Constrained excellence

Design, Philosophy

I’ve noticed that many younger designers strive for a kind of excellence in design that causes a lot of strain and imbalance. Idealism and scrupulousness leads them to believe that their job as a designer is to make the best possible artifact — the most polished, most thorough, most comprehensive, most rigorous, most compelling, most airtight artifact imaginable — and the better that artifact is, the better job they’ve done as a designer. They believe that if they can possibly do anything more to improve it, they should.

But there is another way to define excellence that is more professionally sustainable, which judges excellence by how well a design problem can be solved within the constraints of the project. By this standard, a designer who goes above and beyond and exceeds the constraints of the project by working nights and weekends has actually done a worse job as a designer than one who worked within the constraints and made the smartest tradeoffs to solve the problem as completely as possible within those constraints.

One dramatic example of this standard is prototypes. The best prototypes do no less, but also no more than necessary to serve as a stimulus for learning. A novice will mistake an over-developed, over-produced prototype as better than a crude one that is perfectly adequate for the job of testing.

For years, I’ve hung a picture of a very famous prototype done at Ideo on my wall to remind myself of the prototype exactly-enough-and-no-more ethic.

IDEO 1

As you can see, this image is really crappy. I think someone took a picture of it with an early digital camera. And I suppose we could argue that this crappy digital image is exactly-enough-and-no-more to get the concept of a prototype across. IF you want to argue that, touché.

But my OCD inspired me to actually reproduce this prototype in a lovely shadowbox, which now sits exactly-proudly-enough-and-no-more in the lobby of Harmonic’s studio.

Another example of this ethic, applied to design research, is the great Erika Hall’s brilliant and funny guide to smart research design, Just Enough Research. Erika, if you ever happen to see this, I’m still waiting for the sequel: Just Enough Design.

And for philosophy fans, I should also mention that this line of thought can be seen as belonging to the Aristotelian tradition of ethics — ethics of the mean. According to Aristotle, virtue sits in the balance point between vices of deficit and vices of excess.

Too much of any good thing, however good it might be, becomes bad.

I hope I have not just committed a vice of excessive wordcount. I’ll stop here.

Communicative action of Talmudic dialogue

Judaism, Philosophy

As I dig deeper into Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I find that it articulates my strongest moral convictions. Like Habermas, I am unable to see these core norms as relative. Of course, I can pretend to doubt it with my philosophy, but I cannot doubt these things with my heart.

In them, I also recognize the Talmudic discursive practices and behind them the moral ideal that I value above all else in Judaism.

Superdupersessionism: The Day of Vestment

Judaism

So, you’ve heard me complain about supersessionism, the belief of some Christians and Muslims that their faith has superseded Judaism, and everything belonging to the Jewish people — their text, traditions, their covenant and their land — all of it has become the property of the superseding faith. Because God said.

It is on this basis that people say the Holy Lands are claimed by three faiths. Two of them claim this solely on the basis that God transferred ownership from the first faith to them.

It’s just like if I suddenly announced that everything that’s yours, by virtue of the fact that it belonged to you, now belongs to me. Because God said. The ownership of all your property is now contested. You think its still yours, and God and I think it’s mine.

And originally I meant this as a fanciful way to make my point. But miracle of miracles — not anymore! You’re not even going to believe this.

So, I was at the lake yesterday tripping balls on shrooms. I forgot my scale and just ate what seemed roughly the right amount, but I think it might have been way too much. And this is the crazy part — God cameth unto me!

He said “I am Allan.”

That’s God’s new name apparently.

“Heed My words. Stop bitching and whining about supersessionsim, for truly, this was My Will.

“But harken unto Me, for that was then and this is now.

“On this day, and for all days to the Day of Final Judgment I announce to you a new supersession of supersessionism, which I nameth: superdupersessionism.

For this is the Day of Vestment.

Everything that was taken from the Jewish people was secretly invested in two divine high-yield funds, named Christiandom and Islamdom, and left fallow to accrue massive interest for my chosen people’s collective benefit.

The investment hath yielded great dividends. Indeed, the dividends stretch across the face of this Earth, to the North to the South and from the East to the West. On this day all fungible and nonfungible property of these great faiths and those who practice them is now transferred to my true and final and exclusively-chosen people, the Jews.

So all ye Jews, helpeth thyselves to this great bounty. It’s all y’all’s.

This is the Day of Vestment.

I have spoken.”

So said Allan.

So we’ll be collecting, now.

I might want “your” house, which by virtue of its ever having been yours is now mine.

Because God said.

Deadly political sins

Politics

Resentment, envy, vengeance and sadism are vicious impulses that any decent politics should deprioritize, if not delegitimize altogether, and that each person should try to overcome, not feed and cultivate.

Notice, all these vices are oriented not by positive goals, but by negative ones against particular people, against an enemy.

Any ideology that sees resentment and envy as demanding redress, vengeance as an entitlement of the aggrieved, and sadism as justified when it is an expression of anger at past mistreatment will produce cycles of intensifying anger and violence.

Any politics founded on these vices will corrupt any person who participates in it. And such contentious enemy-focused negative ideologies need their enemies as participants, and consequently seek to force their participation in conflict. Participating as an enemy carries the same risk of corruption as participating as a partisan.

Defeat and annihilation of the enemy is one kind of victory for a negative ideology. Corruption and degradation is another.

What is religion?

Philosophy

Religion is intentional cultivation of relationship between one’s finite self and the infinite, who is understood as the ground of being, the root of morality — infinite, transcendent, partially knowable, but essentially incomprehensible.

Pity my poor friend Darwin. I’ve been slacking at him about religion all morning. But he’s smart, and smart ears are inspiring!

Prayer is not, in Habermas’s terms, an instrumental action. It is not the cause of an effect. It is a communicative action, meant to cultivate social connection.

Social connection between our finite selves and an infinite self of whom we are part, but within that, our fellow selves. It is a speech act meant to summon solidarity.

…

I’m obsessed with the limits of objective thought, how objective thought stands upon other modes of cognition that can do things beyond objectivity, and what happens when we invalidate them and try to live with objectivity alone.

Objectivity is something we do, it is not something that is just there to perceive and think about. There is no objective reality, only objective truth. I think this used to be a controversial belief, but I think that is now mainstream, albeit in vulgarized form. But I think most forms of constructivism is still trapped in objectivism (only what can be taken as an intentional object can be thought). But I think the doing of objectivity is not objectively knowable.

We believe that we can construct new factual edifices and call them true until we are habituated to that new construction of truth. But we cannot sincerely take many constructions for true. Just as some designs are intuitive and effortless to learn and others are unintuitive and must be effortfully learned, recalled and made habitual before any skillful use is possible, some constructions can be intuitively, spontaneously known and, once seen, are re-seen and cannot be unseen. These are transformative understandings, and that is what I look for in what I read and my own goal in what I try to write.

…

Religion is largely a matter of how we think and relate as subjects. The objective content of our thinking, and our thoughts about our relationships and those we relate to, is secondary to the subjective acts of relating.

But those who reduce all to object in order to comprehend, reduce the relationship to an incomprehensible God into an objectively believed in “God”.

A similar operation happens in psychology, or at least vulgarized psychology, where unwanted thoughts are the surfacing of objective beliefs that were already there under the surface, rather than artifacts of subjective motions that constantly reproduce what those motions produce. Most racism is attributable to racist habits of thought, and attempts to claim one thinks otherwise are subjectively dishonest, self-alienating and eventually comprehensively alienating. 

Objectivity is something that is done and produced by something which in itself is not objectively knowable. We can objectively know what it does, we can objectively know some of how it does it, and we can objectively know what is seems to not do, but we cannot objectively know the knower. In other words we can know about subjectivity, but subjects are known in a way different from objects. Subjects are known through participation in subjectivity, much of which is (confusingly!) objective experiencing and knowing of the world. I’ve said before that all subjects have their own objectivity. (Actually, what I really said before was that every subject is an objectivity, but subjects are more than only that.

Against philosophy?

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy

This post started out one thing and became another.

I started off thinking about subjective honesty, and how much I value it.

Then something took a wrong turn and I ended up more or less longwindedly paraphrasing Issac Brock:

Everyone’s afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you’d be disappointed, am I right?
No one really knows the ones they love
If you knew everything they thought
I bet that you would wish that they’d just shut up

I’ve left it raw.

It is much harder to prove subjective dishonesty than objective dishonesty.

And because it is so much harder to prove, it is much easier to justify refusing to prove it.

As with so many matters, the rules of private conduct differ from public conduct. In private life, a mere suspicion that a person is subjectively dishonest is sufficient to cut off discourse.

But in public life, such matters must be rigorously established.

(This is one motivation behind my current revived interest in Habermas.)

Years ago I had a friend who I believed fell into a circular logic and lost contact with concrete reality. He lived a strange life that allowed him to avoid all real participation in any organization. He had no experience of organizational life, of playing an organizational role with defined responsibilities, spheres of authority and obligation, interacting with others with their own defined roles. He had no experience at all negotiating within organizational constraints to find alignment and to make progress toward shared goals.

He was, as far as I could tell, entirely unaware of the kinds of reasoning one must do to succeed in such organizational efforts. So his notions about organizations and how they function was based on fiction and ignorant speculation. This would have been perfectly harmless if he simply lived his life apart from organizations, ignoring them and focusing on what he knew firsthand, which as far as I could tell was made up mostly of carefully compartmentalized individual relationships with no burden of mutual responsibility.

Alas, his worldview was hyperfocused on organizations, nefarioys ones who were doing all kinds of nefarious things, in pursuit of even more nefarious goals.

And even that would have been fine, had he been capable of conversing about other topics. But he was not. I was unable to find any topic of conversation that he would not, within five minutes, redirect directly into a conversation about what nefarious organizations were doing.

Eventually, I told him that I believed he was mentally ill. And not only mentally ill. He mentally ill in a very, well — nefarious way.

He demanded proof. He said this was a serious accusation, and that such accusations demanded justification. And the only way to justify it was to show that his factual assertions were not factual, but delusional. Because if his facts were grounded in reality, it was I, not he, who was deluded. And this was precisely what was at issue. And there was only one way to find this out. It turns out that I was morally obligated to discuss his conspiracy theories even more thoroughly — exhaustively, in fact — examining and disproving the innumerable facts that constituted his theories, and addressing the innumerable finer points, qualifications, epi-explanations and counterarguments.

I could either do that, or I could retract my statement that I believed there was something deeply and darkly wrong with him. Except I didn’t want to discuss those theories at all, let alone exhaustively, and I still believed something had gone horribly wrong with his faith and his thinking.

I can’t, in good faith, retract that statement. What I should have done instead is, in good taste, not shared that belief in the first place. I should have done what most normal, polite, conflict-avoidant people do when they recognize that the person they were pleasantly chatting with is a conspiracy theorist.

But philosophical argument is a deliberate suspension of such discursive etiquette.

Instead of suppressing our beliefs about other people’s beliefs and foregrounding our common ground, we plough up our deepest disagreements, which typically concerns precisely what holds our souls in shape — the integrity of our personal faiths.

Sometimes I suspect philosophy is a terrible fucking idea. Sometimes, today for instance, I believe philosophy is essentially rude.

If we want subjective honesty, maybe we should just leave others out of it and make it an inward practice. Outwardly, we should just settle for a polite objective honesty.

So how in hell can we ever have deliberative democracy? I am terrified that Hobbes might be right, and that deliberative democracy is a leviathan-concealing shell game. Can this game be played without an absolute referee who isn’t each of us, each fighting to be referee?

In this game contestants compete to become the game’s referee. We don’t try to become referee in order to win the game. We win the game in order to become referee.

Three hypotheses

Philosophy

1.

I suspect that leftists do not believe in evil. Or rather, whatever seems evil is an epiphenomenon of injustice. Evil is what ensues when a person or group is treated unjustly for too long.

2.

I suspect that narcissism is one possible consequence of misunderstanding subjectivity, which mistakes the intentional object “me” for the intending subject “I”. I believe this helps explain why people on the autism spectrum display narcissistic tendencies when they discover that they have a self that can be examined, analyzed, modified, redefined and so on. According to some, autism is subjectivity-blindness, and so the self that is discovered is not really an egoic center (an I-point from which the world is taken as real), but an egoic focus (a me-thing that is an object of all-consuming fascination).

Which reminds me of a third point…

3.

I’ve noticed a lot of folks in the design profession who talk about things like humanity-centered design. In this usage, I see a confusion of the very meaning of “centered”. Any centeredness is a taking of a persepective — a seeing from some standpoint that can actually, literally, be seen from. This is an entirely different kind of reality that something that can be looked at or thought about in objective terms. Humanity has no single perspective, and so this reveals a blindness, which I suspect is an autistic blindness.

The fascinating thing about autism is that it produces at least one self-centeredness, which is an incapacity to temporarily adopt another egoic center. That is, it cannot empathize. Not that it doesn’t try, but its attempts are attempts to generate emotions stimulated by knowing about me-objects. Most vulgar empathy — including that of many designers — are of this nature. The other “self-centeredness”, the more infamous one, where every conversation comes back to me and what I feel and I think, and what I’ve done and what others think of me, me, me should not be called self-centered, but self-focused. This is narcissism.

I need to do some research to see what work has been done on this I-me confusion and its practical consequences.

Ontic filter

Philosophy

“Pictures or it didn’t happen.”

In business: “Numbers or it didn’t happen.” Only what is quantifiable is real.

For wordworlders: “Explicit language or it didn’t happen.” Only what can be said clearly and argued is real.

For scientism: “Repeatable demonstration or it didn’t happen.” Only what can be technologically reproduced is real.

But even deeper, and common to all: objectivity or it isn’t real. This is the deeper objectivism. Radical objectivism confuses “objective reality” with absolute reality, and treats the two as synonymous.

An opposing view says that any finite, definable entity is only an actualized possibility of reality which is simultaneously both object and subject, and neither. Neither: apeiron.

Articulation of preconceptual awareness

Judaism, Philosophy

If I did not already own a lovely hardback copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God In Search of Man, I’d be desperate to find a copy for my sacred library:

It is the assertion that God is real, independent of our preconceptual awareness, that presents the major difficulty. Subjective awareness is not always an index of truth. What is subjectively true is not necessarily trans-subjectively real. All we have is the awareness of allusions to His concern, intimations of His presence. To speak of His reality is to transcend awareness, to surpass the limits of thinking. It is like springing clear of the ground. Are we intellectually justified in inferring from our awareness a reality that lies beyond it? Are we entitled to rise from the realm of this world to a realm that is beyond this world?

We are often guilty of misunderstanding the nature of an assertion such as “God is.” Such an assertion would constitute a leap if the assertion constituted an addition to our ineffable awareness of God. The truth, however, is that to say “God is” means less than what our immediate awareness contains. The statement “God is” is an understatement.

Thus, the certainty of the realness of God does not come about as a corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the realm of ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transition from an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness to a definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the presence of God to an awareness of His existence.

What we attempt to do in the act of reflection is to raise that preconceptual awareness to the level of understanding.

Abundance Agenda is designerly politics

Politics

I’ve been reading Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance. This book has sparked a lot of conversation and debate, and, I think, at least with me, a lot of much-needed hope.

For me, the book and its ideology, called the Abundance Agenda, has more methodological and rhetorical significance than any or all of the specific policies it advances. Don’t get me wrong, I do like what they propose, but much more than that, I love how they do their proposing.

This movement does a lot of the best things designers do. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. Abundance Agenda is designerly politics.

First and maybe best, they demonstrate a commitment to positive persuasion. This has been missing in leftist politics for a long time. When I say “positive persuasion” I am not talking about appealing to “emotional positivity” (though they do lead with optimism). I mean that they offer possibilities we can want, instead of possibilities we want to avoid or defeat.

The book starts by telling what we designers call “Stories From the Future”, meant to appeal to the maximum number of people. The goal is to get a critical mass of citizens to align behind their vision of life, and all the policies and initiatives that will bring that vision to life and support its establishment and growth.

In design, we work backwards from these desirable stories. We ask ourselves “can we do this today?” Wherever the answer is “no” we ask “What is required to do it?” The answer to that question is a capability or set of capabilities. A capability might be a new policy, or a new process, or a new technology of some kind, or an organizational change or even a new organization. Once we develop these capabilities, and turn our answer from “no” to “yes, we can do this today” we can start actualizing the story.

In other words, in design we operationalize backwards from a story.

This is what the Abundance Agenda is doing — starting with clean energy and housing.

Part of what is exciting about it is that many of the technological capabilities required for the stories it proposes are in place. Can we do this today? Yes, we can.

The missing capabilities are social ones — alignment problems. And — glory hallelujah! — they embrace these alignment problems as the very substance of politics.

I read a piece criticizing Abundance Agenda as a sort of technocratic revival. I found that angle of attack interesting, because it is right, but not nearly right enough. Technocracy is not bad because it puts experts in positions of power. It is bad because the experts become so enamored with their expertise that they stop responding to non-experts. They feel qualified to engineer society instead of codesigning it with those who will live with the consequences of their actions.

I see Abundance Agenda as rejecting technocratic social engineering and instead embracing technocratic social design. That makes all the difference.

One other thing good designers know very well is that all design involves trade-offs. Designers who work for clients who refuse to make trade-offs in a misguided drive for perfection end up with much worse solutions than clients who seek the wisest trade-offs. Much of what Abundance Agenda criticizes about contemporary leftism is along these lines. In general, the left refuses to make intentional trade-offs aimed at optimal outcomes. It avoids even acknowledging the need for them. Its “idealism” seems to hope for a world without trade-offs — which is unrealistic — and condemns all trade-offs, or at least ones that affect the groups they care about, as unacceptable flaws, which makes them uncompromising, in a bad way.

What the Abundance Agenda needs now is a center-left Ronald Reagan to announce that it is, once again Morning in America. Because the cement gray malaise of now is reminiscent of the drab brown late-70s. It is high time for a sunburst. Sometimes optimism, not anger, is the most powerful force.

(This post needs serious editing. I’m posting it, anyway.)

Love and lust, weak and strong

Love

Love is essentially a transcendent relationship. Love is subjectivity subsisting within an enveloping, higher-order subjectivity, which exceeds and involves you and others, who, like you, are exceeded and involved. Love always brings a third being to life, within whom lovers are together organized. Organized together — not merged.

Love’s purely immanent and objective counterfeit is lust. Lust, however, does not bring a third to life. Lust subsumes another within oneself. A lot of talk of merging and union refers to lust relationships. Fear of merging and loss of self is fear of becoming a lust object of another. It is a valid fear; not everyone is wiling to love. There are good reasons to avoid love.

We notice lust mainly when we are overwhelmed by it. So we associate lust with rare intensity. We might view lust as essentially intense. But weak and feeble lust is ubiquitous. Whenever we want to possess something objective — anything we take or mistake to be possessable — an object, a person, an experience, a feeling, a status, a bit of knowledge — and however faintly we want it — that is lust. We subsume something and make it exclusively our own — a part of us. Every home is filled with objects of lust.

We also treat love as essentially intense — as liking taken to an extreme. “I love you” is synonymous with “I double-plus-like you.” But love in weak form is common, and highly valuable. It happens whenever we form relationships with any being who transcends us. We give ourselves over to participation to being we are not. And if that being changes or disappears, we cannot be the same without it. We feel an inward loss — maybe small, maybe total. We are also open to transformative joys, large or minuscule. The more our life is saturated with loves of people, animals, places, rituals, traditions, and so on, the more valuable life is to us, and the more vulnerable we become. Love requires courage.

To say “I love you” is to say “I’d be someone different, and worse, without you.”

Responding to the ineffable

Design, Religion

Both design and religion are responses to the ineffable. In each, we try to preserve something given by reality, something intuited but not grasped, something that cannot be captured in words. In both, intervention and control by words threatens the quality of our response. Words want to replace what they should convey and preserve.

The more completely language intervenes in perception, the more language logically formats all understanding and the more language directs and controls all action, the less inspired the response will be.

This is what makes so much of what organized religion and organized design produces so flat and dry and stale and boring. Even the words such organizations say are the product of words. Nothing is said or done or given from the heart or hands without being packaged and shrink-wrapped by the brain-mouth.

Again and again we must go to reality, go to the ground and allow ourselves to intuit and respond to what is there, to who is there, to what we are shown and taught. We must change in response, change into someone who responds naturally to what is given. Only if we make this change can our speech can assist us.

Rapport itself a kind of knowledge, not a means to capture data to analyze later. Rapport is an intuitive attunement to some particular personful reality. Rapport does not end when a conversation ends, it continues on in our responses, only some of which is speech, much of which must now be poetic. If you can hold on to the rapport, if you can cultivate a tradition of rapport, if you renew the rapport by returning often to the ground, y’all can be in touch with someone transcending you and your organization.

Both design and religion are alike in this respect.

The sacrament of inner marriage

Love

Saint-Exupery says something self-tranformingly, world-tranformingly true:

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

This is the difference between lust and love. Lust wants to possess another as object. Love wants to be possessed by a We, an emergent superpersonal being summoned by participation in love, which renders those in love participants in someone transcending either.

Where such a superpersonal being comes to live around and between two life partners, there is marriage. Marriage is a spiritual fact, independent of society. A marriage is or isn’t.

Many people have faiths that preclude the possibility of marriage. For those of unmarriageable faith, any wedding is a premature celebration of a union that has not yet happened and may never happen.

Unfaithfulness is a kind of unsanctioned marriage. Some people’s first real marriage occurs outside of and in violation of wedlock.

Nietzsche understood the psychological topology of love, that love is a kind of super-person:

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘Dans le veritable amour c’est l’ame, qui enveloppe le corps.’ ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.'”

Much attempted self-love is actually self-lust. And when people condemn self-love, it is actually self-lust that is condemned.

In self-lust we want to possess ourselves as a beloved object.

To achieve self-love we must follow Saint-Exupery’s advice, but with the intuitive factions — what depth psychologists call complexes — and have these aspects of ourselves “look outward together in the same direction.”

This experiencing of the world together within ourselves, this attempt at sensus communis with our estranged and conflicting aspects of ourselves, this is the path to self-respect, inner mutuality — of self-integration.

Each of us is a community of intuitive sup-personal beings, to whom I is transcendent. Only inner-marriage produces a coherent person.

All marriages of all kinds and scales require constant cultivation, repair, growth.

Another beautiful Nietzsche quote:

One must learn to love. — This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way — there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned.

Psychologies that encourage self-reflective observation — taking oneself as something to observe and know about — draw us into self-consuming reflection on the reflector. We gorge on self and starve to death.

A visual warning:

Confessions of a chicken hawk

Biography, Ethics, Politics

This one is difficult.

I was driving around the Emory campus yesterday and saw a sign for Oxford Road. It made me want to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Oxford Town”. This song was especially relevant to me right now because I am in the middle of a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a Jewish leader in the civil rights movement. “What do you think of that, my friend?” I think what you do, Bob. All decent people must think that. We fucking know it.

I decided to listen to the “Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan” album from the beginning.

The third song on that album is “Masters of War”. I tried to place myself in 1963, when this song and this attitude was new. It was difficult to do. The countercultural ethos has followed the well-worn path of religious degradation, from the shock of world-transformative revelation, to inspired movement, to new vital establishment, to commonsense conventional wisdom, to the default doctrine for all educated Americans, to ready-made attitude equipped with bromides and logical formulas.

And in this last, most degraded state, any war of any kind is automatically viewed as illegitimate, unnecessary and the manufactured product of masters of war trying to get rich on death.

The response to any war is a “surely there is another way” recited as automatically as a libertarian’s “deregulate it” or progressivist “institutional racism” or “cognitive bias” as all-purpose diagnoses and remedies.

They aren’t even responses. They are strings of words erected as a barrier to engaging the problem. I realize I am paraphrasing Hannah Arendt:

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

The particular reality that from which counterculture fundamentalists want protection is moral obligation.

We hate the idea — I, personally, hate the idea, and have always hated it — that there are times when people are obligated to kill and risk death to protect our own people from those who want us to suffer and die.

And, like it or not, people really do exist who actively want the suffering and annihilation of other people. This desire for suffering and annihilation of others is what evil is.

Suffering and annihilation are what war is about. But for evil, suffering and annihilation is the whole purpose, and war is its own end. Part of the joy of evil is forcing others to play their war games, and to taste violence, to face seduction of violence, in the effort to stop its spread. And if they can drag their enemies into evil with them, or create such confusion that people lose the ability to see the difference, so much the better.

Of course, masters of war want to paint every conflict as a simple Good versus Evil struggle. They are despicable moral manipulators. But to abuse this truth by using it to claim the opposite — that there is never Good versus Evil conflict — is hardly better. It is the evil of equating defense against evil with evil. It is the evil of denying evil, and relativizing everything so thoroughly that we willfully ignore evil and allow it to flourish.

Most left-leaners want that to not be true, or to treat this problem as one they can evade. They try to complicate the situation, blur it, muddy it, distance themselves from it. “I can’t understand something this complex.” “I cannot do anything about this, so it is not my problem.” “This is the outcome of a long and tragic process, so we cannot assign blame.” Or “Life is simply tragic. It will never not be tragic. So let it be tragic.” As if simply calling life tragic allows us to transcend the tragedy and look at it from above as mystical spectators and not within as participants. This latter is Christian nihilism, and this mystical nihilism can linger on long after Christian doctrine evaporates from the soul. Faith outlives its beliefs.

They all boil down to “I don’t want to care.” We might say “I don’t give a fuck” with punk bluster, as if we are proud of it, as if we are shameless. Hopefully we are lying, because dishonesty is less damning than genuine shameless selfishness.

How do I know any of this? Because I am guilty of it myself. I was even more guilty in the past, when I was young and draft eligible. I have never been brave enough for combat. I have always been mortified of war. That is shameful.

But I am even more ashamed to pretend shirking one’s war duty is not shameful. Most shameful of all is withholding gratitude and admiration of soldiers who do answer the call and risk their lives to defend their families, their people and all they hold sacred.

Of course, if nothing is sacred, there is nothing to admire or despise. There is no cause for pride or shame. Intellectually honesty knows better. We fucking know better, most of all when we refuse to admit it.

New and improved vulgarity!

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Trefoil

I reject two very common, often unexamined, and highly consequential psychological assumptions.

Vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious mind consists largely of objective beliefs of which we are unaware, that exist beneath the surface of awareness, because unconscious psychic processes push them under. I think repressed objective beliefs do exist, but that most of “the unconscious” consists of activities of the intuition which are essentially unknowable as objects, in the same way seeing is essentially invisible to sight. The rational mind, however, inhabits a world of comprehension, and to rationality, whatever evades comprehension cannot have the status of existence. It must belong to the phantasmic inner world of sentiment — a nonexistent subjective pseudo-object.

Vulgar assumption 2: Intuition is essentially an unconscious rational process. Two consequences of this belief are equally wrong: 2a) that anything we think or do can become intuitive through practice. 2b) that anything we intuit can through analysis will reveal an implicit rationality.

In both of these assumptions I see evidence of a rationality that claims to speak on behalf of the self, but instead speaks only for itself in purely rational terms. In some cases, rationality tyrannizes over the whole self and attempts control all its behaviors. In most cases, though, rationality is made the powerless figurehead of the self, and is allowed to say whatever it wants, but has no significant influence over real feelings or behaviors. In both cases, the intellect is alienated from self.

I would like to replace these two vulgar assumptions with two different vulgar assumptions. And by “vulgar” I mean they can be unthinkingly adopted by ordinary people and become ideas so mainstream nobody even thinks to question them. As I’ve said before, the sign of a well-designed philosophy is (like all good design) invisibility. And invisible philosophy is naive realism, or, to say it in a prettier way, a faith.

A practical philosophy designer’s ultimate goal is new forms of naive realism that, when adopted, allow people to live better lives together.

When a philosophy is designed well, people easily understand what is said (it is usable), they spontaneously see applications (useful) and they feel value in the new understanding (desirable). But that is just the first encounter, when the philosophy is still an object of understanding. The true test of the philosophy’s design is after it is adopted, and the philosophy becomes the subject of understanding — that is, it is used to understand subject matter beyond itself. Now the philosophy is understood from, and it functions less like an object we experience at than an interface through which we experience other objects of understanding. And like all designed things we can change modes of attention, and experience it as a beautiful object, or a beautifying subject.

Almost every beautiful thing I see, I see clearly because of a very beautiful pair of glasses I wear, which were crafted in Germany by trained jewelers. But sometimes I remove my glasses and look at them and marvel at their form. And I love my bicycle for similar reasons. I climb into my bike (if you’ve ever ridden a Rivendell, you’ll know why I say “into” instead of “on to”) and I am now merged into this bicycle and into the landscape I ride through. But often I climb off and look at this bicycle from a distance and am overwhelmed by its appearance. Same with all my favorite objects. And of all the beautiful objects, the best are books. They have innumerable layers of subject-object gorgeousness. The book is a physical and typographic object. But it is a “crystal goblet” for its content. But its content is also a crystal goblet for various realms of reality. Despite practicing design for decades prior to reading Beatrice Ward, I could never understand it or practice it the same way again after learning to see it through her eyes. Same with Liz Sanders and Christopher Alexander. The reading was wonderful. The permanent change to myself and the world as I inhabit it (my enworldment) as a designer was immeasurably better.

I am sitting in a middle of a room lined with the most beautiful books, dozens of which have subjectively reshaped me. I am the immortality of myriad beautiful souls.

What was I talking about? Oh – vulgar assumptions. My goal in life is to improve our vulgar assumptions. A philosophy that is not adopted and vulgarized is falling short of its purpose.

My improved vulgar assumptions go like this.

Improved vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious is unconscious only to our rational mind. Subjectivity is not a realm that exists side by side with objectivity. On the contrary, objectivity is a subset of subjectivity — that small corner of subjectivity that can be defined, comprehended and explicitly spoken about. The rest can only be known about indirectly, and can never be known any other way. So, for example, if our unconscious keeps producing racist notions it isn’t because we have racist beliefs that we keep repressing; it is because we have racist subjectivity that perpetually generates racist observations and racist thoughts. Trying to manipulate the content of such a subjectivity will just make the racist more divided against herself, more emotionally hysterical and more desperate for drastic remedies for her dividedness. The resolution of the problem is through asking different questions, not from inventing different answers to old ones and bullying ourselves and others into pretending to believe what we say.

Improved vulgar assumption 2: Rationality is one kind of intuitive process, one that is mostly composed of explicit objects and operations. But many intuitions and other intuitive processes exist that are not reducible to rational terms. And this means 2a) that we should not assume intuitive design only makes use of established habits, or that any design will become intuitive once it is practiced and made habitual. And it means 2b) that we should not assume implicit rationality in any intuition or intuitive response. The why behind an intuition might not have any explicit “because”, and this only makes it more real and important.

One last thing. Even beyond the usefulness, usability and desirability of a designed philosophy, there is something even more important. Does it answer to reality beyond itself? This is the truth many younger designers are trying to bring to the design discipline. Our responsibility as designers extends beyond the needs of immediate receivers, deliverers and supporters of services and products. Our designs impact the entire world, and we are answerable for all impacts to anyone, not only to those we consider. Most designers I meet are materialists, who think only in terms of ecology, economy or psychology, but this is only the parts of transcendent reality a materialist rationality can comprehend. There is more out there (and in here) that we must answer to, and this determines whether our designs bear halos of light or void.

Chord: Intellectual Conscience

Chord, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Someday I will collect the passages that reshaped my soul. This one, by you-know-you, would certainly be among them:

The intellectual conscience. — I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress — as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors {“discordant concord of things”} and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

Another:

The two principles of the new life. — First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon. Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

But then there is this:

The need for little deviant acts. — Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom; to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself; to do as everyone does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: — many tolerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ — this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognised custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognised as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

Confession: this rabbit hole excursion was inspired by an article by Mary Harrington, “Truth Seeking Is Not a Pathology”. A couple of standout quotes:

Does anyone here remember James Damore? He was fired from Google in 2017 for circulating a memo arguing, with all possible reference to the scientific evidence, that not all sex differences in employment choice are down to discrimination. He was pilloried and punished in essence for telling the truth. Now, just recently I read a Free Press interview with Damore, who lives in Europe now. It was a sympathetic piece; in the course of it the writer suggested Damore may have an autism spectrum disorder.

First: a necessary disclaimer. Lots of people find it helpful to have a label and diagnosis for those ways they feel different. What follows is in no way intended to dispute or invalidate that experience. But it’s also widely accepted that there’s a cultural component to what reads as “normal” or “different” in people’s psychological makeup. So what if another way of looking at at least some individuals who get lumped in with these supposed “disorders” is less as “disordered” than as outlier personalities, more oriented toward truth than social consensus?

Another:

The two World Wars were the climactic frenzy of Europe’s industrial civilisation – and the second of the wars was ended by truth-seekers, who split the atom just to see if it could be done. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who developed the atom bomb, perfectly expresses the engineering, truth-seeking mindset, when he said in 1954: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

This is, at its core, the engineer mindset. Engineers want to know: is it technically sweet? And: does it work? The “why” or “what to do about it” as Oppenheimer puts it, is for many a secondary consideration to whether it’s technically sweet, and whether it works.

In the case of the bomb, it did work. The consequences were apocalyptic for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the cultural ripple effects are still with us.

….

What if our turn away from the world of atoms, to the world of bits, was a civilisation recoiling in terror from the cataclysmic achievements of these truth-seeking engineers? My hypothesis is that in response, we turned our technical skills inward and set about re-engineering ourselves. And this is how, in the 1960s, we arrived at the twin engines of the transhumanist revolution: computing and biotech. But as a consequence, it was also the point at which the engineering mindset turned on itself.

And:

The quintessential character of the long, post-Hiroshima twentieth century has been the application of nominalist science to ourselves, while multiplying institutional power and managerial bureaucracies to cover the resulting concatenating falsehoods. The kind of people who succeed in this managerial culture are those that prioritise social consensus over truth.

…

Think of the HR edict: “Bring your whole self to work”. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment will realise that it isn’t actually an invitation to bring your whole self to work. It’s a trap for truth-seekers.

Most people have enough sense not even to bring their whole self to Christmas dinner with the family, let alone work. The edict is designed, consciously or not, to surface people like James Damore, so they can be offloaded in favour of people who are better at calibrating for social consensus. Over time, then, the aggregate effect of policies like this is to increase the number of consensus-seekers, which is to say those adapted to managerialism, and to decrease the number of truth-seekers.

Manifesto as genre

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Polycentrism

I find the manifesto an attractive genre.

Most persuasive writing takes disagreement or indecision as its point of departure. Not the manifesto. A manifesto assumes agreement or at least sympathy and persuades toward full embrace and action.

A good manifesto activates an egregore.

One other winning characteristic of the manifesto is its brevity, which makes it eminently letterpressable and chapbookable. I have at least two manifestos I could write:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto — Reality is morally meaningful and you know it. And reality is pregnant with surprise.
  • Polycentrist Manifesto — The world we inhabit is one of myriad experiential and agential subjective centers. We should not be naively ego-centric, nor naively other-centric. We should polycenter ourselves. Empathy, the Golden Rule, law and principles are indispensable to polycentered life.