Battling design triads

Designers love diagrams. We tend to be visual thinkers. Where verbal thinkers feel they understand things when they find the right words to express a thought, designers feel they understand when they find the right shape. And so it is not surprising that designers understand their own work in diagrams.

If you ask a designer what they do, there’s a strong chance they’ll draw a Venn diagram. There is an equally strong chance one of the three overlapping circles will be labeled “Desirable”.

Perhaps the most popular one is the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad. My first exposure to it was the late 90s, but expressed in different language. A User Experience Architect used it to explain to me that our role was responsible for finding the overlap between 1) “User” (what users want and need), 2) “Technology” (what is technologically possible), 3) “Business” (what serves business goals), and 3) . At least according to one source, it was IDEO who developed and popularized the now ubiquitous Desirability-Viability-Feasibility model. What is Desirable, Viable and Feasible satisfies the needs of people, is good for the business, and can be developed and delivered easily enough that it is worthwhile to do.

Another version, which I believe predates the other by almost a decade is the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad. When designers focus on the benefits they provide to people — and this is our primary focus — we often speak of these benefits in terms of good experience. This triad clarifies what is meant by “good experience”.

A good experience has three qualities: It is 1) “Usefulness” (the design satisfies functional needs), 2) “Usability” (the design minimizes functional obstacles), and 3) “Desirability” (the design is valuable beyond its function).

Years ago, I became curious where this triad originated. It turns out it was conceived in 1992 by Liz Sanders, who is now known primarily for her work in participatory design. To the degree a design affords usefulness, usability and desirability, it will be valued by people and adopted.

So which of these two Venn diagrams is preferable? They seem to do similar things with a similar shape and with one overlapping word. Do we just choose the one we like better? Do we just choose the one that we think will resonate more with our audience?

I propose that these two triads complement each other. This becomes easier to see if we avoid using the word “Desirability” in two different ways. In the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad, Desirability is about people’s response to what is being designed. It asks if the design will actually be adopted. Let’s call it “Adoptability”.

And adoptability is the goal of good experience. Looking at the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad, they define what is adoptable. So the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad fits inside the Adoptability region of our new Adoptability-Viability-Feasibility triad.


Not one to stop while I’m ahead, I’ve decided to add yet more elements. I’ve been warned by trusted colleagues that I’m pushing it too far. I’m going to try anyway.

Years ago I heard someone, and I suspect it was Jared Spool, talk about design having two modes. 1) “Design the right thing.” 2) “Design the thing right.”

I see the first triad Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability as representing “Design the right thing.”

I see the second triad Usefulness-Usability-Desirability as representing “Design the thing right.”

So far so good?

Ok. But here’s where I got in trouble with my colleagues. While I was digging around the internet to confirm that Jared Spool was in fact the inventor of “Design the right thing.” / “Design the thing right.” I came upon an article that mapped these two statements to the famous Double Diamond of design thinking. And I got all excited about mapping the two triads to the diamonds to produce a  Grand Unified “What Designers Do” Diagram.

I received two objections. The first objection points out that we are not only thinking about adoptability-feasibility-viability while defining our problem. We also think about usefulness, usability and desirability. And once we think about designing a thing right in the second diamond, we don’t stop worrying about feasibility and viability.

Honestly, none of this bothers me. In design, when we describe what we do, we exaggerate and sharpen definitions and separate things that are blurrier and messier and more intermingled in real practice. We’re just trying to help people conceptualize, and this makes it easier. It is roughly true. Good enough.

The second objection, however, might be fatal. But if it fails, it seems to be an interesting failure, so I’ll expose the idea with the objections and see what happens. If I can’t rescue it, maybe somebody else can.

The objection is this: While it is true that the first diamond is where we determine what the right thing is to design — and while it is also true that the right thing to design is adoptable, feasible,  and viable — it is not necessarily true that the first diamond helps us determine what the right thing to design is by defining what is adoptable, feasible,  and viable. Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability is more commonly used as a framework for evaluating concepts, and that is something that belongs in the second diamond.

But then, I’m thinking… Maybe designers should be thinking more about how we can bring feasibility and viability into that first diamond.

Perhaps we are overemphasizing Adoptability when framing our opportunities and design problems.

I don’t know the answer. But I do know from years of design practice that sometimes clearly framing a question is the key to better answers. So I’ll leave it open.

Thoughts?

 

The ressentiment generator

I just said out loud a thought that has been gestating in me.

I posted it in response to Radical Radha‘s excellent Substack article, “Applying the Bhagavad-Gita to modern life”.

My danger is fury toward progressivism and its mind-boggling hypocrisy. Progressivism itself is blatantly guilty of everything it projects on patriarchy, whiteness, heteronormativity, etc. I’m constantly — obsessively, compulsively — trying to turn progressivism’s critique back on itself, trying to make progressivists acknowledge what they are really doing. I’ll say “Do a search and replace on DiAngelo, replacing ‘White’ with ‘Woke’ and you can see what’s really going on.” But it never works. They refuse to apply their principles to their own movement. They will never “do the work” when it threatens the real source of their privilege and power. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But in my better moments I suspect the problem has nothing to do with choice of target, and that the root problem is with the critical logic itself. Regardless of target — regardless of whether a real oppressor or some phony surrogate is in the critical cross-hairs — this philosophy itself is a ressentiment generator, and whoever uses it will radiate misery.

Permanent designer hat

Here is why I’m reading Fritz Perls: The interlacing intellectual traditions that birthed gestalt psychology also birthed human-centered design. They are sibling traditions with much to learn from one another.

There is an issue, a problem; and there are opposing parties: the terms in which the problem is stated are taken from the policies, vested interests, and history of these parties, and these are considered to be the only possible approaches to the problem. The parties are not constituted from the reality of the problem (except in great revolutionary moments), but the problem is thought to be “real” only if stated in the accepted framework.

But in fact neither of the opposing policies spontaneously recommends itself as a real solution of the real problem; and one is therefore continually confronted with a choice of the “lesser of two evils.” Naturally such a choice does not excite enthusiasm or initiative. This is what is called being “realistic.”

The creative approach to a difficulty is just the opposite: it tries to advance the problem to a different level by discovering or inventing some new third approach that is essential to the issue and that spontaneously recommends itself. (This then would be the policy and the party.) Whenever the choice is merely and exclusively the “lesser evil,” without envisaging the truly satisfactory, it is likely that there is not a real conflict but the mask of a real conflict that no-one wants to envisage. Our social problems are usually posed to conceal the real conflicts and prevent the real solutions — for these might require grave risks and changes. If a man, however, spontaneously expresses his real irk, or simple common sense, and aims at a creative adjustment of the issue, he is called escapist, impractical, utopian, unrealistic. It is the accepted way of posing the problem, and not the problem, that is taken for the “reality.” We may observe this behavior in families, in politics, in the universities, in the professions. (So, afterwards, we notice how past eras, whose social forms we have outgrown, seem to have been so stupid in some respects. We now see that there was no reason why a spontaneous approach, or a little more common sense, could not easily have solved their problems, prevented a disastrous war, etc., etc. Except that, as history shows, whatever fresh approach was at that time suggested, was simply not “real.”)

Most of the reality of the Reality-principle consists of these social illusions, and it is maintained by self-conquest.

Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Existentialism — application, reflection, re-application, re-reflection — iterated until both practice and account of practice are internalized and made extensions of one’s own being — heart, soul and strength.


Designers should never “take off their designer hat.” Design is a better mode for doing everything a person can do — politics, friendship, marriage… and worship.


When I say “design” I do not mean what past generations of designers meant.

I certainly do not mean what design technocrats mean: envisioning a utopian world, and actualizing that utopia into a new, better reality. Design technocrats see themselves as revolutionary heroes with a vision, a plan, faith and courage to take action — cutting through all resistance to make things better for all. It encourages us to use all available power to treat those who question or resist our utopian plans as vicious (small-minded, unimaginative, greedy) and invalid, if not nonhuman — mere obstacles to overcome.

This kind of revolutionary technocratic attitude is narcissism, and anathema to design as I know and love it.

This vision of design neglects design’s very essence — the hard work that precedes the technical work — the hard work of going to the rough ground of reality, getting in touch with it, experiencing it, participating in it, learning from it and intuiting for ourselves what seems relevant and salient.

And we don’t do this work alone. We do it with others. Inevitably we find that we intuit reality differently, and these different intuitions produce different truths.

A crucial designerly faith: while these initial truths are true to some degree, they are never true enough. We collaborate with others to instaurate ever-better truths. The truths bring us closer to reality and they allow us to find agreement, or at least alignment, with other people.

This idea that we should just overwhelm other people with power because we, ourselves, know best — and those other people can be explained away into inhumanity — this makes us unreasonable, inhuman. It makes us into enemies who can only be met with violent force. People who cheerfully advocate revolution never imagine themselves subject to the revolutionary violence. Revolutionaries unconsciously assume the superior power they pretend to lack. Revolution is the fantasy of the privileged-in-denial.


Sadly, few people will meet us as equals and design with us. As long as people think they can ignore us, or overwhelm us or annihilate us they’ll continue to do so. But if we accept that we must live together and prioritize our life together over our own narcissistic utopian ideals we can start making progress — not toward some set revolutionary goal imagined by some prophetic genius — but away from a state of affairs we would prefer to put behind us.

Coming together on approaches to reform the real world: this is the part of design that matters most. If we do the work before the work — the political work — the engineering efforts we employ to effect the changes will create peaceful, second-natural improvements to our lives.


None of us knows better, least of all those who believe we know best. We only know best when we know together.

Design is human-centered design

The introduction of human-centered methods to design did not just improve design methods. It didn’t simply improve the quality of design work.

The introduction of design research — the essence of human-centeredness — fundamentally transformed design.

It radically differentiated what engineers always meant by design from what designers mean by it — and what we all now implicitly mean when we speak of design.

A similar essential change might be in store for design as we move from design intended for solo use, centered on one person at a time to design meant to mediate interactions between multiple persons, each of whom is part of the other’s experience.


For years now I’ve experienced philosophy as a kind of design. I don’t mean that the theoretical concept occurred to me. I mean I noticed that I had already for some time been evaluating philosophies as designed artifacts. And I don’t only mean that I was assessing the objective content of the philosophies as well-designed or poorly-designed. More importantly, I was noticing how I responded to the world itself mediated by the philosophies I internalized as I read them. The medium of philosophy is its message, not the content of propositions or arguments. I treated the philosophy as an invisible mediation of my experience of life, which got worse or better, based on the deep design of the philosophy.

I call this understanding of philosophy design instrumentalism.


I now believe philosophy should be a kind of polycentric design.

We must design philosophies for interoperability within culture, or we are committing design malpractice.

Cosmopolitan provincialism

Marxism never did manage to establish international working class solidarity.

The working class of the early twentieth century was too widely dispersed and separated by physical distance and culture. Individual workers had no opportunities to form interpersonal relationships with workers from other nations. Interconnecting technologies were lacking. National identities turned out to be a much stronger social bond among workers than common economic interests, and this fact was exploited to extremes by the national socialist fascists of the mid-20th century.

But where the working class failed to form international solidarity, we, the international managerial class, have succeeded. We have formed a very strong international class with shared economic interests, our own globalist ideology, our own shared cosmopolitan culture, our own shared corporation-friendly values — and, most of all, techno-social networks of interpersonal relationships spanning national boundaries.

By strong, I mean two things. 1) We feel much stronger loyalty to fellow managerial class members who share our culture than other of different classes within our own nations. And as a class we are overwhelmingly strong — so strong, in fact, that we no longer feel any need to pretend to respect the beliefs or lifestyles of those of the lower classes. We invent who they are and what they think and why they are, and do and say and think. We despise their religions, their loyalties, their aesthetic values. We despise them as people.

Consequently, the working class hates us. They hate us the way all oppressed people hate their oppressors.


The international managerial class believes, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that we are leftist.

After all, leftism has always been international.

But what the international managerial class really seeks is international capitalist domination over all human life, micromanaged by the managerial class. It is an international class supremacist movement, the furthest possible thing from leftism — and from liberalism. We are the direct opposite of who we believe themselves to be.

To the managerial class, we ourselves are the We of “we the people” and the Our of “our democracy” We know what is required to survive climate change, domination of the powerless, managing our own runaway inventions (AI, automation, GMOs, etc).

We have the skills, expertise and ethics to take care of the problems of the world (again, problems we ourselves created) and so we should have the power requires to take care of these problems.

These problems, created across national boundaries, are too vast for nations to manage.

Nations stand in the way of this great global project.

Anyone within a nation who attempts to preserve or recover national sovereignty is a nationalist, which to a globalist is a close neighbor to fascism, if not covert fascism.

Any nation with a strong national identity of its own, ruled by people with greater loyalty to their own nation than to the international managerial class is fascist adjacent if not outright fascist.


Most progressivists I know are extremely authoritarian, uncritical, unreflective, conformist and naive realist. They believe otherwise, of course, because authority has told them that conformity to what everyone calls “critical thinking” makes them independent thinkers. When they use the ssme conceptual repertoire snd logic to independently come to exactly the same conclusions as each other, that is because the truth is the truth. Part of that truth is that people who don’t think like they do are naive realists, unaware of how social forces trick unthinking dummies to believe what is in their own interest. Since they are not subject to such things, they deserve to have all the power and benevolently dominate society for its own good.

I’ve come to call this metanaivity. Metanaive managerial classers are naive realists who believe in everyone else’s naive realism, but believe their own belief in naive realism immunizes them against succumbing to it themselves, which, of course, guarantees their hopeless succumbing.


When I try to explain any of the above to people who have internalized their class identity, they become hostile and morally suspicious. They more or less say “I don’t know what you mean, but I know I don’t like it.”

This is cosmopolitan provincialism.

Agonism overview

From Chantal Mouffe’s Agonistics:

Let me briefly recall the argument I elaborated in The Democratic Paradox. I asserted that when we acknowledge the dimension of ‘the political’, we begin to realize that one of the main challenges for pluralist liberal democratic politics consists in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations. In my view, the fundamental question is not how to arrive at a consensus reached without exclusion, because this would require the construction of an ‘us’ that would not have a corresponding ‘them’. This is impossible because, as I have just noted, the very condition for the constitution of an ‘us’ is the demarcation of a ‘them’. The crucial issue then is how to establish this us/them distinction, which is constitutive of politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism.

Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).

For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the ‘adversary’, the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the democratic principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’, while disagreeing about their interpretation. Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position. This confrontation between adversaries is what constitutes the ‘agonistic struggle’ that is the very condition of a vibrant democracy.

A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. If this is missing, there is always the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation between non-negotiable moral values or essentialist forms of identifications. Too much emphasis on consensus, together with aversion towards confrontations, leads to apathy and to a disaffection with political participation. This is why a liberal democratic society requires a debate about possible alternatives. It must provide political forms of identifications around clearly differentiated democratic positions.

While consensus is no doubt necessary, it must be accompanied by dissent. Consensus is needed on the institutions that are constitutive of liberal democracy and on the ethico-political values that should inform political association. But there will always be disagreement concerning the meaning of those values and the way they should be implemented. This consensus will therefore always be a ‘conflictual consensus’.

In a pluralist democracy, disagreements about how to interpret the shared ethico-political principles are not only legitimate but also necessary. They allow for different forms of citizenship identification and are the stuff of democratic politics. When the agonistic dynamics of pluralism are hindered because of a lack of democratic forms of identifications, then passions cannot be given a democratic outlet. The ground is therefore laid for various forms of politics articulated around essentialist identities of a nationalist, religious or ethnic type, and for the multiplication of confrontations over non-negotiable moral values, with all the manifestations of violence that such confrontations entail.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress once again that this notion of ‘the adversary’ needs to be distinguished sharply from the understanding of that term found in liberal discourse. According to the understanding of ‘adversary’ proposed here, and contrary to the liberal view, the presence of antagonism is not eliminated, but ‘sublimated’. In fact, what liberals call an ‘adversary’ is merely a ‘competitor’. Liberal theorists envisage the field of politics as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete to occupy the positions of power, their objective being to dislodge others in order to occupy their place, without putting into question the dominant hegemony and profoundly transforming the relations of power. It is simply a competition among elites.

In an agonistic politics, however, the antagonistic dimension is always present, since what is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally, one of them needing to be defeated. It is a real confrontation, but one that is played out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversaries.

I contend that it is only when we acknowledge ‘the political’ in its antagonistic dimension that can we pose the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace liberal theorists, is not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, nor is it how to reach a ‘rational’, i.e. fully inclusive, consensus without any exclusion. Despite what many liberals want to believe, the specificity of democratic politics is not the overcoming of the we/they opposition, but the different way in which it is established. The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to ‘sublimate’ those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives.

Pragmatic metaphysics, continued

I’m having a fruitful conversation with Digitalap3 in response to yesterday’s post, Pragmatic metaphysics. It inspired one possible answer to the question I posed: What pragmatic difference is there between pantheism and panentheism?

I think the “difference that makes a difference” (to put it in Rortian terms) may be that pantheism sees nature as a stable, intelligible order, and panentheism does not.

Pantheism conceives both nature and God to be available to us through reason. We can expect linear progress in knowing more and more deeply and thoroughly.

Panentheism, on the other hand, expects deep, epiphanic disruptions to our understanding. Reason is always tentative, and its stability is never long assured.

By this understanding, Thomas Kuhn’s innovation was the introduction of a panentheistic conception of science!

I’ve said before that mine is a metaphysics of surprise. Maybe this gets at it:

Pantheism is a metaphysics of radical reason.
Panentheism is a metaphysics of radical surprise.

Pragmatic metaphysics

I have a philosophical problem fermenting in the back of my mind: Is there any pragmatic difference between pantheism and panentheism? In other words, if we trace what follows from believing pantheism (the faith that sees the universe as identical to God) versus what follows from panentheism (the faith that sees the universe as part of God, in other words a subset of God), do the consequences diverge in any significant way?

Pragmatic metaphysics

Obviously, we cannot conceive something inconceivable prior to acquiring the capacity to conceive it.

But so what? Some realities are inconceivable. Some realities are incomprehensible. Why should we care? Is it such a problem that some things elude our understanding?

It would not matter if it were not for this truth: the as-yet-inconceivable attracts our attention and energy, and gives our lives purpose. The problem is not that we should already conceive or comprehend what we do not yet understand, but a living, active relationship with being who is beyond our understanding is a fundamental condition of a meaningful, fulfilling life. Understanding is a valuable by-product of such a participation in transcendent being.

This is where the Pragmatic Maxim is indispensable.

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

When we reach toward the inconceivable or incomprehensible, we cannot grip the “object” of our awareness (the ungrippable reality beyond our reach) but we can, in fact, work out some of the consequences of this incapacity, as well as some of the consequences of the possibility of acquiring a new capacity to comprehend what has been, so far, incomprehensible.


Strange. I wrote the passage above two days ago. Today, I was looking for an old post and stumbled upon exactly this same thought, which I’d forgotten.

I’ve never thought of pragmatism as something opposed to ontology, or as a methodological alternative to ontology, but this morning I am seeing it that way. I think mine is a pragmatist metaphysics, interested less in what transcends us, than in how a finite being (like each of us) interacts with being understood as transcending its finitude, and how such interactions are experienced. It is metaphysical because it concerns itself with transcendent being, but it chooses to not fruitlessly speculate on what is “behind the veil” but instead the properties of interactions that take place across the veil-line, especially the ones that surprise the anticipations, expectations and norms that comprise mundane existence.

A sliver of givens

What gives my thinking its unusual tone, which some might correctly recognize as religious, is a conviction at the root of my meta-understanding of understanding: We are able to experience, intuit and know only a small sliver of reality, because we lack the subjective capacity to receive any but a small sliver of givens.

Wherever we lack capacity for a given, we are oblivious.

I have termed enception any capacity to take as given some particular category of given.

Because I live in a practical world, in which I get things done with others, I have adopted a safe-for-work term for enception: sensibility.

We have five senses that allow us to perceptively intuit realities in our environment, and we have a great many more sensibilities that allow us to conceptively intuit many more realities of inter-connection among our experiences, memories, anticipations, beliefs and inchoate gists.

To put it in Kantian language, an enception is any transcendental faculty for intuiting some specific kind of reality.

It is important to note that the percepts and concepts we intuit are quite different from the connections we make manually in argument or causal explanation. Constructed/contrued truth is not the same as intuited truth. Intuition and construction complement each other. We need perception, conception and construction. Based on which enceptions we activate and cultivate and which we neglect or suppress, different realities will be intuited directly or construed indirectly.


Perceptive designers might recognize this distinction in their design work. Designers make tradeoffs between what elements in an artifact a user will wordlessly recognize and interact with, which elements require some degree of figuring out, and which elements will become focal objects of the experience.

The reason I keep insisting that philosophy can and ought to be regarded as a design discipline is once a thinker recognizes the role enceptions play in everyday understanding — in what stands out as self-evident and relevant — one realizes this is the deepest realm of personal responsibility.

If we do not take this responsibility and simply prescribe to what those around us prescribe to, we risk becoming participants in collective sociopathy.

The reason I read philosophy is to cultivate new enceptions.

Against Post-liberalism

Below is a letter I wrote to a Christian friend of mine who sometimes exhibits signs of Christian nihilism — an attitude toward the world that would prefer Christian dominion, were that real possibility, but it isn’t because the world is Fallen; so nothing will turn out okay in this world, but that is okay, because the God’s Kingdom will come, so consider the lilies and birds, etc.


This whole interview is great, but this part jumped out at me as something I’ve said to you:

The strange thing about contemporary post-liberals is that they come from very small minorities within our society and they are arguing for the elimination of the protection of minorities in our society. They’re saying, the fact that we don’t all have one integrated view of the common good is why we can’t succeed. But the fact is, if we decided to live by a single integrated view of the common good, I guarantee you that it would not be traditionalist Catholicism. There’s no way that that’s what it would be. 

… 

…and the alternative to that is force. The alternative to that is coercion. And I think that’s a lot of what is left unsaid in the post-liberal argument. That ultimately, there are certainly downsides to a society that doesn’t say with one voice what it takes the good to be. But the alternative to that society is oppression. And we have to see that sometimes in life, it is really a matter of balancing out alternatives. And if we want our family and our community to live a better life, we have to work within this society because we really don’t have the alternative of overthrowing this society. 

And one other thing I’d say is a lot of the arguments that you find among post-liberals on the right are framed as we used to be able to live in this way. Here’s the community that I grew up in, and now that’s impossible. And they never stop to think, where did that community come from? How did that happen in the 1960s or ‘70s? How could you have grown up in that world? That community was the product of the liberal society, the product of a lot of dynamism, a lot of choices made by a lot of people in a lot of ways, and to channel our nostalgia for our own childhood through an argument that says the West took a wrong turn in the 17th century is a very strange way to think about what we’re trying to protect for our own children. And so I think the liberal society just has much greater moral potential than they tend to give it credit for. And we have to begin by seeing that and working to realize it.

In case you don’t recognize his name, Yuval Levin wrote the book on Burke vs Paine that dramatically deepened my respect for conservatism, and made me feel some real affinity for some of conservatism’s core principles .

It is important to note that this is a conversation between two Jews. This bit stands out as a key insight into why Jews tend to be among the most committed liberals: “If we want our family and our community to live a better life, we have to work within this society because we really don’t have the alternative of overthrowing this society.”

If we are a permanent minority who wants to live what we believe to be the good life, and we do not believe there is an eternal afterlife — only this life in the here and now — we will work to create and preserve a liberal order that supports our existence — an existence we love and want to pass down, as it was passed down to us. It isn’t a sneaky, manipulative scheme to pull the strings of the world stage, etc. for eventual domination. It is simply wanting the conditions to continue flourishing as a minority — a few among the many. That it is so hard to believe any people could want this, and no more than this, says more about the suspectors than the suspects. 

Pragmatic panentheism

When I trace out the pragmatic consequences of panentheism they weave themselves into something I recognize as resembling the reality in which I participate.

Panentheists seem, on the whole, to be a pretty unaggressive lot. We don’t like to prescribe doctrines. I am starting to believe, however, that unexamined metaphysical assumptions are behind much human misconduct. I have developed a strong metaphysical preference, not only for myself, but for others. In other words, it is no longer a matter of personal taste, but of morality.

I might write a Borgesian book review of the nonexistent title, Panentheist Pragmatic.

Voegelin on students (1973)

From Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections:

I am frequently asked about my experiences regarding the difference between European and American students. There are marked differences but not of such a nature that I should say that one type is preferable to the other. They have their peculiarities. With the Germans, I found a very high degree of background knowledge that facilitated their progress to independent work in science. The people whom I admitted to my seminars, and especially the ones who became assistants and conducted their own seminars, had a knowledge of at least one Classical language and of course were able to read German, French, and English fluently. Some of them had additional knowledge of languages in their particular field. The Islamists, for instance, had under the regulations of the university to have a good knowledge of Arabic and Turkish; the students dealing with Far Eastern affairs had to know Chinese and Japanese in addition to the Western languages. That made for a group of highly educated, intellectually alert young people who certainly helped each other in the sharp contest of competitive debate of problems. One of their favorite games, of course, was to catch me out on some technical mistake, but unfortunately I could offer them the pleasure only rarely.

The American students belonged to widely different types. In Louisiana there was a considerable cultural background provided by the Catholic parochial schools. I had students in my courses who knew Latin and who took courses in Thomist philosophy with the Catholic chaplain at Louisiana State University. That of course helped. The average students, I should say, did not have the background knowledge one would expect of European students, but they had instead something that the European, especially the German, students usually lack—a tradition of common-sense culture. In the South especially, the problem of ideological corruption among young people was negligible. The students were open-minded and had little contact with ideological sectarian movements. My experiences in the East were less favorable. The ideological corruption of the East Coast has affected the student mind profoundly, and occasionally these students betray the behavioral characteristics of totalitarian aggressiveness. A great number of students simply will not tolerate information that is not in agreement with their ideological prejudices. I frequently had difficulties with students of this type. Still, on the whole, even the so-called radical students, short of the hard-core militants, can be handled by swamping them with mountains of information. They still have enough common sense to be aware that their own ideas must bear some relation to the reality surrounding them; and when it is brought home to them that their picture of reality is badly distorted, they do not become easy converts but at least they begin to have second thoughts. I cannot say the same of radical students in Germany, who simply start shouting and rioting if any serious attempt is made to bring into discussion facts that are incompatible with their preconceptions.