". Once someone is imprisoned in the belief in a logically coherent (i.e. conceived
without pain in a certain region of the brain) complex of externalities,
which he calls "reality", it becomes rather difficult to try to evoke
in him a particular emotion or state of mind by means of words which he can
only interpret in accordance with his reality.
[Return to list
of CONTENTS]
13. Debate as democracy
and emergent truth
When approaching 75 and with
an increasing feeling of urgency because of consciousness of finding myself in
the "vestibule of death" I did reread the Swedish political scientist
Tage
Lindbom's The Myth of Democracy where he finds a way of exposing the phenomenon of
"debate", which dispenses of any further explanations and recalls
that the deepest truths have already been revealed in the many great books. In
a cursory review of the history of ideas about democracy he writes the
following three paragraphs that I would have risked to waste my time by trying
to express myself, namely:
"A
seductive notion is that truth is to be found like a 'vein of gold'; and the
hope of finding this 'vein' of truth gave impetus to feverish philosophical
search" (p. 30). [And gave impetus to scientific development, I may add.]
"[Jean-Jacques
Rousseau] tries to find and explain different ways in which this ascension can
be accomplished [wherein human choices are elevated from the merely private to
the general level, where the Popular Will is to be realized]. By deliberation,
he says, it may be possible to bring a multitude of different opinions in
concert. The more thoroughly we discuss a question, the more our differences
can be reduced. By this means we can come nearer to what we want to achieve,
namely unanimity, and unanimity expresses the Popular Will" (p. 35f).
These ideas foreshadow, by the way, a Hegelian dialectic of the kind that I
myself applied in my dissertation on quality-control of information. With the
great difference, however, that I did not assume that one would come nearer to
unanimity, and for that very same reason I called for an accounting of a
measure of the degree of disagreement.
"Truth
is an endless number of fragments in which true and false are mingled. But the
golden grains of truth can be sifted out; and this is accomplished by the
unending, reiterated exchange of opinions. The lifeblood of liberalism,
therefore, is debate and discussion. Every restraint, every limit on opinion
must be denied." (p.41). "Continual searching and researching,
gathering raw data, empirical trials, analysis through logical and discursive
processes of thinking, always in a cadre of continuous debate: these are the
operative demands of the liberal search for truth - truth which, it is
believed, is like grains of gold, washed and sifted in a free selective
process, the false dross being separated from the noble metal of truth. ...A
world of freedom in which truth will win out over the lie ...The true will
become better and better, ever more 'true'" (p. 43).
Leaving Tage
Lindbom's general problematization of democracy we have also one particular
illustration of pseudo-democracy as denounced in the Catholic Church's internal
struggles during the Extraordinary assembly of the synod of
bishops, 5-19 October 2014, dealing with "Pastoral Challenges to
the Family in the Context of Evangelization". (Not to mention sordid
allegations in externalized internal struggles about sexual scandals, which illustrate the dangerous hopelessness
of debates.) Alleged attempts to manipulate the Synod are described as follows,
in Culture Wars (January 2015
issue) by an Italian journalist specialized in the section "Vatican
Insider" of the newspaper La Stampa (20th September
2014):
"[T]he
Extraordinary Synod was going to be manipulated in order to achieve the desired
result. This would be done in three ways; the first, which had already been
accomplished, was that all interventions by synod fathers had to be submitted
by September 8. This made possible the second strategy, which was to read all
the interventions carefully to ensure that any points contrary to the desired
agenda could be answered in the most effective way possible before the speaker
even had chance to speak. The third strategy was simply to prevent certain
synod fathers from even addressing the assembly. They would be told that there
was no more time for interventions but that their views would be taken into
account in the final report."
[Return to list
of CONTENTS]
14. Debate:
Catholic Church and gender ideology
What follows can
be a challenging productive example of Catholic view of debate at the
confluence of democracy and religions. It deals with an interview about the
criticism of gender ideology in a document published by the Catholic Church in
June 2019 and signed by the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education,
Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi. See the excerpt from Catholic Herald,
"Cardinal Versaldi: Why we have produced the gender
document",
regarding the full text of the Vatican document (translated from Italian)
providing schools with guidance on gender issues: "Male and female he created them. For a path of
dialogue on the issue of gender in education":
---
The Church wants to intervene in a dialogical way in
this debate, not with arguments of faith, but with arguments of reason. The
very method we suggest to our operators is that of dialogue, which means three
steps, to wit:
.
First, to listen to the reasons of others, who think differently — do not
assume that you know immediately what others say, for being able to be open,
reciprocally, to a gesture of trust, of presupposition of good faith on the
part of all.
.
The second step, which is the central one, is to reason. For our part, we
know that faith illuminates reason, but we cannot use arguments of faith in our
schools, especially in scientific debate. Therefore, we must be able, let us
say, to translate into rational terms also those, which are the intuitions of
faith.
.
[Thirdly], This also means that, on the other hand, that everyone
[involved in the discussion] should abandon the ideological aspect — of
slogans, of ideological a priori [commitments], which take for
granted that theirs is the only scientific thought. So, by reasoning together,
we try to find, together with each other, the elements that are compatible with
each other, because for us, the extreme forms of gender ideology are not
justifiable also [even – ed.] from the rational-scientific point of
view. There are also elements, however, of greater openness.
.
CH [Catholic Herald]: However, if there is one thing
on which the document is clear and unequivocal, it is that the state — civil
authorities — hence public institutions as such, need to stay out of the
anthropological debate: when schools — even primary schools — are transformed
into battlefields for irreconcilable ideologies, the society for which those institutions
are given is already in a pretty bad way?
CV [Cardinal Versaldi]: Yes, this is the problem. It
is an epistemological problem [confused] with the political problem: because a
state cannot impose a single way of thinking [It. pensiero unico], above
all in the ethical field. Having different opinions, which the state ought to
respect, favors that pluralism, which is the basis of democracy. Because —
above all in our [Catholic] schools — we are not the ones who choose the
students. The students are the ones who choose us. They choose us, moreover,
because they espouse — they believe — the Catholic identity even in this field.
If the state imposes a pensée unique even in our schools, this
ideology that we believe has no scientific basis — and that in any case has
assumptions that are meta-scientific — then it is not possible that there
should be democracy.
Because, if we all have to conform to a pensée
unique — a single way of thinking — we subtract from those with the
primary responsibility for education, ie from families when it comes to minor
children, and [from] young people, when they are of age, the possibility of
choice. With choice, however, there must be a pluralism. If, on the other hand,
we all have to think the same way: that is not only an ethical state [a
philosophical term of art, indicating the notion that the state is the supreme
end of human endeavor, to which all human activity tends and is to be ordered],
but a dictatorial state.
---
So far the Vatican document on gender. In another
essay on Information and Theology I have indicated
that one main problem of such a Catholic official approach to debate (besides
wishful thinking such as that everyone should abandon the ideological
aspect) is cardinal Versaldi's claim, above, that "we must be able, let us
say, to translate into rational terms also those, which are the intuitions of
faith". These "should", "must" and "let us say"
appear to me as equivalent to wishful thinking and to the wrong belief that one
can do away with faith or even talk about religion, with the consequence of
reducing religion to politics - power games and "debates" in
negotiations. I have tried to “solve” this problem in my essay on Reason and Gender.
[Return to list
of CONTENTS]
15. Debate as scientific method:
"Hegelian-Singerian” inquiring systems
Why are
others' views and conviction not taken into account? This is the issue of
subjectivity or the person's subjective conviction of being objective while
dissidents are in error, as in naive empiricism. Sometimes, if not often, it may be in
psychological terms a case of tragic pathological narcissism or, more
professionally, narcissistic personality disorder, reaching the
extremes of psychological manipulation exemplified in so called gaslighting, with the
conscious or unconscious objective to impose one's views and convictions upon
the counterpart. In analytic psychology this recalls the phenomenon of ego inflation. Otherwise it is
the case when everybody tends to start his logic from different and often
unconscious basic assumptions, contrasted to earlier times' more general,
collective Christian assumptions in the Western world. Furthermore, it may be a
question of relying upon different cultural backgrounds or experiences. One may
get help in the forgotten method of uncovering basic assumptions by means of a
Platonic or Hegelian dialectic that requires much more than the typical blog-one-liners. One main
problem is that each participant in a debate may start, and unfortunately keep,
being honestly or, rather, naively convinced of being right and be unable to
"relativize" himself by imagining that others can and do see him as
he sees them, or worse. It is a classic Christian image of the case of Matthew 7:3, "Why do
you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that
is in your own eye?"
At this point we can adduce the philosophy of information systems as advanced
in West Churchman's The Design of Inquiring Systems, countering the
naive idea of data and information as "fragments" related to a
supposed logical truth or empirical reality, and advancing the conception of
debate as dialectic Hegelian or Singerian inquiring systems. They account
for and "synergetically" (otherwise it being a vulgar buzzword)
are intended to transcend opposing or multiple perspectives of the same
question. It seems to be a main if not only theoretical approach for a
scientific understanding of the pertinent debate-related field of diplomacy. The idea is to conceive of a higher level of
understanding or system that synthesizes and is consistent with the earlier
apparently opposed views based on the same data. To avoid the fallacy of
divinizing man by believing that humans can gradually reach the level of an all
encompassing "God's eye" view, and the implicit worldly relativism,
the process will have to stop at the point where the contenders' educated or
religiously educated, initiated conscience tells them to have reached (their)
"truth" and, if necessary, their readiness for martyrdom.
That requirement explains why each "fragmentary
debater" expects that the counterpart(s) will read all his
background references, which is often perceived as an impossible pre-requisite
because of lack of resources and time - even in a lifetime, as implied by the
difficulties of implementing the earlier mentioned quality control of
information. At this point appears a paradox: those honest debaters who are
conscious of ignoring their counterpart's background references or supposed
"facts" may be prone to withdraw from the discussion, based on their
acknowledgement of their shortcomings. All this while the counterpart expresses
facile claim for raw, terse logical statements in executive summaries. And this
will apparently strengthen the counterparts' position who is left with the
“last word”. I have seen this phenomenon in the context of the challenging of
absurdities of feministic and LGBT theorizing
about "TERF" (sic!): wise people suspend their judgment
and give the benefit of doubt to absurdities, which then gain public
credibility. Such kinds of complex debates presume not only an emotional
content that transcends the limits of logic, but also a
consciousness of the complexity of "facts", which are often
mistakenly assumed to be per se a sort of monolithic atomic arguments that
would talk by themselves. There exists also the question of cost and financial
power since there is a cost (ultimately even political and life
endangering costs) associated with digging out facts, or rather creating or
measuring and assembling them with appropriately designed instruments, as the
same Churchman states it in the earlier mentioned statement of Prediction and
Optimal Decision (1961, p. 331): "It should be noted that the
verification of the theory depends as much on the cost of trying to apply it as
it does on other empirical evidence." Not to mention sheer power beyond
financial power as when the public statement of an opinion can lead to being
persecuted as in many cases of challenges to political correctness that I comment
elsewhere. This is also the background for attempts
to contrast the term data to capta, with
consideration of arguments of the type advanced by, say, Christopher
Chippindale in an article on "Capta and data" about the nature of
archeological information (in American Antiquity, 65(4), 2000.)
I witness what happens today's with the so called social media not to mention
computer games and blogs, phenomena that academia is desperately trying to
intellectualize by selling basic courses on, for instance, "Blog's theory
and practice". Such kind of theory and practice, including Facebooks, Twitters
and all the rest of the net including Wikipedia and Wikileaks, thrives on the assumption that systems can
be reduced to networks as in books like Peter Hinssen's The Network Always
Wins (2014).
Consequently debates are supposed to be reducible to exchange of one-liners or
ten-liners in inserts in blog commentaries, Wikipedia-talk exchanges, facebook comments including those with fateful consequences, or tweets. The book, apparently ignoring late coming warnings
such as "Do social media threaten democracy?" is
presented with, among others, the following words:
"Peter
Hinssen explores the enormous opportunities in our completely networked world.
Perhaps the strangest thing about networks is that they grow
https://archive.org/details/quantum-psy-com without a grand design. In that
respect, they're much more organic than any structure we deliberately create in
our organizations.[...] That fact can be vexing to technologists seeking to
create logical systems that bring control and certainty to an increasingly
volatile world. But those who cling to this nostalgic goal are doomed to fail.
In this age of uncertainty, the best hope for organizations is to learn how
networks operate so that they can become more like networks themselves. In an
era of fluid strategy, companies have to act more quickly – and be more agile –
than ever before. Their future – like ours – depends on it. The Network Always
Wins will be a source of inspiration to any business person who deals with
customers, partners and employees, and who feels the need to adapt the internal
workings of his job, team or company to the way the world around him is
evolving."
These words,
fortunately, seem to be directed to "technologists" and
"business persons" but unfortunately they also are taken at face
value by university researchers who have given up the idea of what a university
should do, beyond "exploring enormous opportunities" uncritically
given or imposed by technology and offered research funds. They want to
renounce to "grand design", whatever that is besides not being a
system, preferring to become more like networks themselves, to adapt their job
to the world with the help of fluid strategies, whatever that is, and
forgetting grand designs. Grand design are alike, one must suppose, those that
take the concept of strategy (and consequently innovation) seriously as, say, Igor Ansoff did, or those networkers who take psychological and
sociological knowledge seriously as in symbolic interactionism, or connectivism.
The question is
then whether there are alternatives to see debate mainly as this networking
that I have criticized in another context (Presuppositions in
Information Systems Design: From Systems to Networks and Contexts?) Yes, I know,
the following too good advices (more on this below), apparently still more
simple than Plato's dialectics, like the following one: "Conversation is a
game with some hard rules: say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you
can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be
willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation
partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure
necessary conflict, to change your mind if the evidence suggests it."
Quoted from David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics,
Religion, Hope. (Harper & Row, 1987, p. 19, referenced in Anthony Flood's web page).
[Return to list
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16. Debate as Fact Nets: “Leibnizian”
inquiring systems (logical soccer)
I wrote above about debate as scientific method
referring to Hegelian-Singerian inquiring
systems, but I realize that the most common typical approach is the use and
abuse of logic that in the same context
of inquiring systems was labeled as Leibnizian inquiring systems. This is in
honor of the philosopher Gottfried
Leibniz who is labeled as a polymath active as a
mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He has also been mentioned
as attempting to improve human communication, seen as failed in the context of
the Thirty
Yeas’ War, by developing the structure and application of
logical thought.
When the philosophical context of Leibnizian thought
is forgotten, what is left today is a sort of “archetypal” trap of inviting to
or provoking a debate that is reduced to skirmish in terms of elementary logic.
This is done forgetting that logic implies the use of words that in science
transcend their everyday trivial meaning. They are often concepts that assume a background philosophy or theory. It is not a
question of whether to apply logic or not but rather of applying logic to what.
This requires consciousness of that information is not “atomic”, that is
consisting of words, but rather it is contextual or systemic, requiring a definition of background in terms of explicit
assumptions.
For instance, in a debate with a computer-oriented
psychologist interested in virtual reality (VR) I contested his definition of reality that I saw
as based mainly on experience and perception. Experience and perception are
most often mentioned, and perceived to be of basic importance, possibly because
of their seen as the evolutionary basis of survival. The following sample of
the dialog between me (KI) and my counterpart (CP) on the WhatsApp (WA) may
illustrate the question. For me, it illustrates the “evaporation” of reality in
the context of mathematization intertwined with the logic of argumentation,
exemplified already by Wikipedia’s initial reference to “simulated experience”.
As if experience of a simulation could be called a simulated experience. More
on this in Wikipedia’s section
on VR-etymology.:
(KI)] By the way, which was (your or who's?) definition of virtual? I
should have known that, by now...For a long time (naively?) I thought that
virtual was not real.
(CP) In the context of VR, the V usually means "simulated",
and the R means "physical". These days, people in my area don't talk
about virtual versus real (real reality?), but virtual versus physical (or
sometimes "actual"). And often "virtual" is replaced by
"digital", as in Digital Travel. The idea that the digital and the
physical can both be real (for the observer, experiencer), as currently
espoused by philosopher David Chalmers
[links were spelled in WA], is becoming more accepted… VR was very nearly called Artificial Reality,
from Myron Kreuger's early work in the field, but for some reason "virtual
reality" caught on.
Please note the affirmation that virtual is often replaced by digital. It
is easy to oversee that digital is mathematical (and logical) if yet physically
embodied in the computer, incurring in all the problems of mathematization of
reality (see below). Therefore, to claim that the digital and the physical can
both be real, is like claiming that mathematics and the physical can both be
real, without taking in account the difference between mathematical physics and
physical reality.
(KI) Thank you, indeed. Now I got food for thought or at least for
recognition of the link to my supposedly insightful academic hobbyhorse: the
misunderstanding and abuse of mathematics. All along my papers on its foundations
and consequences for computerization. And it comes to my mind: a (for me)
mind-blowing core-reflection by West Churchman: "An Analysis of the
Concept of Simulation" (Cf. reference in the 3rd paragraph from the end of
my paper
on climate warming.
(CP) Yes, sometimes mathematics is abused in computer-generated
simulations, which can be misunderstood by their audience. But often this is
not the case. And maths can be abused in other ways, of course. Simulation does
not imply the misunderstanding and abuse of mathematics. Many simulations are
about fictional or fantasy realities. The word "simulation" can be
misleading if it is taken to mean predictive of events in the physical world.
VR is much broader than that.
The dialog runs
further in a rather disorderly way until I challenge my counterpart by
exemplifying the ineffectiveness of logic and perception in the scenario of a
foreigner in a country where a certain kind of insult (dealing with the morals
of the mother) can trigger his being murdered. Perception and logic are not
enough for survival, pending what perception and experience are supposed to be.
The recourse to “perception and logic” could be seen as good old naïve empiricism, belong to the age old scientific and
philosophical discussions about logical empiricism and logical positivism that culminated
in the 1960ies. Its abuses motivated the counter-abuse of Kantianism in the
postmodernism and aestheticism in “the “free play of imagination and understanding or the free play of the
faculties” (today
in VR and computer games). Only somebody
like Christopher Norris, along with the criticism of postmodernism, could try to
unravel all this along the basis of its own logical premises, and I myself have
documented my struggle with the issue in my text on the phenomenon of computerization of society.
If interest in
scientific method and basic philosophy had been alive today, this text could
have ended here. That the problem is not trivial and is alive today is shown in
the context of the interpretations of the “unconceivable” Quantum Physics. My own conclusion and my counterpart’s final
comment displaying what I elsewhere call “logic acrobatics” along with the abuse of aesthetics were
(KI) So logic, like
perception, is not good enough for survival.
(CP) Not enough,
necessarily, but good enough, potentially.
I repeat for
myself: “Not enough, necessarily, but
good enough, potentially”. It reminds the logical expression used in
mathematics “necessary but not sufficient”. It opportunistically refrains from
telling what is necessary in order to turn it into sufficient. And this kind of dialog with
mathematical concepts applied in academic language outside the mathematical
field is intertwined with CP’s requests of not mentioning erudite pedantic
references but rather to give short summaries of books and papers. It is a
language where the CP also requires that a “point” should be given for the
whole text, the point being supposed to be a terse logical statement, assuming
an answer of yes or no. It is a dialog that usually must end
in the CP’s final judgment like “I do not
see your point, and therefore you are not making sense.” This will be
stated without ever reflecting upon the meaning of “point” or that the problem
may have started in the blindness of not
seeing. Psychologically this may amount to a sort of ego inflation where “I do not
see” is, as in naïve empiricism, equated to “there is nothing there”. Paradoxically one might argue that in much
VR and gaming (not all, since something may always happen to be judged as
useful) people may see a lot, but there is nothing there, especially if
related to costs.
It is obvious
that if all this happens in this simple pedagogical example of dialog between
peers, the problem is enormous when it comes to discussions between strangers
on complex scientific, financial, political or theological matters. Not to
mention extreme examples such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, and the Russia-NATO-Ukraine crisis situation in
January-February 2022.
And this is to
be compared with (above) what scientifically trained academicians are tempted
to dedicate their time to leading to “logical” debate impasses that I exemplify
also in another VR context, and have considered further above, regarding fragmentary debates.
Furthermore,
Leibnizian inquiring systems or “fact nets” or their popular expression in what
I called logic acrobatics or logic soccer are particularly enticing for
oversimplifying (for the logically gifted mind) the most complex problems that
appear in social, political or theological context. Whoever reads these lines
and wishes examples may find them in some other articles. One of them deals
with polemics between supporters of Christianism vs of atheism, another with
the climate warming
controversies, and a third one about polemics regarding the crisis of Ukraine vs. Russia centering on
the role of NATO. These fact-nets are opportunely sustained by an own Analytic Philosophy that in
Wikipedia’s words “takes things piecemeal,
in an attempt to focus philosophical reflection on smaller problems that lead
to answers to bigger questions". It all
enables unlimited eclecticism since they allow scientific work to dispense
of philosophical assumptions except for unstated analytic philosophy loosely
associated with variants of phenomenology and by any number of philosophies that are
logically intertwined with any number of empirical findings from the most
variated sources. The unending debate paradoxically ends when all except one
party get exhausted or hopeless: they give up and this is interpreted as being
a victory of the most persevering party, the “winning” survivor. The social Darwinism of survival of
the fittest.
My
familiarity with analytical psychology has probably prompted me to conceive a
hypothesis on why analytically, logically or mathematically gifted people,
especially scientists usually display perseverance, not the least in private
unending debates that they even prefer, rather than public debates that follow
publishing. My hypothesis is that such minds peel off the emotional empathic
content of the debated issue. It is one if not the essence of formal science as even advanced in F. Cajori’s History of Mathematical Notations. Because of this,
if in lack of faith in any great religion and Christianism in particular, they
have great difficulty to establish a whole contact and merge with another mind,
a contact which is fulfilled in love or Christian “caritas” or social
benevolence. This leads in turn to their need for a compensation, attempts to
forced repeated contact with the other party, as if it were a sort of “rape”,
as suggested by one main dimension of the word perseverate and perseverance, and interpretable in terms my Reason and Gender. An opposite type of mind in this respect is
the author or romances or of diaries, who talks with the expected world of
readers or with his own diary without requiring a response.
Forced
logic can be seen as a historic social tragedy as implemented in the ongoing computerization of society and the
problems of human-computer interaction. It is also
apparent in judicial systems such as the Swedish one. Citizens arrested by the
police and suspect for having committed grave crimes are acquitted in court
because “beyond any reasonable doubt” is interpreted
in only logical terms. The courts cannot handle the combination of a series of
“probabilities” that incriminate the accused, while the defending lawyers
conceive the most improbable possibilities in the course of the criminal event
that “explain” their client’s innocence well within the range of any
reasonable doubt. (Cf. in Swedish language examples here and here). Logic
precludes the possibility of beyond any
reasonable doubt in many practical cases. When “public opinion” or political
correctness finally reacts to such schemes that free arrested suspects, the
consequence as in the case of “rape” is that the judicial definition of rape is
changed to “sexual consent” (see here and here), switching from coercion-based to
consent-based definitions of rape and laws. Paradoxically, the difficulty of
proof beyond any reasonable doubt, is
then bypassed by the court’s use of testimony’s “trustworthiness” (Swedish:
trovärdighet) by the assumed “oppressed” raped party. Not to mention the analog
to raped, i.e. the “oppressed” in hate crimes in social media as well as in violence against women in modern western nations, after decades of
women’s liberation movements, and sexual education replacing moral
and religious education. It is the failure of such logic of positive law, replacing natural law, that leads to violence and wars as lately in Ukraine?
A friend
om mine called my attention on a book about travel in virtual places, The psychosocial reality of digital travel (open access), where the concept of reality itself (including the reality of
scientific findings?) tends to be dissolved among hundreds of references to
books and reports. Feelings (as if) or perceptions (or intuitions)? Pretending
as make believe that the virtual “world” is real? Experience of perceptually
real, perceived realness? The world may be a simulation, be veridical, be
misperceived or even be a hallucination. Environment or (apparently)
surrounding environment. Feeling of being located in a perceptible external
world (or environment or “universe”) around the “self” (or ego subject)?
Subjectively real virtual travel. Facts and accuracy have a similar role in
digital references as in situ (physical “world”?) experiences. (Cf. pp.
141-144)
Some of my
readers may find this as competing with the number of links in my own text,
except for many of them being definitional links according to my initial
Contents’ Link to a general disclaimer. And except for
my basic reliance on West Churchman’s philosophical pragmatism where
“environment” is defined but not world or surrounding, Carl Jung’s analytical
psychology where the “self” is defined, and Christian theology where
“experience” is central.
Indeed
“The world may be a simulation, be veridical, be misperceived or even be an
hallucination” bypassing most of the discussion in philosophy with and after
Hegel (cf. The Design of Inquiring
Systems, chap. 7, p. 149 ff.), and why after Immanuel Kant the West had to
recur to phenomenology (cf. my chapter on the critique of judgment in the
context of digitalization-computerization).
Logically-analytically
minded people reduce the polemics to logical soccer, and possibly further
debate between pairs of individuals. By definition, such logic peels off the
social, political and theological dimensions of the problem, and it can be the
reason why Leibnizian inquiring systems are preferred, in the first place. By
the often ignored definition of logic itself they
assume the possibility of regarding “information” as a series of intertwined (“atomic-molecular”)
logical sentences about uncontroversial hidden definitions and
assumptions. They stand behind the long and forgotten confused story of research
on the meaning of information
and information systems, including Börje Langefors’ definition of an “elementary message”
and “infological equation” built upon the logic of Y. Bar-Hillel’s and Rudolf Carnap’s “semantic information
processing”.
Disregarding
such strivings, logical sentences today are used to build up only a chain or
network that is named “argument” or “the point” of the discussion.
Consequently, it is assumed that every argument
(cf. here and here) can and
must be met by a counter-argument followed by computing the conclusion, regardless the assumed agreement on
ignored definitions and assumptions, i.e. the system, which is the core of the discussion in The Design of Inquiring Systems. A very logical engineer friend om
mine confessed that he did not understand two thirds of this book and nothing
at all of Carl Jung’s psychology, not feeling any need of them. An illustrative example of the
consequences of the limitations of such logical engineering minds is offered by
the criticism against my essay on the Ukrainian-Russian
conflict.
“Logicians” who pose as scientists in physics, computer science, psychology,
and even in philosophy want to speak only of “arguments”, a term they seldom
define if not tautologically in terms of elementary logic, without noticing
that it is already implicit in ordinary language from which logic itself is
seen to have been derived (cf. Jan Brouwer). It is as if their claiming that (an
unspecified kind of) logic that is always necessary also means that air and
water being basic necessities for life they must be considered the most
important things to strive for and think about in life. This may be one reason
for their present emphasis on digitalization of society and on climate warming. Therefore, e.g. in the case of analysis of the
Ukraine-Russia conflict they claim that objectivity or impartiality consists in
exposing both (or several) parties’ atomic arguments as advanced in mass media
(that in the West, in the case of that conflict are mainly critical of Russia),
and respective counterarguments. I claim that this directs the discussants to intellectual
insanity and disaster, both at the social level (identity politics and war) and individual level (estrangement and
divorce). Nevertheless, they can be good technicians and engineers, our modern
times’ equivalent to elder times’ manual workers, as brilliantly codified in
the Bible’s Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) verses 38:24-31., and 39:1-11 that 2000 years before the conception of Psychological Types, also explains
why engineers may have difficulty in understanding the problems of philosophers
and theologians.
Individuals who
are particularly gifted for logical thinking do often refuse references to
philosophical-social-political-psychological literature, other than
logical-mathematical. They refuse such references because they perceive them as
relying on “authority” or scholarly-academic erudition rather than on pure
reason that is equated to logic-mathematics. Since physics and associated
technology is the most mathematized discipline they consider it and
logic-mathematics to be a self-contained
and -controlled tool and just a “tool” whose application and consequences are the
responsibility of the “user”. Since they do not want references to philosophy,
not even philosophy of technology and science,
and ignoring the problems of pragmatism, they simply claim, along the ignored
philosophy of logical positivism as espoused in Administrative
behavior, that arcane
science such as quantum physics “works”. It is seen as developed by good, well
paid and innocent scientists, engineers and administrators in safe jobs. But it
can be used either by “bad guys” that
should be fired after their producing
and launching atomic bombs, or by “good guys” on safe jobs for good purposes
such as magnetic resonance imaging and welfare,
according to the will of God or of the god Democracy, professing or advertising
loudly their allegiance to only one or both of them. So, the Holocaust is
supposed to not having been co-produced by scientists, industrialists,
engineers or government officials but rather by bad guys like Hitler and
politicians. Never mind if this insight was not easily applied at the Nuremberg trials. In fact, aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, member of the Nazi Party and SS, is reported to
have worked in Nazi Germany’s rocket development program during World War II,
and following the war was secretly moved to the USA for well-paid and honored
work for its Army on its ballistic missile program. He was even object of a
telling satirizing song by
musician and mathematician Tom Lehrer:
"’Once
the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,'
says Wernher von Braun."
So, it should
not be so easy for us, both bad and good guys, to forget about our own conscience, with all its difficulties, in order to guess whether we are really good
in doing “good work”.
And it is not only a question of extending verbal
discussions to written ones because the mere writing helps people to think, as
explained in the book Thinking on Paper. It is a phenomenon that invites me as an observer to
speculate about the analytical-logical psyche. It often says that one wants to
"understand" and "be understood" by in one-to-one
correspondence between individual person, leading if not to agreement (e.g. by
submission of one part to the other), at least to "understand why one
disagrees" or to “agree to disagree". I guess that this is equivalent
to not being able to reach each other
because there is no psychic or spiritual contact that is supposed to be
supplied by working on the common ground of what it is to be human. The etymology of the
word religion allows for “"bond between humans and gods”, i.e. brotherhood through
having a common Father-God.
For that reason, I suspect that it is possible if not
probable that those who follow the whole interminable process of debate, if
they do not separate or “divorce” from their friendship, they may enter into a
personal crisis. I mean that it is dangerous If one does not see that love,
war, atheism and Christianity are a matter of “life and death”, most recently
in 2022 exemplified by the Ukraine
crisis.
It is therefore not a question of logical soccer or
ball play. In psychological and mythological terms it is a question of a
childish playing the Trickster
archetype as some researchers
in human-computer interaction recommend. They
specifically argue (pp. 18, 23, 53) for the importance of myth (of the
trickster) as source of design creativity or bricolage (pp. 21, 89,
92f.) for the designer seen as a “mediator between mythical and modern thought
-- an alternative for designers who have fallen under the spell of instrumental
rationality”. For me this is instead an invitation to the danger of submerging
of the mind into the unconscious bypassing the problems of individuation. If
you are a professional you risk to lose your intellect and ethics. If you have
children there is a risk of not educating them in the right way so that will
they enter into life tragedies by misconduct, leading to the destruction of
families that follows divorce, violence and to crime that affect others. It is
therefore difficult for whoever sees the problem in these terms to risk remaining
silent in order to avoid personal conflicts, persecution or to avoid triggering
life crises in those whose conscience is awakened while their self-confidence
is shaken.
This chapter of my present paper is already too long,
indicating its importance, the more so in view of the its expansion in two
later papers on Information on: Christianity or Atheism, and Logic as Rape, vs. Truth and Love.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
17. Pseudo-debates in democracy's mass media
Occasionally it pops ut in political debates
that leaders of political parties do not themselves believe in sheer debate
based on sheer freedom of expression. As the leader of the Swedish Center
party Annie Lööf expressed it in a debate article on a controversial
issue (including "polygamy") in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 11 January 2013: "A point is
reached when a kind of stop line must be drawn in the debate to avoid confusion
to be created". Also occasionally it will be found that some insightful
journalist like Niklas Wahllöf (TV column in Dagens Nyheter 29 November
2012) uncovers the empty dramaturgy of many pseudo-debates and interviews at
the supposedly "public service" Swedish television. It also happens
that this strange atmosphere of empty, sterile egocentric debates is noted in
unpretentious musings and deeper probes in very symptomatic newspaper essays as
for instance, in the titles' translation from Swedish, "The air in the debate is stale and confined", (Dagens Nyheter, 17 September
2013), "All talk and no one says anything", (Metro, 26 September
2013), "After threats and lampoons I take now leave from the
gender debate" (Swedish Television Debate
Page, 8 November
2013), or "When verbal vomit drowns public discourse" (Svenska
Dagbladet, 26 January 2014), and in "The debate about the debate is hereby declared dead" (Svenska
Dagbladet, 29
January 2014.) A new wave of such insights did arise in the press on occasion
of the onslaught of political correctness or "opinion corridor"
(PC/OC) connected with the tabu matter of limits to immigration, especially
refugees to Sweden, carrying accusations of racism, akin to sexism.
Examples of insightful difficult analyses of such political correctness, sexism
and racism are (in Swedish) "Uncomfortable when moralisms are disguised as
goodness"
(Swedish Television's Opinion, 2 April 2014), (Victims cardigan: An anti-racism that reinforces
inequality" (Dagens Nyheter, 24 August 2014)
where victims cardigan refers to the phenomenon of self-victimization, "Jasenko Selimovic: Your battle is not mine" (Dagens Nyheter, 2 September
2014), and "Sweden's idealized image contains nothing ugly" (Dagens Nyheter 5 September
2014, by Jenny Nordberg). A didactic archetypal example of political
correctness was at last offered by the treatment by the press of the pressing
Swedish national problem of refugees to the country, as confessed by Jasenko
Selimovic in the article "Therefore nobody dared to speak openly about the
refugee crisis" (11 January 2016). It is obvious that many
citizens sense deep frustration at the emptiness and poverty of the debates
despite of not being able to grasp the core and the why of the phenomenon as
related to controversial political correctness. Sometimes this frustration
about mass media and social media appears in more elaborate personal blogs, an
example being (in Swedish) Krister Renard's "Dummeligens - eller varför högt intelligenta människor kan ha så korkade
åsikter"
[Stupid-intelligence -- or why highly intelligent people can have so stupid
opinions]: quote: "Smart people believe weird things because they are
skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."
I have come to realize that in many ongoing
debates about crises or problems "Democracy" is named as the
theoretical basis of debate and as a general solution in a way that recalls the
old universal appeal to God and religion. So, it can be in the case of trying
to explain the mass murder tragedy of Anders Breivik in Norway, or Islamic terrorism, or the wave of economic crises in the USA, or in
Europe as analyzed by Roger Cohen in The
Age of Outrage. What becomes apparent is that the solution is
supposed to be "more of the same" whatever that same could be, if
only it is called Democracy. It seems never to occur the possibility if not the
need of the analyzers self-criticism. With that I mean the hypothesis that
"something is rotten in the state of Denmark" but in
our case not Denmark but perhaps in the practice of democracy in the Western
world, where Democracy has become an idol that has replaced the supposedly
old-fashioned God. As Cohen writes "Egos expanded...Money outpaced
politics. Rage surged... The only people who walked away unscathed from the
great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and
greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers and hedge-fund honchos".
Nevertheless there is no real analysis, no real questioning of the sources of
ethics or of why democracy went wrong and may be going towards a short or long
term disaster. I suppose that democracy went and goes wrong because it has been
equated to the implementation of a truth determined by a supposed majority in
the supposedly free market of opinions, never mind wise arguments. And this is
gradually being represented by the Internet or by more communication and
pluralism despite the likewise gradual realization that notwithstanding freedom
of speech there must be rules of communication, and a motivation to avoid
seeking narrow consensus based on restricted social "debate
groups" that foster oversimplification in face of complexity.
Nevertheless more than 150 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville, to whom I have repeatedly referred to in my
writings, in an insightful analysis of democracy in the USA offered an analysis
that is surprisingly modern and deserves attention. The more so during times of
financial crises and upheavals such as in Europe after year 2010. One
very focused and clear analysis of financial crisis as example of the failure
of debate or rather of dialogue in the democratic system is offered in an
editorial of 27 January 2013 (in Swedish Det verkliga
hotet, The real
threat) by the economy columnist Andreas Cervenka of the newspaper Svenska
Dagbladet.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
18. Conspiracy theories (and vaccines)
Conspiracy theories can be seen as
examples of breakdown of debate and consequent pollution of information leading
to doubts, mistrust, accusations, insults and polarization of opinions. This
text is an insert in my blog and was intended for people who want to understand
those who were in doubt about getting a vaccine or even suspected vaccines as
well as the covid19-pandemics and other societal disasters to be linked to
worldwide conspiracies. In order to save space in this article I prefer to
refer to a link
to the insert in my blog.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
19. The type-psychology of debate
C. G. Jung is described as a Swiss psychiatrist and
psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology, having been influential not
only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology,
literature, and religious studies. One of his most famous works is on psychological
types, corresponding
to the contents of volume 6 of his Collected Works (CW6). The
so-called types is a classification conceptualized in terms of two basic
attitudes, extraversion and introversion, each one combined with one main
conscious out of two "rational" psychic functions: thinking or
feeling, and one conscious out of two "irrational" ones: sensation,
and intuition. The approach has the disadvantage of being easily “explained
away” by claiming that it does not account for later research, but it has the
advantage of being philosophically and historically grounded as well submitted
to the criticism of schools of psychological thought. As such it stands in
sharp contrast to occasional outgrowths and neologisms such as when Ludwik Fleck’s idea of “thought styles” is to be
applied in the computer field.
It is claimed
that Jung was driven to develop this classification in order to understand the
motives behind the differences between him and his early mentor or associate
Sigmund Freud. In other words, it is a paradoxical matter of
"understanding the misunderstandings" that are common in academic or
political contexts, as in most human relations, especially debates and wars.
Persons with different type-constitutions, just because they are simply human
and not divinely god-like, have limitations and different grasps of one same
"reality", and are prone if not bound to misunderstand each other. In
the following I will disregard an important aspect of difficulty of debates as
in Jung's conception of "Animus possession", exemplified in a specific video about debate involving prof. Jordan Peterson's critique of
academic "political correctness". Swedish readers can get an
orientation about basics in a chapter of my manuscript on psychological manhood and womanhood (pdf-format, p.
198 ff., also in the Internet Archive). More generally, Jung's types are a part of
a whole conception of the the relation between conscious and unconscious
leading to projections which, interpreted more superficially, have been at the
core of anthropological philosopher René Girard's "scapegoats and sacrifice", where
debate portrays fears, desire, envy and resentment, leading apocalyptically to
wars and death: "His contention is controversial: Religion is not the
cause of violence, as many suppose; it was, in archaic societies, a way of
solving it." And
it could be so still today.
It would take
too far to describe Jung's conceptions here but for the purpose of future
studies I wish to point out that the question is implicit in the whole text of
the CW6. The whole CW can accommodate even psychological enigmas such as
Gregory Bateson's socio-psychological double bind that also involves the dimension of power and
dependency. Sometimes
the problem is considered explicitly with the reference to the term misunderstandings
or
analogue as on the following pages of the English translation of the Collected
Works (first Princeton/Bollingen paperback printing, with corrections, 1976):
282, 311, 314, 353, 356, 370, 372f, 377, 384f, and 391f.
If one sees the idea of "types" as also embracing the roots of
religiosity which is no longer understood in the secularized
"tolerant" or, rather, simply indifferent West, it is also
interesting to witness what is told about the poet, social activist and student
of comparative religion Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in Wikipedia with reference
to what he reports in The Seven Storey Mountain: He admired the
devout Catholic couple, whom he saw as good and decent people, but religion
only once came up as a topic between them. Merton expressed his belief that all
religions "lead to God, only in different ways, and every man should go
according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private
way of looking at things." He wanted them to argue with him, but they did
not. As he came to understand later, they realized that his attitude
"implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith, and a dependence on my own
lights, and attachment to my own opinion"; furthermore, since "I did
not believe in anything,... anything I might say I believed would be only empty
talk." He could have gone (in vain) further by espousing perennialism whose
expression in Frithjof, however, inspired Tage Lindbom, one of the few
intellectuals who in my opinion did leave notable traces in Swedish
intellectual life.
This recalls
what the scholar and humanist Juan Luis Vives, sometimes titled as "father
of modern psychology", is quoted to have written, awakening my
own memories and experiences of discussions with, and endless
"questioning" by atheist engineers and enthusiasts of
amateur-science:
"Even
the youngest scholars are accustomed never to keep silence;
they are
always asserting vigorously whatever comes uppermost to their minds,
lest they
should seem to be giving up the dispute.
Nor does
one disputation, or even two a day prove sufficient, as for instance at dinner.
They
wrangle at breakfast; they wrangle after breakfast;
they
wrangle before supper and they wrangle after supper.
At home
they dispute, out of doors they dispute.
They
wrangle over their food, in the bath, in the sweating room,
in the
church, in the town, in the country, in public, in private.
At all
times they are wrangling."
Anybody may
argue endlessly, claiming to believe in (one own's perceived and undefined)
"Reason", and this leads further to beyond the question of
type-psychology: the trivialization of the concept of psychology (and
consequently politics) itself, including the facile and incompetent claim
(often based on second and third sources) that Jung is a gnostic. The failure of debates is then attributed to
unintelligibility or incomprehensibility of the text, sheer "lack of
knowledge", unwillingness or incapacity to keep on answering repeated
continuous questioning, stupidity or outright idiocy which makes them unworthy
to be allowed to talk and be listened to, or rabid madness of the devilishly
abusive "racist-sexist" arguments. Compare with e.g. the case of Anders Breivik or the Trollhättan school attack not to mention
Nazism etc. This amounts to accuse the counterpart for not wanting or not being
able to adduce "scientifically" empirical fact, to manipulate
computerized statistics of "big data", to follow the basic rules of logic or
mathematics or of so called common sense that is vaguely understood as popular
empiricism or induction. It also often implies also an unstated invitation or
injunction to the opponent to reduce all human knowledge to natural science and
engineering. Consequently the counterpart's 's arguments are not even worth to
be listened to and his writings, which are only verbose empty talk, are not
worth to be read, especially if they counter one own's or the supposed the "statistical"
public opinion, or, worse, the "majority of scientists". And, by the
way, "I have not time for reading and arguing [or thinking?] and please,
give me an executive summary or explain why I should read this and that, or
finally, get lost: I keep my opinion and you may keep yours if you don't bother
me and my cause."
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
20. Contemptuous interaction in social
media?
The following was originally a
contribution to my weblog (blog). Having been a member of a WhatsApp chat-group together with old colleagues of mine, I noticed a
recurring behavior, which requires a particular understanding of old age and
its problems. They include but transcend valuable insights such as in the best
research I know as the one directed by Laura
Carstensen at the Stanford Center on Longevity dealing
with changes in physical, and cognitive vs. emotional aspects of the psyche. I
noticed among the members of WhatsApp groups a particular sensitivity to a
perceived lack of respect among peers, and it certainly makes debates or even
dialogues impossible. It is a perceived lack of respect that recalls the
historical meaning of ressentiment (resentment). Wikipedia
refers to the use of the term by some 19th
century thinkers as a sense of hostility directed toward an object (“subject”)
that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for
one's frustration. I understand it also as related to the controversial
phenomenon of political
correctness to which I dedicated the review of a
book that became an essay by its own. In practice it all shows up as
unexpected interpretation of something which has been said with all goodwill,
perceiving it an unjust criticism or sheer lack of respect up to "verbal
violence", where respect is a misunderstood word based on
elusive etymology. For instance, today respect such as when referring to
respect for others is often misused for covering simple indifference, as when
“I respect [read: ignore!] you, your feelings, opinions and actions so long
they do not affect or bother me”.
In more popular terms, when I first
observed the phenomenon, I understood it spontaneously as the feeling
experienced by aged successful professionals such as engineers, doctors,
professors, CEOs or the like who during most of their professional life got
accustomed to increasing recognition and respect by peers at their workplaces.
When they get older and retire with self-perceived signs of physical bodily and
mental decline, which for a few may even announce dementia, this gets coupled to their increased emotional maturity and
sensitivity. They feel isolated, away from their workplace and among other
common people, including family youngsters. That is, among people who do not
really know “who they are”, or rather have been, and do not show the same
degree of respect and consideration for their person, their age and especially
their formerly authoritative if not authoritarian opinions and judgments. All
this in an age and society that does not respect the elderly, as I expand elsewhere, and Swedish readers can appreciate in newspaper essay such as "Skräcken för att åldras i Sverige"
(Dagens Nyheter, 31 jan. 2021). Whatever "respect" should
mean. Consequently they develop a selective perception and sensitivity to
whatever is said or written, which could be a sign of contempt and
aggressiveness. From having tended to identify themselves with an admired “persona” they may have to retire towards a misunderstood and inflated ego.
Ego-inflation has been studied along the lines of analytical psychology, e.g.
in the context of relation to Eastern thought. At its extreme
ego-inflation recalls what has been called narcissistic personality disorder.
Disregarding
controversial psychological or psychologizing interpretations, I find that
some elders do not understand and apply the teachings to be found in what I
call an archetypal manual for retirement and after-retirement. It is the
biblical Ecclesiastes, and
on occasion of my 75th birthday I selected the following verses, which may
be found on the net, and may be not the only ones to also apply
to the present context:
"What has happened will happen again,
and what has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the
sun...The men of old are not remembered, and those who follow will not be
remembered by those who follow them..."(1:9, 11)
"So I applied my mind to understand wisdom and knowledge, madness
and folly, and I came to see that this too is chasing the wind. For in much
wisdom is much vexation, and the more a man knows, the more he has to
suffer..."(1:17)
"Yes, indeed, I got pleasure from all my labour, and for all my
labour this was my reward. Then I turned and reviewed all my handiwork, all my
labour and toil, and I saw that everything was emptiness and chasing the wind,
of no profit under the sun..."(2:10)
"What sort of man will he be who succeeds me, who inherits what
others have acquired? Who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he
will be the master of all the fruits of my labour and skill here under the sun.
This too is emptiness." (2:18)
"One more thing I have observed here under the sun: speed does not
win the race nor strength the battle. Bread does not belong to the wise, nor
wealth to the intelligent, nor success to the skillful; time and chance govern
all..."(9:11)
"One further warning, my son: the use of books is endless, and much
study is wearisome."(12:12)
For the rest there is a proposal for basic rules of behavior for WhatsApp groups but
some of them are questionable. They would help in the above context only at the
cost of limitations in the freedom
of expression, at the edge of self-censorship and
imposed political correctness. The issue is so difficult and hopeless, related
to philosophy of technology: WhatsApp is part of the whole problematic of social
media with its questions that are
sometimes classified as impact on users, social impact, and criticism, debate
and controversy. It did motivate me to write a whole
essay on the difficulties of debate.
There is no substitute for morality in interpersonal relations supported by Christianity and the major
great world religions.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
21. Case study of psychological syndrome
as type-psychology
This latter
remark leads me to recall a case I know, of a dialog involving a gifted and
successful engineer. Whenever engineers have philosophical interests they
typically and symptomatically prefer Anglo-American analytic philosophy or logical positivism also known as logical empiricism. He was puzzled by
how different and apparently intelligent people he appreciated could have so
different opinions about, and difficulty to debate a same
"existential" subject such as the essence of rationality or the
importance of psychology or religion or the overwhelming importance of the
problem with global warming for all humanity. When he got from a friend a hint
about Jung's type psychology to explain individual differences that play a key
role in debates' misunderstandings he tried to read about that in the suggested
reading (cf. the collected works, CW volume 6, "General
description of types".) There are also popular atheoretical variants of more
intuitive and “practical-entertaining” ideas of types, such as in Thomas
Erikson’s success book Surrounded by idiots that I consider in the context of a discussion of artificial intelligence.
Nevertheless he
had difficulty to understand the text while at the same time expressing
diffidence for psychology and all claims for knowledge that are not based on
logically structured "facts" of natural "empirical" or
"evidence-based" science. Because of this he requested repeatedly
detailed guidance, summaries, explanations, logical arguments and motivation
for why he should confide in the value of what he was going to try to read: why
should he read Jung who wrote so long ago as about 80 years ago, rather than
read updated knowledge of facts from biology, neurology, psychiatry, or works
about empathy. And, by the way (as I mention elsewhere): when he was recommended to read something
specific about theology because of its possible relevance (despite of his
counterpart knowing that he had refused to debate whenever he did not have the
same background knowledge as his counterpart), he answered that he did not
judge the recommended text to be relevant because (1) He is materialist and
therefore he does not believe in God - or the other way round. (2) For a
materialist free will is, in its basic meaning, logically impossible.
Disregarding our intuition that the first item was a naive tautology, and
disregarding my own conclusions on the futility of debates on such
complexities, I think that he simply only believes in both
materialism and logic (the power of matter and of logic). Such an attitude of endless
questioning or wrangling in what he did not even see as
deserving the name of debate is akin or analog to the earlier mentioned
"Why not?" strategy and amounts to placing the burden of proof on the
other party exhausting his resources, energy and patience.
A further reflection by the original proponent of the hint to read Jung was
that the engineer was used to understand immediately all what is customarily
required in a secular technical society. Consequently he came to believe that
anything he did not understand speedily was either badly written requiring
extensive clarification and motivation, or sheer humbug. Repeated endless
requests for motivation to further study, for clarification of badly written or
badly read short twitter-like excerpts from the text, complaints of not
understanding them or rather for being incomprehensible, several "Why not
the contrary or something else". Refusal to read other explanatory texts
because of their supposed lack of relevance or of interest , raise the question
of what is the source of "interest", after all. It becomes then an
unintended or intended increased intellectual burden on the counterpart, a protraction
and final impasse in the debate that seems to end with the defeat of whoever is
the first one to surrender and give up. The whole sequence of events tended to
be also crowned by victim playing or self-victimization
by the challenger or other party in the dialogue according to the cannons of
the abuse industry as exemplified in its alleged application by
radical feminism to family conflicts. This means that
the feeling or conviction of having been abused by whatever arguments (or
defective arguments) have been adduced. Shortcomings in their linguistic form gives a final justification for a supposed
original rightfulness or for interruption of the otherwise endless dialog. This
may be accompanied by a public display of self-righteousness - since a victim
is definitionally supposed to be always right. Otherwise the ending of such
kind of debates becomes tragically problematic when power, dependency and
coercion come into the picture recalling the issue of terrorism: "I don't
argue, I shoot". Jung's type psychology could explain this case as one of
conflict of types, say (including the so called auxiliary function)
"EXTRAVERTED+THINKING-sensation" type (cf. empirical+logical) vs.
"INTROVERTED+THINKING-intuition type". (Cf. CW vol. 6, p. 333ff, §
562ff.) Of course, these described events can also be related to other
superficial explanations such as cognitive dissonance and the earlier
mentioned double-bind.
One most
interesting aspect of this tale I told above is that the engineer
symptomatically refuted the account: he had not demanded any executive
summaries, he had indeed read attentively the proposed texts, he had had no
difficulties to understand it, etc. This recalled to my mind the famous Japanese
film Rasho-mon, which acquired
cult status in the fifties to the point of originating the term Rashomon effect, referring to real-world situations in which
multiple eye-witness testimonies of an event contain conflicting information.
As Wikipedia puts it, the film is known for a plot device that involves various
characters providing alternative, self-serving and contradictory versions of
the same incident. One intermediate conclusion in the film is that all men are
motivated only by self-interest (as usual, except for us, supposedly neutral
observers who always are supposed to be good and honest?) Their deceptions and
lies shake faith in humanity. One of the involved figures, however, reveals at
last an inner genuine goodness that reestablishes this faith. It is symptomatic
that such a tale in our secularized Western world may not recall the religious
holy story of redemption through love and goodness. Consciousness about one's
own type as related to others may foster a self-examination and self-therapy
that Jung refers to as individuation, and recalls the
practical effect of religious confession.
Another
interesting reaction of the engineer in my tale or account was a violent
reaction that I see as caused by belonging to the
EXTRAVERTED+THINKING-sensation type: the abomination of what is perceived by
the counterpart was the insinuation that somebody can know or intuit his
feelings and motives better than he himself does. This was also perceived when
there was a request for his introspection, i.e. the opposite of objective
external observation that is paramount in extraversion. The request is
perceived as "psychologizing" and bullying, as if the counterpart
wished to play the abominable role of psychotherapist. In The Design of
Inquiring Systems Churchman criticizes this reactive behavior in a
section dedicated to "The Self-knowing Self: The Subjectivity
Syndrome" (p. 151f.), which is the paradoxical unconscious psychological
compensations of objectifying extraversion.. The criticized syndrome implies
that "because I and I alone know the inner states of my own mind, no one
else can possibly supply any better evidence about my own inner states than I
can; at best other people can only infer the properties of my inner states by
observing my outward behavior."
When applied to
debate and to my tale or account above, this led to violent reaction in terms
of accusation that one attributed to him opinions and motives that were not
true. The counterpart should have asked him for his written opinions. One
should have asked verbally again, something which, by the way, is only possible
with a still living person. Such a request is, per se, reasonable for once, but
it neglects the basics of hermeneutics: the meaning of what is said or,
especially of what is written, is "objectively" not known except in
terms of interpretations that include the context, bordering to the
problematics around ad hominem. When a
particular interpretation does not please the author it will be countered by
his personal statement that it was a "misinterpretation", followed by
a - for him - tedious rephrasing ad infinitum. If the
interpreter eventually does not satisfy the author the latter could apply the victim playing declaring to have been abused, and disrupt the
debate because of having been willfully misunderstood. An illustrative example
is the engineer commenting upon one of the counterpart's statements, after a
long e-mail dialog, in the following way: "I needed a few days to
formulate my answer but you responded within three hours. The only conclusion I
can draw from your comments is that you do not read at all carefully what I
write, alternatively do not care, but you just scan it quickly and then write a
brief association on some sentences. Sometimes it just gets wrong and often
completely incomprehensible." What to make out of this?
The final
paradox is then the destruction of friendship because of the wish to continue
debating, analog to divorce in a marriage. In the particular case a gradual
erosion of demanding friendship was triggered by the insight that the engineer,
as often seems to be the case with computer nerds, showed some of the signs of
what is associated with autism spectrum, that is an extraverted concentration upon
perceivable facts in outer world manipulated by logical thinking, combined with
underdeveloped unconscious intuition and feeling. This all is consistent with
and explains preferences for analytic philosophy. It is a condition that is
analyzable in terms of psychological types and is consistent with preference
for the engineering profession, dealing with things rather than the
complicacies of people. Some main interests, motivations, and arguments of the
engineer were very analog to those confessed by Greta Thunberg, a (at the time) 15-years old climate activist, confessedly diagnosed with Asperger syndrome in the autism
spectrum. I have considered her case in a blog on climate change and global warming. She
symptomatically became suddenly world-famous, displaying traces of indigo children , child prodigy, and savant syndrome. In an interview at the Swedish television she explains
how her syndrome directed her focus on climate activism, a black-and-white
vision of a physical world where ethical human-social preconditions and
urgencies are seen as "social games", and get relegated to others or
to anonymous sociopolitical forces. In a later video of the same activist's address to the World
Economic Forum in January 2019 it is evident that concern for climate,
especially in a secular societal spirit of pantheism as in Sweden, has become as strong as earlier
concern for God's will and wrath. This awakens strong if not violent
unconscious emotional responses that impair debate, and recalling in my mind
Chesterton's discussed quote that "A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything". It
should be needless to say that such a condition makes it practically impossible
to surmount the subjectivity syndrome mentioned above, associated with the
incapacity of understanding the inner mentality of a debating counterpart. This
sort of lighter form of autism that also recalls high-functioning autism (HFA) may allow a
high-functioning professional and daily life but, as in narcissistic personality
disorders, lead the individual to unconscious manipulations
and for instance to terminate a relationship without a personal intimate
feeling-interaction. An example is requesting, authoritatively demand, that
something written like the present text, inspired by interaction with the
anonymized counterpart, be deleted (self-censorship) because of not fitting
"real events" as perceived by the counterpart who disbelieves the
existence of any Rashomon effect. Another consequent example is putting
suddenly the counterpart's e-mail address on the spam-filter of the own
computer or, in the most communicative cases, by sending a terminating
SMS-message to his/her mobile cellular phone.
Ultimately I believe that the surmounting of the misunderstandings would have
required either a godly "grace" or predisposition as suggested in
Pascal's Pensées, and exemplified by the case of Krister Renard quoted above, or then the Socratic recommendation
mentioned in the above introduction to this essay. That is, mutual trust of true
friendship and good intentions that open the way of feelings and intuitions,
enabled by a loving attachment in religious faith, or in a type-psychology that
accounts for such realities. Swedish readers may check a description of this
approach in a book by Iris Johansson "En annorlunda barndom" [A different
childhood], preferably completed with the more analytically based by Gunilla
Gerland in "En riktig människa" [A genuine human being]. A fruitful debate or
teaching may only be between friends or in the context of agape: therefore the
connection between love and wisdom and the Bible's Song of Songs.
In this spirit,
partly extended to cover the aims of the present essay of mine, those who can
read Portuguese (or Spanish) can be referred to an essay written (6 April 2015)
by Marcia Tiburi and Rubens Casara, "A arte de escrever para idiotas"
[The art of writing for idiots] published in the Brazilian magazine CULT, reproduced in Emporio do Direito, and on a site related
to the Brazilian bank Banco do Estado de S.Paulo. Unfortunately the authors do
not mean "idiocy" in its original etymological sense, as exemplified
by the mathematical physicist and historian of science Clifford Truesdell in his An Idiot's Fugitive Essays
on Science" (1984), especially its essays on The scholar, a
species threatened by the professions, and The computer: ruin of science and threat to mankind.
The whole
endeavor, however, is doomed to failure according to the main message of this
paper regarding the insurmountable difficulties of debate on foundational
matters. For instance, the whole mass of references to Carl Jung's psychology
is easily offset by classifying it as "old obsolete stuff" and by
alternative reference to "modern research" or references to "Schrödinger and biological consciousness" or along
the thoughts of "An integrative theory of consciousness that is supposed to incorporate
"self-psychology, self-theory, artificial intelligence, quantum physics,
visual cognitive science and philosophy" with "inroads made from the
fields of computer science, machine technology and artificial intelligence,
including robotics." I keep looking for dignified synonyms of the term
"buzzword" and associated magic megalomaniac verbiage that raises
suspicions of developmental disorders.
[Return to list
of CONTENTS]
22. Case study – The Freedom of Will
This case
involves also an engineer, and I will obviously account for it according to my
memory and experience, since I understand that involved persons often tend to
experience and account for events in different and logically adjusted ways or what
could be called the Rashomon effect, already mentioned above, not to
mention the problems of eyewitness testimony. He had become
particularly fascinated by the question of free will to the point of studying
philosophy in order to demonstrate the impossibility of free will. In this context of mine I will paraphrase
widening an expression found at the beginning of the article on free will in
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: I will state that “I cannot undertake a review of discussions in neither
Western nor other philosophical traditions”.
If I dare to express the engineer’s main point, it was simple in the sense that
in a deterministic physical natural world our actions are determined by
material processes going on in the brain as a result of its structure and
function after having been influenced by inborn and external stimuli.
In the
past I had pointed out for him that this is a millennial discussion by many
brilliant human minds. It requires a life-long study and commitment in order to
make justice to the complexity of the question. This is exemplified by a recent
book by Henry E. Allison, internationally eminent scholar of Immanuel Kant, Kant’s conception of freedom, which
illustrates mindblowing complications in Kant that I myself dared to touch upon
in an essay on Computerization as logic acrobratics. The engineer
wanted, however, to boil down the discussion to logic and empiricism in a
framework of engineering science supported by analytic philosophy. As an
intermediate suggestion I recommended him to get in contact with Giuseppe Trautteur, and
Swiss-Italian professor of theoretical informatics at the University of Naples
Federico II whom I
knew as also interested in these matters and willing to discuss them in
English.
After a
while I heard that my friend had found his inquiry in Trautteur’s thought very
interesting but had stopped it because its continuation required my friend’s
studying literature adduced or implied by Trautteur. My friend, however, could
not afford the time and effort for doing this. In 2020 Trautteur published and
I started reading his latest book with the symptomatically relevant title Il Prigioniero Libero [The Free Prisoner]. I recommended the book to
my friend. He could not read Italian, but I assumed that he could ask for my
assistance at least for individuating some of its many scientific and
philosophical references, most of them in English language, catalogued in a
very comprehensive subject and word index. He answered that since he could not
read Italian “when you have read the book you can tell me what he thinks about
the free will”.
When I
pointed out that he had given me the heavy task of writing an “executive
summary” or review of a book about a very complex matter because he was interested about it, his further
answer was “if I had been able to read the book in Italian I would not have had
any problem to give a short account of what the author thinks about free will.
At least if he does not radically depart from other books about the matter that
I have already read”. After that, it occurred to me that I myself could do on
his behalf what he had not done. I wrote to Trautteur asking what he himself
would have answered to the “executive question” of what he thinks about the
free will on the basis of his book. His short answer translated from the
Italian was: "Trautteur analyzes the thoughts and
experiments for and against free will and proposes that both its acceptance (of
free will) and its refusal are unacceptable for common sense and for a healthy
and consistent mental survival. He tries to communicate to the reader this dramatic situation, without
trying to counter any of the various pro and con considerations in the
literature." I communicated this answer to my “executive friend” without
getting any answer or comment up to the time of writing this text.
An alternative development of the issue
around a book that I have experienced is exemplified by an academically trained
technician who was a theologically well read and convinced atheist who showed a
continued interest in discussing God’s (non) existence. I gave him a hint about
Antony Flew, presented as an English philosopher belonging to the analytic and
evidentialist school of thought, “most notable for his work related to the
philosophy of religion” and in particular for his revised views on the matter. My hint included a
reference to another common acquaintance who had appreciated some of Flew’s
arguments in his work. The technician’s response to my hint, instead of
indicating a possible intention to study Flew, was
I
think I heard of him, perhaps mainly because some Christians cite him as an
example of a former atheist. I read your reference [to his revised views, cf. above] but found nothing of interest. He does
not seem to understand evolution because he promotes Intelligent Design. As I
may have told you, I came up with an argument a few years ago that shows that
ID is rather an argument against a God. I assume, however, that you are not
interested.
Please
note the “pattern” of thought. Instead of studying a work of a “grand old man”,
professional philosopher and lifelong atheist who during the course of his career taught at several
universities in Great Britain and Canada, the technician reverts to his own
prior convictions about Intelligent Design and by a sort of association fallacy
he disallows the final judgment of a philosopher in his own preferred school of
thought. More about it: by finalizing his communication to me with “I assume,
however, that you are not interested” he reveals that he would like to turn the
whole thing into a dialog and debate between the two of us. He himself does not
want, as he never did, try to write and publish some self-contained work on
these issues. He just seems to want to get me into the trap of a play of
superficial logical arguments about an issue which is not mine, since I
perceive that I have no problems about the issue, I do not feel the need to
dwell into it, but I thought he did. Did he? I don’t think so. He wants to win
in a debate with me about another issue (intelligent design) as if it were a
self-contained truth about God.
Conclusion
beyond the last issue on the book: please note how the challenging complexity
of a fascinating difficult issue is not yet a priority among other tasks, and
it is expected to be reduced to an executive summary or debate that dispenses
from reading or even browsing a book, not even make a selection among its
references. Everything under the assumption that the book and its references do
not radically depart from other books that were already read, possibly because already selected for
confirming one’s own opinions. Such is the background in many debates that
start by putting the “burden of proof” on one’s counterpart (telling what the
author says or changing the focus of interest) and reducing everything to a
logical questioning of the executive summary that was requested initially.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
23. Case study: Atheism vs.
Christianism and Logic as Rape vs. AI & HCI
In order to
limit the volume of text in this article, this case study is presented in its
original form, as a separate article on Information on Christianism and Atheism. In it I make the observation that discussions
on religion vs. rationality can be seen as a poor reenactment and analogy of
the misunderstood and endless theological debate on the Filioque, subject of great
controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity that serendipitously deals with the meaning of Spirit. where today the most analytically or
rhetorically gifted and persevering party seems to win the game. Here I can
specify that my choice of the adverb serendipitously
referring to the discussion of the meaning of Spirit can be relevant for the ongoing debate on Artificial
Intelligence and especially Artificial General Intelligence – AI/AGI, if
intelligence is related as it should to the discussion of the human intellect
plus the hopeless debate with anonymous automatically created texts by
generative artificial intelligence - AI, as I otherwise indirectly suggest in a
paper on AI/AGI,
or struggle with anonymous “systems” as suggested in my paper on Human-Computer
Interaction – HCI, or worse with the morass of so-called Disinformation and conspiracy
theories. It seems to me absurd to
imagine that a deep-going “world-wide” discussion on the Filioque among educated intellectuals should have been going on for
centuries without having a bearing on other intellectual questions and on how
to think and behave.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
24. Case studies: the
Russia-NATO-Ukraine crisis and Israel-Hamas war
In order to also
limit the volume of the text in this article, the case study is presented in
its complete updated version, as a separately published text on The
Russia-NATO-Ukraine crisis, including the appendix on readers’ criticism of my text. The issue was already mentioned above in the context of “fact nets”. Similar
phenomena are studies in the context of “semantic exercises” on the Israel-Hamas war.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
25.
Pathology of type-psychology: political correctness
A particular
case of problematic debates arises because of psychodynamic personality disorders consisting in the
subversion of the above mentioned types whenever one main conscious dimension
of the psyche is dominated by the one which is unconscious or undifferentiated,
playing havoc with the whole psyche and obfuscating rationality. This leads to
either outright psychosis or to what in analytic psychology is called (for men)
Anima possession - or (for women) Animus possession. The question of conscious
vs. unconscious requires the repetition of what was written in the previous
section, namely that the so-called types is a classification conceptualized in
terms of two basic attitudes, extraversion and introversion, each one combined
with one main conscious out of two "rational" psychic functions:
thinking or feeling, and one conscious out of two "irrational" ones:
sensation, and intuition.
This is not the
place for an explanation of the details of the dynamics of the pathology that
is extremely complicated, as it is properly mentioned in one of the videos
referred below. Fortunately, these videos can illustrate empirically how all
this worked in a particularly virulent case of so called political correctness
related to the Canadian political and academic milieu.
The account
starts with an introduction to two main protagonists of the case. Prof. Jordan
Peterson and TV-journalist Cathy Newman, followed by a specification of the
videos that were available on the Internet by the date of 12 February 2018:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#Critiques_of_political_correctness>
Jordan Peterson: on critiques of political correctness. Wikipedia introduces
Peterson as a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of
psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in
abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the
psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and
improvement of personality and performance.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Newman#Jordan_Peterson_interview>
Wikipedia introduces Cathy Newman, as an English journalist and presenter of
Channel 4 News in England. She interviewed the Canadian psychology Professor
Jordan Peterson on various topics, including identity politics. Peterson was in
the UK promoting his new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The
interview had been viewed more than two million times on YouTube within three
days, and within two weeks more than 6 million times.
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest>
How dangerous is Jordan B. Peterson? A left-wing review of the events since his
confrontation with Cathy Newman: the Canadian academic's book has become a
bestseller. But his arguments are seen as riddled with 'pseudo-facts' and
conspiracy theories.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54>
(ONE MAIN FOCUS OF DEBATE)
30 min. Jordan Peterson interviewed by Cathy Newman
& debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXkLaZLSzgM>
30 min. Jordan
Peterson and Cathy Newman POST-INTERVIEW ANALYSIS. Jordan Peterson analyzes the
aftermath of his interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News. He shares his
reflections and thoughts on Cathy Newman and how it turned from interesting to
an ugly controversy of purportedly online abuse.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz7jhFMavo8>
7 min. Animus
Possession [regarding Jordan Peterson interviewed by Cathy Newman].
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc>
55 min. "Gender,
Rights and Freedom of Speech: Free Speech vs. Social Justice", starring
mainly Jordan Peterson, Nicholas Matte, Mary Rogan.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvsPbOY5Lgg>
24 min. Jordan B
Peterson's very best moments, all-in-one. Most will probably find the first
clip almost unbearable due to the nature of the ''definitely not a she'' social
justice warrior ''trying'' to debate with Dr. Jordan B Peterson.
All this seems
to indicate that "political correctness" is a problem tainted by a
breakdown of the psychological (and theological) presuppositions for political
debate, and they can destroy any debate and debater, as already suggested by
the mathematician Jan Brouwer's views on limitations of language long before
the explanations in terms of analytical psychology (chap. 5 of his Life,
Art, and Mysticism). Empirical evidence for such destruction
appears when somebody speaks truth, believing in debate. One example is the Guardian's account of the case of James Damore being fired by
Google for claiming the politically incorrect existence and consequences of
certain differences between men and women. Another example of empirical
evidence is presented in Peterson's post-interview analysis (starting at the 12th minute of the video) of what may be
perceived as a perfidious troll-hypothesis regarding the threats directed on the Internet to
his interviewer Cathy Newman. This perfidious strategy is well described after
the first 2:40 minutes of a video involving
Peterson and dealing with the "trickster figure".
Another
apparently perfidious evidence appears in a personal communication that I
received so early as in February 2018, claiming that Peterson's pronunciation
appears to be anti-Semitic for the following reasons. (1) He characterizes
Ashkenazi Jews (constituting a majority of north-American Jews) as being a
different group, and falsely claims that they have an IQ above the average
(check, however an account of the evidence). This would have been a starting point for
the application of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Jews. (2) Peterson would associate
every evil in the world such as communism and capitalism to the Jews. (3) He
affirms correctly that the majority of Jews vote for democrats-liberal, but
does not mention that African Americans and Latinos also do that, because it
would banalize the argument. All this is supposed to be the classic process of
reasoning of traditional anti-Semites exemplified by journalist and author
Édouard Drumont in France, and later still active "conspiracists and
negationists" (Holocaust denial). Further insidious attacks against
Peterson are denounced by himself in a later video published in October 2018 where he is interviewed by the feminist Helen
Lewis, much in the same style as earlier by Cathy Newman, complete with a
summarizing interview and discussion of the general hopeless "debate
problem" in Jordan B. Peterson finally asked about the Catholic Faith.
In my view such "perfidious" interpretational outcomes may be caused
by the fact that prof. Peterson's ultimate analysis of the source of political
incorrectness is partially flawed for reasons well beyond his own his good
advices on "The art of argument". They are
flawed because of his wavering theological position as stated in
Wikipedia, albeit addressed in his videos Thoughts on God, and Why still believe in God. It leads to
inconsequential political wrangling about conservatism vs. liberalism,
left-right wing's sympathies, identitarian collectivism vs. individualism.
Nowhere Peterson's wavering theological position appears to me more clear than
in the integral version of the interview at the Swedish television channel SVT1 in October 2018. He explains
there (with start at about 20 minutes from the beginning) his apprehension for
danger of chaos and destabilization of the Western culture when people tend to
put their own group identity ahead of their individuality. This, he says,
leads to increasingly violent tribalism in contrast to what happens when we try
to achieve peace bringing people under the same roof, into a single shared
identity. What he does not (rhetorically dare to) say is that this is exactly
the purpose of great religions in general and the stated purpose of
Christianity in particular where the term "catholic" means universal, on the whole, or general.
Besides that, despite of being knowledgeable about analytic psychology,
Peterson does not (rhetorically dare to) go into the definition of
"individuality" as related to the process of individuation where the
regression of the Ego in favour of the Self implies an approach to the divine
dimension of that archetype (of the self). Without a proper religious education
(as explained in the context of "conscience and truth") the Self is seldom fully understood (as also
in Wikipedia). Peterson's wavering theological position,
which is most probably necessary for his rhetorical impact, implies an
impossible attempt to do away with religion and all talk about God. It also
implies a reliance upon logic and empiricism in which Peterson appears to
excel, and that I already denounced in my text on debate as ultimately fated to fail. It incurs into the
curses of "diabolic" sterile and hopeless debates.
I already
analyzed a consequence of this issue in a review of a book about the Swedish state individualism with the
symptomatic title of Is the Swede a human being? Several
articles in this direction based on the conflicts around Jordan Peterson have
already been published (with chosen Peterson's videos), in English with the
title Jordan Peterson's Rejection
Of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide, and in
Swedish, with a title that translates into Jordan Peterson's tactical nominalism - a response
to the centrism. Not to mention the violent attacks on all fronts
such as in Jordan Peterson puts facts
aside to defend retrograde thinking, which expose the deepest wounds of the
present Western civilization in general, and of its universities in particular,
culminating with the "scandal" of the Cambridge University rescinding an invitation for a
fellowship in March
2019 (Twitter "debate" here). Stuff for "diabolic" sterile and
hopeless debates or suffocation of debates as mentioned above, appears in
English language exemplified by texts in the sites of Toronto's Star (by Bernard Schiff, May 25, 2018) and
passably countered by such as Esquire (by Wesley Yang, May 1, 2018). For the rest
there have been only partial, timidly balanced portraits such as by David
Brooks in the New York Times' The Jordan Peterson Moment.
As exemplified above by
Cambridge university’s attitude to Jordan Peterson, there has been a growing
concern for a crisis of the freedom of speech and expression on universities
and college campuses all over the Western world. The phenomenon, a pathology
beyond the limits of strict type-psychology, has been seen as a menace to the
essence of the idea of university itself, and motivated me years ago to gather
a bibliography about the issue. It is in turn related to the New Public Management which had already been disavowed by Ida
Hoos in her book Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A
critique at its early origins in
the Planning, Programming and Budgeting
Systems (PPBS) at the United
States Department of Defense. Nowadays the whole appears related the cultural Woke movements and trends of increasing governmental control of
research as described by James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and exemplified by the Swedish government influencing
universities on the basis of a policy of state feminism. It is a trend that is barely opposed by university
managements except for the Chicago Principles and the civil courage of a minority of researchers
themselves, as in G. Lukianoff and J. Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, or (in Sweden, in Swedish) for instance in several
articles in the magazine Axess (2021, no. 2 pp. 36-57, and no. 3 pp. 37-57).
More on theology
below and as suggested in other texts of mine, as that related to the so called
MeToo-debate on sexual harassment and to Information and Theology. Also in my review of a book on political correctness by
organizational psychologist Howard Schwartz, and (in French) by Olivier Rey
"Quoi faire des différences?" [What to
make of the differences?] in Recherches de Science
Religieuse 2013/3 (Tome 101), pp. 329-350.
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
26. Political theology, and theology
After
Tocqueville mentioned above we also have Carl Schmitt whose controversial work exposes the connection
between the misunderstandings about debate and the perils of dictatorship if
not totalitarianism. In the context of political theology he is referred to as follows: "Schmitt
criticized the institutional practices of liberal politics, arguing that they
are justified by a faith in rational discussion and openness that is at odds
with actual parliamentary party politics, in which outcomes are hammered out in
smoke-filled rooms by party leaders. Schmitt also posits an essential division
between the liberal doctrine of separation of powers and what he holds to be
the nature of democracy itself, the identity of the rulers and the ruled.
Although many critics of Schmitt today, such as Stephen Holmes in his The Anatomy of
Anti-Liberalism, take exception to his fundamentally authoritarian
outlook, the idea of incompatibility between liberalism and democracy is one
reason for the continued interest in his political philosophy." (ref. The Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy.) Another reason that has been noted in Sweden by Hjalmar Falk for the continued interest in his political
philosophy in the political-theological complex (cf. review in Swedish in Lýchnos, 2015, pp. 241-245) is that "all significant
concepts of modern state theory are secularized theological concepts".
This has deep
implications for the ongoing debate about the relation between the Islamic and
the Western world with its ignored Christian background, an issue that has been
buried by the kind of politically a-theoretical debate based on logic acrobatics with a
plethora of the latest ad-hoc trendy political terms (cf. extremism,
fundamentalism), such as in Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the
Future of Intolerance (2015). In my view their neo-religion, in the
eloquent words of Nawaz purports, under the ambition based on secularism and
liberalism, scientific rationality,
human rights and gender equality, to facilitate
"a genuine grass root movement to popularize alternative
narratives that can compete with Islamist ones". (My
italics, pp. 64, 122.) It seems that self-appointed representatives of dialog
about Islam in the secularized Western world (in the book published by Harvard
University Press), completely lacking self-criticism, berate others' religious
convictions by recommending their own narrative religion or religious narrative
with its "more of the same": a new Islamic or cosmopolitan version of
the good old Religion of Humanity. This is probably perceived by the many
others as further undermining the presumed morality of the West itself as it
appears to them daily in its mass media, Internet, and international television
networks.
"The genie is let out of the bottle", and language is no longer
effective for meaningful communication, leading to overconfident illusions
about the power of unbridled debate or "art" in the style of the
earlier mentioned Muhammad drawings
controversy, or "artful" caricatures of dialog such
as Kränkta vita män (Swedish for
"Outraged white men", possibly and paradoxically inspired by the book
title Stupid white men) a degrading
Facebook group where presumed righteous feminists scornfully urge critics
of feminism to join. It is ritually praised by other feminist journalists (like
Catia Hultquist in Dagens Nyheter 17 December
2012) who use the rhetorical trick of equating antifeminism with racial discrimination or worse. Occasional deep but paradoxical insights about
"debates" versus political correctness appear very seldom in daily
newspapers, but are exemplified by Johan
Hilton in Dagens Nyheter (17 September 2013.) The
self-avowed lesbian feminist Kristina Hultman earlier in the same Dagens Nyheter (9 October 2012) equates antifeminists with "terrorists like
Anders Behring Breivik, aggrieved white men, religious patriarchs and fascist
movements." Never mind about guilt by association. I can only despair about the empty hopes and wasting of time in
one-liners by millions of Internet users (see just one example) who unconsciously maintain an unfounded faith in a sort of
intellectual social Darwinism. My latest distressing experience besides a short
free subscription to a major Swedish newspaper and its section on a symptomatic
"culture & entertainment" (cf. "edutainment"!) has been
to witness some of the discussions about the theater staging in Sweden of the
unfortunate "feminist" S.C.U.M. manifesto. It is no longer justified to put hope into democratic debate when,
for instance, Swedish newspaper columnists write articles (Dagens Nyheter, 25 August 2012)
that are equivalent to one-liners and reject democratic votes (the hollow new
god of Democracy) in the name of libertarian cultural radicalism. The voting
human being seems to be considered as an object, such as a sort of
biotechnological automobile platform with sexual organs as styling accessories, and his supposedly wrong
voting behavior is said to be due to pseudo-Marxist false consciousness. Opposing intellectual currents are demeaned in a few lines,
resembling Twitter's 140 characters, as "romantic enlightenment" and
are swept away in the name of the latest trends in "gender theory".
[Return to list of CONTENTS]
27. Terminal breakdown and analytical psychology
In volume 10, Civilization in Transition, of Carl Jung’s
collected works dealing with the The Undiscovered Self, there is a piece
of text on “rational argument” that requires some knowledge of the author’s
work but is sufficiently self-contained for permitting an understanding of the
complexity of the issue. I will present the text of paragraphs §§ 490 and 491
without any further comment on the concepts of rationality, arguments as
related to logic and mathematics (“Leibnizian inquiring systems”) in the
philosophy of scientific method, as mentioned above in this essay:
Rational
argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the
emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If
the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s
having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical
wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which
rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. Under these conditions all those
elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of
reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be
met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every manifest case of
insanity there are in my estimations, at least ten latent cases who seldom get
to the point of breaking out openly, but whose views and behavior, for all
appearances of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and
perverse factors. […] Their mental state is that of a collectively excited
group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a milieu of this kind
they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They
know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know
how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, sustained by fanatical resentment,
appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they
express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people
under the cloak of reason and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small
number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of
infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a
limited degree of self-knowledge.
Most
people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious
ego-personalities. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for
granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the
unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the
average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not the real
psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the
psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure
the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it,
most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge
is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to
speak of all that is not known, which also exists.
[Return to the list of CONTENTS]
28. Terminal
breakdown and theology
The fact that "The genie is let out of the bottle", and that
language is no longer effective for meaningful communication indicates the road
towards the terminal breakdown represented by sheer war, war between nations,
civil war, war between the sexes and between generations. Elsewhere I have
already addressed some of these terminal breakdowns in terms of papers about the
previously mentioned S.C.U.M. Manifesto, about Philip Zimbardo in his quest against evil in The Lucifer Effect, about unconscious sources of radical feminism, and about terrorism in terms of the case of Anders Behring Breivik. What is seldom recognized in these contexts is the remarkable
relation between, first of all, violence as distinct from power (and force, or
strength) as suggested by Hannah Arendt in her book On Violence. I understand that the less is the power, including the power of
communication and conviction, the greater is the motivation to use violence.
But the most remarkable relation is the forgotten one between love and power. Regarding
the lesser kind of power to awaken interest and motivation for understanding
"the other" I have often been amazed at noticing how the sheer fact
of sympathetically, personally knowing or having met this other, raises the
wish of listening and reading, even commenting whatever he (or she - yes, I
know the PC code, including how to follow it)
writes. In this context I am also amazed by the apparent increased inability to
notice and to appreciate (not to mention to retribute) the goodness or kindness
(not to mention the beauty - as the platonic form of goodness) of others, which
should foster the raise of love.
For the rest, I recall the quotation from Carl Jung in the conclusion of my paper The Illusion of Communicative Information about sources of radical feminism: "Logically, the opposite of
love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to
power. Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to
power is paramount, love is lacking." Consequently, the lesser the love,
the greater will be the perceived need for power, and the lesser the power, the
greater will be the perceived need of violence. I perceive that such insights
are also those that lead Richard Stivers in the previously mentioned book on
technology as magic to the conclusion (p. 138) that "We have turned power
into a value. Uncontrolled power, however, produces cynicism, for trust rests
upon shared moral meaning that places some limitations on the exercise of
power." It is symptomatic that the philosopher J.G. Fichte took so much
trouble, in the context of his atheism dispute mentioned above, to try to
explain why Christianity, even contrasted to "monarchical" Islam, is
a religion of love above power (ref. Fichte, Querelle de l'Athéisme, pp. 199-213, cf. The Atheism Dispute.) An updated Catholic theological summary of all these issue with respect to specifically political debate is offered in the Doctrinal Note on some
questions regarding the participation of Catholics in Political Life, published on November 24, 2002, by the Vatican's Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith. Nevertheless the main historical contribution of
Catholicism to the issues treated in this paper, and which should properly be
put below at its end is pope Piux X famous encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, (1907) on the doctrines of the modernists.
Because of all this it is a great impediment for debate when discussants do not
share basic values or have unconscious presuppositions. In particular, whoever
declares himself to be atheist, agnostic or "religiously tone deaf"
without having studied or reflected upon the matter to an extent comparable to
the one necessary for a professional education risks to explain away at least
2000 years of cultural history of humanity. What is also forgotten in this
context is that a human's life length is definitely not enough for reinventing,
let alone reading and understanding some thousands of years of historical
discussions and conclusions about religion, which is completely ignored if not
also derided by only a tiny fraction of the word population, consisting of
"enlightened" people, mainly in the Western world. This is also the
basis for the rational necessity of trust in all cognitive and scientific work
(cf. Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth), as much as it is necessary for economic life (cf. Lars Huemer's Trust in Business
Relationships). This turns also to be
especially valid in question of ethics or moral conduct including ethics of
research, the choice of research problems and what is to be taken as truth, as
in the case of ad hominem arguments. This is probably what lies behind West Churchman's
statement in his The Systems Approach and
Its Enemies (p. 99): "My colleagues like to argue endlessly as to what should be
required courses for our MBAs. My answer is that I have grave doubts about making any of the
existing ones required, but that I have no doubt that we should require a basic
course in theology." For myself I have extended this requirement in that I
do not consider as intellectually serious any approach, theory or tradition
that explains away a couple of thousands of years of cultural theological
history. This is an attitude that appears consistent with many others' such as
Wernher Heisenberg's in his essay "Scientific and religious truth",
in Across the frontiers (1975, pp. 213-229, text
available also here and commented on other sites of the net.)
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29. Conclusion
Conclusion? As a summary or main conclusion I borrow some of the
words already written above, which I believe are the key to
communication. I believe that the surmounting of the
misunderstandings requires either a godly "grace" of faith or
predisposition as suggested in Pascal's Pensées, or then the Socratic recommendation mentioned in
the above introduction to this essay. That is, mutual trust of true
friendship which culminates in love as conceived in the Cristian virtue of caritas, and good intentions that open the way of feelings
and intuitions, enabled by a loving attachment in religious faith, or as
understood in a type-psychology that accounts for such realities. Since
religion deals with ultimate assumptions it precedes politics, and conflicts
about religion precede politics even when it is not understood that religion is
a pretext for driving politics and war. I see also this is also the reason why
Jesus Christ did not found a political party or form a guerilla or army putting
power above love.
For the rest, I feel strengthened in my earlier research-reflections expressed on occasion of my 75th birthday. It is no longer a question
of writing or reading but a question of enemies of the systems
approach, or as I did write elsewhere, of simply adducing the remaining
alternatives of either Evangelization or Apocalypticism. In Christian terms it can be seen as the struggle about the relation between "conscience and truth" that I consider elsewhere, or the struggle
against Gnosticism, harsh as when Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240
AD) is reported to express it:
So Tertullian deals with heresies: it is of no use to listen to their arguments or refute them, for we
have a number of antecedent proofs that they cannot deserve a hearing. Heresies, he begins, must not
astonish us, for they were prophesied. Heretics urge the text, "Seek and
ye shall find", but this was not said to Christians; we have a rule of faith to be accepted without question. "Let curiosity give place
to faith and vain glory make way for salvation", so Tertullian parodies a
line of Cicero's. The heretics argue out of Scripture; but, first, we are forbidden to consort
with a heretic after one rebuke has been delivered, and secondly, disputation
results only in blasphemy on the one side and indignation on the other, while the listener
goes away more puzzled than he came.
This is a severe ultimate option corresponding to the Bible's Matthew 18:15-17 (but in oblivion of, among others, of Matthew 7:3) that as late as
nowadays I see practiced by some traditionalist Catholics, followers of the Society of Saint Piux X, SSPX. Probably it would not be applied straightaway to loved close family
members. Another option is evangelization on a small local scale, in and around
one's own family or in retreat environment as joining a monastic life, as
suggested in the kind of discussion that has been going on about Rod Dreher's
book on the so called Benedict Option, or "A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation"
(review here). It can also be seen as an echo of ancient wisdom such as
systematized in the Confucian I Ching (but, to avoid new-age pseudo-mysticism and superficialities, keep to
the I Ching edition with the
introduction by C. Jung, cf. hexagrams 33 on
"Retreat" plus 12 and 18). All this besides the considerations in my
essay on Computers as Embodiment
of Mathematics and Logic.
There was a time when the attainment of consensus and resulting action was not
mainly a question of debates but, rather, of recognizing and accepting the
"narrow road" of Matthew 7:13f. which It is not an
exclusively religious question. It is no longer a question of entering endless
so called debates, neither in academia nor in mass media, the least so at old
age when time turns to be more scarce. If one happens to regard religion in
general and Christian theology in particular as a vehicle for discussing
ultimate values then the breakdown of communication, which also appears under
the guise of increased perceived need of debates, may correspond to the
ultimate denial of forgiveness and be related to Matthew 18:15 (integral text in Matthew 18:15ff.), and finally to the famous Matthew 12:31: "And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be
forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven." Refer
further to available commentaries on
the text (p. 654), with due regard for the criticism leveled against such commentaries. It is symptomatic that long after I
had written the main body of this text, one Swedish main newspaper dedicated a
long, ambitious, cultural analysis of political correctness as seen in the
breakdown of debate as contrasted to conversation in Swedish mass and social
media ("Titta de snackar!", Svenska Dagbladet, 7 April 2019). The
“apocalypse” of debate is pre-announced in the development of artificially
intelligent “chat-bots” that are
envisaged to allow anyone, in a sick society, to discuss with them, as
announced by META-Facebook on August 5, 2022
regarding “BlenderBot 3: An AI Chatbot that Improves Through Conversation”.
What is most symptomatic is its forgoing to mention the possibility of
religion being a necessary basis of meaningful consensus: charity and respect
for the human being, where respect does not mean tolerance in the sense it does
not matter what somebody thinks so long it does not bother me or
"us". It means that we all want to help each other to reach a common
truth and good. One opportunity for getting convinced about this is to study
very carefully the most ingenious analysis I have seen of the breakdown of
debate vs. political correctness, or whatever you want to call it, in Ian
Buruma's bewildering article, related to the #MeToo issue, "Editing in an age of outrage", in Financial Times, March 29th 2019. (Swedish translation "Det ska fan vara publicist när Twitterstormen viner" in Dagens Nyheter, April 14th 2019.) Ultimately, in the future, in analogy to the problem of self-driving vehicles, people may have to discuss mindless texts that are generated by
artificially intelligent agents such as improved “language model” GPT-2 (marketed as ChatGPT) where the meaning of “model” as in the concept of “large language models” is no longer discussed, as earlier were in “An analysis of the
concept of simulation” (cf. C.W. Churchman, in A.C. Hoggatt & F.E.
Balderston, Eds. Symposium on Simulation Models, Southwestern Publishing
Co., Cincinnati, 1963, and same author in Reliability of models in the
social sciences, in Interfaces, vol.4, No. 1, November 1973).
Consider:
"GPT-2 generates synthetic text samples in response to the model
being primed with an arbitrary input. The model is chameleon-like—it adapts to
the style and content of the conditioning text. This allows the user to
generate realistic and coherent continuations about a topic of their
choosing..."
and will be drained of their intellectual energy as human drivers will
be drained of their skill and intelligence in order to avoid incidents with the
self-driving vehicles. [Test a simplified GPT-2
here, linked at from here.] For the rest please allow me to direct you to my specific essay on Artificial General Ingelligence and ChatGPT, and to the "ultimate debate" considered in my blog on The desecration of the Quran.
All this is the reason of why, objectionably, I write as I write, with a preliminarily poor graphic layout and structure, with an
intentional profusion of references and without much hope for dialog with
people who expect one-liners, or "executive summaries" of about half
page that they hope will enable them to avoid painful studies of something they
really do not know why they should care about. This style of writing becomes
gradually more urgent as life is perceived to get short and the most important
task becomes to leave a heritage of the type "take it or leave it" to
those who happen to want to study further. Or, as I did write in the
introduction to my weblog: psychologically I may be writing in the spirit of
"Dixi et salvavi animam meam" ["I have spoken and saved my
soul"], a quote that is attributed to Karl Marx's ending of his Critique of the Gotha
Program, while its origin and
meaning can be traced to the Bible (Ezekiel 33:9). The reason why I do not encourage debates in general is tentatively
explained in the present text, and in Plato's famous Seventh Letter about the questionable value of writing. It culminates at §341 ff. and
did already considered it in part in my analysis in the essay on Platonic information information technology -
Reading Plato, (pre-publication text here), extracted from
an earlier study, (also in pdf, with a table of contents).
Let me terminate with some biblical food for thought beyond The parable of the Sower, which is too long to be reproduced here, and that describes the need or
value of discussion in life:
Tests in Life
4 When a
sieve is shaken, the refuse appears;
so do a person’s faults when he speaks.
5 The kiln tests the potter’s vessels;
so the test of a person is in his conversation.
6 Its fruit discloses the cultivation of a tree;
so a person’s speech discloses the cultivation of his
mind.
7 Do not praise anyone before he speaks,
for this is the way people are tested.
Long after I wrote the main of this essay I happened to notice a
text of Plato to which I already referred above and had passed less noticed in
my earlier readings of his work but is most important when dealing with most
serious and difficult matters as with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine:
I terminate by quoting what he, before or presaging the need of the
advent of Christianity and of the Bible, wrote in his famous Seventh
Letter (341d,
and 344c):
|
If I thought it possible
to deal adequately with the subject in a treatise or a lecture for the
general public, what finer achievement would there have been in my life than
to write a work of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of things
to light for all men? I do not, however, think the attempt to tell mankind of
these matters a good thing, except in the case of some few who are capable of
discovering the truth for themselves with a little guidance. In the case of
the rest to do so would excite in some an unjustified contempt in a
thoroughly offensive fashion, in others certain lofty and vain hopes, as if
they had acquired some awesome lore. […]
|
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For this reason no
serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the
general public so as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity.
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