Category Archives: Ethics

Ingratitude and alienation

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When someone gives you something that you value, either willingly or unwillingly, and you try to take possession of it “no strings attached” without gratitude toward the giver, something very bad happens to your soul. You suffer guilt.

This is especially true if you have no theory of relationship to help you conceptualize what gratitude is — or for that matter, any concept expressing one’s own organic belonging to living orders that transcend one’s own individual selfhood.

A philosophy of isolated self cannot make sense of gratitude, of jealousy, of loyalty, of belonging, of guilt or even of love beyond the inwardly felt emotional content. Such a philosophy takes these valid intuitions of spiritual realities as psychological hallucinations, or as biological responses to stimuli. It severs a whole category of direct intuition from the reality intuited, and this severing leaves the individual cut off from its own relational context. That is, it takes the perception of an apparent phenomenon as pure pheno- (appearance) with no corresponding superperceptual reality (noumenon).

A philosophy of isolated self is not only an expression of a spiritual state of social alienation, but alienation of all being who transcends the egoic self. All being of this kind is assigned names and explanations that strip them of the same kind of being that an egoic self has and reduces them to physical concepts.

And even this physicalization is distortive, because physical concepts do not necessarily involve any actual relationships with matter.

Physics, and science in general, is a particular class of theories about material relationships, substantiated by closely observed material interactions and rigorous tracing of causal implications of what is observed, expressed as theory. But a great many folks who never stepped foot in a laboratory or much concerned themselves with how laboratories generate theoretical knowledge, accept scientistic doctrine the way others have accepted Christian or Buddhist doctrine without ever undergoing the kinds of firsthand experiences that make immediate sense of these religious concepts, and in fact necessitate them. Scientism is an ungrounded dogma with exactly the same form as dogmatic religion, just populated with a different style of content. In other words, the medium is identical, and its spiritual effect (message) is the same.

The spiritual effect is compulsive playing of construction toy games with abstract concepts derived from physics (or theology) without ever contacting, or missing contact or even wondering about the concrete realities from which these abstractions were abstracted!

Notice how this dogmatic physicalization move resembles the self-isolating one: A revelation of a given reality is taken as the only reality, severed from the reality given. The experience of givenness of reality is accepted as real, but the given reality is denied reality. An intuition of relationship with being beyond oneself is taken as an experience within the self (an emotion one has). A theory of matter derived from disciplined and intensive interactions with matter is taken as knowledge of matter. And of course, infamously, a belief in a theology (a serious attempt to make sense of one’s actual religious life in relationship with divine being) is treated as religion itself, as if a religion is a belief system!

All these moves ignore the fact that all knowledge is abstracted from concrete reality, and concrete reality is given by intuition. Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

And if you habitually suppress intuited givens, especially intensely intuited givens, in order to preserve a construction of ungrounded concepts, you will suffer alienation. Less and less of reality will feel real to you. As social alienation increases, people will feel like phantoms or identity avatars. As world-alienation increases, the world will seem like a simulation or shadow play. And you, yourself, will feel like a ghost, dissipating and reappearing, today as one me and tomorrow another. A thunder-perfect nobody, alienated from self, precisely because that self is alienated from whatever is not of itself.

The strange thing about alienation is how all its various forms converge at the same abyss-point, the antipode of the esoteric summit: “Mind as its own place.” Milton knew.

But when we intuitively ground ourselves in a shared reality, intuited and valued diversely, but loved in common, we now have ground for participation in something realer than real in whom we subsist. We now have the participatory medium we need, connecting us to each other, connecting us to a world that feels real, connecting us to reality beyond our own sphere of experience and knowledge which may at any moment irrupt into our midst, apparently from nowhere, changing everything.

Guilt is real, gratitude is real, love is real because we belong to something greater than us. And that belonging is the source of all meaning. If we know this we will feel grateful for our guilt. If we do not, we will feel anxious hostility toward even love.

Unsolicited advice to altruistic nihilists

Ethics, Polycentrism

Anyone who tells a child “You are not the center of the universe!” is arguing against the most immediate self-evident truth. Only an “adult” could fall for such a lie.

What we should be saying is “You are not the only center of the universe.”

When the child is a little older we can say “Polycenter yourself.” And “Center yourself around your own experiences, intuitions, understandings an?d purposes, but do so in affirmation of others doing the same. At minimum respect this reality, and to the greatest degree possible, love it.”

If we demand that children stop being self-centered and decenter themselves altogether? in the name of altruism, what we are really saying is “Abandon your own center and join me in this centerless abyss in which I abide.”

In this time and? culture this abandonment of center is what “adult” means. We don’t believe in our own cognition because it’s biased. We don’t trust our own moral judgments because our moral sense is unconsciously self-interested. But boy do we ever trust expert consensus. We trust it automatically and uncritically. We even believe the expert consensus that whoever conforms to these beliefs is a critical thinker, an individualist and an anti-totalitarian.

If someone ever commands you to “decenter yourself”, you should firmly refuse.

The appropriate reply is “I have polycentered myself. You should polycenter yourself.”

This advice to “polycenter yourself”, however, means something different from the exhortation to the self-centered child, who needs to know that other people, like themselves, are the centers of their respective universes.

This “polycenter yourself” means “The nowhere in which you abide, is not the center of the universe, nor of anything. I will not join you in your centerless abyss.”

It means “Recover your center. Then develop a capacity to inhabit a polycentered universe.”

Qualitatively, we are neither infinity, nor zero. Alchemically, we are like One, in that we are one; yet, we are not One. We are neither God nor nobody. We should all polycenter ourselves together.

The gift-rooted organization

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Exnihilism

The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.

In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.

The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.

Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”

But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.

Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”

Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”

Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.

The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.

Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.

Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.

This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.

Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.

Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become infused with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.

But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.

But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.

Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.

To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.

Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.

Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.

This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.

If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.

We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.

Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.

Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.

The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.

That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.

This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.

But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.

(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)

But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?

Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.

Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.

Dang. Out of time.

To be continued.

Respiratory cycle

Ethics, Politics

In oppressive times, disorderly culture breaks bonds, loosens constraints and opens possibilities.

Disorder, having won freedom, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over order per se, until “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

In anarchic times, orderly culture offers bonds of belonging, defines generative constraints and narrows the field of possibilities to a focused mission to actualize.

Order, having secured Pax Imperium, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over disorder (including destabilizing alternative orders), and proceeds to dominate, constrain, suppress or destroy any possibility of alternative to itself.

Every extreme hates its opposite, even in trace amounts. A microdose of the detested essence is a gateway leading inevitably to deadly overdose. So attack it with excessive force in the cradle before it has a chance to toddle about as a minidose or walks confidently as a mezzodose, because we foresee where it is headed.

The true enemy of extremism, whether an extremism of excess or deficit, is temperance.

Someday temperance may discover that its golden mean and golden rules for maintaining that mean is not a mere averaging of extremes, but something of its own

Someday temperance may discover that its centrism is not a mediocrity between two forms of inertial unreason, but principled centeredness.

Extremists will sneer at this and feel wise to it. There is a word for this conceit of feeling wise to wisdom.

Anti-Logos

Ethics

Yes, it is true that language and logic can imprison us in wordworlds, and alienate us from intuited reality beyond the reach of cognition and from our own inarticulate selves. Only what can be said and argued and objectively proven is real, and everything else is phantasm.

The problem here, though, is not with articulate reason. The problem is treating articulate reason as the sole arbiter of truth.

If we conclude that the problem is, in fact, with word and reason and decide to reject it or subjugate it, or if we claim that articulate reason knows nothing of any importance, or that it is articulate reason that generates logical and linguistic phantasms — and crown intuition and feeling as sole arbiter of truth — we only commit the same sin of excess, but in the opposite direction.

Now, we suffer another alienation — alienation from community. Without words or reason, we cannot communicate and share reality with others. We cannot make appeals or hear appeals or honor appeals. We can only fight or flee or fuck, but never love.

And in a state of anti-Logos, the community-making sacrament of communion stops being a sacrament, and becomes ritual sorcery. The “communicant” sits alone in a ritualizing crowd, performing magical motions — sitting, standing, genuflecting, self-crossing, muttering little prayers, summoning mental images and ecstasies and intimacies, and attempts to transcend the neighbor, to make direct contact with God.

No, it is not only the theorizing, theologizing, philosophizing mind that “is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

The intuiting, feeling, imagining mind is just as capable of the same kind of solipsism, when it rejects Logos.

An ethic of the mean finds the ideal in balanced moderation.

What is virtue in balance becomes vice in extreme.

Extremists believe some things are essentially good and other things are essentially evil.

Any trace of an essentially evil thing is a slippery slope to excess. Therefore, it should be opposed with excessive essential good. Every evil microaggression should be confronted by good macroaggression. The sins of secular atheism should be overcome with fundamentalist or traditionalist fanaticism. The infuriating imperfections of liberalism are capital crimes. And so on.

But! …Extreme moderation is also extreme.

There are no preexisting, eternal rules to follow.

And no method can guarantee success.

There is no solid truth holding us up. We all walk on water together. We sink alone.

Each application of the Golden Rule must itself be guided by the Golden Rule, and the guiding Golden Rule, in turn must itself also be guided. Ah, sahib, it is Golden Rule all the way up.

Each iteration upward ripples downward. … the infinite recursive, nonlinear, radically ordered, radically unpredictable. Under the anarchic order of chaos, futures swerve, lurch and bubble. The stirring of a butterfly wing can whirl a hurricane. Here truth is known only in the moment of disclosure.

It is from this, that we are suspended, always in suspense.

Golden mid.

Against altruism

Ethics, Judaism

Wikipedia:

The word altruism was popularised (and possibly coined) by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) c.?1830 in French, as altruisme, as an antonym of egoism. He derived it from the Italian altrui, which in turn was derived from Latin alteri, meaning “other people” or “somebody else”. Altruism may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of self-centeredness.

My current inadequately informed — (as always, I reserve the right to revise) — hypothesis is that the concept of altruism was coined by a quantlocked positivist, stuck in a wordworld of defined objects, composed of nothing but objects, comprised by nothing real. In this objective world one can only act selfishly or selflessly for the sake of exterior others, with no enveloping being among or beyond.

An insincere exhortation

Ethics, Everso, Philosophy

This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:

We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.

The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.

Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.

Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.

Just justice

Ethics, Politics

Let us not valorize impassioned overcompensation for past injustices.

Justice is not an accounts ledger, and to treat it as such is a catastrophic category mistake.

Overcorrection does not balance the books of justice.

Justice is better seen as a pendulum seeking equilibrium. Judicious action damps, slows and narrows the oscillations making them gentler, subtler and more easily directed.

Overcorrection shoves the pendulum from one extreme to another. It inevitably swings back as a counter-overcorrection, raging back with wrecking ball force.

The remedy for automatically dismissing a group’s claims is not to reverse the attitude and to believe them automatically. Justice abolishes automatic belief and disbelief. Justice listens to all people and judges their claims on the merits of the claim itself, not on who makes it.

The remedy for bigotry is not reversed bigotry. Justice abolishes bigotry.

The remedy for domination is not reversed domination. Justice abolishes domination.

The “settling of accounts” model of justice is justification for revenge. It is false justification and it produces false justice.

Anyone who thinks justice entitles the aggrieved to a proper measure of revenge knows nothing of justice.

And beware the correctors of structural injustice. The restructuring is usually a scale of justice where half the balance weights are the fingers of their own all-comprehending hand.

Against pure transaction

Design, Ethics, Philosophy

From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.

There are several distinct senses of “gift” that lie behind these ideas, but common to each of them is the notion that a gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.

Thus we rightly speak of “talent” as a “gift,” for although a talent can be perfected through an effort of the will, no effort in the world can cause its initial appearance. Mozart, composing on the harpsichord at the age of four, had a gift.

We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him.

An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that “I,” the artist, did not make the work. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” says D. H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize the “gift” phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it.

These two senses of gift refer only to the creation of the work — what we might call the inner life of art; but it is my assumption that we should extend this way of speaking to its outer life as well, to the work after it has left its maker’s hands. That art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — that work is received by us as a gift is received.

Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price. I went to see a landscape painter’s works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation. We feel fortunate, even redeemed. The daily commerce of our lives-sugar for sugar and salt for salt,” as the blues singers say—proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift revives the soul. When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.

If a work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift and if it is received by its audience as a gift, then is it, too, a gift? I have framed the question to imply an affirmative answer, but I doubt we can be so categorical. Any object, any item of commerce, becomes one kind of property or another depending on how we use it. Even if a work of art contains the spirit of the artist’s gift, it does not follow that the work itself is a gift. It is what we make of it.

And yet, that said, it must be added that the way we treat a thing can sometimes change its nature. For example, religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. Such, at any rate, is my position. I do not maintain that art cannot be bought and sold; I do maintain that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising.

Another bit:

The classic work on gift exchange is Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don,” published in France in 1924. The nephew of Emile Durkheim, a Sanskrit scholar, a gifted linguist, and a historian of religions, Mauss belongs to that group of early sociologists whose work is firmly rooted in philosophy and history. His essay begins with the field reports of turn-of-the-century ethnographers (Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Elsdon Best, in particular), but goes on to cover the Roman laws of real estate, a Hindu epic, Germanic dowry customs, and much more. The essay has proved to hold several enduring insights. Mauss noticed, for one thing, that gift economies tend to be marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. He also pointed out that we should understand gift exchange to be a “total social phenomenon” — one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological, and whose meaning cannot, therefore, be adequately described from the point of view of any single discipline.

I think I disagree a little with Hyde (at least so far), on one point. I I think ordinary market economies include a significant component of gift exchange, and to the degree they exclude gift exchange they stop functioning.

Confusing market economies with zero-sum transactionism is a mistake.

In service design, we speak of value exchanges broadly, to include not only material and functional value, but also emotional and social value. Some of this value is explicit and calculated, but much of it is not. The part that is not calculated, but instead intuited and felt is an indeterminate surplus of an exchange, and that flows into the relationships that bind people together in a market, and gives commerce soul. This is the stuff of gratitude, loyalty and brand.

The minute the value of the intuited surplus is quantified, extracted, inventoried and calculated into pricing, it no longer flows into the relationship, and the relationship begins to starve. Quantified brand equity is theft of the brand relationship by one of the organization who tries to steal, exploit and betray what is not theirs. It is not only bad taste, it is bad faith.

The drive to calculate all value in order to maximize profit squeezes relationship out of the picture, destroys brand and generally de-souls markets.

Of course, we can — if we want to — have a purely transactional market ethos governed by an ethic of impersonality.

But we cannot have this impersonality without paying a price — a very high price.

And we might eventually discover that it is a price we cannot afford to pay.

Return to the fold

Ethics, Everso, Judaism

Aporia is intolerable for individuals.

But groups gripped with aporia is inescapable, all-pervasive, all-encompassing hell.

What immediately transcends the aporia-gripped mesoperson (the all-too-divisible “individual”), is yet another aporia-gripped macroperson.

No where to go. No escape. No hope.

Collective aporia is experienced as anomie.

Anomie dyspires violence: scapegoating, persecution, war, and collective suicide.

A collective can be two, three, a dozen, a gross, legion, myriads…

A collective can be a shattered individual person.

The sole way out of anomie is a return to within: principled integrity.

Metanoia is necessary but insufficient.

Teshuvah alone — echad — is sufficient.

Everso.

Even a two-millennia-old collective aporic — a mutating being at war with itself, spasmodically oscillating between perverse antiworld-religiosity and revolutionary anti-religious worldliness — can return to the fold.

Treatment for mistreatment

Autobiography, Ethics

I just capped my Wimbledon Hooligans fable with a nice, pat moral:

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

My mistake has been moralizing respect.

Respect is an ethical principle, not a moral principle.

I prefer respect, of course, because I flourish only in a respectful ethos. But this is always where the moralizing vice strikes. “What is good for me defines what is good.”

The world as it is right now has very little genuine respect. We have only the remains of respect — vestigial manners. Manners have degraded into behaviors having nothing to do with establishing or maintaining mutual respect. In work settings, manners are instruments of professional depersonalization. In social settings manners are class performances. In corporate-political life manners govern socially-acceptable forms of petty sadism — subjugation, humiliation, recreational coercion, etc.

So be it.

The new program:

  • Do not cheapen respect by throwing it on the street like shriner’s candy. Do not run around expressing every admiration you feel. In the market, oversupply cheapens.
  • Exchange respect with the precious respectable few, who are capable of receiving, valuing and reciprocating respect in kind. Treat the rest with cheerful dispassion. It is nobody’s fault that they have become whatever they are, but it is also not to their credit.
  • Just as liberalism is an ethic at home only in a liberal ethos, respect is an ethic at home only in a respectful ethos. Do not follow the rules of a game nobody else is playing, and then resent them for not playing along. Mutuality is for the mutual.
  • The world is what it is. The world is not obligated to conform to your ideal or bow to your judgment.
  • Lower daily dose of vitamin B, and start loading up on vitamin N.

Philosophical ethnomethods

Enworldment, Esoterism, Ethics, Philosophy

I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.

The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.

What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.

Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.

But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.

In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.

In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.

Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.

Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.

Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.

This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”

Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.

Unacceptable interruptions

Autobiography, Ethics

Jews famously interrupt a lot. It’s just how Jewish conversations go.

And apparently, even healthy married couples constantly interrupt.

Many interruptions happen in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and I barely notice them.

But there are three varieties of interruption that I will no longer tolerate.

  • Aggressive interruptions. You know it is an aggressive interruption because if you keep talking through the attempted interruption, the aggressor continues. It is a conversational stare-down. I’m not having that. And I will not be in a relationship with a person who does that. It is a sign of low arrogance.
  • Disregard interruptions. The partner just does not value what is being said, has no curiosity about where it is going, and feels too little respect for the speaker to ignore whatever they’re saying to the end of the sentence.
  • Apprehensive interruptions. These happen when a conversation presses against the comprehensibility limits of one of the partners, and they try to divert them conversation back to safe regions. The interruptions are self-defense against aporias.

I am not fucking around. If I feel disrespectfully interrupted, I might give one warning and I might not, before I bring things to a sudden and awkward close.

I’ve already ended several meetings both in and outside work.

I have accumulated too many people in my life who have made me doubt their respect. Part of the problem is they have never learned to signal respect. They have also never been taught to refrain from inconsiderate behaviors. I have too little time and patience to allow people like this in my life.

I don’t command respect. But if someone withholds respect from me, there will be no effort to establish respect. I will remove myself from the source of offense, or remove them from where I am.

Me being leftist

Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politics

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Red Card

Ethics, Letterpress, Politics

There is room for disagreement on immigration policy.

As a staunch agonist, I honor even extreme, bitter conflict on such issues.

Those who disagree with current policy have every right to protest it publicly.

There should be less room around enforcement of current policy. Policies are designed to narrow possibilities into practical particulars of enforcement.

Protesting policy by actively interfering with its enforcement is a dangerous line to cross, if we wish to preserve rule of law, which is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy.

But enforcement outside the bounds of policy is at least equally dangerous, and repugnant to any decent citizen of a liberal democracy.

Civil rights are non-negotiable and sacred.

This is why I have donated to the Red Card Campaign, and why I think every decent American liberal or conservative, ought to donate, too.

I am compelled to letterpress print Red Cards. All sacred ideas call me to the press.

Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation

Ethics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Politics, Polycentrism

Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.

As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.

Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule.  A patch, if you will.

Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.

It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.

And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…

Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.

They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.

When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.

You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.

They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.

Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.

They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.

According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.

Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.

Unlike us.

Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.

Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.

Respect acknowledges that when we look at another  and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.

Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.

Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.

Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.

So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.

Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.

Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.

Conscience warfare

Autobiography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.

That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.

On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”

This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.

But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.

My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.

Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.

And all this is only for private thought.

I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.

My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.

My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.

Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.

For many “the personal is political”.

But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.

The personal should not be political.

And the political should not be personal.

Conflating them destroys both.

And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.

I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.

I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.

I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.

“That quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner”

Ethics, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Each time I see a young people’s eyes light up at the mention of the word “ethics” — and, oh, how they do light up! — I remember this Nietzsche passage:

So, how many people know how to observe? And of these few, how many to observe themselves? ‘Everyone is farthest from himself — every person who is expert at scrutinizing the inner life of others knows this to his own chagrin; and the saying, ‘Know thyself’, addressed to human beings by a god, is near to malicious. That self-observation is in such a bad state, however, is most clearly confirmed by the way in which nearly everyone speaks of the nature of a moral act — that quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner, with its look, its smile, its obliging eagerness! People seem to be wanting to say to you, “But my dear fellow, that is precisely my subject! You are directing your question to the person who is competent to answer it: there is, as it happens, nothing I am wiser about.”

This is also true of aesthetics and of religious/spiritual/philosophical insight.

Cultivating moral judgment, aesthetic taste or profundity of insight is certainly personally rewarding, but it is a stupid and noxious mistake to expect recognition or acknowledgement for it. Because in each and every one of these subjective fields our appreciation for anyone else’s accomplishments is entirely constrained by what we have accomplished ourselves.

Unless we work at perceiving it, we each are always the apogee of everything that really matters.

Wouldn’t it be a comical paradox if it turned out that the closest a human can come to apotheosis is finally overcoming natural misapotheosis?