Like Cynthia Ozick, as a little kid I was a Romantic, devoted to total immersion and pure experience rather than deliberate interaction with it. And as one’s real surroundings are often not enough for someone not yet ready to participate actively in life, this frequently took the displaced form of indulgence in fantasy and the imagination. Eventually, as an awareness of my own place and doings in this world began to take hold, this shadowy hedonism came to seem less defensible. And then a fixation, at least on the intellectual level, with duties and rules of conduct. One comes to see that immersion in experience is never complete, because experience slips irrevocably into the past. And the only form of nostalgia which is not tinged with loss is a memory of having behaved admirably or at least decently. Because we cannot continue to enjoy our past lives, but can only hope to be able to respect them. But I think now that a sense of obligation to others is not really sufficient either. Like the Law, it tends to shut down alternatives rather than putting us willingly on the right road, to drag us reluctantly through life rather than driving us by inner volition. Only love can do that. Which is where an element of misanthropy is fatal. Sometimes I look on those who simply love more than I with plain bemusement. And I often feel greater compassion for little animals than people, not because I value their lives more, but because people are competitors. All living creatures, animals, plants and people alike, compete and fight to secure the good things in life, but a small dog or cat, like a baby, is no danger to me in trying to get its share. But in human society everyone has a certain status, so that just by virtue of their existence people come into competition.  This may have a semi-rational basis, but it is all just internalized as instinct.  In any case, it suggests that to cultivate a kindlier way of life perhaps requires changing one’s view of others more than one’s view of what deeds are allowable. And that the attitude embodied by Goethe’s words “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen” (“Whoever tries with every effort, him can we save”), perhaps does not represent the right psychology.

“art activist Hans Haacke explains why he dares criticise the USA, but not Islam: “When I did works critical of Apartheid or Bush’s politics, there was no reason to worry that in doing so, I’d be putting people’s lives in danger. I knew the American National Guard wouldn’t pull out their guns and start advancing… But my reservations against criticising Islam aren’t cowardly, in fact they might even be wise.”

As Bill Hicks would say: I’m not alone? Thank God! I thought I was alone!

Some might blame P.B. Shelley. Whether it’s his fault or not for the bit about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, creative writers holding forth on whatever political issue catches their attention has become rather pro forma. And it’s hard to determine exactly how this came to be considered a normal state of affairs. Granted there have been a few rather spectacular instances of literary authors leading or perhaps even embodying great political causes, like Émile Zola or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I feel that in general it might have more to do with writers being in a particularly good position to shape others’ perceptions of their contributions and expertise.

Granted the track record of scientists, philosophers and other types of non-political thinkers expostulating on politics, from Bertrand Russell to Richard Dawkins, has perhaps not been a great deal better. Yet at least they made their names through rigorous analytical thought, and one would like to believe that it is simply ignorance, or perhaps a lack of being held to professional standars when speaking outside of their fields, that accounts for the sloppy thinking and dogmatism. The point is that there are at least semi-rational grounds for imagining that someone’s proven ability to think clearly in one area might transfer over in some measure to another, even if knowledge of the subject matter doesn’t. But as for creative writers…I fancied myself an aspirant to a creative writing career for several years, and so I’ve spent a fair amount of time around creative-writing types. They tend to be more emotional and intuitive than analytical, and even when their perceptiveness is keen it tends to be a sort of automatic response to diverting stimuli, like a cat pouncing at whatever is moving near it. Among college campus groups I’d probably put the creative-writing groupies at about the same level as the comedy clubs and the People Enjoying Every Possible Substance. I suppose authority as a “political thinker” is just a concretion of the more nebulous roles of idealist and “social critic.” Yet there seems to be something a little contradictory in the way many in the intellectual community are willing to excuse writers like Peter Handke for holding views that they find reprehensible as a prerogative of genius. Personally, I have begun to find the whole rubric that establishes “realistic” literary works as being almost inevitably social critiques a little tedious. Granted, it’s probably better than the patronage system of the past that kept writers employed as paid sychophants of the aristocracy, but there is a high price to be paid for forcing every story to be somehow typical or symbolic and hence–not truly individual. This is somewhat related to the claim, often made by realistic writers but less coherent the closer one views it, to be depicting a general but not a specific truth.

Man hardly needs a theoretical justification for selfishness. So although perhaps no one perfectly embodies disinterested ethical principles, and everyone struggles to reconcile their self-interestedness with the principles they struggle to live up to, and even if perhaps the greatest hope for happiness both individually and collectively lies somewhere in the uneasy middle region between care for others and care for oneself, it does not necessarily follow that equal intellectual space should be granted to self-interested reality and ethical principles, unless, as some like Adam Smith have tried to do, the selfish and self-interested can be put to the use of the ethical. For like massive bodies in a gravitational field, the weight of self-interested motives warps reality around itself and does not need the support of theory. As Mary Sarton said, “one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” One ought not make the unsophisticated mind’s classic mistake of believing a description of an unpleasant reality or potential reality to be tacit support for it, but it is equally common for more dour minds to mistake a hope for a naive belief in the existence of that which is hoped for. And of course another distinction exists between genuine ideals and unrealizable fantasies. But as long as we bear all these differences in mind, and remain always conscious of what ideals really mean in practice, I think that it is perhaps best to keep our minds just a little elevated above the wilderness we slog through everyday, for in some sense, to use another metaphor, our lives are like the trajectory of a snake, which leads with its head.

I often think that human society would be founded on much better, or at least more realistic, principles if everyone repeated to themselves upon waking up in the morning that we’re all in the end a bunch of (relatively) hairless monkeys whose ethical and even cognitive distinction from our simian forebears is much amplified (some might say exaggerated) by our ability to communicate extensively with each other. Of course that truth would have to be tempered by the realization that being a hairless ape doesn’t absolve one of all responsibilities to other hairless apes, or even to beings that aren’t hairless apes, but no even moderately truthful view of the world could be predicated upon a denial of that basic fact. Why bring this up now? For one thing, our society is starting to understand that tolerance necessarily has its limits. This has no doubt been a vague intuition all along, but it would have been clear from the beginning had anyone stopped to consider the matter in evolutionary terms, namely that unlimited tolerance does not represent what is somewhat grandiosely called an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, i.e. it can’t last. If we define tolerance as intentional passivity with regard to the activities of others, total tolerance of others would presumably involve allowing them to take one’s food, mates, etc. Assuming there to be at least a few opportunists in such a society, they would quickly begin to take over. Of course, being totally intolerant and hostile toward one’s neighbors would not work any better, because those who cooperate can combine their efforts to accomplish a lot more. Think of an army against one man. So of course an equilibrium would have to fall somewhere in the middle, some sort of system where opportunists are successful but provide enough prosperity to everyone else as not to provoke them, like for instance the developed world. One should not entirely blur the distinction between a normative ideal and practical considerations as to whether it can be reached and sustained, but in my opinion tolerance isn’t even a normative ideal, it’s more like a concession to other peoples’. As I’ve said before, tolerance of wrongs is a pretty shady practice, morally justifiable only if the attempt to stop them makes things worse (such as, arguably, Iraq right now). The value of toleration can only be assessed according to a pre-existing set of norms and values. So tolerance as an ethical concept seems contradictory to some extent. Acting decently demands more than just putting up with things, it also requires standing up for something.

To vie with a rival or opponent often requires that one come more and more to resemble them. This is a truth of which I was reminded reading this profile of Stewart Brand, the founder of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, a sort of clearinghouse for ’60’s bohemian consumer culture. The reason is that, while of course a large distance separates communism from comunalism, ’60’s bohemians are not generally known for their antagonism to Soviet-style communism. Their political aversions were generally directed at the American government, and sometimes even wrapped around to identification with its foes, including the communist countries. But the article reveals that Brand was early inspired by a visceral fear of living in a individuality-crushing Stalinist state, and his embrace of the counter-culture indeed probably represents a more philosophically true rejection of that form of society than many of its more overt opponents in the ranks of business, government and the military. He seems to have felt, in fact, that not a great deal separated bureaucratic life in America from that in the Soviet Union, although presumably with the crucial distinction that in the U.S. one could opt out of that existence. Of course, without the legions of officials in the government, military and business American society could not very well have resisted Soviet hegemony, much less outlasted it. But those who might be inclined to view people like Brand as worthless to the well-being of society, if not actually subversive in some way, would do well to remember that one cannot wait until all of one’s enemies disappear before embracing one’s ideals. The philosophial ideal of a free society is supposed to be that it allows people to pursue their own inclinations and define themselves according to their own standards whether or not their actions contribute to the competition with its neighbors. For a similar reason I don’t have much sympathy for those who complain that Western society today is decadent in the sense of luxuriously self-indulgent. Isn’t that one of the main reasons why people work so hard to accumulate money in the first place, so that they or their families and offspring will have the chance to enjoy leisured, comfortable existences? That doesn’t mean that the resultant state may not contribute to the erosion of that wealth and power, because after all decadence can mean decline as well as luxurious indulgence, but that’s hardly an argument for shunning it entirely. No point in earning it if you never enjoy it.

Traditional free-market liberals generally pride themselves on their biological, or at least psychological, realism, following Adam Smith in the belief that humans are fundamentally self-interested, if not actually greedy, beings, and that self-interest has to be taken into account and put to use in any effective society and economic system. Now that their critics seem to be incorporating research in evolutionary biology to an encouraging degree (though whether they are interepreting the findings correctly is a different question entirely), I have noticed a bit of a strange drift towards tenuous psychological claims and social-constructivist claims in a couple of free-market defenses themselves. In one, this year’s Nobel laureate in economics, Edmund Phelps, tries to comparatively assess the economic systems of the Anglophone world and Continental Europe. Although he asks the question as to whether at some point continued gains in wealth and economic growth are valuable, he seems to assume implicitly that the comparison can essentially be reduced to these terms. I don’t think even the most die-hard defender of social democracy would deny that Americans have a higher average income than Europeans; that’s just a fact. Usually the defense, and a not invalid one either, is that the greater range and quality of state-provided or -guaranteed social services makes the society as a whole, and especially the poorer members, better off. And in fact, on other measures of quality of life, for example average health, European countries generally score a lot higher than the U.S. Phelps also seems to be aware that wealth is not the sole measure of quality of life, but his alternative justifications for more time spent working and earning money, as in America, seems to hinge on dubious non-empirical claims such as: “The American application of this Aristotelian perspective is the thesis that most, if not all, of such self-realization in modern societies can come only from a career. Today we cannot go tilting at windmills, but we can take on the challenges of a career. If a challenging career is not the main hope for self-realization, what else could be?” Um, I don’t know, but if we really want to be tolerant liberals, we should probably let people find out for themselves. I think a more pressing, and objectively verifiable, question about the social democracies is not whether they are providing a high standard of living for their people but whether with the general lack of economic dynamism it will be sustainable into the forseeable future. I know that the vaunted tuition-free university systems in most of the European countries, for example, are, if not bankrupt, under increasing financial strain, especially in comparison with American universities.

At the end, Phelps urges us to see entrepreneurs as the victims in a society that does not facilitate entrepreneurship, even if poor people benefit. I am rather skeptical that entrepreneurship is intrinsically prejudicial to the interests of the poor, but if it were than it seems to me the case would be a lot more complicated. Because Phelps doesn’t seem to acknowledge that some people’s desires are not compatible with others’. The desires of thieves or arsonists cannot be reconciled with the interests of the rest of society, so they have to be excluded. I am not saying by any means that entrepreneurs as a class fall into this category, but if one is willing to sanction a group’s activities even if it is detrimental to the well-being of another, which Phelps is apparently willing to grant hypothetically, then it has be determined whether the harm is only incidental or intrinsic.  That distinction to me often represents the line between what can be tolerated and what has to be suppressed. The other article responds to a claim made from several sources recently that income inequality is inherently bad because it is detrimental to the psychological well-being of humans who, evolved as status-seeking beings, are wounded by the seeing themselves as less well-off than others. There is evident psychological truth in this view, although it is equally evident that even its proponents, like the British politician Richard Layard (a member of the British nobility, it should be noted!), believe that it can be to some extent transcended, or they would not be presenting policy proposals for how to fix the problem. Nor does Will Wilkinson, the author of the article, really contest the biological evidence of this phenomenon, even though he throws out some pro forma arguments about how humans and rhesus monkeys are in fact different and results from research on one are not necessarily extrapolable to the other. His basic argument is that, even if status-seeking is a fixed element of human existence, the forms of status are not, and in an ever-expanding world the number of high-status positions can be multiplied without limit. In one sense this is obviously false, in that no matter how many status groups there are, one still has to have status relative to someone else or it becomes meaningless, like everyone in a class getting gold stars.  On the other hand, this view has merit insofar as it shows that, once again, wealth is not the only measure of status. One of the many ways in which Layard and his ilk are either naive or disingenuous is in seeming to believe that if perfect equality of wealth were achieved humans would either stop seeking greater status or would be stymied in their quest. But people are not equally intelligent, or athletic, or attractive. They would find other ways of one-upping each other. Wilkinson recognizes this. But it is unclear if he recognizes that there is at least one inflexible fixed measure of status, which is of course…reproductive success! Poets, economists, pop singers and politicians may define their status within different niches, but the odds are that they will not all be equally successfiul in getting girls or boys. And there is a rather high probability that people will find themselves competing across niche boundaries for a mate, which is where all the tidy non-competitiveness breaks down. And especially at these times, I doubt that a “high-status” poet will even be able to convince himself that he has a truly high status in the world.  Not that I have any policy proposal at the bottom of this. If you think about the basic tradional needs of humanity, like food, shelter and mating, there seems to be a radical and ever-increasing asymmetry between food and shelter, which are relatively easy to obtain for most people today, at least in the developed world, and mating, which seems to be just as difficult to secure as ever. And the reason, as I see it, is that our environment is the source of food and shelter whereas we are the source of mating to each other. We can make collective progress relative to the environment because it is relatively unchaning, but we can’t make collective progress relative to our selves, so the growth of societal knowledge and expertise has not been of much use. But at least we can make ourselves more beautiful.

Many people seem to believe that the major question in the study of consciousness is how inanimate matter could give rise to it, the ability to be aware of oneself and one’s environment. But would it not be equally valid to ask why consciousness, which is after all a quality possessed by the only being that we really know from the inside, should not be common to all things? I would not claim that all objects actually possess consciousness, but all knowledge comes through the filter of one’s own subjective point of view. Until very recently, pretty much the only decisive evidence of the consciousness of other things came from commication with them, and hence was almost entirely limited to our own species. Since consciousness is an interior experience and we can only see the outside, the surfaces of others, it seems not very hard to imagine that we might underestimate their capacity for conscious awareness.

John Searle is right: since the whole question of consciousness arises from the dichotomy between the simple movement of matter and the existence of subjective impressions of it in the mind, the attempt to somehow reduce the latter to or equate it with the former seems to defy everyday experience, even if mental impressions do correspond with objective physical events. But I don’t think even the causal link between them, i.e. how matter should give rise to consciousness (if it does), need be so problematic. Even if one granted that matter lies at the root and cause of all consciousness, the subjectivity of consciousness pretty much guarantees that, outside of oneself, one would only see part of what exists in the universe, i.e. the matter, that which is not consciousness. Even of other presumably conscious people we can only see the outward manifestations, not directly perceive the interior awareness, and therefore it is no wonder that consciousness should seem a little anomalous, since it can only truly be perceived in one single being in the universe. Therefore, we, like materialists, might suspect it, as the only foam in a clear blue sea, of being just an illusion. Alternatively, as the gate through which all knowledge of the world must pass, we might idealistically take consciousness to be more central than matter, or maybe even to be the only reality. The polarity arises from the inability to perceive viscerally the combination of matter and consciousness in other things, which would probably make the phenomenon seem more normal.

Models only represent. Their creators often have a keen sense of their limitations, having struggled to find some adequate way of describing what they observe. Newton, for example, never claimed that his equations were anything other than simplified descriptions of physical phenomenon. But after several generations of being taught as the gospel truth, the distance between the model and the reality often begins to disappear, leading for example to the grandiose claims for the identity of words with the objects they represent, which somewhat opportunistic minds like Wittgenstein were able to overly-dramatically puncture later on. And so it seems to me with the new generation of psychologically-minded economists (or economically-minded psychologists) who have arrived at the shocking conclusion that in the mind “there is a conflict and interaction between passion, and reason and self-interest.”

Now, it’s not my intention to defend economists as a breed, particularly those of the so-called Austrian school who more than any other have contributed to the divorce of economics from actual lived human experience (accompanied by a more and more exclusive focus on mathematical models), but while most economists’ (and probably any sensible people’s) worldview is predicated on the idea that people pursue their self-interest, my understanding is that the crucial factor of rationality was introduced more as a standard by which to evaluate people’s behavior rather than a necessary component of it.

But even if economists have become more broad-minded as to the nature of people’s behavior, to tell the truth, the term “rational” still seems to encode a questionable invidious judgment about what things people ought to value. For instance, if one’s goal were to make as many friends as possible, one might rationally conclude on certain actions which would not necessarily be defensible from a purely wealth-aggrandizement point of view. So it seems to me that rationality within certain limits can pertain to the means of accomplishing a goal regardless of what that goal might be, and this does not seem to be sufficiently recognized within the field.