A Conversation on Love of All Wisdom

A weird post, but this is an archive of an exchange I had in the comments section of a post on Amod Lele’s blog, Love of All Wisdom, for a discussion of Seth Zuihō Segall’s book, The House We Live In.

First post on “Listening to non-pragmatists” (7 Apr. 2024)

As MacIntyre on ibn Sīnā rightly notes, at least from a theist’s perspective the difference between theists and atheists does not merely concern the existence of one entity separate from the world, it concerns the nature of the entire world. The question of God only seems irrelevant when one has already taken a side on it.

This is a point that is often missed in discussions between theists and non-theists, or even between ‘classical’ and ‘non-classical’ theists. The acceptance of a supernatural order radically shifts one’s worldview – this has its most radical expression in Shinran and Shin Buddhism, where entrusting yourself in Amida Buddha leads to shinjin, an awakening where one realizes the non-dual nature of the world and birth in the Pure Land here and now. A similar view is expressed by Abraham Joshua Heschel:

It is not in a roundabout way, by analogy or inference, that we become aware of the ineffable; we do not think about it in absentia. It is rather sensed as something immediately given by way of an insight that is unending and underivable, logically and psychologically prior to judgment, to the assimilation of subject matter to mental categories; a universal insight into an objective aspect of reality, of which all men are at all times capable; not the froth of ignorance but the climax of thought, indigenous to the climate that prevails at the summit of intellectual endeavor, where such works as the last quartets of Beethoven come into being. It is a cognitive insight, since the awareness it evokes is a definite addition to the mind.

Much of the impulse to dismiss this seems to result from a misguided notion of what the pragmatic maxim entails. There is no doubt that, in developing the maxim as a theory of meaning, Peirce thought it was possible to use it to clarify theological questions – his use of it to declare transubstantiation meaningless is near-infamous – but what it meant for something to have “practical effects” is a question that Peirce, a staunch theist himself, grappled with throughout his life. Modern pragmatism has seemed to take the pragmatic maxim in either a subjectivist (Richard Rorty,

or neo-positivist (Cheryl Misak, Howard Stein) direction, but Peirce’s later works show that this is not the only two paths available to us.

It is noteworthy that, in rejecting

This is similar to a point I heavily disagreed with

The positions of James and Dewey seem to involve, by necessity, a continual questioning of our beliefs on the part of the individual that appears utterly unrealistic. They seem to hold little regard for the so-called ‘background beliefs’ that Peirce took care to consider and clarify the role of within inquiry. There is a section from Alexis de Tocqueville that I recently read:

Men will never be able to deepen all their ideas by themselves. That is contrary to their limited nature. The most (illegible word) and the most free genius believes a million things on the faith of others. So moral authority no matter what you do must be found somewhere in the moral world. Its place is variable, but a place is necessary for it. Man needs to believe dogmatically a host of things, were it only to have the time to discuss a few others of them. This authority is principally called religion in aristocratic centuries. It will perhaps be named majority in democratic centuries, or rather common opinion.

By shifting the role of truth-making from the community of inquiry to the individual inquirer, those influenced by James and Dewey seem to place a burden too heavy to bear upon them. As you note, we hold a great many beliefs which originate from little more than ‘guessing’, whether such ‘guess’ originates from the individual or their community, and which cannot be known to be true in the present with any degree of certainty. Peirce, recognizing these facts, formulates his notion of truth thus: “if, if inquiry were pursued sufficiently far, then H would be believed, then H is true” (re-stated here by Misak). The implications of this future-oriented notion of truth are equal parts baffling and fascinating.

However, in a different vein from Nathan, I would like to offer a soft criticism of this article’s understanding of pragmatism (though Stern will likely be subject to this criticism as well). Particularly, I think there is a failure to appreciate pragmatism as first and foremost a theory of action or, in the late Richard J. Bernstein’s words, a “philosophy of praxis”. I recognize that the length of this comment is getting rather large, and I do not wish to impose on you an explanation of a philosophical movement you may not care for, so I’ll end with a quote from Erkki Kilpinen on the subject and recommend two papers from him, which are freely available if you so choose – “Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Action” and “Habit, Action, and Knowledge from the Pragmatist Perspective”.

Classical Pragmatism completely discarded the above understanding about ’habit’ [as unconscious action] and its role in human action. It redefined this term, so that it hardly is an exaggeration to call it the basic concept in classical Pragmatism. Needless to say, the meaning of the term then undergoes a radical transformation. In its Pragmatist usage, it does not refer to the routine character, but instead to the process character of human action. For Pragmatism, action is an already ongoing process, not a series of instantaneous, discrete actions. Human intentionality, rationality and moral responsibility are not forgotten, but Pragmatism situates them inside the habitual process of action, not outside, as is the traditional understanding.

To make one last reference to Heschel, it is worth recalling his writings on prayer, in particular his claim that “prayer in Judaism is an act in the messianic drama. We utter the words of the Kaddish: Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He has created according to His will. Our hope is to enact, to make real the magnification and sanctification of this name here and now.” This is the essential proclamation, in my view, of pragmatic spirituality.

Second post on “Listening to non-pragmatists” (7 Apr. 2024)

Apologies for the incomplete paragraph in the middle there. I got carried away writing the rest of the comment and seem to have forgotten to finish it. What I was going to go for there was simply a point about how Peirce expanded his notion of experience later in life. To quote Misak (quoting Peirce):

For Peirce, experience is a very broad notion—it is anything that is forced upon one. Perception, for instance, goes far beyond what our ears, eyes, nose, and skin report. He says, “anything is, for the purposes of logic, to be classed under the species of perception wherein a positive qualitative content is forced upon one’s acknowledgement without any reason or pretension to reason. There will be a wider genus of things partaking of the character of perception, if there be any matter of cognition which exerts a force upon us . . .” (CP 7. 623, 1903.)

A sensation or observation does not have to be caused by one’s senses, for it ‘is merely an idea arising in the mind, and not produced by previous ideas’. Peirce takes anything that is compelling, surprising, brute, or impinging to be an experience, regardless of what causes us to feel compelled and regardless of whether we can identify the source of the compulsion. He says that ‘By brutally I mean without appealing to our voluntary reasoning.’ (MS 339, ‘The Logic Notebook’, 15 Oct. 1908.) Something impinges upon us if its ‘immediate efficacy nowise consists in conformity to rule or reason’ (CP 6. 454, 1908). And: ‘The course of life has developed certain compulsions of thought which we speak of collectively as Experience.’ (CP 8. 101, 1900.)

This is relevant due to the contrast with Segall’s “minimalist model” – he does not appear to appreciate ‘experience’ as the vital force it was for the pragmatists (see Steven Levine on the subject). A model which “restricts itself to the kinds of claims that modern Westerners can potentially endorse without reservation” is not really worth much of anything, because it denies this the centrality of experience, broadly construed, in forming our beliefs. His discussion of rebirth, as you note, is a prime example of this. Our ‘background beliefs’, the “preexisting prior beliefs” of a given society, are not set in stone, they are historically contingent and infinitely fallible in light of experience. Neither are they, as you recognize, relative – either rebirth (or some variant of rebirth) is true and will be held to be true no matter what or it is false and future experience will deem it to be false.

Third post on “Listening to non-pragmatists” (8 Apr. 2024)

A final addition, just to entirely clarify the missing paragraph because I realize now that I probably did properly understand some of Segall’s arguments, is a response to the particular arguments regarding truth. In particular, a comment you highlighted in the previous blog post:

I think it’s best to give up claims to anything being “ultimate reality” — when have such claims ever gotten us anywhere useful in the past? — and also to give up on a single integrated theory that can include everything—everything being not only the nature of mind and material reality, not only quantum mechanics and relativity, but also ethical, aesthetic, historical, and political “reality.” Instead we can come up with “little” theories that partially describe and predict within one or two domains in ways that are useful for us given our purposes and projects in the world. If the little theories are in some ways incompatible, so be it, as long as they are useful in their domains of application. A “larger” theory of how disparate domains might be interelated is something we may aspire to but may be beyond our reach for now. For me the question of nondual vs. dualistic accounts is purely pragmatic—if I view the world through a nondual lens, are their certain problems that are important to me that seem to yield valuable insights I wouldn’t have gotten had I viewed the world through a dualistic lens, and vice versa. I’m not sure there is anything one can meaningfully say beyond that.

While I share Segall’s skepticism toward what I’ll term ‘worldview philosophies’, there is a fundamental distinction between skepticism of such ‘big thinking’, which I take to mean a fundamentally agnostic view of their utility, and a denial outright of their place in inquiry. I would agree with Segall that truth is “always tentative and partial”, but he seems to take that in a different meaning. I very much agree with him when he claims that “modern Western science is on the wrong foot in its insistence on a clockwork universe which leaves no room for purpose, intention, awareness, or any grounding for moral and aesthetic values.” However, to state that Western science must give up the possibility of knowing anything about the ‘ultimate reality’ is a decidedly unpragmatic notion. It is breaking Peirce’s ‘sole rule of reason’: “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Such a claim does not merely reorient the scientific process, it undermines it.

An important distinction in Peirce, which Segall does not appreciate, is that Peirce does not claim that we will know anything about the ‘ultimate reality’ or regarding ‘lost knowledge’; he claims that we must hope to know such things.

With regards to experience, I believe saying that Segall disregards it was a misreading on my part, and I apologize for that. The statements regarding ‘backgrounds beliefs’ may still hold true. Additionally, I believe that I was correct when I said that pragmatism is more properly thought of as a philosophy of action, and that this is a perspective that Segall is missing.

It’s inevitable that as we experience more, read more, and learn more, we eventually come to see our older ideas in a newer light. This newer light isn’t something we deliberately seek out—it just “happens” along the way. Is it ever otherwise? It seems consistent, howewer, with the Buddhist teachings on non-self and impermanence—there’s no unchanging you or me, and no unchanging understanding of Buddhism.

The important distinction Segall and Peirce here, as I referenced the fact that Peirce held experience to be something that “happens to us”, is that rather than Peirce’s “recalcitrant experience” which shocks one out of a dogmatic slumber, very much akin to the notions of Shinran and Heschel I referenced in the original post, Segall takes a much broader and gradual view. The issue is that this appears, ironically, to deny our agency even more than Peirce does. My issue is that Segall seems to view inquiry as something which happens rather than emerging with intentionality out of human action. For Peirce, an experience that throws one into doubt is simply the first step of inquiry, of the “scientific method” as he referred to it. This is not, as Erkki Kilpinen is quick to note, an individualistic perspective – Royce and Mead are essential reads for anyone who wishes to claim such – but it implies a level of agency arising from social action. I am especially critical of his statements on social evolution with this in mind, as he seems to endorse a rather mechanistic view of the concept compared to the classical pragmatists.

Dewey believed that there is no such thing as an essential human nature but only the way we happen to have turned out given a particular train of genetic and social evolution and personal experience. Human nature may change over time given further genetic and/or social change. All we can say is what humans are like now and what the historical record says we were like in the past. Can we humans overcome our selfishness, competitiveness, tribalism, and aggressiveness in some ideal future? We can’t appeal to some essential human nature to answer that question. The answer can only be “who knows?” and maybe, “we shall see.” In this way, Deweyans share the Zen attitude of “not knowing.”

Morality is also contingent on social evolution. What was moral for honor, warrior, or frontier cultures is not what is moral for industrialized Western democratic cultures today. Aristotle, in his day, did not extend his esteem for the Athenian male aristocracy to women, slaves, or barbarians. As pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty suggested, moral growth occurs through acts of imagination that allow us to understand the perspectives of people we once thought of as “not like us.” As we consider their perspectives and take them into account, we often enrich our own.

All this said, it is worth stating directly that I hope that I do not appear to be criticizing Segall with any sort of hostility – unfortunately, due to my autism, this can come across as such even when it is not at all intended. I have found his comments and blog very insightful, and we appear to be in a great deal of agreement, just having what Misak refers to as ‘family squabbles’ between pragmatists.

Nathan replies:

Hello Em, thanks for your interesting comments. One point I would question is: “The positions of James and Dewey seem to involve, by necessity, a continual questioning of our beliefs on the part of the individual that appears utterly unrealistic.” This may be more true of James than of Dewey (and the same for your claim that James and Dewey shift “the role of truth-making from the community of inquiry to the individual inquirer”), though it would take deeper knowledge of their whole works than I possess to say for certain. I remember that Colin Koopman criticized Dewey for the opposite reason (in “Genealogical pragmatism: how history matters for Foucault and Dewey”, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 5(3), 2011, 533–561):

Once our problems are evident and plain to see, it is clear that pragmatist reconstruction is an enormous resource. But if we sometimes need to force ourselves to confront problems where we assume that there are none, pragmatism (especially Dewey’s) is of little help in this project of teaching ourselves to doubt where belief is most firm. (Footnote 56: This criticism can be offered at a more general level as applicable to the pragmatist conception of inquiry as a motion from doubt to belief as exemplified in Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” [1877] in Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955). What pragmatism does not prepare us for is to undertake inquiries whose motion is in the opposite direction, namely from belief to doubt. I would argue that William James is an exception to this general tendency of the classical pragmatists, and that Richard Rorty among more recent pragmatisms is also a thinker of ironizing doubts.)

Koopman also has interesting things to say about what he frames as a conflict between metaphysical versus methodological pragmatism, which is related to Amod’s beefs with Seth’s book.

I think you’ve reached the wrong conclusions about some of Seth’s views in your third comment. You said: “An important distinction in Peirce, which Segall does not appreciate, is that Peirce does not claim that we will know anything about the ‘ultimate reality’ or regarding ‘lost knowledge’; he claims that we must hope to know such things.” I agree with the two sentences preceding this one, but I don’t see how what Seth said notably differs from what you are saying in this sentence. You also said: “The issue is that this appears, ironically, to deny our agency even more than Peirce does. My issue is that Segall seems to view inquiry as something which happens rather than emerging with intentionality out of human action.” I don’t think he’s denying agency; he’s talking about insight, not inquiry; inquiry is the action, and insight is one of the products. Insofar as the insight is a result of the acquisition and systematization of knowledge (cf. Nicholas Rescher’s coherentism again), saying that it “happens” is accurate and captures well how it feels (e.g., Graham Wallas in The Art of Thought, 1926: “we cannot influence it by a direct effort of will”); we initiate and guide the systematizing, but the insight comes from the knowledge system. Finally, you said: “I am especially critical of his statements on social evolution with this in mind, as he seems to endorse a rather mechanistic view of the concept compared to the classical pragmatists.” I think what Seth says here is pretty congruent with Dewey (e.g., his 1938 essay “Does human nature change?”) and pragmatic ethics in general (e.g., Elizabeth Anderson’s 2015 address “Moral bias and corrective practices: a pragmatist perspective”).

Reply to Nathan (10 Apr. 2024)

Hello Nathan,

You’re correct I was overstating the case re: Dewey and conflating his position with James’. Dewey’s view is unacceptable to me on different terms, which is his conflation of epistemology with political philosophy. In this regard, I would turn to Michael Oakeshott, but both Misak and Robert Talisse have also criticized Dewey on this point with relevance to this conversation. They accuse Dewey of not being able to account for “the fact of reasonable pluralism”, as Rawls puts it. This whole debate seems to be almost a rehash of that critique, though in different terms, as Segall’s view seems similarly ‘comprehensive’ in the way Misak and Talisse oppose.

This is where I’ll bring Oakeshott in and note that Segall here does seem to be engaging in what he calls the “politics of faith”. Oakeshott doesn’t mean religious faith here, but rather a political doctrine whereby

political decision and enterprise may be understood as a response to an inspired perception of what the common good is, or it may be understood as the conclusion which follows a rational argument; what it can never be understood as is a temporary expedient or just doing something to keep things going.

This is relevant to Lele’s critique that “[w]e must see their very different worldviews as more than just ‘resources’.” The opposition here, though mild, is that Segall is attempting to assert a pluralism through a political philosophy and worldview that cannot meaningfully account for it. Seth Vannatta argues that Dewey’s political philosophy is not subject to Oakeshott’s critique in Conservatism and Pragmatism, but I think he’s off-base here in light of Misak and Talisse’s critiques (for which I find his answers unsatisfying) – I would go so far as to say that Vannatta simply does not understand them. Regardless, I do not believe that Segall’s brand of pragmatism can adequately defend the pluralism he wants to go for. I believe Oakeshott and Vannatta would actually be of great benefit to him in this regard. Roy Tseng as well, though I consider his reading of Oakeshott to be rather idiosyncratic.

This is an entirely minor point, and I am only bringing this up because I was reading some history on the subject earlier, but I would like to point out that the notion “[t]here are some questions (e.g., foreign policy) that can only be addressed as a unified nation, and others that can be left to the laboratory of the states” is an argument derived from James Madison which was used to justify the institution of slavery throughout the Southern states. The reason I bring this up is due to the shared historicism between Segall and I. Oakeshott’s concept of a ‘civil association’, while superficially similar, avoids this issue through its conception of freedom as non-domination, “freedom from being legally subjected to the purposes of others.” (to lazily steal from the SEP) Additionally, I’m not convinced that Segall’s incrementalism holds up historically. To steal an analogy from geology, politics is neither gradualist nor catastrophist – it is a gradual process punctuated by occasional catastrophe. This is not to say that consensus in politics is unnecessary, but that these “intimations of a tradition” (Oakeshott’s phrasing) do not always take incremental forms. They can happen quite suddenly and, indeed, violently. Nonetheless, to quote Vannatta,

[A]lthough the 620,000 deaths of the U.S. Civil War played a role in the extension of civil rights, ultimately, the affections, sensibilities, and prejudices of the American people were and are the conditions for the possibility of real, melioristic reform. And while the genuine reforms were legal, the condition for the possibility of their occurrence was the change in cultural sensibilities and affections.

And, to quote Oakeshott directly one last time, because I love this quote in particular:

[Tradition] is neither fixed nor finished; it has no changeless centre to which understanding can anchor itself; there is no sovereign purpose to be perceived or invariable direction to be detected; there is no model to be copied, idea to be realized, or rule to be followed. Some parts of it may change more slowly than others, but none is immune from change. Everything is temporary.

On my understanding of Segall’s position on inquiry, I would acknowledge again that I appear to have misread him in an effort to clarify myself. However, my understanding of Rescher is unfortunately not as strong as I would like. The distinction between inquiry and insight seems to be precisely the sort of distinction that I read the pragmatists as arguing against – as Erkki Kilpinen notes, “for pragmatism human action also is a process; it is not a string of individual ‘actions’ that take place one at a time, as is the understanding in other major philosophies.” It’s additionally important to note here Peirce’s and the neo-Peircean emphasis on truth as that which would be agreed upon at a hypothetical end of inquiry. This is not an especially helpful formulation of this concept of truth, see Misak’s monograph on the matter, but it points out something important for this discussion here – that the neo-Peircean is kicking the can of truth down the road, such that a distinction between insight/inquiry doesn’t really make much sense. As Peirce says,

We cannot be quite sure that the community ever will settle down to an unalterable conclusion upon any given question. Even if they do so for the most part, we have no reason to think the unanimity will be quite complete, nor can we rationally presume any overwhelming consensus of opinion will be reached upon every question. All that we are entitled to assume is in the form of a hope that such conclusion may be substantially reached concerning the particular questions with which our inquiries are busied.

In this sense, inquiry would be more accurately described – as Kilpinen notes – as a process. Segall, obviously, is much more influenced by Dewey than Peirce, but the notions of impermanence and dependent arising seem to imply a similar sense of inquiry-as-process rather than inquiry-as-event. As he says, “the search for better beliefs is always an open-ended process of continued inquiry.”

The point about ‘lost knowledge’ is related to this and a direct response to Segall’s question “when have such claims ever gotten us anywhere useful in the past?” My point is that this seems to contradict a consistent fallibilism. To quote Peirce (for the last time, I promise):

But I may be asked what I have to say to all the minute facts of history, forgotten never to be recovered, to the lost books of the ancients, to the buried secrets … Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge? And then, after the universe is dead (according to the prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever, will not the shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to know it? To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough. Who would have said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human race has existed? Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred years? Who can guess what would be the result of continuing the pursuit of science for ten thousand years, with the activity of the last hundred? And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any question which might not ultimately be solved?

Segall comes very close to arguing for the Peircean position at times, which is why I emphasized that our disagreement is ultimately minor. For comparison, I criticized Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm in an abandoned paper for adopting what I called “a ‘misaligned’ Peircean pragmatism” (one of the few parts of that paper I would still stand by); with Segall, I barely view his position as misaligned. He is simply not as hopeful.

I was not especially clear concerning the social evolution bit, but I will admit that I do not believe that my criticism was accurate there. What I took issue with is not the notion of social evolution. I have written before about sociocultural evolution and am a massive admirer of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, who are theorists of sociocultural evolution. What I took issue with is how Segall emphasized the genetic aspect in a way that I felt created a distinction between genetic and social evolution; in essence, I took Segall to mean that they are distinct rather than interrelated forces. As Richerson and Boyd note,

Researchers in [the sociobiology tradition] emphasize that cultural evolution is molded by our evolved psychology, but not the reverse. As psychologist Charles Lumsden and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson put it, genes have culture on a leash. Culture can wander a bit, but if it threatens to get out of hand, its genetic master can bring it to heel. We think that this is only half the story. As we argued at length in the last chapter, heritable cultural variation responds to its own evolutionary dynamic, often leading to the evolution of cultural variants that would not be favored by selection acting on genes. The resulting cultural environments then can affect the evolutionary dynamics of alternative genes. Culture is on a leash, all right, but the dog on the end is big, smart, and independent. On any given walk, it is hard to tell who is leading who.

However, upon reflection, it appears self-evident that Segall was expressing something closer to Richerson & Boyd than Lumsden & Wilson here.

Nathan replies:

Em, I agree with a lot of what you said, but I’m not really with you at “a distinction between insight/inquiry doesn’t really make much sense”. I will grant that there is some overlap between the two terms. But based on my own experience and my knowledge of the psychological literature, I assume that insight, which my dictionary defines as “an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing” (or fact, situation, etc.), is not something that we entirely aim at and achieve intentionally. There is, I admit, a metaphysics behind my view (but other metaphysics could lead to the same conclusion): Our brains, and much else in our lives, are complex adaptive systems. No matter how skillful our executive functions are, they do not have so much control over our understanding that we can call it intentionally produced. Your first quote from Heschel can be interpreted as exemplifying this.

Reply to Nathan (11 Apr. 2024)

Nathan,

I’ve been considering the issue since my reply and I can definitely see a place for an insight/inquiry distinction on similar grounds to you. However, under such an understanding, it doesn’t make sense to talk about insight as a product of inquiry so much as a separate process. Inquiry, as understood by the classical pragmatists, is an intentional process with an aim of ‘getting things right’ or, at least, resulting in a belief. What you’re talking about and what Heschel was talking about seems entirely distinct from this. If we are talking about what happens when I knock on a table, then this simply falls under what Peirce refers to as ‘experience’ (or, more accurately, as firstness). If we are referring to something more akin to what Heschel calls ‘radical amazement’ or Shinran ‘shinjin’, then calling such a thing a product of inquiry seems to just be a category error.

If “insight” is meant to refer to errors of human judgement, or at least the irrational aspects of it, then it’s not an incorrect notion, but misses the key point (at least for Peirce and Dewey) that inquiry is a social and communal process. Peirce very much views the individual inquirer as reactive whereas the community of inquiry is proactive. I am referring to we-intentions when I talk about intentionality in inquiry.

However, there are nuances here that can’t really be discussed without turning the clock back on this conversation in order to fully explain Erkki Kilpinen’s arguments. I am just going to lazily quote from him, particularly from “Problems in Applying Peirce to Social Sciences”:

[W]e can pose the following question: if every train of thought is essentially inferential in character, what then does the human mind do, when it infers?

Peirce’s answer to this question is prima facie surprising, if expressed
in a laconic manner: the human mind does not actually ‘draw’ its inferences. In order to see what this means, recall what he said above about thought’s role in regard to motor action and conduct: it regulates them, rather than, say, produces them or brings them about. The idea of regulation is not confined to this task. Above, Peirce was perhaps unnecessary generous to his predecessor Wundt, by calling him the sole inventor of the idea that thought is essentially inferential. Rather, the truth is that Peirce brought to fruition Wundt’s original idea. Namely, his mature position is (cf. Murphey, 1961, pp. 359–60) that though every train of thought is potentially inferential, it does not have to be so actually. Peirce is famous for maintaining that logical reasoning takes place by means of self-control – in this it resembles ethics and is related to it – so that according to him a logical reasoner does not so much ‘draw’ his or her inferences. He or she rather receives ‘inferential candidates,’ in the stream of mental associations (CP 7.443-4f. [1893]), and out of these (s)he by means of self-control, by deciding whether to accept the association as a conclusion or not, makes genuine conclusions. “A logical reasoner is a reasoner who exercises great self-control in his intellectual operations”, is Peirce’s well-known position (EP 2:200–1 [1903]). The underlying idea is a bit like that of a gardener cultivating her flowers (cf. EP 1:354 [1893]). A gardener begins with great many seedlings, of which only a small minority will eventually flourish. Out of those seedlings, the gardener selects the most promising ones, nurtures them actively, and picks out of the ground and destroys the less promising ones. In this way she eventually produces a beautiful flower-bed, and I submit that the model in Peirce’s theory of reasoning is similar: a small minority of continuously flowing mental associations are eventually accepted as logical conclusions, and the procedure in doing this is precisely that of exercising self-control, as Peirce liked to say.

Nathan replies:

Em, calling insight a separate process makes sense. In my conception of it, insight is a psychological process, whereas inquiry is more or less a social epistemological process. What I meant by calling insight a product of inquiry (and I should additionally specify: a cognitive/experiential product, which is also a process) is this: Inquiry, as you just said, aims for belief or knowledge. Knowledge is more or less a knowledge system (due to the coherence aspect of knowledge). Insofar as we possess this knowledge system in the brain, it is input for insight. Therefore insight is (proximally) the product of this knowledge system, which is (distally) the product of inquiry. I don’t know much about Heschel, but in your quote he calls his “cognitive insight” “the climax of thought, indigenous to the climate that prevails at the summit of intellectual endeavor”. That does seem to imply, in my interpretation, that insight is a product, at least distally, of “intellectual endeavor”, i.e., inquiry. I love your latest Kilpinen quote. The garden metaphor is also used in Yogācāra-derived Buddhist philosophy to describe the mind, albeit in a different way. In my conception of insight, the garden is, to some degree, the output of inquiry and the input to insight.

Nathan replies:

Em, by the way, your latest Kilpinen quote reminds me of a book that may interest you if you don’t know it: C. A. Hooker’s Reason, Regulation, and Realism: Toward a Regulatory Systems Theory of Reason and Evolutionary Epistemology (State University of New York Press, 1995). It makes some claims very much like Kilpinen’s but in the idiom of complex adaptive systems and without reference to Peirce (but with lengthy discussions of Popper, Rescher, and Piaget).

Notes Toward an Analysis of Political Violence

These are some comments which I’ve been writing over the past 2 months on the question of political violence. I share these entirely unedited from my personal notes; as such, they are not entirely clear nor concise. They contain contradictions and questionable claims. Originally, I had planned to write a post on this topic, the fragment of which is included here, but I believe that this topic deserves greater study and effort than a WordPress article written at 3AM.

My mind is not made up on the question and I doubt it will be for a long time. Reading back on what I wrote even a week ago, I am unsure as to how much I would agree with it now. I do not believe I have read enough in order to speak on the topic with any degree of certainty or authority; in posting this here, I do not endorse it as some sort of ‘final word’ from myself—rather, I hope to “keep myself honest” and recognize the full evolution of my thought on the topic, good and bad. Too many of us present a sanitized version of ourselves, where we seek to eliminate our faults and hide where we have gone wrong. It is keeping against this, which I am myself very guilty, that I post here and try to say, “I am wrong! I am know nothing! I make mistakes!” For someone who can fall very easily to arrogance and unwarranted confidence, i.e. me, this exercise becomes all the more important.

First Notes on Political Violence (16 Mar. 2024)

1. there is no consistent basis on which we can condemn wholesale the use of violence in politics. this is particularly true if such “violence” is not committed against persons. the only meaningful distinction between forms of resistance is between violence against persons and violence against non-persons. further, attempting to discern the right and wrong of political action before it has occurred is meaningless.
2. we are, however, under no duty to support such violence – as in, there is no obligation for any individual to engage in (un)civil resistance. there is no duty for victims to resist injustice inflicted upon them nor is there a right to resistance.
3. it is possible to criticize society, and to enage politically within society, without seeking to order or plan society. more relevant, violence is not necessarily ideological. there is little planning involved in a riot. a riot akin to those of the BLM movement, in a sense, is the most radical expression of what Oakeshott called the “intimation of tradition” – the need for change in light of contradiction between lived experience and law. if politics is a form of conversation, then such actions reveal a demand to listen; “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

to expand on #1, I see no problem with violence in the abstract. it is possible to criticize violence as an expression of something which should be opposed, but i do not think it is possible to criticize violence because it is violence. what matters is only that such action emerges spontaneously.

this makes the point about “intimation of a tradition” more important, because that is what allows us to distinguish the pursuit of intimations in the name of power (e.g. race riots, keeping with the theme) and those in the name of equality (e.g. the aforementioned George Floyd protests). because we are able to recognize the dynamics of power within society, we are able to recognize that whereas the latter seeks to expand the conversation, to broaden our notion of politics, the former seeks to restrict it. thus, we are capable of saying that there is a difference between Charlottesville and Ferguson.

Second Notes on Political Violence (31 Mar. 2024)

listening to the war stories of It Could Happen Here have probably ‘radicalized’ me against violence. which is to say, i have moved from a more ambivalent position to completely denying the possibility of a “just” war.

though i’m mostly talking about warfare here, the question of political violence raises its head.

1. there is no duty to resist and there does not exist a right to resistance.
2. there is no such notion as a “just cause” for the usage of political violence.
3. as Lenin said, “[w]e are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. my thoughts on this statement should be obvious and will go unsaid.” however, Lenin is correct that any analysis of violence must avoid utopianism, i.e. you cannot base your political or social practice on an ideal. if your analysis is unable to account of the conditions of the real world, if it is unable to say that the oppressed have committed no wrong in acting against their oppressors, then it is not merely moribund – it is entirely useless. thus we turn to two concepts: rationalism and non-domination.

let us begin with “non-domination”. this is the republican conception of freedom, i.e. freedom from non-domination. “domination” here refers to domination by arbitrary power, i.e. power that is not “reliably controlled by effective rules, procedures, or goals that are common knowledge to all persons or groups concerned.”

“Rationalism” is a concept we will appropriate from Michael Oakeshott to denote, roughly, the notion that there are universal principles one can deduce from politics. in other words, ‘rationalism’ denotes the concept that political principles are not mere assertions, but truths. a useful distinction one can make here, given my noted sympathy for Charles Sanders Peirce, is between the study based on reason and study based on sentiment. politics and morality are fundamentally sentimental affairs which hold no ground for reason; thus, they are not subject to inquiry. this has, funnily enough, been noted by empirical studies of how people come to and justify their political and moral beliefs, how they engage in political action. this does not mean that there is nothing to be said about politics or morality, but it has an important implication: the only things we can meaningfully state about either are theoretical.

we will recognize our beliefs as historically contingent. this is an appropriation from Rorty, but we differ from Rorty in applying it specifically to those beliefs for which there can be no ‘end to inquiry’, i.e. moral and political beliefs. the value pluralism of figures such as Berlin or Galston likely has something to say here, but i have not read their works. though we must reject any form of rationalism in politics, though we must turn away from any programmatism, the recognition of contingency frees us to consider politics on a normative level without giving ground to metaphysics and rationalism.

Oakeshott refers to the “intimation of tradition” – if we extend our recognition of politics as sentiment, then it becomes apparent that what Oakeshott is referring to is the contradiction between the social practice of a society and its social sentiments or, as i stated it initially, “the need for change in light of contradiction between lived experience and law.” it is on this basis that we are capable of distinguishing between acts of violence, because it is plainly obvious that not all acts of violence should stand on equal grounds. by recognizing that political action expresses itself through this form of an ‘intimation’ and that we hold the contingent belief that freedom is equivalent to non-domination, we may meaningfully sort between different acts of non-state violence. it will be stated, but not expanded upon, that I believe a consistent application of the principle condemns all acts of warfare, as war is an expression of arbitrary power against non-combatant populations. attempts to apply rules to war in order to make such power non-arbitrary, and thus make make war just, cannot leave the realm of the theoretical.

returning to political violence, let’s quote from the previous, which i believe holds up:

it is possible to criticize society, and to enage politically within society, without seeking to order or plan society. more relevant, violence is not necessarily ideological. there is little planning involved in a riot. a riot akin to those of the BLM movement, in a sense, is the most radical expression of what Oakeshott called the “intimation of tradition” – the need for change in light of contradiction between lived experience and law. if politics is a form of conversation, then such actions reveal a demand to listen; “a riot is the language of the unheard.” … because we are able to recognize the dynamics of power within society, we are able to recognize that whereas the latter seeks to expand the conversation, to broaden our notion of politics, the former seeks to restrict it. thus, we are capable of saying that there is a difference between Charlottesville and Ferguson.

put more simply, with the added analysis of non-domination, we may state that an act of political violence may be differentiated on the basis of whether it serves to reinforce or combat arbitrary power. this does not free those committing acts of violence entirely – we will note that we may hold contingent beliefs about morality which do not intersect with their beliefs on politics. for example, one can condemn political violence on entirely moral grounds. however, for the purposes of this analysis, we restrict the discussion to political philosophy. however, such an analysis allows us to transform our sentiments into a practical philosophy of action – we are capable of condemning injustice without being irresolute in our beliefs and without appealing to abstractions.

Notes on Sentiment (31 Mar. 2024)

on “sentiment”:

Grayling’s dismissal of abductive inferences depends on his treating them as deductive inferences and then finding that the results of abduction are not as firm as the results of deduction. If, however, we treat abductions as abductions, then we may put them to the test. What he says elsewhere is quite helpful in making this test: “Our moods are like tunings on the wireless, picking up truths at different frequencies, so that if we do not know the gamut of human feelings, neither can we know the gamut of truth.”

In other words, our sentiments are literally attuned to truth. It might help to give some context: Grayling makes this argument in order to foster compassion for those who suffer from depression, arguing that in fact the range of emotions are to be embraced because they are epistemically valuable. Perhaps despite his best intentions, Grayling’s statement comes remarkably close to Peirce’s position when Peirce argues that one may come to belief in God in a scientific spirit. Peirce, in his “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” reminds us several times of the importance of performing any inquiry into the reality of God in what he calls “Scientific singleness of heart.” This is a phrase Peirce has evidently borrowed from the Anglican liturgy and, in turn, from the book of the Acts of the Apostles. In other words, it is a phrase in which Peirce has taken the language of prayer and shown how it is relevant to science. Theological thinking should not take presuppositions as our unquestioned guides, but rather it should allow meditation and contemplation to lead where they will. The “Neglected Argument” is not an attempt to prove God’s existence but to examine how, in a certain spirit of scientific inquiry, instinctive sentiment emerges from a kind of prayerful contemplation into novel belief.

you can replace the word ‘sentiment; with “abduction” but ‘sentiment’ is actually clearer here due to the shift in understanding of abductive reasoning from Peirce to the present – with Peirce understanding abduction as an essentially instinctive, habitual part of reasoning. ‘instrument’ could also work, but it’s a cold phrase.

Peirce’s outline of the scientific method goes abduction –> induction –> deduction. abduction is that initial point, the point where you come into some experience that makes you fall in doubt and so you form some hypothesis to explain it. obviously, i don’t literally believe in a three-step process to thought, but a good way to express the epistemological nature of questions in ethics, politics, social philosophy, theology, etc. would be that they form explanatory hypotheses and then stop. there is no further inquiry. i do not agree with Misak and Talisse that ethical or political statement can be rendered true through a process of inquiry, that democracy can be justified on epistemic grounds, and i think much of their proposals are functionally identical to the Deweyan democracy they criticize. the only things which ground our beliefs in the social arena are habit, sentiment, and tradition. sentiment informs habit, habit informs tradition, tradition informs sentiment, and so on (and it goes the other way, too, obviously).

Dewey argues that the function of value judgments is to guide human conduct, understood broadly to include conscious and unconscious bodily motion, observation, reflection, imagination, judgment, and affective responses. There are three levels of conduct: impulse, habit, and reflective action. These differ according to how far they are guided by ideas of what one is doing.

Abandoned WordPress Article (11 Apr. 2024)

It is useful in this time to return to The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James’ book on the Haitian Revolution, in order to

While it is no

The brutality by which we may see old men and women shot dead in the streets or cities turned to dust does not deserve our enthusiastic support—to paraphrase C.L.R. James, such actions are not policy, but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics. In this sense, it is important to temper any analysis which may lead us to take a favorable view of mob violence with the recognition of the unpredictability of political action, especially spontaneous political action. Order that may form from this spontaneity is not guaranteed to take a just form.

In a comment for Amod Lele’s wonderful blog Love of All Wisdom, I described politics through an analogy from geology—a gradual process punctuated by occasional catastrophe. Through this lens, I meant to describe events such as the American and French revolutions, the English and American civil wars, and other such ‘catastrophic’ occurrences—my argument here approaches, on different terms, one made by Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler. However, we may likewise view the varying degrees of violence during the multiple civil rights movements, these so-called “Black uprisings”, through this concept.

Does Matt McManus Understand Conservatism?

I previously wrote a brief post reacting to a piece I had read by Matt McManus on Michael Oakeshott’s political philosophy in Quillette. Initially, I was going to leave the subject there, but I unfortunately seem to have a bone to pick with Matt.

McManus seems incapable of understanding philosophy outside of his Kantian, Rawlsian presuppositions. This is most clear when he makes reference to the conservative critique of ‘rationalism’ — what he conceives of as ‘rationalism’ is not what conservative philosophers refer to. It is certainly not what Burke, Oakeshott, or even Hayek were referring to in their respective critiques.

I quoted directly from several authors in the previous article. To make a point about how elementary this misunderstanding is, I will quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here.

What Oakeshott calls “Rationalism” is the belief, in his view illusory, that there are “correct” answers to practical questions. It is the belief that an action or policy is rational only when it rests on knowledge whose truth can be demonstrated. Its error is thinking that correct decisions can be made simply by applying rules or calculating consequences. In an early essay, Oakeshott distinguishes between “technical” and “traditional” knowledge. Technical knowledge is knowledge, whether of facts or rules, that is easily learned and applied, even by those who are without experience. Traditional knowledge, in contrast, is “knowing how” rather than “knowing that” (Ryle 1949). It is acquired by engaging in an activity and involves judgment in handling facts or rules (RP 12–17). Knowledge often involves an element of rule-following but using rules skillfully or prudently means going beyond the instructions they provide. Even a simple rule, like “no vehicles in the park” (Hart 1958), implies an element of judgment, in this case what counts as a vehicle. This holds for collective as well as individual decisions and for political as well as private ones. But if technical knowledge has limits, so does traditional knowledge. We cannot conclude that experience and judgment are infallible: clearly, they are not.

Political deliberation occurs when a public decision needs to be made and a proposed course of action defended. But deciding which course of action to pursue involves more than simply applying rules or calculating costs and benefits. It requires interpretation and judgment. We must decide which rule to use and then interpret what the rule means in a given situation. If, alternatively, we choose an action based on its likely consequences, we must assess the expected value of those consequences, and this involves making value judgments as well as estimating probabilities. Whether we are applying rules or calculating outcomes, we must work with what we presume to be facts, though these are always uncertain in various ways. For these reasons, there is never a demonstrably correct course of action. Political arguments cannot be proved or disproved; they can only be shown to be more or less convincing than other such arguments. Political discourse, then, is a discourse of contingencies and conjectures, not of certainties or context-independent truths. It is persuasive and rhetorical, not a matter of demonstration or proof (RP 70–95).

These are familiar points, made by Oakeshott with particular clarity. What he adds to other philosophical discussions of practical reasoning, such as Aristotle’s treatment of techne and phronēsis (Nichomachean Ethics 1142a) or Kant’s remarks on judgment as the middle term between rules and applications (Kant 1793: 8:275), are reflections on how practical, and in particular political, discourse can cause disasters when these points are overlooked. His conclusions rest on a dissection of ideological politics, which, Oakeshott thought, reflects a characteristically modern disposition to substitute rules for judgment in practical reasoning. The rules that are thought to govern practice are not independent of practical activity but abstracted from it. They are “abridgments” of customs, habits, traditions, and skills (RP 121). To borrow language from Michael Walzer, they are interpretations rather than discoveries or inventions (Walzer 1987). And what they interpret are ways of doing things:

the pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. (RP 51)

Rationalists, unaware of the local origins of the universal principles that they imagine they have identified, reject knowledge gained through experience in favor of something they call reason or science. Whether deductive or computational, this abstract reason is thought to guarantee greater certainty than experience and judgment can provide. The fallacy of Rationalism, in other words, is that the knowledge that it identifies as rational is itself really a product of experience and judgment. It consists of rules, methods, or techniques abstracted from practice—tools that, far from being substitutes for experience and judgment, cannot be effectively used in their absence.

The SEP is not an infallible institution; however, Terry Nardin is one of the foremost interpreters of Oakeshott. Likewise, authors such as Paul Franco and Efraim Podoksik have all argued similarly in their interpretations of Oakeshott.

The point of this exercise is not to proclaim these views as the interpretation of Oakeshott upon which all others must rest; it is to criticize McManus for his apparent complete lack of engagement with secondary sources on Oakeshott (or, in the cases of The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, even primary sources). His interpretation of Oakeshott is a very particular and contested one that shares arguments with Aryeh Botwinick and his monograph Michael Oakeshott’s Skepticism—a reading that has been viciously criticized by the aforementioned Oakeshott scholars.

What I want is not deference to authority, it is humility—the humility to not write about subjects upon which one cannot speak. To summon the spirit of Mao once more,

Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense.

It should be admitted that misunderstandings are not uncommon, and I have engaged in severe misunderstanding as in my failed attempt to critique Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, but it should be noted that McManus is not merely using a misreading to assert scholarly critique, there are explicitly political implications to the critique. If conservatism is what McManus says it is, then it would be logical—even necessary—for a person of the 21st century to reject it. And we certainly must reject a conservatism—we must, for example, reject out of hand the radical conservatism of the American right. However, McManus is not content to offer a rejection of modern conservatism; he must, in one fell swoop, cut the head off the conservative snake.

In doing so, he presents an entirely ahistorical argument which attempts to collapse the traditionalism of Burke and Oakeshott with that of right-wing radicalism—which descends, most properly, from classical liberalism and the history of (neo-)Confederate white supremacism. It is on this point where McManus makes a classic error—that of viewing his enemy as a monolithic whole. The category confusion of modern American conservatism, which is itself a self-admittedly radical doctrine, leads McManus to be unable to mentally distinguish between reaction and conservation. One needs to only read a single article by Rothbard to see this distinction in full force.

In this sense, the ‘postmodern conservatism’ which McManus (rightfully) opposes shares greater commonality in their method of governance with the Jacobins than Burke. This is a comment on the style of their politics rather than their location. They are the rationalists which Oakeshott sought to set himself against—what is Project 2025 if not the culmination of this undercurrent in American thought, the victory of self-created ideals over material reality? Even so-called ‘conservatives’ such as Yoram Hazony, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule who seek to reclaim ‘conservatism’ from neoliberalism are not rejecting rationalism in their political theory, they are enshrining it. There is little distinction between they who seek a ‘renewal’ of traditional institutions and the Southern secessionists who declared their break from the Union on the basis of “states’ rights” (to enslave others), whereupon their method of governance began to break entirely with the tradition of American democracy and slide further into self-serving, antidemocratic autocracy. They are not conservatives, they are revolutionaries, as in the style of George Fitzhugh when he wrote in 1863,

These doctrines of Locke put into distinct and imposing form, in the Declaration of Independence, and exported from America to France, acted like a torpedo shot into a magazine. They blew up first the French monarchy, and soon thereafter all the monarchies of Western Europe, but established in their stead, not the absurdity of a “consent government,” but the great military despotism of Bonaparte.…

We now come to the Southern Revolution of 1861, which we maintain was reactionary and conservative—a rolling back of the excesses of the Reformation—of Reformation run mad—a solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality and the social contract, as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Say, Tom Paine, and the rest of the infidel political economists who maintain that the world is too much governed, “Pas trop gouverner,” and should not be governed at all, but “Let alone,” “Laissez nous faire.” This reaction commenced in 1840, as we have said, under the lead of Calhoun, Tyler, and R. M. T. Hunter—Kendall, and Blair, and Benton, and their base, radical and destructive clique, were then ousted from their places as leaders of the Southern Democracy, and the States Rights Whig party took their places and controlled the action of the South. In truth, the Democratic party of the South became Whig and conservative, but retained its name and its offices. The reason of this new departure was, that it was perceived that the doctrines of Jefferson and of the other illustrious Fathers of the Republic were being successfully employed to justify abolition and to upset the whole social system of the South—besides, excluding her from equal or any participation in the public lands, most of which she had acquired against the protests of the North, that was now greedily and rapaciously seeking to monopolize them.…

We may likewise quote the vice president of the Confederate States, Alexander H. Stephens, who wrote that

The old Constitution set out with a wrong idea on this subject; it was based upon an erroneous principle; it was founded upon the idea that African Slavery is wrong, and it looked forward to the ultimate extinction of that institution. But time has proved the error, and we have corrected it in the new Constitution.

We have based ours upon principle of the inequality of races, and the principle is spreading — it is becoming appreciated and better understood; and though there are many, even in the South, who are still in the shell upon this subject, yet the day is not far distant when it will be generally understood and appreciated…

It is Peter Viereck, one of the most prescient and biting critics of the American right-wing, who rightfully noted that the conservative movement of the 1950’s onwards represented a fundamental break, much as the counter-revolution of the 1860’s had, with these traditions.

The historic content of conservatism stands, above all, for two things: organic unity and rooted liberty. Today the shell of the “conservative” label has become a chrysalis for the opposite of these two things: at best for atomistic Manchester liberalism, opposite of organic unity; at worst for thought-controlling nationalism, uprooting the traditional liberties (including the 5th Amendment) planted by America’s founders.

The response of McManus may be to state that ‘conservatism’ can be considered to be nothing more than what so-called ‘conservatives’ consider themselves to be—this is a fair critique; however, it belies the broader point. If we are to adopt such a view, then our concept of ‘conservatism’ must be evolutionary. It must recognize the historical contingency and ever-changing nature of human thought. In this sense, the attempts by McManus to collapse Burke and Oakeshott into the pantheon of modern American conservatism appear even more dishonest.

Oakeshott is a strange thinker and one who cannot be easily collapsed into any system of political thought. In unpublished writings, I have written defenses of #BlackLivesMatter and even riots in response to police brutality on Oakeshottian grounds. He has been referred to both in defense of neoliberalism and in critique of it. To call him a progenitor, or even an ‘anticipation’, of ‘postmodern conservatism’ is to merely repeat the same nonsensical lies of American conservatives regarding the Frankfurt School that McManus has himself criticized. The fact that McManus defends the Frankfurt School against accusations of irrationalism, while falsely accusing the very similar arguments of Oakeshott of indulging in irrationalism, is not lost on me.

In the previous article, I referenced Rorty’s debt to Oakeshott. However, this should not be misconstrued as a statement that Oakeshott would have agreed with Rorty—Rorty was notorious for his idiosyncratic interpretations of varying thinkers. As Seth Vannatta has convincingly argued in Conservatism and Pragmatism, the thought of Oakeshott shares greater commonality with that of Peirce and Dewey than it does Rorty. The positions of the classical pragmatists can, likewise, not be collapsed into the positions of Rorty and the neopragmatists—see Erkki Kilpenen’s work on pragmatism’s theory of action and Steven Levine’s wonderful book Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience for why. The classical pragmatists may be opposed to McManus’ conception of philosophy, but they are not ‘postmodernists’ in any sense of the term. In particular, as Steven Levine has argued, they held an entirely different view of experience than Rorty’s later emphasis on language that McManus views as key to the postmodern philosophy.

Whether McManus even understands the “postmodernism” he criticizes is another topic which I may decide to write about another day.

A Very Bad Article on Oakeshott

This is a brief and informal write-up to note my strong disagreement with—and great disappointment in—Matt McManus and his postmodern reading of Michael Oakeshott for his article in Quillette, Michael Oakeshott and the Intellectual Roots of Postmodern Conservatism. The project of reading Oakeshott through a postmodern lens is always precarious, and one I do not believe holds under close scrutiny, but McManus’ attempt to draw a link between Oakeshott and modern right-wing radicalism (what he refers to as “postmodernism conservatism”) is especially egregious. McManus writes,

More importantly, Oakeshott anticipated the positions of many postmodern conservatives today. For instance, postmodern conservatives are reticent to trust rationalistic arguments made by cosmopolitan “elites” who stress that we have moral obligations to all individuals, regardless of where they come from. Instead, politicians like Donald Trump and Victor Orban stress that they are “nationalists” who believe that our primary moral obligations will always be to those who look and act like us. Of course, a rationalist might counter that these factors are highly arbitrary. It is purely an accident that one is born an American or Hungarian, as it is purely accidental that refugees from Latin America or Syria were born into unstable countries where they faced serious risk of violence.

Nonetheless, these factors matter to postmodern conservatives for reasons that would have been familiar to Oakeshott. The insistence that we concern ourselves with individuals with whom we have little in common is implicitly an insistence that maintaining traditional practices, and the sense of identity and meaning they provide, is at best a secondary concern next to our universal obligations. This rationalistic emphasis that we accept the “unfamiliar” into our communities, along with the skeptical injunction that we examine why we attach so much moral significance to arbitrary factors like who belongs to what nation, destabilize the postmodern conservative worldview. For this reason, postmodern conservatives are committed to combatting such positions wherever possible.

This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of Oakeshott that I am baffled it was not only written by a professor of politics, but one who has written multiple works on conservatism and right-wing thought. McManus has referred to Edmund Neill before, so perhaps it would do him some good to read his wonderful volume on the man. Quote Neill,

Rather than claiming that liberty should be valued because we have a fundamental right to it as human beings, or because it enables us to develop our abilities to the full, as we have seen for Oakeshott its value ultimately remains related to the tradition into which we have been socialized. Although Podoksik is undoubtedly right to suggest that Oakeshott intends us to enjoy the individualism that has fortunately developed in modernity, therefore, ultimately this is something that must be put down to good fortune – unlike most liberal thinkers, Oakeshott has no rational justification for the individualism that has appeared in modernity, just as he has no justification for the fortunate development of a sophisticated plurality of non-philosophical theoretical disciplines that enable us to understand the world fruitfully.

The similarity between Oakeshott and Rorty here should be immediately obvious. Indeed, Rorty owes a great debt to Oakeshott in his own statement of liberalism—a fact which McManus seems, in spite of his comment that Oakeshott’s outlook “rivals that of Richard Rorty in his most postmodern moments”—unaware of. Regardless, why McManus assigns to ‘the rationalist’ Oakeshott’s own position—i.e., the notion that the traditions with which we identify are historically contingent, ‘pure accidents’ as he phrases it—is a question in need of an answer.

McManus makes no reference to Oakeshott’s theories of enterprise association and civil association, or to his distinction between modes of experience, which are both vital in bringing context to Rationalism in Politics. I do not know why he chose to do so.

Additionally, McManus does not appear to understand what Oakeshott means when he is criticizing “rationalism”. He begins with a discussion of utilitarianism, and appears to equate utilitarian reason with “rationalism” in Oakeshott’s terminology. Oakeshott uses Bentham as an example of a ‘rationalist’, to be sure’, but this is an altogether minor point—in Oakeshott’s own words, “so far as authority is concerned, nothing in this field can compare with the work of Marx and Engels. European politics without these writers would still have been deeply involved in Rationalism, but beyond question they are the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms[.]” Additionally, Oakeshott’s discussion of the “early history of the United States of America” as a rationalist enterprise makes little sense if we tie his understanding of ‘rationalism’ to Bentham’s project of utilitarianism. Oakeshott is referring to something broader, something which contaminates all political thought.

Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by ‘reason’ and satisfied according to the technique ofan ideology: they are the politics of the book. And this also is characteristic of almost all contemporary politics: not to have a book is tobe without the one thing necessary, and not to observe meticulously what is written in the book is to be a disreputable politician.

The most questionable aspect of McManus’ article, however, is his reading of Oakeshott’s The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism. He writes,

Oakeshott formulates much the same point in a somewhat different manner in his essay “The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism.” There he concedes that the traditionalist reason with which he is contrasting rationalism is predicated on a kind of “faith.” We morally privilege those individuals and practices emerging from our traditions because they provide us with a sense of constancy and stability. Echoing Russell Kirk’s claim that a progressive is someone who rationalistically asks “What is?” while a conservative asks “What does this mean?” Oakeshott conceded that the practices flowing from these traditions could not be defended by pure reason. But that is not their chief virtue. Traditions help us establish a continuity with the past, and so emphasize what is familiar and known in the present and future.

By contrast, a politics of skepticism must continuously criticize the present by showcasing how many of our beliefs and practices have no rational epistemic or normative basis. Politically, this leads the skeptical rationalist to demand traditions be overturned where they cannot be shown to conform to their conception of reason.

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism both is not an essay and does not make the claims that McManus assigns to it here. One can only conclude that McManus has not read the work he is citing, because this is explained in Timothy Fuller’s introduction to the book. I will quote basically the entire section here, just to emphasize how absurdly off-base McManus is here:

Oakeshott, of course, described himself as a sceptic, ‘one who would do better if only he knew how’. In the present work, he expresses more fully and poetically that:

[The] disturbed vision of the weakness and wickedness of mankind and the transitoriness of human achievement, sometimes profoundly felt (as in Donne and Herbert), sometimes philosophically elaborated (as in Hobbes, Spinoza and Pascal), sometimes mild and ironical (as in Montaigne and Burton), was, when it turned to contemplate the activity of governing, the spring of a political scepticism . . . which detracts from the allure of the gilded future foreseen in the vision of faith. In practice, the politics of scepticism is not identical to philosophical scepticism which is sceptical about the politics of scepticism as well as the politics of faith. The animating spirit of each kind of politics encounters its ‘nemesis’ whenever the urge to an unmitigated expression of its pure or ideal form takes over. The politics of faith is ever susceptible to the latest plans for improved Towers of Babel; the politics of scepticism too readily devolves into mere playing by the rules of the game, denying the extraordinary.

In practice, the politics of scepticism is not identical to philosophical scepticism which is sceptical about the politics of scepticism as well as the politics of faith. The animating spirit of each kind of politics encounters its ‘nemesis’ whenever the urge to an unmitigated expression of its pure or ideal form takes over. The politics of faith is ever susceptible to the latest plans for improved Towers of Babel; the politics of scepticism too readily devolves into mere playing by the rules of the game, denying the extraordinary.

To advance beyond this ambiguous legacy of ‘faith’ and ‘scepticism’ would demand wisdom and insight Oakeshott does not think we can attain. There is little to be gained by pushing to the extreme one ideal or the other, and there is an enormous risk: the misfortune of seeing the present ‘as an interlude between night and day’, and thus only as an ‘uncertain twilight’. The extremes imply that the abstract form of either ideal corresponds to a latent order concealed within, distorted by, or expected to come to pass in and through action in history. But history has no ideal pattern and no end state, either inevitable or willed to be. Those who pursue such things will always be foiled in the effort to put them into practice and will cause a lot of pain in the process.

If the politics of faith overestimates the possibilities for human action, the politics of scepticism will underestimate or fail to recognize them. Neither the politics of faith nor the politics of scepticism can comprehend the whole of politics. The assertion of the one evokes the counter-assertion of the other, continually recreating the held on which we must operate. We cannot devise any simple principles or propositions to master the complex held of action in which we are situated. Thus politics, in Oakeshott’s now famous formulation, is ‘the pursuit of intimations’. What is needed, then, is the trimmer: the one who understands the political tradition comprehensively, not chafing at its constraints, yet willing to consider new possibilities.

There is no mistake-proof manner of deciding what should be done. We cannot know that because we have managed to get through one situation we shall do well (or not so well) in the next. This is true for all practitioners, whether informed by the politics of faith or by the politics of scepticism. The advantage of the sceptic is the modest one that the sceptic may make fewer mistakes by not forgetting that politics cannot ever transcend the pursuit of intimations. The sceptical disposition is more open to the contingencies of the human condition manifest in history, its recollective function suggesting sobriety when others are exuberant. ‘In the politics of faith,’ Oakeshott says,

political decision and enterprise may be understood as a response to an inspired perception of what the common good is, or it may be understood as the conclusion which follows a rational argument; what it can never be understood as is a temporary expedient or just doing something to keep things going.

Whereas, the politics of scepticism,

(regarded as an abstract style of politics) may be said to have its roots either in the radical belief that human perfection is an illusion, or in the less radical belief that we know too little about the conditions of human perfection for it to be wise to concentrate our energies in a single direction … to pursue [perfection] as the crow flies … is to invite disappointment and . . . misery on the way.

In short, governing by political scepticism, leaves us important matters to attend to but no comprehensive purpose. Nor does such a government claim to be in charge of a preferred manner of living it feels entitled to encourage at the expense of alternatives. The aim is not to tell people how to live, but to maintain arrangements within which people can safely pursue the remarkable multiplicity of imaginable possibilities that human beings, left to their own devices, will bring forth. Thus ‘the sceptic understands order as a great and difficult achievement never beyond the reach of decay and dissolution’. This is order in the sense of a framework of rights, duties and means of redress, constituting what Oakeshott calls a ‘superficial order’.

Emphasis mine.

False Allies, False Hope: A Critique of Climate Rhetoric

This is probably the oldest piece of writing I’ve done that still exists. I wasn’t even aware that I still had it in my drafts until earlier today. The bulk of it was written in about 2018-19, but I continued to edit and revise it until I ultimately abandoned it (and Marxism generally) by the end of 2020.

1. Introduction – 5 PARAGRAPHS (al gore is shit)

2. Modern Climate Change – 10 PARAGRAPHS (climate crisis, geoengineering)

3. Trump’s Willing Executioners – 10 PARAGRAPHS (critique of liberal/settler climate rhetoric)

4. Pessimism Against Pessimism – 10 PARAGRAPHS (critique of radical climate rhetoric)

5. Conclusion – 5 PARAGRAPHS (all of you are shit)

‘Introduction

In 2006, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth was released, detailing the activist campaign of failed u.s. presidential candidate Al Gore against environmental disaster. While there had been predictions of a warming world for the past several decades, no previous alarm captured the minds and attention of amerika’s general public like Gore’s lecture, gathering praise and condemnation from believers and skeptics alike. The message of a movement to stop a ‘planetary emergency’, one diluted for appeal to the senses of the liberal settler populations, empowered millions of bleeding-hearts in their quest for narcissistic activism and personal reassurance that they were making a difference; that they were not part of the problem. Even the prophets of old—those liberal activists who had warned of a warming climate in the mid-20th century—could not resist the temptation of a restored revenue, founding new ‘grassroots’ organizations and publishing new ‘manifestos for change’ in the years following. After the release of the film, an acceleration in the publishing of media relating to climate change—coinciding with a plateau in climate change’s own acceleration—began, with each new release carrying a deeper and more frightening message, a new call for action, and a new means to stop the capitalist-imperialist system from bringing about its own destruction. For many, Al Gore was the face of an emerging climate movement—the Messiah come to resurrect the environmentalist dead.

More than a decade later, An Inconvenient Truth has all but been abandoned as the supposed ‘radical’ manifesto for change it once was; its sequel, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, being released to moderate success in an atmosphere of an increasing consciousness surrounding ecocide. The u.s. climate movement has reinvented itself behind the Democratic Socialists of America’s faux-radicalism, transitioned toward new forms of parasitism and new conceptualizations of eco-capitalism, and created younger messianic figures to begin the cycle of impotence anew.

Climate Reality, Al Gore’s “non-partisan” INGO, has been increasingly sidelined by the more energetic, youth-led activism of the so-called “Future Coalition”—a fact which Al Gore, in practice, recognized when he chose to tail behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and endorse her proposal for a Green New Deal.

However, regardless of how extraneous he may now seem, Al Gore’s ghost still haunts the core-centric environmentalism of today.

2 more sentences

This is not to imply that there were any progressive or revolutionary contents within Al Gore’s campaign—rather, his work represents a bourgeois cooptation of 

rather than any meaningful 

+

, a man 

The culmination of Al Gore’s liberal activism, the Paris Agreement—his prize for the years of attempting bourgeois reform—is an impotent failure.

5 paragraphs total

Panic and Preparation

The intensification of climate change has thrown a future once deemed certain into a precarious position, as the possibility of communism’s reconciliation with the conditions inherent to a climate collapse remains an open question.

Doubts on these prospects are best exemplified by the 2011 text, Desert, 

declaring in open terms that “revolution is not going to happen” (6); that there “is no global future.” (11)

This line of thinking is not unique. Desert was one of the first texts to take such a drastic stance, but it is not alone in this. More texts repeating similar warnings of catastrophe, especially from the green anarchist and ultra-leftist milieux, are published today than ever before. Rising trends of nihilistic literature taking a magnifying glass to ecological devastation are not surprising; they are the result of radicals coming to terms with the implications of a hotter world.

Liberal media, too, has been taking an increasingly alarmist and anxious stance on the issue. Headlines such as “When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?”[1] would have been unthinkable publications within mainstream news aggregators less than a decade ago—now published in New York Magazine. Climate change is no longer the boogeyman hiding in Al Gore’s closet; it is the new reality that humans and movements must adapt to. Atmospheric scientists, who raised alarm bells about rising CO2 levels in the sixties and seventies, have been forced to watch climate collapse turn from a possibility into a certainty. One of the few vestiges in which optimism for the future remains is, ironically, within the world-destroyers themselves.

Bourgeois society long maintained a stance of denial (or, at best, passive dismissal) of warming trends. While this remains the case for many prominent actors in American politics, there has been a burgeoning paradigm shift toward panic and preparation in the face of catastrophic climate change. As liberal capitalists speak of calm moderatism and hopeful confidence, downplaying the rate of change for the sake of “policy”, they are making preparations for the worst. Even purported denialists are putting up a front for the public eye—the Trump Organization plans to build barriers to protect its golf course properties in western Ireland, citing sea-level rise as a fundamental concern.[2]

As sincere as Donald Trump may be when he calls climate change a “myth”, actions speak louder than words.

The “optimism” of the bourgeoisie referred to is not an optimism for the proletariat or humanity generally; it is the arrogance of a class that expects to survive climate collapse while accelerating its process.

One of the strangest dynamics of bourgeois climate politics is its need for mitigation without forsaking fossil fuels; a cure to its fever without fighting its illness. A once unspeakable taboo of climate discourse—geoengineering—has appeared to answer this call.

Geoengineering as a “Solution”

Many well-intentioned liberals and social democrats have thrown in their lots with these salesmen of climatic snake oil; as without this pillar of hope, the grim reality of climate collapse will set in. This flocking to outlandish and 

The dominant trend within radical environmentalism has tended toward a climatic pessimism—best exemplified by the collapse fetishism of those who considered themselves torch-bearers of “anti-civilization” thought. However, while primitivists and those within the green anarchist milieu generally may provide some useful insights and analysis against the hegemonic trend of optimism which plagues the modern Left, they themselves fall into the trappings of binaristic religious thinking with regard to climate change.

The optimist refuses to engage in climate discourse because he believes it to be a non-issue—a struggle for future generations and future dictatorships—and he therefore becomes an apologist for genocide. The pessimist throws himself into the discourse and becomes captivated by it—the headlines, the narratives, the apocalypticism—he sells his soul to the devils of fuel and plastic; signs their decrees on the inevitability of collapse—and he therefore becomes an apologist for genocide.

[add more]

The uncritical acceptance of geoengineering by socialists represents a particularly dangerous trend within the hegemonic climatic pessimism of the so-called ‘Left’ today—a viral strain which emphasizes action and speed above all else; which seeks to fight climate change “by any means necessary”—let the consequences be damned. It is a fundamentally First Worldist view of the climate crisis, content to allow the waters to rise and the crops to die all across the Majority World, but once the crystal towers of the labor aristocracy begin to crack—then is the time for action; then is there no time to waste.

This is

in the slogan “we only have 10 years to stop catastrophic climate change!”

It would be a mistake to deride the possibility of geoengineering-as-

; however, 

—in other words, while the personal opinions of 

While the eschatological narrative provided to us by the Marxists and anarchists of old promised the toiling masses a heaven on Earth, the question of climate change renders all possible futures precarious. If Marxism wishes to survive the coming crises, it must not only consider the problematics posed by ecological disaster but begin the process of answering them in theory and practice. It is no longer sufficient to declare fidelity to party programs or to base ourselves on the old dogmatics of a prophetic six heads. If a party is to be capable of uniting the masses, then it must ground itself in the actual conditions of the modern age—in other words, it must reckon with ecocide.

However, many first-world leftists—those from the northern bloc of settler-colonialism in particular—make a fundamental error in their analyses of climate change, viewing it as an equal-opportunity apocalypse rather than 

; thus it is necessary 

Climate genocide

can be considered 

There is a need for a pessimism against pessimism; an acceptance of our climate reality while accepting the possibility for future liberation. The failure of imagination among the First Worldist left has seemed to foreclose all possible futures; the realization of reality becomes the declaration of a crude nihilism—there can be no socialism within the confines of climate change; no liberation in the face of genocide; no hope in death. It is necessary to reject this line of thought—to turn it on its head—and affirm, to quote the late Huey Newton, “an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope.” 

To speak of anything else is to reaffirm the parasitism 

The 2011 text published by an anonymous author, Desert, serves as both the perfect encapsulation of this trend and the basis upon which it must be critiqued—while the author’s criticisms of the illnesses and optimism of the anarchist left in the Minority World ring true, ze too makes the fundamental mistake of assigning conditions to a future under climate change; in other words, ze acts as the oracle for our future despite being as blind as us all. In the foreword to hir text, ze declares that “the world will not be ‘saved’. Global anarchist revolution is not going to happen…We are not going to see the worldwide end to civilisation / capitalism / patriarchy / authority.” While this is meant to emphasize the correct observation that climate change will exacerbate contradictions between Worlds—as ze puts it, the acknowledgement that “there is no global future”—the declaration that there will be no “happy ending” is itself a form of the religious thinking which Desert attempts to critique. Rather than breaking with the arrogant religiosity which plagues the First Worldist left, Desert instead revels in it—ze repeats, in different terms, the primitivist lie that the genocidal project cannot be fought or challenged; that it may only continue to consume the lives of billions unhindered.

If climate change cannot be stopped, then any political project which attempts to oppose its acceleration is doomed to failure. Indeed, to many so-called “anti-civilization” thinkers, the collapse of industrial civilization is not just forthcoming but inevitable—the genocidal project will happen regardless of attempted intervention.

bourgeois proletariat

Settlers also have an interest in surviving rather than fixing climate change

Settlers 

However, the tacit acceptance of our climate reality by capitalists and bourgeois politicians has not translated into acceptance by the u.s. settler population generally—a mere 64% of amerikans surveyed by Gallup believe global warming is caused by human activities and 45% believe it poses a serious threat to their livelihoods.[3] While these trends are showing a steady increase, they are revealing in how it unmasks the blatant denial of reality

—as many within the u.s. settler population hold as much interest in upholding the status quo as the bourgeoisie.

[…]

Donald Trump is the externalization of these anxieties within the settler population; his bombastic, dictatorial rhetoric against migrants and refugees serves as an omen for the genocides to come and a prefiguration of the border struggles under climate collapse. The growing reactionary movements against migrants must be viewed within the context of a rapidly changing climate. Deportations and concentration camps are not a new state of affairs, but they take an overt character as climate collapse grows nearer.

[…]

Liberal media is no longer able to ignore the ethnic cleansing happening on the southern border of the u.s. settler regime nor do spokespersons for so-called “progressive” politics have the ability to revise history currently underway. For liberals, the election in 2016 was monumental not because so-called “Trumpism” is unique within the history of u.s. settler-colonialism, but because Trump pulls the mask off from the regime—in other words, while Trump was not the cause of fascism in amerika, his election drops any pretense for its purpose. The options presented to liberals 

and will continue to do so

The border politics unfolding today are a microcosm of the struggles under a world 2C degrees warmer.

The border politics at 2C warming 

The term “lifeboat Britain”, first used by journalist Gwynne Dyer, is emblematic of the border struggles inherent to climate collapse—

Further Reading

Anonymous. Desert.

Malm, Andreas.

Out of the Woods. Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis.

Robinson, Rowland Keshena. “Draft Thoughts on Leftist Necromantic Praxis.” Maehkōn Ahpēhtesewen, 21 October 2019, onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/draft-thoughts-on-leftist-necromantic-praxis/.

Wilson, K.D. “Who’s Man is This?: Black Radical Ecology and the Anthropogenic Question.” Red Voice, 16 January 2020, content.redvoice.news/black_radical_ecology_and_the_anthropogenic_question/.

Wolfe, Patrick.

Microeconomics Papers

Two papers that I wrote for Intro. to Microeconomics in Fall 2022. Neither of them are particularly notable, but the Elon Musk paper is funny.

Consumer Choice – Is It Really Price Gouging? (Nov. 2022)

The question of price-gouging has been on many people’s minds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rapid increases in prices during this pandemic have led to new laws enacting price ceilings during states of emergency. Is this a good thing? Not really, but with an asterisk. Laws which attempt to force prices to stay at the same level which they were prior to a natural disaster or other emergency tend to backfire in the name of doing good. Price controls encourage the hoarding of goods, causing shortages and lowered production (Smith 2020). When the price increases, supply goes up and demand goes down. No one is going to buy 12 rolls of toilet paper if they’re priced at four dollars per roll. This seems fairly clear, and there is good reason to oppose price control legislation on economic grounds, but there are also clear examples where getting rid of price controls is not a good idea.

The sudden abolition of price controls immediately prior to the Bengali famine exacerbated the food shortage by encouraging panic buying of rice stocks, leading to a speculative price increase that priced much of the population out of food and exacerbated the oncoming famine (Sen 1982). Of course, the blame for the famine in Bengal cannot be laid solely at the feet of this policy—other policies enacted by the British are at least equally to blame here—and even Sen himself is not a proponent of price controls as a measure against price gouging. However, this does not absolve the rapid increase in price of food stocks from its role in the famine. As Sen notes, the cause of famine is not a decline in food output, but rather the ability of people to purchase that food, in other words, the ability of someone to exchange their entitlements. Not only this, but the ability of price gouging to curb consumption in times of emergency comes at the price of an inherent inequality—those with greater access to wealth have more price inelastic demand (Snyder 2009; Kim 2021).

This is all to say that while price gouging may be an efficient and even beneficial means of resource allocation during short-term disasters, it can be disastrous in the longer-term. Markets do not always provide an outcome that is socially desirable. Whether price gouging is a morally permissible activity remains an open question, but there are certainly economic benefits. However, this cannot be considered separate from these moral and social questions, as economics is a science with political and social implications to its work—and, indeed, it has often used its tools and theories to analyze society and the political system. As Haanabi Kim in his 2021 article A Perspective on Price Gouging says, “[c]reating a better strategy against market shocks during a panic would make the rest of the world a little less stressed.” Amartya Sen proposes cash remittances in order to allow people in crisis the ability to purchase essential goods (Drèze and Sen 1989), but while this may be effective for long-term emergencies such as famine or pandemic, it is obviously not actionable for disasters which are not only shorter in length, but also more destructive to infrastructure and housing. We are merely left to wonder and hypothesize, as is the nature of science.

Sources

Drèze Jean, & Sen, A. (1989). Hunger and public action. Clarendon Press. 

Kim, H. (2021, March 23). A perspective on price gouging: An exploitative benefit. The Economics Review. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://theeconreview.com/2021/03/23/a-perspective-on-price-gouging-an-exploitative-benefit/ 

Sen, A. (1982). Poverty and famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford University Press. 

Smith, D. J. (2020, April 17). Crisis economics: Price gouging laws perpetuate the hoarding of goods and create shortages. Bizjournals.com. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2020/04/17/crisis-economics-price-gouging-laws-perpetuate-the.html 

Snyder, J. (2009). What’s the matter with price gouging? Business Ethics Quarterly, 19(2), 275–293. https://doi.org/10.5840/beq200919214 

Final Exam on Elon Musk (Dec. 2022)

Much ink has been spilled over Elon Musk, particularly following his rise to becoming the richest man in the world at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic and especially following his takeover of Twitter in late 2022. Since that time, much of the senior leadership of Twitter has left the company and Elon Musk has implemented widespread changes to the company on a structural level, as well as controversial new design changes. (Schwartz 2022) The workplace culture of Twitter has come under a media spotlight, particularly following the exodus of employees in the immediate aftermath of his ‘hardcore reset’ announcement (Wagner & Alba 2022) One Twitter employee went so far as to say that “since Elon took over, everything is unpredictable, bad management and communication.” (Callahan 2022) Musk has been publicly defiant and sarcastic in the face of this criticism, writing an ‘apology’ on Twitter following the mass firings that he “would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” (Ding 2022) 

This is hardly the first such cultural conflict at the company, which has traditionally “tried to attract workers with a welcoming culture” despite paying lower salaries than would typically be expected of Silicon Valley. (Conger 2021) However, while Twitter fired the person responsible for the last company culture war in late 2021, it seems to most observers that Elon Musk intends to stay with the company for quite a while. (Farley 2021; Hagstrom 2022) Obviously, there are major institutional problems arising at Twitter from multiple fronts, but let’s consider a singular aspect of this culture and go from there to consider how Twitter can more effectively manage its workplace culture to be less ‘toxic’.

One of the most universal problems facing Silicon Valley workers today is that of overwork, the utter destruction of work-life balance that has eroded it and anything that comes into contact with it like a drop of acid on metal. It’s not uncommon in the technological center of the world to experience anything between 12 to 16-hour workdays, sometimes broken up by a nap at the cafeteria or a quick game at the office basketball court. (Lyons 2018) In a sense, this seems like the perfect environment for someone like Elon Musk, who is notoriously demanding of his employees, to thrive. However, the experiment at Twitter has thus far proven rather disastrous for Elon, having led to a mass exodus of employees and plenty of criticism, both internal and from the media, directed at this ‘grind culture’ method of management. Why is this?

First, we need to talk about stress. Defining ‘stress’ is relatively simple, it is “the body’s reaction to a change that requires a physical, mental, or emotional adjustment or response.” (Bauer & Erdogan, 2021) However, explaining why stress occurs in the workplace and the effects of stress as such are more complicated endeavors. In general, stress which cannot be traced to external or malignant forces, e.g. a family member dying or a coworker engaging in sexual harassment, occur due to role stressors. Ambiguity, conflict, or overload regarding our roles within the workplace create stress; role overload in particular can cause issues with work-life conflict, the excessive blurring of lines between work and non-work. (Bauer & Erdogan, 2021) Following Elon Musk’s email ultimatum that he will be expecting an “extremely hardcore” culture from his employees, the need for “long hours at high intensity”, many of these problems have found their way into Twitter way of life. (Siddiqui & Merrill 2022) Employees have been seen sleeping at work in makeshift bedrooms, a change encouraged by corporate leadership including Musk. (Morrow 2022)

Many of the reforms implemented by Elon Musk since becoming owner and CEO of Twitter are not just callous, but unnecessary. When we consider that work-from-home workplace have an equal or greater productivity than in-person, then the directive demanding a return to office seems to have no real motive other than ego, the need to reshape the old into the new within a newscycle. Managers in football/soccer do it all the time, they take over a new team and implement radical changes within the club within the snap of a finger rather than allow old structures to adapt. As romantic as the concept of reshaping something from the ground-up may be, it is almost always an unsuccessful strategy at both a micro and macro level. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson analyze the example of Botswana, one of the most economically developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa, to explore why it has been able to succeed in contrast to many of its neighbors. One of the many reasons given to explain Botswana’s success is Seretse Khama’s willingness to allow Europeans to maintain key administrative positions while the country transitioned into being able to sustain its own educated labor force. (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2013)

In particular, the declaration of an “extremely hardcore” culture that necessitates the destruction of work-life balance and high stress levels raises the specter of workplace trauma. Chronically high levels of stress are not good for the human psyche, especially when combined with a culture of toxicity and bullying that seem to have emerged at Twitter. (Padhi 2022; Kay 2022) It’s no surprise that the company under Elon has been described by its employees as “psychologically unsafe.” (Schwartz 2022) But what is ‘workplace trauma’, exactly? When we think of ‘trauma’, we typically associate it—quite rightly—with victims of abuse or war, those who have witnessed death or suffering first-hand, however this is not always the case. Taking the example of child abuse, chronic emotional trauma can be just as damaging as physical trauma. (Van der Kolk 2014) Is this true of adults? Not to the same extent, as our emotional and cognitive development completes itself at some point in young adulthood. (Girgis et al. 2018) However, the extreme stress of certain workspaces is still perfectly capable of causing trauma and acute stress disorder. This is particularly true for workspaces in which management or coworkers engage in ‘exclusionary behavior’. In other words, “[a]s exclusionary situations occur with more frequency, employees may experience managers or colleagues talking over them, shutting them down in meetings, dismissing their ideas, or even turning the employee’s concern into an issue about them. In these cases, as the occurrences increases, the brain begins to register any interaction with this person as dangerous and starts to code the experiences as physical injuries. Over time, repeated exclusion damages the employee’s nervous system, creating an unbearable, traumatic work environment. Employees in duress also lose their ability to think clearly and operate in a protective, overly defensive state. They simply shut down, which eventually inhibits their ability to create or innovate.” (Neogy 2020)

How is this relevant to Twitter? By bringing in an ‘extreme’ work culture and bully-esque style of management, Elon Musk is, for all intents and purposes, burning the bridge he’s standing on. While he has been forced to roll back some of his planned reforms, such as the strict policy against work-from-home, many of the cultural and structural changes he has brought with him still are and will continue to be disastrous for the company. Unlike SpaceX, which was able to band aid its ‘extreme’ work culture with its mission statement, Twitter has no such unifying mission. It’s a social media site with dozens, if not hundreds, of clones that will pounce on the opportunity to feast upon its corpse. If Elon wants to stabilize Twitter, then the rapid and forced introduction of a ‘grind culture’ into the Twitter workforce is not the means to do it; rather, allowing senior leadership to continue in their positions and allow a slow change to a desired cultural circumstance. Likewise, he should reconsider the “extremely hardcore” work he intends on having Twitter employees do in its entirety; it is entirely possible that he might find his employees creatively and productively better off for it.

Sources

Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2013). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Crown Business.

Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2021). Organizational Behavior: Bridging Science and

Practice. Flat World.

Conger, K. (2021, August 16). Culture change and conflict at Twitter. The New York Times. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/technology/twitter-culture-change-conflict.html

Farley, A. (2021). Dantley Davis—Twitter’s ambitious, divisive design chief—is out. Fast Company. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.fastcompany.com/90703239/twitter-design-chief-dantley-davis-out-in-reorg

Girgis, F., Lee, D. J., Goodarzi, A., & Ditterich, J. (2018). Toward a neuroscience of adult cognitive developmental theory. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00004

Hagstrom, A. (2022, December 14). Tesla investors grow restless as Elon Musk’s focus stays on Twitter. Fox Business. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/tesla-investors-grow-restless-elon-musks-focus-stays-twitter

Hesse, M. (2022, November 21). I don’t think ‘hardcore’ means what Elon Musk thinks it does. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/21/elon-musk-twitter-hardcore-work/

Hwang, S. (2022, May 8). What Elon Musk will likely do to Twitter’s work culture. Time. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://time.com/charter/6174661/innovation-require-culture/

Kay, G. (2022). Elon Musk is ‘outside his depth’ at Twitter and his ‘bullying management culture’ won’t fix it, early spacex investor says. Yahoo! News. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-outside-depth-twitter-223545289.html

Kovach, S. (2017). Working yourself to death isn’t worth it, and Silicon Valley is starting to realize that. Business Insider. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.businessinsider.com/why-silicon-valley-glorifies-culture-of-overwork-2017-6

Lyons, D. (2019). Lab rats: Why modern work makes people miserable. Atlantic Books.

McMenamin, L. (2021). Why long-term workplace trauma is a real phenomenon. BBC Worklife. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210415-why-long-term-workplace-trauma-is-a-real-phenomenon

Morrow, A. (2022, December 7). Twitter’s makeshift hotel rooms show just how broken us work culture is. CNN. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/07/business/nightcap-twitter-work-culture/index.html

Neogy, R. (2020). Exclusion and trauma are impacting the workforce. Here’s how to fix it and heal. Fast Company. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.fastcompany.com/90526659/exclusion-and-trauma-are-impacting-the-workforce-heres-how-to-fix-it-and-heal

Padhi, A. (2022, September 20). Workplace trauma can affect anyone in any occupation. how can we deal with it? The Guardian. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/21/workplace-trauma-can-affect-anyone-in-any-occupation-how-can-we-deal-with-it

Schwartz, M. (2022). ‘I don’t want to work with these clowns.’ inside the culture war that Elon Musk has unleashed at Twitter. Business Insider. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.businessinsider.com/anonymous-twitter-employee-elon-musk-twitter-culture-war-2022-11

Siddiqui, F., & Merrill, J. B. (2022, November 18). Musk issues ultimatum to staff: Commit to ‘hardcore’ twitter or take severance. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/16/musk-twitter-email-ultimatum-termination/

Vartanian, O., Saint, S. A., Herz, N., & Suedfeld, P. (2020). The creative brain under stress: Considerations for performance in Extreme Environments. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.585969

Wagner, K., & Alba, D. (2022, November 17). Elon Musk softens his remote-work mandate at Twitter after many staffers opt to quit rather than continue in his ‘hardcore’ office environment. Fortune. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://fortune.com/2022/11/17/elon-musk-remote-work-mandate-twitter-employees-hardcore-office/—. (2022, November 18). Elon Musk’s ‘hardcore’ twitter culture is backfiring. so many workers are quitting that the operations are at risk, sources say. Fortune. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://fortune.com/2022/11/17/elon-musk-twitter-work-hardcore-or-leave-exodus/

Selections from Conversion Questions

These are just some selected answers from the questionnaire I completed during my abandoned conversion to Judaism in 2023. It is probably the most personal of the writing fragments I’ll be sharing here, and part of me wishes I had gone through with the process to its end, but the unfortunate truth is that I love Judaism more than it loves me. There is little use in engaging with a spiritual community if you do not find said engagement fulfilling. After all, what is religion if not community?

Where, according to tradition, was the Torah given to the Israelites?

According to tradition, the Torah in both its written and oral forms were given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. Though the ‘accuracy’ of this tradition has come under doubt in recent years, and not entirely fairly (see Richard Elliot Friedman’s book on the Exodus), the notion of a mass revelation at Mount Sinai remains historically important for Judaism. Though the Documentary Hypothesis (or any other similar hypothesis regarding the origins of the Torah/Pentateuch) likely means that modern Jews cannot hold in good faith to belief in an unbroken chain of transmission for the biblical text from Mount Sinai to the Masoretes, the story of the Exodus remains a central aspect of Jewish religious civilization, if not *the* central aspect. It is good, therefore, that Judaism largely eschews dogmatism and systematic theology (even within the realm of Orthodoxy, scholars such as Menachem Kellner and Marc Shapiro have presented good arguments against the use of Maimonides’ 13 Principles as a form of creed).

However, a belief in theophany at Sinai is not necessarily required nor even implied, see these articles: https://www.thetorah.com/article/judaism-without-sinai; https://www.thetorah.com/article/who-wrote-the-torah-according-to-the-torah

Judaism, in my understanding, adheres very strongly to what would be termed the “consensus theory of truth” – i.e. the notion that what is truth is that which would be agreed upon. This is most blatant in the famous Oven of Akhnai story in the Talmud, whereby the Rabbis scold God to re-emphasize human providence over interpretation of the divine texts, in line with Exodus 23:2. However, more specifically, Judaism may be seen through the lens of a philosopher known as Charles S. Peirce, one of the forefathers of a philosophy known as ‘pragmatism’ that left its mark on Jewish philosophy through the works of thinkers such as Mordecai Kaplan and Eliezer Berkovits. Peirce introduced a notion of truth which emphasized the role of inquiry in the search for truth. To Peirce, all beliefs are subject to constant inquiry and what is true is that which is reached at the end of inquiry, that which would be agreed upon if inquiry was pushed as far as it could fruitfully go. In orders, what is true is that which can be considered ‘fixed’ or ‘settled’ belief. While Orthodox Judaism tends to identify these truths with the 13 Principles, and they are mistaken in this endeavor for the reasons Shapiro and Kellner argue, the notion that Judaism has ‘settled beliefs’ of some sort should be less controversial. The definition would, however, be much more limited than the assumptions of dogma or ‘principles of faith’ – they are merely the set of background beliefs which all (semi-)religious Jews might be expected to accept.

Peirce’s argument might be summarized as such:

1. To believe p is to hold that p is true.
2. To hold that p is true is to hold that p “is a belief that cannot be improved upon, a belief that would forever meet the challenges of reason, argument, and evidence.”
3. To hold that a belief would forever meet these challenges is to engage in the project of justifying one’s belief, what Peirce called “inquiry.”
4. One cannot determine on one’s own when all the best reasons and evidence have been considered, so the project of squaring one’s beliefs with the best available reasons and evidence is an ongoing and essentially social endeavor that requires what Peirce called a “community of inquiry.”

See this article on Peirce’s philosophy of religion: https://jsr.shanti.virginia.edu/back-issues/volume-16-no-1-june-2017-recent-reflections-on-scriptural-reasoning/the-sentiment-that-invites-us-to-pray-the-religious-aspect-of-charles-peirces-philosophy/

What are two of the many ways that Jews understand God?

I’ll avoid some of the modern theology that I take primary influence from (i.e. I won’t talk about process theology) and instead focus on traditional understandings of God. Maimonides’ theology is very much akin to that of St. Thomas Aquinas, a former theological love of mine, and this is no coincidence – Maimonides was a primary influence, alongside Muslim philosophers like Avicenna, was a primary influence for Aquinas’ neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Christianity. While there have been interesting Jewish uses of Aquinas since the publication of the Summa Theologica, Maimonides remains the king of traditional Jewish interpretation of God and scripture. Maimonides was an Aristotelian, a staunch rationalist, who believed that God could not be described with positive terms, a viewpoint known as negative theology. He denied any and all interpretations of God as anthropomorphic, denying that God can be conceived at all in personal terms. God is what Aquinas called the Necessary Being, “the first mover, put in motion by no other.”

However, Maimonides’ philosophical conception of God conflicts strongly with the tradition associated with Kabbalah. I do not understand it that well, as I have not studied Kabbalah in-depth and have generally preferred interpretations of God originating from philosophy, but as Abraham Joshua Heschel noted, it would be a fundamental error to take strongly to one tradition or the other. As I understand it, the Kabbalistic viewpoint is essentially panentheistic and constantly-evolving, a being known as Ein-Sof, that is connected to the world and manifests itself through the Sefirot, i.e. divine attributes of some sort? I’m pretty sure there is a tradition not to study Kabbalah until you’re middle-aged, i.e. learned enough to understand it, and there is a good reason for that, as far as I can tell.

The process viewpoint, perhaps, provides a good synthesis between the two in its critique of traditional metaphysics’ failings.

What are the basic themes of the Yamim Noraim, the “Days of Awe”?

At the time of writing this, I will not have read the relevant chapter in Rabbi Greenberg’s book, so the answer may change in the near-future. However, I nonetheless feel confident enough to write down a preliminary answer. The core themes of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are judgement and repentance.

Rosh Hashanah is a day of judgement, the day in which it is said that the Book of Life is opened and the days of repentance begin. A shofar is blown during the holiday to signify this, that a new year has come and all must prepare to be judged by God for their actions. Yom Kippur is a day of repentance, the holiest and likely most melancholy holiday that doesn’t originate from the past century, in which Jews are asked to partake in a complete fast similar to what is done by Muslims during the month of Ramadan. These holidays, in fact, serve a similar purpose – just as Muslims are asked to seek forgiveness for sins through fasting during Ramadan, Jews are asked to seek forgiveness through fasting during Yom Kippur. I believe Islam even shares the Jewish tradition of the Book of Life that is opened and closed during the period, but don’t quote me on that.

Of course, Judaism and Islam have differing conceptions of sin, but these concepts are still much closer than either are to the Christian conception in which sin separates the sinner from God. Both Judaism and Islam understand sin to be acts rather than states of being. In essence, the Jewish concept of sin is an action someone has taken by which they have strayed from the path of the good life, identified traditionally with God.

Judaism is a perfectionist religion, as in moral perfectionism, in that it holds to the idea that there is a concept of the good life – a version of what Aristotle might have called eudaimonia – that one can and must attempt to reach through their actions. This is the purpose of halakha, as well as the Noahide Laws and Ten Commandments. The Jewish Aristotelian, Maimonides, is somewhat vague about what he conceives of as ‘the good life’ – Kellner has an article about how Maimonides interprets human perfection as being akin to perfection of the intellect, but this is hardly satisfactory in this day and age. Thomas Aquinas, his Catholic interpreter, is not as vague. He also speaks of a form of eudaimonia, what he calls felicitas, and identifies its achievement as coming through living a virtuous life, juggling the dual considerations of natural and divine moral law. It is quite possible that, with adjustment, he and Thomistic ethicists – or, more properly, the field of virtue ethics – might have some things to discuss with Jewish ethics, but this is merely a preliminary thought.

I have not read him in any real depth, but the work of David Novak seems relevant here in bridging the gap between the broader ‘Western’ (i.e. Christianized) philosophical tradition from which Aquinas emerged and the Jewish philosophical tradition. Of those within ‘Western’ philosophy broadly, I believe Charles Peirce and the methodology of pragmatism provides the most interesting outside insight into Judaism. Peirce was a staunch Christian, in particular a follower of the Episcopalian Church, and it bleeds into much of his philosophical work. This includes a very famous example of his regarding where pragmatism might clear up disagreement – the doctrine of transubstantiation.

I will assume, of course, that you are familiar with the Protestant and Catholic disagreement regarding transubstantiation. To Peirce, the disagreement is entirely nonsensical. Take into account the pragmatic maxim: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” What does the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation mean in light of this maxim? According to Peirce, “[W]e can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either—

1. That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
2. That wine possesses certain properties.

Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon.”

It’s my contention that this sort of pragmatic reasoning is very attractive for modern philosophy of religion and has deep roots in Jewish thought. Peter W. Ochs, in particular, has argued for parallels between Peirce and Hasdai Crescas: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12810

One of the primary problems facing the current Jewish encounters with pragmatism, and I say this with an eye toward Mordecai Kaplan in particular, is the interpretation of pragmatism as a worldview rather than as a methodology. This has its roots in Peirce’s contemporary interpreters, particularly William James and John Dewey, who broadened the range of pragmatism far beyond what Peirce himself had envisioned. As Robert Talisse writes:

“According to the account I have just sketched, the philosophical progression from Peirce to James to Dewey marks an increasing systematization of pragmatism, a broadening of what I have called pragmatism’s domain, an inflation of the philosophical commitments constitutive of pragmatism. What begins as an intuitive methodological principle for conducting philosophical inquiry in Peirce becomes in the hands of James and Dewey a systematic and comprehensive philosophy in itself, complete with its own metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; in Dewey’s version in particular, pragmatism is expanded to include in addition an aesthetics, a social philosophy, a philosophy of religion, a philosophy of science, and a philosophy of education. […] Peirce saw pragmatism as a new philosophical methodology, a way forward for philosophy. As we have seen, Peircean pragmatism is essentially the imperative to keep open the way of inquiry both by clearing away meaningless concepts and by subjecting our meaningful claims to the test of proper inquiry. Although Peirce himself spent his career documenting and systematizing the results of his own pragmatic inquiries, Peircean pragmatism in itself does not stand for any particular results of inquiry; that is, Peircean pragmatism is not a Weltanschauung (CP, 5.13). Consequently, among Peircean pragmatists there is room for disagreement over the main philosophical questions. This is not the case for Jamesian and Deweyan pragmatism, each of which tends to directly entail a particular set of philosophical answers to the standard questions.”

In other words, while Mordecai Kaplan takes his pragmatism from Dewey and therefore offers an interpretation of Judaism that is its own comprehensive doctrine, a worldview of its own, a Jewish pragmatism that looks instead to Peirce can be far more pluralist in its commitments. The entirety of Jewish dialogue, from the Talmud to modern Jewish philosophy, is a community of inquiry in the sense that Peirce imagined; a communal endeavor to continually assess, interpret, and argue beliefs in search of truth. Is this not the way of the Mishnah and Gemara, of the hundreds of thousands of years of Jewish theological debate?

Peirce writes: “Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.”

A consistent problem with Maimonides, particularly in interpreting him within a modern context, is his elitism – not only toward non-Jews, but toward non-learned Jews. To him, the non-learned Jew is unable to effectively commune with God, whose presence is known only through the intellect, who can only be imitated through the perfection of said intellect. By identifying the highest perfection available as intellectual rather than ethical, by placing ethical perfection as a mere step on the ladder, it thus becomes difficult to argue for his relevance in modern moral philosophy. Even Aquinas, who wrote philosophical treatises for the medieval Catholic Church, sought to soften the arguments of Aristotle and Maimonides in this regard. It’s embarrassing, and there is a reason Kellner consistently criticizes Maimonides for it. A Jewish ‘rationalist’ philosophy that looks to Crescas alongside Maimonides, to Peirce as well as Aristotle, is therefore necessary to help sidestep some of the weights bearing down Maimonidean philosophy.

What are some things a person should do to engage in teshuvah (repentance)?

To engage in teshuvah, one must regret the sin and commit not to do it again. However, such repentance is not to be expected only during the period of Yamim Noraim:

“We learned there in a mishna that Rabbi Eliezer says: Repent one day before your death. Rabbi Eliezer’s students asked him: But does a person know the day on which he will die? He said to them: All the more so this is a good piece of advice, and one should repent today lest he die tomorrow; and by following this advice one will spend his entire life in a state of repentance. And King Solomon also said in his wisdom: “At all times your clothes should be white, and oil shall not be absent from upon your head” (Ecclesiastes 9:8), meaning that a person always needs to be prepared.”

This makes sense, as unless it was a singular rather than continual event, then someone who genuinely regrets engaging in a behavior that is either sinful or morally disrespectful will seek to end such behavior at the nearest opportunity, not merely during the period when it is expected of them. Quote Maimonides: “[Who has reached] complete Teshuvah? A person who confronts the same situation in which he sinned when he has the potential to commit [the sin again], and, nevertheless, abstains and does not commit it because of his Teshuvah alone and not because of fear or a lack of strength.”

There isn’t really any other place to put this, so I want to share one of my favorite sections from the Talmud, Bava Batra 16a:

“Reish Lakish says: Satan, the evil inclination, and the Angel of Death are one, that is, they are three aspects of the same essence. He is the Satan who seduces people and then accuses them, as it is written: “So the Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with vile sores” (Job 2:7). He is also the evil inclination, as it is written there: “The impulse of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continuously” (Genesis 6:5); and it is written here: “Only upon himself do not put forth your hand” (Job 1:12). The verbal analogy between the various uses of the word “only” teaches that the evil inclination is to be identified with the Satan. He is also the Angel of Death, as it is written: “Only spare his life” (Job 2:6); apparently Job’s life depends upon him, the Satan, and accordingly the Satan must also be the Angel of Death.

“Rabbi Levi says: Both Satan, who brought accusations against Job, and Peninnah, who tormented Hannah, mother of Samuel the prophet, acted with intent that was for the sake of Heaven. As for Satan, when he saw that the Holy One, Blessed be He, inclined to favor Job and praised him, he said: Heaven forbid that He should forget the love of Abraham. With regard to Peninnah, as it is written: “And her rival wife also provoked her sore, to make her fret” (I Samuel 1:6), i.e., Peninnah upset Hannah in order to motivate her to pray. Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov taught this in Paphunya, and Satan came and kissed his feet in gratitude for speaking positively about him.”

Just to nerd out a bit: Maimonides, the fascinating rationalist that he is, takes Rabbi Lakish’s argument and runs with it in an outright denial of the existence of Satan and even angels in general as separate beings as is so often assumed, especially in our Christian-influenced culture where the acceptance of them as such is considered a matter of faith. Even Aquinas never questioned this!

Merrimack Valley Havurah’s fascinating article on the subject: https://merrimackvalleyhavurah.wordpress.com/2016/07/08/maimonides-on-angels/

Explain briefly how some of the various streams in Judaism today differ — Conservative, Reform, Orthodox, etc.

The division between the three ‘denominations’ of Judaism originates in the 19th century and the fallout from the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, during which there was a great controversy between steadfastly traditional Jews and modernizers who sought to bring Judaism more in line with the rational philosophy and liberal theology popular in Germany. The group originating from the former became the Orthodox and the group originating from the latter became the Reform movement. Conservative Judaism, the middle-ground between the two, originated from Jews that had sided with the Reform movement’s emphasis on modernization, but broke with them over the extent, famously exemplified by the Trefa Banquet. However, in recent years, the division between these three movements has increasingly blurred, particularly between Conservative and Reform Judaism, especially following the alliance between the Reconstructionist and Reform movements.

While Orthodoxy has often – with exception – remained mired in a stringent legalism that disregards the “covenantal relationship” between God and Man (see R. David Hartman), the Reform movement – at least historically – have rejected tradition so far as to seek to transform Judaism into something near-unrecognizable. This is exemplified by the early Reform movement’s total rejection of circumcision, one of the core traditions that differentiates Jew from Gentile, a rejection that thankfully did not survive the test of history. However, even within contemporary practice, there have been moves that stray much too far into modernization, some of the most objectionable being attempts at syncretism with Eastern religions or practice (even authors I normally respect, e.g. Alan Morinis, are very much guilty of this). Syncretism of such nature emerges through the dialogue and exchange between two religious communities; you cannot will into existence a Jewish version of hatha yoga. In essence, while Orthodox Judaism holds closely to the traditions of Judaism at the risk of turning them into dogma, Reform Judaism runs away from these traditions at the risk of rendering them meaningless. In the middle, ideally, stands the Conservative movement – modernization held back by tradition and tradition brought forward by modernization.

Reconstructionism is an interesting case that I’ll quickly gloss over, as it is the newest movement and therefore has (in theory) the least to talk about. Mordecai Kaplan’s vision of Judaism is fascinating, even if a lot of his actual theology (e.g. his naturalistic conception of God) was outright nonsensical. His attempt at reconstruction is simultaneously very close to and very far from how I would describe Judaism if asked; close in how it seeks to modernize and redefine Judaism as not merely a religion, as classical Reform claimed, but a civilization – an ever-evolving set of communal traditions without dogma that can be subject to continual reconstruction and reinterpretation. It is far in how it seeks to redefine – or outright reject – core traditions of Judaism, e.g. the concept of chosenness, for no good reason. I am not opposed to a reconstruction of such a concept – see Plaskow’s ‘distinctness’ concept – but Kaplan is not especially coherent in his opposition here. Judith Plaskow, brilliant as she is, likely goes too far as well in her critiques of certain traditions, see Rachel Adler and Ellen Umansky on this topic, particularly chapter 2 of Adler’s Engendering Judaism and Umansky’s “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology”.

This is a generalization, of course. There are modernizing Orthodox Jews and tradition-minded Reform Jews, as we no longer live in the 19th century and the lines between each of these movements has (for the most part) become much blurrier. Steven Schwarzschild, whose writings I have the utmost respect for, was a Reform rabbi. If I remember correctly, he also held positions in Conservative and Orthodox institutions. Labels, by themselves, are meaningless.

What is Zionism?

Zionism was the ideological movement promoting the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in what was Mandatory Palestine, now modern-day Israel. What this homeland was to look like was subject to some strong debate prior to the Declaration of Independence by Israel in 1948 (and even after), but it has since coalesced into supporting the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, i.e. Israel, and its continued existence in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflicts.

In the modern day, following the establishment of the State of Israel and the end of open conflict between Israel and its neighboring states, “Zionism” is somewhat of a more tenuous designation, tending to merely mean some sort of support for Israel and/or its status as a specifically Jewish state. In essence, it is a nationalistic orientation toward Israel under which a broad range of ideological opinions – from Israeli peaceniks to Kahanists – may fall, akin to our own American ‘patriotism’. Note that I do not use ‘nationalism’ in a derogatory sense, in spite of the (oftentimes justified) wariness now associated with the word; rather, I use it in a broad sense to refer to a sense of attachment to the community of inhabitants in a particular existing or potential nation-state (see Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, et al.).

Abraham Joshua Heschel and R. Soloveitchik have identified Israel as essentially being a test for Jews, with R. Soloveitchik going so far as to state that it has the potential to falsify the entirety of Judaism should it be failed. In this sense, it is a blessing and a burden – like much of Judaism – as Israel has the potential to act as a beacon for Jews everywhere, a source of hope in which all might aspire to; however, if Israel fails to act justly, if we allow it to fall prey to the same weaknesses as prior nation-states such that it can no longer stand above the rest, it will cause great and irreparable damage to Jews and Judaism worldwide. It is simultaneously a riveting and terrifying prospect.

Quote Mordecai Kaplan: “Now more than ever we Jews must lay to heart the teaching of Ahad Ha-Am [the theorist of Cultural Zionism], the main point of which even his own followers seem to have missed. That point is that the only way in which the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael can come to mean the fulfillment of the long nurtured hope of the Jewish People is for the Jewish People to prepare itself for that fulfillment by undergoing what is tantamount to a metamorphosis. Without a Jewish People regenerated in sprit, no matter how successful the state it would establish, and how large a population that state could muster, Zion will continue to be unredeemed.”

See also: https://www.commentary.org/articles/hans-kohn/ahad-haam-nationalist-with-a-differencea-zionism-to-fulfill-judaism/

Explain the major rules of kashrut.

The two most well-known rules of kashrut are the prohibitions against consuming the flesh of certain animals (e.g. pigs, shellfish, insects) and against mixing milk and dairy, of “boiling the calf in her mother’s milk.”  Kosher animals are killed through a form of slaughter called shechita, in which the throat is slit in a quick motion to ensure a rapid loss of consciousness. All blood must be drained at some point prior to consumption. Additionally, there are some prohibitions against food made or handled by non-Jews, but these seem irrelevant except in specific contexts.

There is an interesting point brought up by R. Abraham Isaac Kook and others that the eating of meat is a compromise to man’s primal desires rather than the intended divine status quo; that the Messianic Age (assuming it is a literal coming rather than some sort of metaphorical concept) will bring about an age of vegetarianism among all mankind. I read an anecdote, though I cannot verify it, that one of the Rabbis of the 20th century – perhaps Kook? – would only eat meat on Shabbat and the Holidays, in order to signify that the time for vegetarianism as intended by the Torah had not yet come. I do not personally eat meat or dairy, as much of modern factory farming practice seems to conflict with core ethical standards (within the realm of Jewish ethics, it seems difficult to argue that even kosher slaughter as practiced within intensive production does not violate the principle of tsa’ar ba’alei chayim – see Rabbis Dorff and Roth’s responsa on shackling and hoisting or R. Adam Frank’s essay on the topic in The Jewish Vegan, ed. R. Shmuly Yanklowitz).

R. Soloveitchik, in particular, provides a forceful argument for vegetarianism from a Jewish, Orthodox perspective – see: https://www.kolhamevaser.com/2012/02/vegetarianism-and-judaism-the-ravs-radical-view/.

However, I would likely side with Maimonides and R. Kook that, if not outright demanded, then it is highly encouraged to consume meat on Shabbat and Yom Tov. Whether this changes in light of current practices, I am not at liberty to say. Shavuot is an interesting case, as there is no mitzvah for the consumption of dairy akin to Simchat Yom Tov, only tradition. However, there is still no reason to disregard tradition without just cause. Whether dairy is innately unethical or merely made unethical by the practices associated with the current industries is beyond the scope of this questionnaire, but it is easy to imagine a Jew who holds to the latter might pay a premium for ‘ethically-sourced’ dairy from perhaps a local farm, while a Jew who holds to the former might decide that the tradition must be discarded in its entirety (or, perhaps, replacing the tradition with non-dairy alternatives instead).

One aspect of moral vegetarianism which R. Soloveitchik touches upon is interesting from a virtue ethics perspective – meat-eating can be viewed as not only bad in terms of the harm that comes to the animals, but the harm it does upon the consumer. In other words, even if all moral ‘ambiguity’ was removed from the current system of slaughter and farming, it would be reasonable to argue that a virtuous person would nonetheless still seek to limit their consumption of meat for the sake of compassion. If we would look down on the person who kills animals for fun, the sports-hunter who kills animals for trophies, where does that leave one who kills animals simply because they prefer the taste, in spite of available alternatives? It would be difficult to argue that this is a virtuous path to take.

Papers for English

A collection of short papers I’ve written for English classes over the years. None of them are notable enough to deserve their own post.

Imprisoned in the Closet: Sexuality in Falconer (Mar. 2020)

The question of sexuality is one which haunted John Cheever throughout his life; variably interested in both men and women, Cheever’s Catholicism imbued him with a sense of guilt that brought anguish and torment. This mental distress revealed itself not only in his personal writings—his journals a screed of homophobia and self-hatred—but in his public writings as well, especially one of his later works, Falconer. Nominally the story of Ezekiel Farragut, a man incarcerated for the murder of his brother, Falconer marries—in a happier example than the one provided in the book—its pessimistic preview of the post-war prison system with an exploration of homo/bisexuality in relation to a less literal prison we often call “the closet”. By all accounts, Falconer lends itself to a queer reading—certainly, if we can have a post-Camusian existential reading, we can have a queer one—but despite the many nonsensical “queerings” published by an academia that has overdosed itself on Foucault and Butler, there are few serious analyses of queer theming in Falconer. With how prominent of a role homo/bisexuality plays within the narrative, even if argued that it is secondary to a greater social critique or psychological exploration, it is interesting that the already scattered papers available online on Falconer neglect to analyze this aspect of the book since, when viewed with a queer eye, it is especially apparent that Cheever’s own struggles with his sexuality were influential to the text—in spite of Cheever’s own denials of such an influence.

Homo/bisexuality is one of the earliest motifs introduced in the novel—within the first chapter, in fact—through the interactions between Ezekiel and his wife, Marcia. It is their shared flirtations with same-sex relations and Marcia’s nonchalant homophobia that foreshadows the later appearances of queerness and queer framing within the text. In particular, the hypocritical disdain of homosexuality by queer characters is strewn throughout the novel. This denialism and self-hatred appears multiple times throughout the novel, most prominently through the character Jody, who expresses his cheerfulness that Ezekiel “ain’t homosexual” even as he is having an active sexual relationship with Farragut (Cheever [placeholder]). This theme of self-hatred underlines the purgatorial presence of both literal and non-literal prisons throughout the novel, where so-called ‘deviance’ is confined and liquidated.

While Falconer appropriates the prison as its setting, and with some deal of accuracy, this setting serves to reinforce the symbolic narrative rather than as an exploration of prison-as-prison. As Robert Collins notes in his essay on marriage and sexuality in Cheever’s fiction, “Cheever several times asserted that Falconer was no specific prison; given his treatment of the story, the reader can readily come to see it as no real prison, in fact, but a symbolic state through which poisonous, indurated social values are contrasted with their direct opposites” (9). The prison as shown in Falconer is less directly related to the modern prison system, the structure of white supremacist and settler-colonial repression which we in the United States associate with the word, but rather something closer to Gehinnom or, since Cheever was Catholic, Purgatory. Phrased more simply, the Falconer prison represents something more akin to a washing machine for the souls of sinners than to any actual prison. The queer self-hatred present throughout the novel contrasts itself with Farragut’s relationship with Jody, a relationship of self-love, which serves to advance Ezekiel’s transit through the 

Cheever’s New Existential Man

Homosexuality in Falconer has a dual nature which reflects

: it is repressed and derided by characters throughout the novel

, but it is also Ezekiel’s relationship with Jody which 

This reflects the true nature of 

<explanation of how Falconer is basically a purgatory for sinners>

Jody escapes through the church

Ezekiel is changed for the better

<explanation of LGBT incarceration rates>
<analysis of Ezekiel and Jody’s sexual relationship>
<explanation of homosexuality in prison>

It is interesting, therefore, that it is the Cuckold who seems to have the most grounded and—for something set/written in the mid-20th century—‘positive’ perception of his own sexuality.

Ezekiel himself comments on his own hypocrisy, 

, but it is their shared queerness

Farragut himself ponders this by asking, “if she loved Sally Midland, didn’t he love Chucky Drew?”

The relationship between Jody and Ezekiel

Ezekiel reflects that the gay couples at the pensions “seemed to be the only happy couple in the dining room” (Cheever [placeholder).

with overtly queer theming and storytelling.

Falconer, therefore, acts to contextualize 

Sources

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

The demons that drove John Cheever

Pilgrim’s Progress: Cheever’s Falconer

David Latham – Falconer by John Cheever

Beyond Argument: Post-Marital Man in John Cheever’s Later Fiction

Homosexuality in Male Prisons: Demonstrating the Need for a Social Constructionist Approach

Inmate-to-Inmate Prison Sexuality: A Review of Empirical Studies

Incarceration Rate of LGB People Three Times the General Population

Hungry Like the Woolf – Falconer by John Cheever

Falconer John Cheever

Cheever’s New Existential Man in Falconer

Eveline Response (Oct. 2021)

The fear of the unknown stands at the heart of Eveline. From the beginning of the story, we are introduced to Eveline through her retreat into the familiar, her home and her memories of childhood. She anchors herself to the present, to her known world, as she contemplates the potential upending of it all. Frank offers her new experiences, a new life of respect and happiness, but her hesitation betrays her. It breaks down the façade behind her affair.

Eveline desires Frank more for what he represents than who he is. She loves him as a means to an end, a foolish sailor boy who will whisk her away to greener pastures, to a new continent entirely, but while Eveline desires an escape from her abusive and indigent living conditions, she nonetheless hesitates. The promise she gave to her mother weighs down upon her. Her obligations, fabricated as they may be, bind her to a fleeting memory of how it once was. It’s doubtful if she ever truly would have followed him to Buenos Aires. She is a passive actor in her life, subservient to the desires of others, left to stare blankly as a momentary happiness leaves her sight.

The Things They Carried Response (Nov. 2021)

Imagery is, as can perhaps be gleaned from the title of the story, a pervading element throughout The Things They Carried. The most obvious example of this is that of love, as expressed through Martha’s letters to Jimmy Cross, but each soldier carries his own imagery with him. While each soldier has their individuality, the symbols associated with th

This is what Jimmy Cross comes to understand after the death of Lavender, when he burns the letters and photographs of Martha.

By choosing to “dispense with love,” Jimmy Cross merges himself into the army unit, refusing any p

other than his strict duty as a soldier.

“[s]he signed the letters Love, but it wasn’t love,” (13) 

However, 

The imagery of love pervades The Things They Carried

F

As Jimmy Cross soon 

; for this reason, he chooses to “dispense with love.”

“that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead”

The Joy That Kills (Nov. 2021)

Can someone die of a broken heart? Kate Chopin seemed to think so, but her interpretation of the trope seems rather twisted. Rather than coming from the absence of a loved one, either actual or hypothetical, Chopin instead chooses to have her protagonist drop dead at his presence. On the contrary, in The Story of an Hour, Louise Mallard seems utterly overjoyed by her husband’s apparent demise. In a sense, she turned Shakespeare on his head. “Grief of my son’s exile hath stopp’d her breath,” (Shakespeare 108) he wrote and Lady Montague was dead, overwhelmed by grief at Romeo’s suicide. Mrs. Mallard, by contrast, “had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.” (Chopin 236) Louise does not grieve because she has lost someone, but because she has lost something—a freedom from the gender norms and patriarchal ideals of her day; a freedom from her husband, not as a person, but as an institution. She feels a joy at her husband’s apparent death, one that ultimately sends her to the grave when it is taken from her.

William James, a founding father of psychology, wrote that “[n]o shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself.” (James 51-52) In other words, the body and mind are inextricably linked in our expression of emotional states. Kate Chopin, of whom James was a contemporary, retains a clear recognition of this throughout her text. Mrs. Mallard’s “pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (Chopin 235) when she begins to conceptualize a freedom from her husband, when she is ‘possessed’ by the “monstrous joy that held her.” (235) It is impossible to analyze the story, and the character of Louise Mallard in particular, without giving thought to the very Jamesian role of emotion within the story. This connection between Chopin and James, and of emotion as central to the text, is made also by Selena Jamil in her essay “Emotion in The Story of An Hour”. As Jamil writes, upon her husband’s return, “[Louise’s] emotions spread through her entire being so profoundly that they lead to another severe physical change, and she dies immediately.” (Jamil 220)

What causes this fatal emotional attack? Jamil argues that it is an awareness of the impossibility of escape from patriarchy, a recognition that “she has lost this freedom, and with it her human individuality.” (220) This is a continuation from an earlier observation, where she writes, “Mrs. Mallard’s ‘heart trouble’ is not so much a physical ailment, as the other characters in the story think, as a sign of a woman who has unconsciously surrendered her heart (i.e., her identity as an individual) to the culture of paternalism.” (216) However, this is a rather mechanistic interpretation of Mrs. Mallard’s demise. If we conceive of the story through a Jamesian lens, as I suppose we ought to, then it is not an existentialist self-awareness of identity loss which causes Mrs. Mallard’s untimely death, but rather grief.

It is obvious that Louise loved her husband in some capacity, that he loved her, “that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.” (Chopin 235) However, she also feels a sense of freedom and excitement for the “long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.” (235) When Louise’s husband returns, remarkably alive by merit of having missed his train, this opportunity is taken from her in an instant. She is no longer a widow, free from the institution and expectations of marriage; she is once again Mrs. Mallard, once again constrained by a “powerful will bending hers”. (235) Fittingly, therefore, Kate Chopin ends her story with a callback to its very first line: “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” (234)

Sources

Chopin, Kate. “The Story of An Hour” Literature and the Writing Process, edited by Elizabeth McMahan et al., 11th ed., Pearson, 2017, pp. 234–36.

James, Williams. “What Is An Emotion?” The Essential William James, edited by John Shook, Prometheus, 2011, pp. 47–66.

Jamil, Selena. “Emotions in the Story of an Hour.” The Explicator, vol. 67, no. 3, 2009, pp. 215-220.

Poetry Response (Nov. 2021)

In “Fire and Ice”, Robert Frost uses the imagery of fire and ice (obviously) to meditate on the world’s end, saying that he “sides with those who favor fire”, i.e. with those who favor war. (526) However, he immediately conditions with by noting that the potential for hatred, i.e. ice, is also a potential spot of conflict. The conflation of ‘desire’ and ‘fire’ is obviously meant to conjure images of war, in particular World War I, which had just happened less than a decade earlier. ‘Ice’ and ‘hatred’, however, are more abstract and continue the general trend in the English language of using metaphors for hot/cold to refer to niceness and nastiness, respectively.

In “People Who Take Care”, Nancy Henry uses irony to convey an injustice in the perception of care workers. As she says, “people who take care of people are not worth much”, immediately followed by, “except to people who are sick, old, helpless, and poor.” (599) While they are unappreciated by most people, they play a vital role in the functioning of workspaces. They can “come and go without much fuss”, but this is qualified with, “unless they don’t show up when needed.” (599)

In “Woodchucks”, Maxine Kumin tells the story of the speaker’s attempts to kill an invasive group of woodchucks. While they first try to kill the woodchucks quietly and “humanely”, this doesn’t work and they soon decide to grab a .22 and shoot them. She evokes the imagery of the Holocaust, wishing for the woodchucks to have died “the quiet Nazi way” (553) in order to emphasize the speaker’s descent into bloodthirstiness. The speaker revels in killing the woodchucks by the end of the poem. They are “a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing.” (553)

Various Fragments

This is just an assortment of various writing fragments and short pieces that won’t come to anything or express views I no longer agree with. Most of them are very bad, even in a fragmentary state. Be warned.

An Untitled Poem (est. 2019?)

	Blessed are you, God,
our Lord, King of the universe,
who has not made me a woman.

	In the garden,
I imagine my pain and my
sorrows washed away, for you had
not created
	woman.

I imagine
my joy disappear with one small
bite, given the knowledge that I
have not been made
	a woman.

	I feel the sorrow
found in those lavender fields of France
of that old prince who cursed and prayed
to have not been made
	a woman.

	The love I feel for
you has not passed, but instead found
strength; yet I cannot help but wonder
why I cannot be
	a woman.

On Anti-Imperialism: An Attempt at a Dialogue (Jan. 2020)

In the interests of dialogue, and of understanding both my own positions and the positions I stand against better, I would like to offer a critique of an article by apparently notable publication by the name of The Weird Politics Review.

To quote Tuck and Yang in Decolonization is not a metaphor, “[D]ecolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity.”

An Untitled Poem (est. 2020)

On the beaches of Palestine, we sing our
sorrows to the sounds of the crashing waves.
We sing of kingdoms past and prophets old, of
messiahs lost and prophecies scorned. Roman
auxiliaries come and listen to us play.

And they say, “Go, sing us a song of Zion!”
Sing us our praises, they say, and set your
sorrows away, for did we not bring you
back to Zion? The fires of the temple still
burn in sight. We sing our songs to forget.

An Untitled Poem (est. 2020)

If I should sleep in the forest,
Nature whistling her tender melody,
A mother’s weep as her chorus,
And a calling man brings serenity
As I follow into the night.

Unknown (est. 2021)

Today, it is almost a cliché to declare the “end of religion” and the so-called ‘death’ of God. It has become apparent to many that the growth of secularism

On the Prospect of Green Capitalism (Jul. 2021)

Asad Rehman makes this most forcefully in a 2019 article for The Independent, writing that the Green New Deal’s 

; as he states later in the article, “[r]educing fossil fuel dependency by itself certainly doesn’t solve the crisis of inequality and poverty faced by the majority of the world’s citizens.”

It is noteworthy here that Rehman’s own charity, War on Want, calls for “a rapid transition to a near-zero goal [for carbon emissions] by 2030” and for a “Global Green New Deal”

Indeed, it is with War on Want with which many of these claims originate

It is, in essence, apologism for the current climatic regime wrapped in anti-colonial parlance.

I am certain, of course, that Rehman does not view himself as such.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/false-hopes-green-new-deal

Many of the arguments advanced by skeptics of the Green New Deal are not, on their face, false

There is reason to be concerned

Climate justice for some is not justice at all

but even ‘revolution’ in-and-of-itself does not imply an end to climate change.

The fact that 

the supposed ‘imperialism’ of the Green New Deal

in this sense, 

reflects 

Communist organization, after all, tends to be little more than a secular reformulation of Catholic charity

It would be a mistake, however, to identify the secular-as-religious as being an exclusively left-wing phenomenon—most modern political movements, from 

to liberal whig histories, have taken on an eschatological and pseudo-religious bent.

After all, if communism is a religion, then the liberal worldview must b

as Leszek Kołakowski so keenly observed, “[a]t present, Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it; it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organize various interests, most of them completely remote from those with which Marxism originally identified itself.”

It would, of course, be utter nonsense to pretend that 

In this respect, I admire groups such as the Catholic Workers Movement 

 much more than 

If you want to 

, you may as well join the Salvation Army.

If there is one

Should those of us who broadly consider ourselves to be ‘on the left’ welcome this new, green capitalism? 

can we, as principled leftists, advance a program which we know to be 

Yes!

Driven from Eden: A Review of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (Jul. 2021)

As Hannah Arendt argues,

and while I share many liberals’ admiration for the principles of the American Revolution

Unless we consider the ideals of the American Revolution to be

, as is the case in nationalist mythos,

then we come to the unavoidable conclusion

if we are to consider, rightfully, the Russian and Chinese revolutions as failed projects—then we come to the unavoidable conclusion that the American project must

the American Revolution =/= America itself

can the American project be redeemed? tentative yes

Habermas unfinished project

The Necessity of Land Reform in the Contemporary United States (Aug. 2021)

We live in a surreal moment, where the promise of 

sits at a crossroads

and the struggle against white supremacy has fallen under the influence of self-help grifters.

in a very real 

Thus far, the debate surrounding reparations to African Americans (and Native Americans) has centered around monetary compensation for the historical wrongs of slavery and genocide.

While the redistribution of land

in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa has largely failed 

and rampant corruption, 

Compare these failures to the successes of the Cherokee Nation

The future of the United States is such that, 

fulfill the promise laid out over 150 years ago

The New Anti-Masons: A Retrospective on the QAnon Movement (Aug. 2021)

It began with

It harkens back to the days of the earl

The so-called “basket of deplorables”

The fears of both the anti-Masons and the QAnon movement had their foundations in reality, but

Populism,

Populism, especially the populism

An Untitled Article? on Climate Change (Aug. 2021)

I think a lot of left, especially the online left, vastly underestimate the potential for the emergence of a ‘green capitalism’ due to their own

and dogmatic analyses.

It harkens back to the days of the Third Period, when the belief in an imminent collapse of capitalism caused the international communist movement to adopt policies and analyses that were frankly idiotic.

To a lot of very online leftists, declaring that future will be anything other than the imminent collapse of civilization is a form of ‘cope’, pure and utter hopium, but I honestly find a ‘green capitalist’ future far more unsettling and existentially terrifying than any collapse scenario.

Those who all but accept the premises of an imminent collapse usually talk about ‘mitigating’ the harms of climate change in some way, but what is there to mitigate? While we can and should talk about adaptation projects and infrastructure, if we genuinely do believe that climate change is already bad enough to destroy civilization as we know it, then what is mitigation? Even under the most optimistic projections, there will still be significant community disruption and even deaths, primarily in the Global South, due to the effects of climate change. What will be the fate of these communities under a global civilizational collapse?

‘mitigation’ in this context is little more than a more radical framing for ‘harm reduction’

Why is blowing up a pipeline a form of mitigation but voting for a climate-friendly politician is not? When someone speaks of ‘mitigating’ climate change with no other prescriptions except revolution or eco-terrorism, it’s little more than piecemeal rhetoric meant to assuage white guilt.

While

This is why I have

This, of course, isn’t to say that things will turn out all peachy. That’s just another form of climate denial.

It’s easy to say that nothing can be done, it’s hard to s

; it’s even harder to acknowledge that what will be done will not be done on just terms.

There is No Autistic Community: Individualism …? (Aug. 2021)

The Combahee River Collective published its manifesto in 1977, a monumental moment in the history of Black feminism

I reserve a great deal of respect for the Collective

While I do not consider myself as having the sufficient knowledge or insight to critique identity politics in general, as necessary as I maintain that is, I believe a specific criticism of the applicability of identity politics with regards to the neurodiversity movement is warranted.

Neurodiversity remains wedded

The politicization of the personal leads nowhere 

It would be a mistake to remain dogmatically 

—lest we repeat her same mistakes at Little Rock—

Charles Taylor argues

a “politics of recognition”

; however, as Seyla Benhabib counters,

; even the so-called ‘abolitionists’ 

The variety of human experience 

The concept of intersectionality provides some reprieve 

A ‘hope of liberation’ within one’s own identity has proven to be little more than 

The 

of claiming historical figures as being “one of us”—that is, ‘an Autistic’—betrays our 

Autism becomes just another set of norms; a new 

Autism is neither a disease nor an identity; it is nothing.

There is no Autistic identity, because 

There is no Autistic community,

There is no Autistic community because it has been killed and subsumed into Autistic identity.

We may phrase it another way: 

If, after all, we accept the premises

, then there is no 

It is little more than the ‘cultural left’ which Richard Rorty rightfully criticizes

We are ‘Autistic’ only through shared trial and shared triumph

I find no comfort 

I am not interested in building ‘alternatives’ to neurodiversity or the language of autism rights. The work of the present movements should be supported, but we cannot lose sight of their weaknesses and limitations.

The neurodiversity and Autism rights movements

and eat their own once their time comes.

I do not oppose the neurodiversity movement, nor any identity-based movement (such 

in its ambitions or goals. Richard Rorty rightfully argues

Sappho is Sappho: Comments on Identity Politics (est. Aug. 2021)

in a very real sense, the long-term threat of division over the question of “inclusionism” v. “exclusionism”

If 

In a

discussion, these are 

I use the term ‘queer’ throughout paper not out of any sort of affection for the term, but out of convenience.

The creation of ‘queer’ identity 

A new generation of ‘queer’ 

. They conceive their ‘queerness’ not through a sense of community, but through the lens of identity alone.

from this rise of a hostile gatekeeping culture on one side and, on the other side, of hyper-specific labelling.

It

It is not a bad thing that people recognize themselves in these identities

, but this recognition is self-serving and narrow. Gender and sexuality cannot be 

A politics of identity

and destroys a political commun

What-ever radicalism ‘queer’ identity may have once had is now thoroughly dead.

the transformation of ‘lesbian’ from a term referring to any woman attracted to other women to a term referring exclusively to homosexual women

It’s important to state here that I don’t take a position on what is or is not a ‘valid’ identity, nor can any such claim be extrapolated from my arguments; the rhetorical cat is out of the metaphorical bag. There is no means of return to a community-based conception of ‘queerness’. It is better to live within this age of identitarianism than act against it on the side of reactionaries.

Xenogenders are good and no less “valid” than the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, but they are identities formed as identities, without the social bonds that formed the basis of previous queer identities

This is true of most modern queer identity

It is no

Transgender is not reducible to dysphoric

What is ‘good-faith’?

Policing the boundaries of identity is bad

The answer is not a return to social conceptions of identity but a willful abolition of these identities (man, woman, non-binary; cisgender, transgender; heterosexual, homosexual)

The claims that “we have always been here” ring hollow

Sappho is not lesbian, she is not bisexual; Sappho is nothing other than herself.

(on TERFs)

John Stoltenberg, noted idiot and self-described “trans-inclusive radical feminist”, has been one of the main voices for the rehabilitation of Andrea Dworkin’s legacy

While there is a genuine discomfort associated 

(on gender nonconformity and “femboys”)

in a

(on asexuality and intersex)

in a

(on “mspec lesbians” and inclusionism/exclusionism)

in a

whether bisexuals hold privilege over monosexuals, or the inverse; whether

into a nonsensical division between ‘mspec’ and ‘mono’ lesbians more reminiscent of Tumblr’s own mini-culture wars over asexual identity

What is Religion Today (Nov. 2021)

; these are not religions, they are political organizations in a spiritual guise.

The impulse toward legalism has retarded genuine spirituality

The goal of religion is not the rejection of pleasure, but the pinnacle of pleasure

It is not merely pleasure for the sake of pleasure, but pleasure for the sake of growing closer to the divine

the freedom to choose

The crystallization of religious dogma

reject the traditional notion of the deity, the being whom 

A denial of God’s relativity 

is not religious belief, but dogma. The great insight of the pragmatic theory of truth is not that 

The poverty of so-called ‘New Atheism’ lies not in the fact that it is opposed

What is the Purpose of the Baháʼí Teaching on Homosexuality? (est. 2021)

The lesser covenant of Baháʼu’lláh delineates not between believer and non-believer, but between takers of a vow and non-takers of a vow. It is a pseudo-monastic relationship in which one commits themselves fully to the worship of and service in the name of God.

Unknown (Nov. 2023)

As the Marxist historian C.L.R. James noted about the massacre of the whites in Haiti,

Unfinished Section on Peirce (Nov. 2023)

The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, a founding figure in the American pragmatist tradition, 

Here we come to one of the uncomfortable truths of sociology—namely, that we are entirely social beings. Not merely in the sense that we are shaped by our social relations, but that we are defined by our social relations. Josiah Royce, one of Peirce’s early followers, used 

construct his metaphysics of community and self-identity. In the view of Royce,

In the words of the American philosopher Josiah Royce, 

Worldwide, these numbers

The American philosopher Josiah Royce, whose work would influence the Chicago School of sociology, was deeply interested in the interaction between the individual and the community.

A Pragmatic Critique of Stephen Batchelor (Dec. 2023)

The understanding of pragmatism presented by the 

In the spirit of this, the question of whether Stephen Batchelor and the Center for Pragmatic Buddhism (henceforth CPB) are justified in their novel interpretations of Buddhist belief will be sidestepped. Whether Batchelor and the CPB are engaging in some form of ‘appropriation’ in their radical revision of Buddhist thought is beyond the scope of a mere paper; whether Batchelor and the CPB are basing their beliefs on an adequate understanding of American pragmatism, however, is not.

The dominant figure within American pragmatism in the latter half of the 20th century was, without doubt, that of Richard Rorty.

This is not actually the position presented by Rorty.

Life and Death in the Age of Mappō (Mar. 2024)

In an age of climate crisis, of burgeoning spiritual decline, of ‘fake news’ and algorithmic 

, of expanding inequality and 

, it is necessary to revive belief in mappō as an age of decadence and conflict. To do such represents a vital corrective to the triumphalist and rationalist narratives of liberalism 

, which have lead to the 

Thus, to be an ‘engaged Buddhist’ in modernity is not to hold out hope for change, but recognize the push toward egotism and greed amid decay; it is to deny our status as moral and political agents, to recognize the inherent limitations of the human mind in overcoming suffering. 

What does it mean to ‘be political’? One does not be political, one becomes political. To ‘do politics’ is to dress a certain way, to speak a certain speech, to think a certain thought. Politics is the collapse of the public into the private, theology into philosophy, matter into mind. 

The good woman knows where to use the restroom. The good churchman does not think ill of his neighbor. The good liberal is anti-racist. Thought itself is a public action. It is not the act of a singular, but an act of shared consciousness—a unity of algorithm and mind. Our thoughts are reflected onto the world, so that consciousness may grow ever larger. There is no self to speak of.

How does one escape this state? Hit the power button, but where does such a thing exist?

In this state, 

Truth is twisted and turned on its head; the conventional reality is hidden until only emptiness remains—emptiness of soul, of thought, of being. It is this decaying force that has mired the world of the political in illusion; our experience of the political is not mediated through the connections which bind us nor a recognition of the dependencies from which we arise, but through claims to objectivity and particulars of the self. Politics is reduced to the status of theater, a stage show in which we are all, at once, actors and directors.

Who can speak amid 

Who can watch as children lay dead on beaches? Who can listen to the cries of sons before their last breath? Who can speak of peace in a peaceless land? If not now, when? 

Fifty meters to my east, they blame the west; fifty meters to my west, they blame the east. The truthmakers lie and the deceivers tell the truth; the most moral among us commit the greatest crime. Why should Amitabha save us? Why should Maitreya greet us? The blood of those past, present, and future calls our name. How arrogant are we to consider ourselves worthy of salvation.

At once cognizant and ignorant of the illusion, we wish for a plague to fall, yet when such a plague comes, 

The transformation of 

all things are empty, devoid of inherent being, yet interconnected and 

A Critique of Zeteticism as Metamodern Epistemology

This is a paper written across four days in March 2024 that I had intended to submit to the Metamodern Theory and Praxis journal that Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm and Brendan Graham Dempsey had started. It reflects my first real attempt at writing a paper I thought was worthy of submission. Unfortunately, due to the multiple misreadings and errors on my part in interpreting Storm, I concluded that it was a failure and not worth continuing midway through writing the first draft.

Due to the time when the paper was abandoned, there is no bibliography and all quotes are unsourced. However, I can provide a source for any quote or piece of information in the paper if requested.

ABSTRACT: In his 2021 work Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm argues for the adoption of ‘Zeteticism’ within the human sciences, which he defines as the notion a belief may be justified on a conditional basis, so long as there is not a significant chance it is wrong. This article places Zeteticism in dialogue with the American pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, arguing for a fundamental similarity between the two theories. However, it is argued that, contrary to Peirce’s account, Zeteticism endorses several propositions which lead to unacceptable consequences. The paper concludes with a reflection on metamodernism as a whole, offering an alternative path forward for a prospective post-postmodernism. ←250 words

The attempt to move beyond postmodernism, to construct a basis for philosophy and social inquiry that is truly ‘post-postmodernist’, remains a pressing matter within philosophy. Decades after the wax and wane of post-structuralism and deconstruction, little work has been done to provide a meaningful path forward beyond the impassé caused by the postmodern critique. Mainstream analytic philosophy has ignored the challenge. Much of continental philosophy has drifted further into the same skepticism which embodied postmodernism’s worst excesses. Against this background, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory is a fascinating work of synthesis, capable of gathering an array of sources within analytic and continental, East Asian and Indian philosophies to argue for a path forward from modernism and postmodernism within the human sciences. It is, in many respects, a truly original work which reveals a deep amount of thought and consideration for the state of the human sciences and academia more generally. It is all the more disappointing when, in what one should expect to be its crowning achievement—a response to the skepticism and relativism of the postmodern turn—it stumbles and falls on its head.

Zeteticism, as formulated by Storm, is American pragmatism. It is important to clarify this claim—what is being argued is not that Zeteticism shares some notable aspects with pragmatism nor that Zeteticism could be interpreted as a child of pragmatism; what is being argued is that Zeteticism is, all meaningful aspects, identical to pragmatism, that Zeteticism is nothing more than pragmatism with a new set of clothes. Why is this important? Viewing Zeteticism through the lens of American pragmatism allows us to see its failings—most notably, its failings due a lack of engagement with critiques of American pragmatism. An engagement with the New Pragmatist revival of the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce shows this plainly, as the Zetetic project becomes subject to much of the same criticisms from the neo-Peirceans as prior neo-pragmatisms. Further, the Zetetic project—in spite of its practical commitments—shares many key similarities with the neo-Peircean project in its stated commitments.

Pragmatism is a term with a nebulous history, unhelped by colloquial bastardization and array of competing interpretations. It is defined under such broad notions as “a philosophical tradition which … understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it” or “

In truth, there is little underlying agreement within American pragmatism other than a name and shared lineage. It is thus important to further clarify our claim—what is being argued is not that Zeteticism is identical to pragmatism as a whole, as there is no core set of pragmatist commitments to which all must adhere, but that it is identical to a specific pragmatism. As a movement within philosophy, pragmatism recognizes three figures as foundational to all subsequent formulations—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Zeteticism shares its core commitments most closely with these thinkers—specifically, we may regard it as a socially-oriented and misaligned Peircean pragmatism. ‘Socially-oriented’ refers to the general orientation of Storm’s thought toward the political and human sciences, which is in line with the trend of modern Peirce interpretation—both Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse have used Peircean epistemology in the realm of democratic theory; Richard Swedberg has often used Peirce in his work in economic sociology. ‘Misaligned’ refers to the contradiction between the stated aims of Zetetic epistemology and its practice—i.e., how Zeteticism manages when it is ‘put to work’, when it is applied to real-life experience. As will be argued later in the paper, the stated aims of Zeteticism are fundamentally Peircean in orientation, aiming for the notions of ‘getting things right’ and ‘fixating our beliefs’—the practice of Zeteticism, by contrast, achieve little more than an affirmation of relativism on a sympathetic reading and a justification for the strengthening of boundaries between disciplines, not to mention the academy and the outside world, on an unsympathetic one.

Peirce is a notoriously difficult thinker. One can be readily forgiven for not being cognizant of all his nuances. However, much of the difficulty in reading him comes not from his writing itself, but the nature in which his work has passed down to us—Peirce’s work exists not as a unified set of manuscripts, but rather scattered and assorted notes, lectures, and papers for the aspiring Peircean scholar to sort through. Thus, as James Jakób Liszka notes, Peirce’s body of work “has been found to be congenial to positivism, logical empiricism, phenomenology, scholastic realism, operationalism, verificationism, scientism, process philosophy, Popper, behaviorism, functionalism, structuralism, semiology, speech-act theory, the critical theory of Apel and Habermas, Prigogine, Putnam and, of course, pragmatists of all stripes.” However, as recent work by intellectual historians of pragmatism have argued, it is nonetheless possible to speak of unified themes and arguments within Peirce’s writings. More recently, a reconstructive project to delineate a specifically Peircean pragmatism from his writings was launched by the work of Christopher Hookway, Cheryl Misak, Susan Haack, Isaac Levi, and many others—it is on the basis of this work that Zeteticism will be criticized.

A Genealogy of American Pragmatism

As has been noted earlier, there is a wide plurality of thought associated with American pragmatism—Peirce is not Habermas is not Haack is not Rorty. Nonetheless, both Cheryl Misak and Nicholas Rescher have noted that there appear to be two distinct ‘strains’ throughout the history of American pragmatism. In Rescher’s terms, we may speak of a ‘pragmatism of the right’ which seeks cognitive security and a ‘pragmatism of the left’ that embraces cognitive relativism; in Misak’s terms, a strand of thought genealogically originating with Charles Sanders Peirce and another with William James. It is best not think of these terms as revealing the ‘true’ thought of any philosophy’s seminal figures or expressing any sort of strong distinction between different pragmatisms, especially with regards to pragmatism’s first-generation,¹ but rather as useful heuristics to guide us through the history of pragmatism in a more purposeful manner. However, in all cases, it is necessary to begin with the word—the progenitor of ‘pragmatism’ as a concept, Charles Sanders Peirce.

As with Dewey, it is difficult to discuss Peirce in a manner which does not make his insights seem utterly mundane. His work is revolutionary, to be sure—but it is revolutionary in precisely the fact that it brings philosophy ‘down from the heavens’, that it 

When compared to the boisterous and radical claims of William James, the pragmatism of Peirce appears stuck-up and conservative. Cheryl Misak provides the best overview of Peirce’s pragmatism when she notes it as “the position which says that we must attend to the consequences of an assertion. This requirement arises in two ways—from a view of what it is to fully apprehend an assertion (a semantic theory) and from a view of what an inquiry which is aimed at truth requires (an epistemological theory).” We will focus almost exclusively on Peirce’s epistemological theory, as it is—as should be obvious—the most direct comparison to Storm’s own epistemological theory.

For Charles Sanders Peirce, the preeminent American philosopher of the 19th century and son of mathematician Benjamin Peirce, pragmatism was first and foremost a theory of meaning—if there is anything which Peirce can be said to be famous for beyond mere naming, it is the pragmatic maxim: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” Peirce uses the example of transubstantiation to illustrate his point: Protestants hold that the sacraments are purely symbolic representations of the blood and body of Christ, while Catholics hold that the sacraments are the body and blood of Christ in a literal sense. However, as Peirce notes, the Catholics admit readily that the sacraments “possess all the sensible qualities of wafercakes and diluted wine.” The ‘real presence’ in the sacraments is a substantial presence, i.e. emerging at the level of substance rather than accident. It is this distinction which Peirce finds unacceptable. In order for it to be meaningfully stated that the sacraments are the body and blood of Christ, they must possess some quality which would result in an experience 

—“[o]ur idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself.”

Since we cannot regard them as acting as anything other than bread and wine, Peirce declares that “we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon.”

This is, as has been noted by Cheryl Misak, a verificationist theory of meaning; however, in saying such, it is necessary to ward off the ‘positivist’ boogeyman. Peirce’s verificationism differs in several important respects from the logical empiricists—it does not reject the whole of metaphysics nor does it rest on strict distinctions between fact/value or analytic-synthetic. His sympathies to Kant and Hegel prevent him from taking the stringent anti-metaphysical stance of the later logical empiricists. Much like his contemporary in Europe, Karl Marx, Peirce should not be conceived as anti-metaphysics broadly, but rather anti-metaphysical in orientation. The pragmatic maxim “speedily sweeps all metaphysical rubbish out of one’s house. Each abstraction is either pronounced to be gibberish or is provided with a plain, practical definition.” The maxim, as a theory of meaning, plays a central role in Peirce’s epistemology due to boundaries it sets around inquiry itself. Misak writes, “If a belief has no consequences—if there is nothing we would expect would be different if it were true or false—then it is empty or useless for inquiry and deliberation. We have no way of inquiring into it. The maxim thus determines ‘the admissibility of hypotheses to rank as hypotheses’ (MS 318, p. 8; 1907).”

At the core of Peirce’s epistemological theory is his notion of truth. For Peirce, ‘truth’ is future-oriented and non-transcendental, “a direct product of the pragmatic maxim” which extends its conclusions to the whole of inquiry. However, Peirce’s theory of truth is often subject to severe misunderstanding, partially as a consequence of his own explanations for it. Oftentimes, Peirce would choose unhelpful or vague language when defining ‘truth’—most infamously, his claim that what is meant by ‘truth’ is “[t]he opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate”. Peirce’s position has thus been misunderstood as a consensus theory of truth, but this misses the nuance of Peirce’s position. When discussing truth, it is necessary to avoid some of Peirce’s own trappings in order to meaningfully step forward into a workable epistemological theory. In particular, Peirce’s emphasis on the “end of inquiry” has likely led to just as many misinterpretations of pragmatism as William James’ most sweeping statements. As Misak notes in Truth and the End of Inquiry, a more useful means of thinking about truth from a Peircean perspective is through that of the subjunctive conditional, ‘will-be’, rather than the indicative conditional, ‘would-be’; that is to say, Peirce offers an account of what will be true as opposed to would be true. Misak formulates it as such: “if, if inquiry were pursued sufficiently far, then H would be believed, then H is true.” It will be immediately obvious that there are some quirks of this claim—most notably, the truth-value of claims such as “6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust” is kicked into the future.² While this is superficially worrying, it is tempered by the recognition that Peirce is claiming that “what we commit ourselves to is experience falling in line with the belief or with some successor of it; and what we expect is that the proposition in some form will survive future inquiry.” In other words, Peirce’s theory of truth is an extension of his fallibilism toward belief. What matters is not that a claim is precisely true but that a version of it will fall in line with future experience—as we have little reason to doubt that our experience will overturn the belief that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, it can be meaningfully stated to be true.

Further, in considering the social effects of Peirce’s theory of truth, it is important to remember that inquiry is a necessarily communitarian effort which cannot be decided on an individual basis. In other words, unless he were to uncover evidence that prompts doubt, the fringe historian writing self-published tomes about the lies of the Zionists is not merely engaging in bad inquiry, it is arguable whether he is engaging in inquiry at all. While an allowance for Holocaust skepticism is a claim that could reasonably be levied against the subjectivist and individualist epistemology of William James, it holds little ground against Peirce’s theory of truth. The role of Holocaust skepticism is even less clear in Storm’s account, where he asserts that “a person can be justified in asserting that they ‘know x’ (in the provisional sense above) if there is not a significant chance they are wrong about it (having evaluated a sufficient amount of evidence prior to making a truth claim). What counts as significant is directly tied to the practical consequences of being wrong.” Further in the same chapter, he writes, “[w]hat makes the discovery of ‘facts,’ limited truths, and even provisional knowledge possible is the disposition of a particular “thought-collective” or epistemic community.” There are two necessary criticisms of this account compared to the very similar Peircean account: first, Storm takes an elitist view of the community of inquiry, presenting inquiry as equivalent to academic inquiry; second, in presenting a theory of justification alone, Storm relativizes truth in a manner that should be considered unacceptable by any reasonable observer. His pluralism regarding truth cannot hold ground in light of his stated scientific pluralism.

Let us begin with the latter point. In abandoning the search for truth in favor of ‘contextual relativism’, the recognition that “everything … will eventually become obsolete”, Storm is repeating, in essence, the infamous declaration by Richard Rorty that truth is nothing more than “what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.” As insecure as Rorty’s account of truth was, it transforms into something downright dangerous when combined with Storm’s pseudo-Peircean account of justification. This is especially relevant due to the nature of the times in which we live. Throughout the text, Storm mentions the notion that we have entered a ‘post-truth’ era in our social and political atmosphere. We are told, time and time again by our media and politicians, that we are having to confront the problem of ‘fake news’. In reality, the state of affairs has become closer to what Neil Postman referred to as an “information glut”—the wealth of context-free information has broken down what it means for us to know something. When we engage with the primary sources of information now to us—television in Postman’s day and the internet in ours—we are engaging with a stream of information set entirely apart from the context in which it was created. In Postman’s argument, this stream of information gives us the illusion of knowledge without granting us any actual, practical knowledge regarding our state of affairs. We are, in Postman’s words, constantly “deprived of authentic information” by the nature of television—and the internet by extension—as forms of entertainment.

Even if we reject Postman’s critique broadly, it should be seen as plainly true that an individual inquirer is incapable of sorting through the wide variety of information available to him at any particular moment. Both Storm and Peirce recognize this issue and both emphasize inquiry as a communitarian process as a result. However, in his notion of inquiry, Storm stumbles and falls where Peirce does not due to the following claims: (A) that knowledge is created among a particular (i.e., non-universal) epistemic community; (B) that there is no demarcation between science and pseudo-science, that “[k]nowledge is produced differently in different scientific disciplines”; and (C) a pluralism with regards to truth in which the value of a belief is entirely dependent on the production of ‘evidence’. The acceptance of these three claims raises a question—why is Holocaust denialism, in the Zetetic view, a non-viable belief? It may be responded that inference to best explanation would naturally rule out Holocaust denialism as a belief, that all evidence is against the belief, but this cannot be held in accordance with the view that there are particular communities of inquiry which produce distinct forms of knowledge.

Let us return to the original Zetetic formulation by Storm. Peirce’s fallibilism is formulated in negative terms, i.e. we hold a belief to be true until we have reason to doubt, until we are met by some “surprising or recalcitrant experience.” By contrast, Storm formulates his fallibilism in positive terms, i.e. a person is justified in holding a belief “if there is not a significant chance they are wrong about it (having evaluated a sufficient amount of evidence prior to making a truth claim)”. This is an essentially verificationist claim—as Storm notes, “What counts as significant is directly tied to the practical consequences of being wrong. More significant consequences lead toward higher practical standards of confidence … It makes sense that we get more cautious as the stakes get higher … Depending on the risks of a given task, we can determine what degree of doubt is warranted.” As we have seen, this breaks down in light of Storm’s elitist, particular view of epistemic communities. Nonetheless, it has important implications for how inquiry is conducted.

In attempting to salvage justification and avoid the consequences of his arguments by appealing to ‘standards of evidence’, Storm undermines the Zetetic project as a whole. In formulating this criterion, fails to move beyond skepticism and instead Storm commits Zeteticism to a stringent Pyrrhonism on any meaningful subject. What are the ‘practical consequences’ of being wrong about a belief? Peirce is clear on what he means when he refers to ‘practical consequences’, Storm is not. In the most unfavorable interpretation, the Zetetic seems to be incapable of stating something as simple as, “the sun will rise in the morning.” If we take a more favorable view and interpret the criterion in terms of social consequence, then the Zetetic is utterly incapable of saying anything with regards to ethics or politics; the Zetetic is so misplaced that they cannot endorse even an Oakeshottian anti-rationalism. It is difficult to see how the criterion of ‘significance’ does not simply condemn the Zetetic to irrelevance.

An obvious response to the accusation that Zeteticism is a skepticism is that the use of abductive reasoning allows for such beliefs to be justified under the Zetetic paradigm. This is certainly valid in the case of a belief such as “the sun will rise in the morning”, but it is questionable that abductive inference is capable of allowing beliefs within ethics or politics, or the social realms generally, to be justified. Abductive reasoning, by nature, has little regard for the so-called ‘risks’ of a belief—an abductively inferred belief which results in genocide is not rendered invalid by consequence. Additionally, the ‘synthesis’ of Zeteticism and abduction only further worsens the problem of its dual pluralism—note, for example, that its pluralism implies that a Zetetic can affirm such beliefs as the flatness of the Earth or a geocentric model of the universe. This is a charge which is partially admitted when Storm writes that “from a Zetetic perspective it makes a lot of sense to maximize epistemic pluralism and consider different possible ‘best’ explanations based on the purposes behind seeking an explanation in the first place.”

Zeteticism’s broad commitment to pluralism means that it cannot distinguish between lines of inquiry which are dead-ends and those which are not, in contrast to a neo-Peircean recognition (borrowing terminology from James) of ‘live’ and ‘dead’ hypotheses. In Peirce’s own terms, he would refer to ‘settled beliefs’—the notion that we hold beliefs which are not subject to doubt except “on a piecemeal basis” in the case of “a surprising or recalcitrant experience.” Rather than expressing an ‘optimism’ regarding the state of current belief, such a demarcation is necessary to clear inquiry of meaningless speculation. A chess player, in considering a move, does not consider every possible move resulting in every possible set of moves; rather, she selects a set of moves which appear to get her into a desired position and examines each line to see if it works. This, as Storm recognizes, is abductive reasoning. However, while the chess player is capable of affirming that a move made was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on future experience, that a belief is made ‘true’ or ‘false’ even relative to a specific position from a specific game, the Zetetic can make no such claim. Whereas one Zetetic community of inquiry may hold that the ‘best’ explanation for the shape of the Earth is spherical, another may hold it to be flat, another still may hold it to be concave. There is no means by which to sort through these differing beliefs except an inquirer’s own allegiance to a particular epistemic community.

The question of what is the ‘best’ explanation with regards to ethics and politics is especially notable. Zeteticism does not appear capable of meaningfully supporting the ‘Revolutionary Happiness’ which Storm proposes in later chapters—with a recognition of the elitist manner in which inquiry is defined throughout Metamodernism, it is difficult to see why a Zetetic should not simply endorse technocracy. Even if the notion of inquiry is expanded, it must be emphasized that the reason as to why a Zetetic should then support one ethical or political proposal over another is transformed into a purely relativistic affair. In practice, the Zetetic can do nothing more than endorse Richard Rorty’s ethnocentric politics: “Our acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or optional.”

Why should the Zetetic be a technocrat? The elitism of Zeteticism lies with how it defines the boundaries of epistemic communities, the ‘community of inquiry’ for neo-Peirceans. Inquiry, throughout Storm’s construction of metamodernism, is taken as equivalent to academic inquiry; while Storm argues to “decolonize and dismantle our academic silos,” he appears to unwittingly recognize the primacy of the academy in his account of inquiry. Throughout the text, examples of what inquiry entails are almost always shown through the lens of academic study; while Storm states that non-academics may hold “varying degrees of knowledge about specific social kinds and their properties”, this recognition is undercut by the discussion of how to deconstruct and reconstruct social kinds. In particular, the statement that the project of undermining anti-Blackness in the U.S. “requires a full knowledge of the various anchoring processes (enforcement mechanisms, role filling, economic needs) that are working to produce ‘race’ as a social kind in our contemporary world” should be opposed on epistemological grounds. It is absurd to expect a full knowledge of varying social processes, least of all in order to deconstruct and undermine them—did those involved in the global anti-apartheid movement hold a full knowledge of various anchoring processes involved in upholding South African racial segregation?

This is especially relevant due to the nature of the times in which we live. Throughout the text, Storm mentions the notion that we have entered a ‘post-truth’ era in our social and political atmosphere. We are told, time and time again by our media and politicians, that we are having to confront the problem of ‘fake news’. In reality, the state of affairs has become closer to what Neil Postman referred to as an “information glut”—the wealth of context-free information has broken down what it means for us to know something. When we engage with the primary sources of information now to us—television in Postman’s day and the internet in ours—we are engaging with a stream of information set entirely apart from the context in which it was created. In Postman’s argument, this stream of information gives us the illusion of knowledge without granting us any actual, practical knowledge regarding our state of affairs. We are, in Postman’s words, constantly “deprived of authentic information” by the nature of television—and the internet by extension—as forms of entertainment. Even if we reject Postman’s critique broadly, it should be seen as plainly true that an individual inquirer is incapable of sorting through the wide variety of information available to him at any particular moment. Both Storm and Peirce recognize this issue and both emphasize inquiry as a communitarian process as a result. However, in his notion of inquiry, Storm stumbles and falls where Peirce does not due to the aforementioned claims that (A) a belief is only justified if there is not a significant chance they are wrong, and (B) a social kind can only be deconstructed through a full knowledge of its underlying processes. As it stands, the assertion transforms the concept of racial equality into a mere metaphor.

As has been argued through example, Zeteticism seems to be fine-tuned as a purely academic epistemology—any attempt to bring Zeteticism outside of purely scholarly pursuit fails on some accord. The difficulty for the Zetetic is that she must commit herself to the elitist account of inquiry which is present in the plain text or the broader notion of inquiry which is implied by Storm’s own words. As we have shown, the utility of Zeteticism outside the realm of academic inquiry is untenable; however, committing to the elitist view is a denial of epistemic status to any outside the halls of the academy—a position which is anathema to Storm’s political project. Regardless of which path is taken, inquiry is further damaged by Storm’s belief that epistemic communities are particular, i.e. that there are multiple communities of inquiry which produce distinct knowledge. In contrast to the Peircean account, which emphasizes a singular and universal community of inquirers, this notion of particular communities leads necessarily to either cultural relativism or self-isolating elitism.

Even if we are to ‘bite the bullet’ and view Zeteticism as a method of academic inquiry rather than a broader epistemological project, it is questionable as to why we should prefer it over a similar method such as pragmatism that seeks to capture the whole of human experience. Enforcing a dualism between the methodology of the academy and the methodology of everyday life only serves to reinforce, not deconstruct, the academic silos Storm sets himself against. It is John Dewey, rather than Peirce, who understood this notion the best: “[f]or Dewey, it is important that [science, religion, and art] are shared social practices that take place within communities formed by those who have a stake in science, art, and religion. Individuals will find these practices more meaningful to the extent they are able to participate in them—that is, to the extent that these practices are organized democratically.” In this light, Zeteticism shows itself as little more than ‘book worship’—to steal a phrase from Mao—and must be countered by his same solution: “Go among the masses and investigate the facts!”

Conclusion

Taking a step back, we may begin to conceive—following the prior genealogy of pragmatism—of Zeteticism as a misaligned Peircean pragmatism. It is obvious that, like Peirce and the New Pragmatists, the Zetetic hopes to avoid the pitfalls of relativism and skepticism; however, her answer to their challenges is woefully insufficient. In practice, the Zetetic endorses positions which collapse her project into little more than a retread of early neo-pragmatism, a broken mirror-image of Rorty’s deflationism. If Metamodernism is to succeed as a post-postmodernist project, as a ‘new paradigm’, it must abandon its commitments to Zetetic epistemology.

It will be noted that much of the critique within this paper has considered Zeteticism in isolation from other aspects of Metamodernism. This is an intentional move: it is the underlying thesis of this paper that the project of constructing a post-postmodernist philosophy cannot be done on a systematic basis. Though this paper has argued from the standpoint of a Peircean pragmatist, this must not be mistaken for a call for a replacement of Zeteticism with pragmatism. Rather, a move away from Zeteticism must imply a move away from theory-building. It must imply a denial of necessary tenets, as such theorizing leads fundamentally to the ‘optimistic fallibilism’ which Storm criticizes. The point may be stated as such: ‘Metamodernism’ should not aspire to be a philosophical theory, it should aspire to be a philosophical movement. Its sole aim must be, to quote Richard Rorty, “keeping the conversation going.” Therefore, if there should be any positive thesis for a post-postmodernist philosophy to claim, it must be a commitment to a cosmopolitan view of philosophy, which seeks to break down the divisions of analytic and continental, Western and Eastern, sciences and humanities, social and natural, religious and secular. The only doctrine which metamodernism need enshrine is what Peirce referred to as ‘the first rule of reason’: “Do not block the way of inquiry.”

1. See, for example, Nathan Houser, “Peirce’s Post-Jamesian Pragmatism” ↩︎
2. In noting this same ‘quirk’, some sources such as the IEP point to relatively mundane claims such as “John F. Kennedy was assassinated”. However, while such examples are perfectly applicable, they are insufficiently aware of the dangers of Peirce’s theory of truth if misunderstood. A more extreme claim such as the one presented here is therefore relevant—the social cost of an apparent skepticism, or allowance for skepticism, toward the Holocaust could undermine the Peircean project before it begins. ↩︎