Nice Nihilism at 3:AM

If I were to have written a popular piece reviewing a piece of popular philosophy, here's what I'd like to have written:

Nice Nihilism, by Richard Marshall

It's on Alexander Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide To Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.

I suppose I should note that I haven't read Rosenberg's book...so that's what you might call a complication.  On the other hand, I don't need to read it; I know the profile. That is: I know this type of position well. You do, too, if you've spent much time reading Hume. It goes like this:

Hey, we should all adopt my view! It entails that our deepest and most important views about ourselves, the importance of reason, freedom, and the significance of our lives is pathetic hogwash. But my view also entails that we can blithely ignore those entailments and pretend that everything's just like we'd like it to be! Cool, huh?

I'm someone who takes certain varieties of nihilism and skepticism very seriously. I believe that it might very well be true that we are squishy robots, that human reason is, ultimately speaking, of no more significant than a cockroach's ability to sniff out a rotted carcass, and that in fact, our very most cherished views of the universe and ourselves may all be not only false, but cosmic jokes. In my view, nihilism is a serious threat, not to be taken lightly.

Hume was, famously, a skeptic who thought that he could shed his skepticism at the door of his study. As a psychological point, I can't speak to that. Or, rather, I can say: if he could, then Hume was a very different kind of person than I am--and probably than you are. Me, I think that if it's true that my emotions are unjustified and unjustifiable itches and aches, and if morality comes down to nothing more than emotion, then we are relieved of any obligation to take it seriously. That is to say: if morality's a fiction, then we are entitled to treat it as such. Obligated, even, I'd say...but you can see where that would lead...

Folks like Rosenberg want to speak for atheists, though their view isn't really about atheism. It's scientism, really, that's afoot, as Marshall notes. Atheism's one more-or-less consequence of scientism...but they're separable positions. I'm an atheist (basically, though not by the lights of some), but not a fan of scientism. At this point things get terminologically murky, but scientism is, roughly, the view that a certain (I'd say: rather unsophisticated) view of science is correct. Such views are often said to be varieties of naturalism (roughly: the view that every real thing is a part of nature), and/or physicalism (the view that every real thing is a physical thing). As for naturalism: meh. Depends on your view of nature, notoriously. I, for example, could be said to be a naturalist...but that would be non-standard, because I'm happy with a fairly expansive conception of nature. Most "naturalists" are not.

But let me cut to the chase: what I think is really at issue here is final causation. The folks who enthusiastically call themselves naturalists are, in my estimation, what we might better call "efficient causalists." They don't believe in final causation, and, so, think that every true scientific explanation must be given (if in causal terms at all) in terms of efficient causation--that is, the push-me-pull-you causation of the type involved when one billiard ball causes another to to into the corner pocket. Me, I think there's probably final causation, and that makes explaining things like freedom, mind and meaning easier...though by no means trivial. I'm happy for the community of inquirers to issue a promissory note with respect to final causation, and to keep working away at trying to get an account of it. Naturalists, so called, usually are not.

This is the point at which the relevant interlocutors will ask me to start making with the theory of final causation--something I cannot do.

But note: something we also cannot do with respect to efficient causation. We do not know what it is. We will not know in my lifetime. We may know someday, but not soon. The interlocutors in question are o.k. with that.

We're all o.k. with different promissory notes, I'd say.

See, that's one of the things that Peirce thinks is interesting. We're in an epistemic position that basically forces us to take certain things on what we might tendentiously call faith. The question is: can some things be accepted on faith rationally? Or are all bets off once we have to take even a single step down that road?

Me, I suppose I'm currently--if anything at all--a kind of atheistic fideist. In my view, I accept certain things on a kind of provisional faith, and I think I'm probably warranted in doing so. But that doesn't mean that anything goes. And, in particular, faith in the Abrahamic God does not go--IMHO. And Jesus is right out. On the other hand, the vaguer and looser one makes one's conception of God, the more plausible it becomes. If you think that one is a non-atheist for thinking that there is something fundamentally mind-like about the universe...well, then Peirce isn't an atheist, and neither, perhaps, am I (being at least temporarily enraptured by/entrapped in the Peircean vortex...). Matter is effete mind and all that...

But the relevant point is this: in the current context, it's not my job to defend any of that. In this context, it's not my burden to prove to the Humes and Rosenbergs (and Dawkinses and so forth) of the world that any of that is true. Nor is it my job to prove to them that their scientism is false. Rather, it is their job to explain how it can be that, endorsing a view that they openly acknowledge to be such that it entails what is basically nihilism...they can blithely tell us that our lives can go on normally, unaffected. Move along! Nothing to see here! Everybody be a happy, Discovery-Channel-level science groupie...oh, and be a liberal, too, while you're at it... The weakest link over there has always been that one. Such folk, in effect, endorse skepticism/nihilism, but try to argue not only that this needn't affect our view of the meaningfulness of our lives, they also often urge us to be more humane. I'm all for that latter bit about humanity...but only if nihilism isn't true. My beef with them is--or here's one way of putting it--that they underestimate the importance of nihilism. I hope--and believe...but mostly hope--that nihilism is false. But I am fairly certain of this: if it is true we can't ignore it. If it's true, the consequences are universe-shaking. And we need to be honest enough to face up to that fact. If it's true, then, for example: Hitler made no moral error, since there is no such thing as a moral error, since there is no such thing as a moral obligation. Morality is a fiction. If nihilism is true, then the scientific enterprise is not noble, because nothing is noble. These are things which, if true, we should come to grips with. We cannot, with a straight face, stone someone to death for impiety while devoutly denying the existence of God. We cannot wax rhapsodic about the grandeur of science out of one side of our mouths while denying the coherence of the concept of nobility out of the other.

Not that God and morality go together--for, as the Platonic Socrates showed, they do not. And that's the biggest relevant error on the other side: to think that we have to believe in God in order to deny such nihilism. In fact, God doesn't help at all. That's the lesson we learn by reflecting on the Euthyphro--that gods don't help. The idea of justification--moral or epistemic--is the idea of something so conceptually difficult that even adding an omnipotent God to the picture won't help ground or explain it. Another thing won't help us make sense of what it means to be justified in believing or doing something. More objects just don't help. Not even an omnipotent object.God is a a minor philosophical puzzle compared to the problems at issue here. Even if he exists, and even if we knew he did, that would not move this particular philosophical ball a yard nor an inch down-field. God would only solve this problem if something like the divine command theory were true--but it isn't.

In short: scientistic atheists who embrace views that entail nihilism err by trying to have their cake and eat it too--or, rather, by accepting both of the following claims:

(a) Cake does not exist
(b) We all can and should eat cake

Theists of the relevant type err by holding that adding God to the picture solves the problems of value and meaning...and so they err by thinking that all atheists--rather than just narrowly naturalistic ones--face problems about value that they, theists, do not.

Folks like me think: there is no God, but that in no way means that the universe is not a complex place, perhaps containing real things like minds and values and final causes...whatever those might be. God is irrelevant here, hence being an atheist doesn't mean that you have to be a narrow naturalist, nor a physicalist, nor a nihilist. Folks like me still face all the relevant tough questions...but at least we don't think that God waves a magic wand--or magic word--and makes things valuable. Nor do we embrace a view that entails nihilism. Nor do we do the worst thing, which is: (i) embrace a view that entails nihilism and (ii) blithely say that it changes nothing about how we should think and act.

As noted, I haven't read Roenberg's book, so none of this carries any weight against anything specific therein. This is just a quick link pointing you to Marshall's review, after all! So who knows? Maybe Roenberg has finally cracked the nut that Hume et. al. found uncrackable...  Maybe he's shown why all can and should be, to use Marshall's phrase, nice nihilists after all. I'm going to be honest--I know the type of position well enough that, unless some consensus emerges that Rosenberg has cracked the uncrackable nut, I'm not likely to read his book. But for the reasons above, you might want to take that with an appropriate number of grains of salt, read the thing, judge for yourselves, and come back and set me straight if need be.

An Easy, Fun, Natural, Illegal Road to Greater Well-Being

Kevin Drum gives us a synopsis of the evidence about the awesome power of 'shrooms.

The Case For Enhancing People

Ronald Bailey, The New Atlantis.

Early on, he gives concise refutations of many terrible arguments against e.g. radically increasing the human life span. Haven't gotten to his positive case yet, but was afraid I'd forget to post...so here it is.

Personally, I think that there's a significant chance that such "enhancement" will be part of the equation that leads us into disaster, as my guess is that lifespans will begin increasing significantly before we figure out how to lower birth rates sufficiently. In my book, though, that's just another argument for addressing the birth-rate problem now, and not later. But my guesses are worth virtually nothing, as I hope we all realize...

Gingrich Decries "Nasty, Vicious,...Dishonest" Politics
In Other News: Trump to Denounce Greed and Bad Taste

Astonishing. (via Drum)

This is like finding Mussolini standing outside the smoking ruins of Guernica, speechifying about the tragedy of senseless war.

I never know what to make of Gingrich and his ilk. Are they really so imprisoned in their own fantasies that they do not realize that they are the primary drivers of our nasty, vicious and dishonest politics? Or are they so utterly dishonest that they are capable of simply ignoring their own culpability without batting an eye?

Funny, isn't it, that Newt has suddenly discovered political civility? Just as he becomes the most salient target of negative ads... What a coincidence.

And while we're at it:
The problem is not "negative" ads. Negative ads are just fine--so long as they are honest and straight-forward. Saying that your opponent is a liar and a cheat is perfectly permissible--in fact, perhaps, obligatory--if he is, in fact, a liar and a cheat. If he's in the pocket of Big Soy or whatever, then you ought to let people know about it. At least some research indicates that people do learn things from negative ads. Our political problem is not negativity, and the solution is not positivity. The relevant problems are, as Newt correctly notes, viciousness and dishonesty. In particular, currently, the viciousness and dishonesty emanating primarily from conservatives, who have left the rest of us in their dust in this respect. Obama is not merely misguided, he is evil...in fact he is not merely evil, he may very well be the Antichrist. And so on, ad nauseam.

But, of course, Newt himself is one of the modern pioneers of this brand of politics. Our current awful politics is largely a creation of Gingrich himself, and unless Newt is deluded to the point of near insanity, he realizes this and is, in effect, telling what is a kind of practical lie. If he is not deluded, then he knows he helped bring it about, and he knows that his denunciation of it is the height of hypocrisy.

You did it, Newt. You turned your energies toward harming the country in a deep and tragic way. You made our national deliberations less rational, less objective, less honest, and less humane. You hit our democracy where it was most vulnerable. You made us, as a nation, stupider and less reasonable. You helped to guarantee not merely that we would make a few sub-optimal decisions; rather, you helped weaken our very ability to make good decisions at all. You, Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter et. al. helped exacerbate some of our worst characteristics---our tribalism, our irrationalism, our misologism, our paranoia. But those others came later...you were a real pioneer in this respect. You were there early on. Not before, say, Nixon or McCarthy, of course...but you were the standard-bearer of the new wave of political divisiveness. The OBLs of the world might shoot us in the leg; you clubbed us in the head. You Phineas Gaged us. You made our politics more dishonest and vicious...and you did so in order to achieve narrow political ends. And how you've got the audacity to denounce that which you yourself largely wrought.

If there's a special hell for evil politicians in the afterlife, I hope you rot in it.

Well, Newt's hypocrisy is of minor concern, of course, compared to his wrongs against America and her politics; but it does give us an opportunity to reflect on the bigger issues, the political derangement that he helped to create. So, anyway, here I am, reflecting on it and whatnot...

Sullivan on the Newest Big Lie: Obama Lost Iraq
With Special Attention to Jennifer Rubin and Peter Wehner

If truth beats out lies in this case, the Bush-Cheney administration will go down in history as one of America's most disastrous, and Iraq as their primary failure. They dragged the U.S. into a war that was not merely unnecessary, but counter-productive, and which had as opportunity costs the exacerbation of problems in Afghanistan and the survival of OBL for ten years after 9/11. Oh: and their ten-year occupation of Iraq was, to say the very least, a non-success.

But being a contemporary American conservative means never having to say you're sorry...nor even that you were wrong. Responsibility for Iraq--like responsibility for all of the Bush/Cheney administration's other myriad errors--lies with everyone but the people who made them happen. Everything that wasn't Clinton's fault is Obama's; it is an axiom that the only error a Republican can commit is to be insufficiently conservative.

Here is Sullivan taking on the Bush dead-enders--in this case, specifically the loathsome Jennifer Rubin and one Peter Wehner on these points. And Sullivan is right. There is simply no even vaguely plausible way to pin the Iraq disaster on Obama. It is Bush's and Cheney's and the GOP's fault, approximately as much as any huge policy error is any one parties. (The pusillanimous Dems went along with the crackpot plan...as the pusillanimous will do...but, once again, it was the GOP who led the charge into fiasco.)

Extremists and other misologists--and both categories now include a large percentage of American conservatives--do not confront the evidence honestly. They exaggerate favorable evidence and gerrymander away any unfavorable evidence. In the case of anything as complex as the Iraq debacle, there will always be something you can say to provide the kind of rhetorical and psychological cover you need to keep from having to--heaven forfend--admit error or change your mind.

One obligation we have here is to object to the big lies about Iraq every time they surface. What the propagandists want us to do is to be silent; their hope is to sway the uninformed by sheer force of repetition. Our job is to make sure that we do not weary of disputing their lies and cede the field to them on this point. Even if truth and history did not matter to us for their own sakes, whitewashing the Iraq debacle makes it more likely that the country will allow itself to be led into such a disaster again in the future. The GOP fears that less than they fear admitting error; so championing the truth in this matter is up to the rest of us.

A Happy Sentence

Been awhile since a sentence about American politics made me as happy as this one did:

"Facing withering criticism from across the political spectrum and abandoned by Senate allies, House Republicans bowed to political reality Thursday and agreed to a two-month extension of a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans."

So we've got a payroll tax-cut extension, and the House GOP shoots itself in the ass in a way that the public actually notices getting there.

It's a Christmas miracle...

Blame Newt...

For the GOP's uncompromising/anti-centrist streak. Sure, they suffer from several other types of craziness, too--e.g. their love of Judeo-Christian zealotry, and their anti-science orientation. But their scorched-earth/anti-compromise approach to legislating was kicked into high gear by Gingrich.

Funny that modern conservatism has been so motivated by it's fear of/revulsion at the French revolution, and by its anglophilia...and yet the GOP's approach is so much more French than British...

Newt's a nut with delusions of grandeur...but that, unfortunately, makes him a perfect fit with contemporary American conservatism...

Welcome To The Dean Dome...

You Longhorns!

And a timely Wilbur Witt tune (NSFW!)

All in good fun...  Looking forward to a good game, and, ideally, a Carolina victory.

Can you believe that I turned down a chance to go to this game so that I could go to Colorado with JQ to see her parental units?  Jebus!!!!!

The Ravages of Obamacare

Oh, the humanity...

Ocean-Floor Methane Thaws

I'm sure we'll be told by the usual suspects that this has nothing to do with any human activity.

Non-Denoting Singular Terms In The News

So:

1. A large subset of the population and the media are celebrity-obsessed

and

2. It is common to become a celebrity for no good reason at all--that is, basically, to become famous for being famous...or even to become famous just for being disgusting

Consequently, we end up hearing a lot about people like Donald Trump. This is a guy who is so stupid, frivolous and disgusting that I have no reason to even know his name...and I'd be much better off if I didn't. I don't want to waste any nonzero percentage of my brain knowing about this lame-ass mofo.

However, he does provide us with a wee example of a philosophically interesting claim in the news--specifically, a non-denoting singular term. The buffoon aforementioned gives us this today:

"It is very important to me that the right Republican candidate be chosen to defeat the failed and very destructive Obama Administration, but if that Republican, in my opinion, is not the right candidate, I am not willing to give up my right to run as an Independent candidate," Trump said in a statement.

Here 'the failed and very destructive Obama Administration' is, of course, a non-denoting singular term. Like 'Santa Clause,' 'The present king of France," and 'Donald Trump's interesting and important thought,'' 'the failed and very destructive Obama administration' fails to refer to anything that actually exists.This contrasts with singular terms that do denote, e.g. 'the failed and destructive Bush/Cheney administration,'* or 'the buffoon-filled field of Republican presidential candidates.'

Thinking about non-denoting singular terms can actually help us think about how language works more generally, as you may recall from whatever encounters you've had with Russell's famous paper "On Denoting."

Here's a link to it, for your edification and amusement.


*As is common in such matters, here I ignore questions about tense.