Make it easier
“Make it easier” is a surprisingly powerful way to increase the probability of an action. Which systems, practices and habits make it easier to acquire accurate beliefs?
Peter Thiel on faith, reason and hyper-Christianity
When I think of the ten commandments, I often think that the two most important are the first and last. The first: only worship God, look up to one true God. The last: you should not look around at your neighbour, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbour.
When you do not have a transcendent religious belief you end up just looking around at other people. And I think that is the problem with our atheist liberal world, it is just the madness of crowds. It’s not reason, it’s not rational, it’s just mass insanity.
There’s a contrast between evangelical Christian Bible study and the atheist rationalists. For the evangelicals, the outward-facing thing is often that people are somehow more moral or better. And the inward-facing thing is that you’re kind of sinful and there’s a lot of stuff you need to fix. [For the atheist rationalists], the outward-facing thing is that you’re more rational than other people, and the inward-facing thing is that you’re not capable of thought at all, that it’s just spaghetti code.
To use the Thomistic Medieval distinction: the medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect, and the moderns believe in the power of the will but the weakness of the intellect. So I guess I think faith and reason are compatible and in fact when you get rid of faith you end up in a world where there’s no reason either. And we’re living in a much less rational world than we were living in 100 years ago.
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I always think there are two different kinds of arguments. One is a metaphysical argument: God doesn’t exist, so the Bible’s not true. The second: the Christians aren’t Christian enough. And we have to think of what we’re struggling against as kind of hyper-Christianity, something like that. It’s sort of an extreme deformation of it. There are all sorts of forms that this takes. I think it’s not that there’s a shortage of morality, it’s that there is too much morality. I mean Greta [Thunberg] is so moral she wants to line up and shoot everybody who is not as committed to climate change. If you think of medieval Christianity, the two most important attributes of Christ were that he was divine and that he was poor. So anyone you saw who was poor might be Christ in disguise. But then in the 19th century you had people like Tolstoy or Marx who pushed this in a hyper-Christian direction—we had to do more than the Christians, we have to have a violent revolution, we’re going to do more for the poor in this world, right away.
And so I think the Christian alternative is to come back to see that we’re in this context, that it’s only if you realise you’re in a context in which things are pretty screwed up that you have any chance of moving beyond it. The two vignettes I always give on this subject: in the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, Pontius Pilate is seen as a saint. The reason is: you can’t expect more from a politican. It’s not that if you had lived in the time of Christ you would have done better. Which was the cause of medieval anti-semetism, you know, we should go after the Jews because if we had lived at the time we would have done better. Or more modern liberals say they would have been more tolerant in the middle ages, whereas its the people who style themselves as being part of the resistance—that very fact often tells you that they would have just been collaborators. And the second vignette: the Catholic doctrine of substantiation is super humbling, where it’s literally the body and the blood of Christ and you’re stilll no better than a cannibal, and still the problems of human nature, the problems of violence are this continuous with the past. And the only hope we have of doing better is to realise that we are still this contiguous with the past. And when we think we’ve set that behind us, we’ve transcended it, we’re much better, we’re hyper-Christian, we’re communist, we’re the tolerant people who would have been super tolerant in the middle ages, that’s when you’re simply worse.
Francis Fukuyama on boredom and sacrifice
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
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The pro-war demonstrations that took place in the different capitals of Europe in August 1914 can be seen in some measure as rebellions against that middle-class civilization, with its security, prosperity, and lack of challenge. The growing isothymia of everyday life no longer seemed sufficient. On a mass scale, megalothymia reappeared: not the megalothymia of individual princes, but of entire nations that sought recognition of their worth and dignity.
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In reading German justifications for the war, one is struck by a consistent emphasis on the need for a kind of objectless struggle, a struggle that would have purifying moral effects quite independently of whether Germany gained colonies or won freedom of the seas. The comments of a young German law student on his way to the front in September 1914 were typical: while denouncing war as “dreadful, unworthy of human beings, stupid, outmoded, and in every sense destructive,” he nonetheless came to the Nietzschean conclusion that “the decisive issue is surely always one’s readiness to sacrifice and not the object of sacrifice.” Pflicht, or duty, was not understood as a matter of enlightened self-interest or contractual obligation; it was an absolute moral value that demonstrated one’s inner strength and superiority to materialism and natural determination.
Wolf Tivy on transhumanism and Henry David Thoreau
Wolf: Is mankind the perfect being? No, we are not. OK, are we eventually going to create—or create conditions that create—beings better than ourselves? Yes, we are.
Alex: Wouldn’t it be healthier, though, if we thought we were the perfect being and just you know, kept it at that?
Wolf: But that’s pride. It’s pride and hubris and it’s wrong.
Alex: It’s Christianity, in a way.
Wolf: It depends what you identify with. Do you identify with the flesh or do you identify with the principle that is animating the flesh? If the latter then we can identify with futures with vastly different technological stacks. So we have vastly different flesh, it’s silicon. I think ultimately we end up there. For now, I’m actually pretty anti-transhumanist, I think it’s all fake. But in terms of taking the scientific worldview seriously and projecting our destiny forward, I think you end up there. But it’s not this self-worshipping transhumanism which has I think become dominant, where it’s like “oh we’re going to use AI to enhance our pleasure”… these are just really stupid self-referential visions. It’s like no, our glorious descendents that are smarter than anything else that has ever existed are going to wage nuclear war accross the heavens, that’s like the glorious thing that’s going to happen, right? You have to see it as an extension of natural law and the whole evolutionary process that we have undergone so far. And yeah it’s going to be bloody, it’s going to be crazy, it’s going to be very dynamic and its going to take a long time. This is the process of creation, this is the process by which God is manifesting into the world the kind of beings he wants to have a relationship with.
Alex: You sound like you’re gripped by religious ecstasy while you’re saying this.
Wolf: I am an ideologue. I am a religious ideologue. […] The bison sphere is a transitional step in this vision… it’s also a joke, an April fools article that I wrote, but look… this is what I believe, right? That was like a fun version of it.
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We are not in the game of subversion. We are in the game of construction. Maybe circumvention. But construction. Visions and ideas that improve the world around us.
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Thoreau tackles head on one of the deepest pathologies in American society, the way in which we are sort of enslaved to our capital. What do you actually get out of your wealth?
He keeps things simple and ends up in a life of contemplation. He teaches a spartan life of philosophy. He doesn’t dislike technology, he doesn’t dislike wealth, he wants us to have a technologically enabled society, but he wants us to be worthy of it. He wants us to have ends that are glorious enough for our means.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/subversive-walex-kaschuta-alexandra-kaschuta-kBN0P1r8OHM/
Ronald Dworkin on Posner’s doubts about the persuasiveness of moral arguments
Posner declares, as a matter of a priori psychological dogma, that moral arguments, no matter how sound or powerful, never convince anyone not already convinced anyway […] no doubt many people are never moved by the logic of a moral argument, even once in their lives, but it is absurd to suppose that no one ever is.
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The most irritating section of the book is a long piece of psychobabble explaining why so many academics supported Clinton: Posner thinks they instinctively protected him as the enemy of their own enemies. He prefers cynical to simple explanations, but in this case a simple explanation is more persuasive. They were committed, not to Clinton, but to the Constitution.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/03/09/philosophy-monica-lewinsky/
quote richard posner ronald dworkin moral psychology sociology
Richard Posner on moral entrepreneurs
Moral entrepreneurs typically try to change the boundaries of altruism, whether by broadening them, as in the case of Jesus Christ and Jeremy Bentham, or by narrowing them, as in the case of Hitler (putting to one side his “zoophilia”). They don’t do this with arguments, or at least good ones. Rather, they mix appeals to self-interest with emotional appeals that bypass our rational calculating faculty and stir inarticulable feelings of oneness with or separateness from the people (or it could be land, or animals) that are to constitute, or be ejected from, the community that the moral entrepreneur is trying to create. They teach us to love or hate whom they love or hate.
The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, p.42