All Posts Tagged With: "philosophy"

David Brooks recently wrote an article on pragmatic idealism but without specifically calling it that. “Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders” says:

Furthermore, we might as well take advantage of this explosion of social entrepreneurship. These are some of the smartest and most creative people in the country. Even if we don’t know how to reduce poverty, it’s probably worth investing in these people and letting them figure it out. The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate. Now they work 80 hours a week, fighting bureaucracies and funding restrictions in order to build, say, mentoring programs for single moms.

The most succinct way that I can describe my politics, which I hope is a unique fusion of conservative means and liberal ends, is to call it pragmatic idealism. Brian once told me that I should just become a Democrat because a good deal of my political conclusions would be considered progressive. But this friendly hope of Brian’s misunderstands my view of what inspires and drives the world. To me it’s all about money. The world is run by the financial markets and it is most accurately portrayed through the lens of the Wall Street Journal, not our beloved New York Times. I view economics as the single most humanitarian pursuit. But how could this be so? This statement might seem bizarre given that we often equate money with base, anti-humanitarian pursuits. But to me, it is economic growth that saves people. The pragmatism and dirtiness of economic growth allows us to create enough leisure time and security for great, uncompromising, principled authors like Kant or Rawls to write about how we should not be pragmatic and capitalistic. Without the capitalism that Rawls scorned, he would have been a peasant in a field, working too many hours to push on the boundaries of philosophy and art. Capitalism is mankind’s crudest, bloodiest, and dirtiest invention, yet it has also created more humanity and beauty than anything else. The pragmatism of capitalism lies in its ability to conform to human nature, rather than in trying to change human nature to conform to an ideal.

How do we help people trapped in miserable and violent poverty in America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and elsewhere? Humanitarian change won’t be wrought by the protestor of sweat shops, the fair trade purchaser and volunteer, the campus crusader, the good-intentioned pastor, or the pristinely principled academic (Stephen Hartnett), rather it will come from the economics nerd reading Friedman and Hayek at the University of Chicago and a politician bold enough to enact that nerd’s theories. The world is about power. Power, informed and guided by the right ideas, propels the world toward good.

Here are three examples of pragmatic idealism. If you are trying to convince people to become vegetarian, instead of appealing to their altruistic instinct that animals suffer pain and understand pain at a level that parallels humans, an advocate should instead appeal to a person’s self-interest in having a healthy diet.

If you would like to see people lifted from poverty in poor countries, you should support sweatshops, as many liberal economists do, as a necessary means. If sweatshop protestors or fair trade activists succeeded in ending all sweatshop activities in Country X, the owners would simply move the sweatshops to Country Y resulting in many people losing their jobs in Country X without any means of creating new jobs. Furthermore, let’s say a sweatshop activist convinced every single American to never buy a sweatshop product again, which is the most successful apex they could reach, it would still say nothing of the purchasing habits of the other 6 billion people on the planet. Perhaps instead the activist could get an MBA or a JD and try to climb the corporate ranks of a multinational corporation so as to influence their policies from the inside. Change most often occurs inside institutions, rather than outside them.

Many of the leaders we consider to have held unwavering idealism actually practiced pragmatic idealism, my favorite example is Gandhi. He studied to be a lawyer – the most dreadfully practical degree available. Here is from the Philosopher’s Magazine, “Although Gandhi’s emphasis on intentions and duties often allows us to relate him to Kant, he is not really a Kantian. First, Gandhi describes himself as a ‘pragmatic idealist.’ He focuses on results. When he acted with good intentions and according to moral duty, but did not succeed in resisting hegemonic British imperialism, alleviating poverty and suffering, or overcoming caste prejudice and oppression, he evaluated his position as a ‘failed experiment in truth.’” In a book review of Gandhi’s Economic Thought, “Dasgupta repeatedly illustrates Gandhi’s pragmatism towards social and economic issues combined with his lucid, timeless and ideal ethical code.” Here you can read a book called Gandhi and Pragmatism. In a university speech, Gandhi’s grandson once “reiterated to the audience the necessary elements to achieve non-violence and the pragmatism that his grandfather’s philosophies hold in dealing with terrorism effectively.”

My problem with conservatives is that they often ignore the potential humanitarian power of their ideas, or rather, they are too self-serving to devote themselves to being an agent of God or of Good – they lack idealism. My problem with liberals is that they are often so concerned with actualizing their idealistic conception of the world that they forget to enact the pragmatic means necessary. Perhaps the strongest, or at least the most frequent, objection to pragmatism is some form of Kantian idealism which states that anything but the purest of means will corrupt the purity of the ends, and so the preference seems to be on not accomplishing to be death in a blaze of principled glory rather than sacrificing even an inch of principle in order to achieve some progress – think Ralph Nader, the Green Party, and many academics. Libertarians are sometimes guilty of this as well – Tom and Ron Paul come to mind. My biggest problem with Obama (and Clinton as well) is that he is preaching a brand of economics that died many years ago among economists. But to me, the highest ideal, the highest moral has always been realization of the end intended, or least a compromised version resembling it.

Conservatives are generally right about how the world works but they are generally wrong about where the world should go. Liberals are generally wrong about how the world works but they are generally right about where the world should go. My goal with this post is to convince both sides to learn from the other – I know that is a task I must personally accomplish more often. This is a muddy world dripping with pragmatic evil that can be stabbed only by pragmatic good.

Last September, I included in my future history a mention of The Church of the Great Programmer, which was dedicated to finding ways to level up faster in the great Multiplayer Game in which we all exist.

Yesterday, I ran across this discussion (h/t to Future Scanner) on the physical evidence for our existence being a simulation. I was particularly fascinated by the speed of light being seen as the rate at which information can go across the big computer that’s running the simulation and the Planck constant being a measure of the size of one pixel.

There are also a number of philosophical concepts that impact on this–the problem of evil with a good Creator (evil is there so that we can get XP by defeating it,) epiphanies (I can write fiction after suffering a heart attack because I got enough XP to level up and get a new skill,) and even omniscence–since a game designer can not know things about what he’s created.

Hell, it even explains the NIU massacre–the player running that guy walked away and his little brother (who’s a total noob) ran the character and got it killed off.

Last I heard, there was about a 20% proability that all this was true. You engineers, and especially Todd, should read the full paper.

Tom

I just returned home from a wonderful brunch sponsored by two of our Best Friends, Heather and Doug. I put on Carmina Burana cranked it on my headphones and got to thinking about the holiday.

It’s not just about that big, silly rodent. The second of February, the astronomical center of winter, has been celebrated for a long time. In our common European culture, it began as Imbolc in Ireland, then was transferred first to the Celtic Goddess, Brigid. Then, when the Irish converted to Catholicism (and incidentally, saved Western Civilization) the name was altered to Bridget. The Catholic Church nowadays celebrates it as Candlemas.

The Sun is halfway to the equator now. Despite the foot of snow outside the window of the ManCave, I know that the green sleeps beneath. The dying of the light, which was arrested six weeks ago, has proven to be averted once more. In Europe tonight, women will parade with headdresses made of rows of candles to celebrate this victory.

To a certain extent, I think that this holiday works as confirmation of little rebirths, of little resurrections. Human beings don’t usually change very much from the person that they are at twenty years old or so. When they do, it’s generally the result of metaprogramming changes from a traumatic or inspiring event. These are called epiphanies, and can be profound.

I’ve got a buddy, Bill Taylor, who was a progressive for years. He had gotten tired of life, had become set in his ways living out on his farm near Monticello. One day, he cut his left forearm off with a chainsaw. He managed to get the stump tied off with a bicyle inner tube and the EMTs got to his farm and got him to the hospital–too late to save his arm.

He said that it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. It made him realize that his life was precious and he could still make a big difference in the world. He increased his involvement with a program to built radio stations for the native people in Central America.

Another old friend, Doug Jones, was the CEO of a tech company. He journeyed to Mexico and, while he was down there, contracted an infection similar to meningitis that came close to killing him. Soon afterwards, he left his position to work on a similar kind of project. He had been raised Unitarian-Universalist and he decided to promote a project to build fifty UU student foundations around the country at universities.

I also reference my story (once more–old-time readers, sorry): In November of 2005, I suffered a heart attack that permanently disrupted my heart rhythm. The doctors have no idea why my heart is still beating, yet it does. I was dying of oxygen-deprivation until they found the mostly-blocked main artery. When I recovered, I found that I could now write fiction, at the cost of my scratch-pad memory.

I decided to drop out of college for the second time in my life (the first time, I was merely a student) and become a professional philosopher and writer. After my first month at doing this, I can assure you, it was the best decision I have ever made in my life. My God, but I feel young.

Nothing focuses a person like the imminent threat of death. Ultimately, our mortality is a gift, rather than a curse. I hope that humanity finds something that will continue to capture our attention in this manner when a generation or two down the road death becomes an option or an accident, rather than a sure thing.

I leave you with a 2005 column written by Jonah Goldberg of National Review about the philosophical meaning of the day and the wonderful movie with Bill Murray.

Live each day as if will never end. Live each day as if you’ll be judged by what you do during it.

Some Celtic lyrics for a Celtic holiday, courtesy of Enya.

Tom Trumpinski

Brenda and I had a friendly dinner together a few months ago. Afterwards, like any normal pair of friends, we got to debating Fukuyama’s End of History thesis versus Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. As we’ve discussed before, I ardently side with Fukuyama.

The point, however, lies within a small avenue of that debate. Brenda made the claim that human greed is endless and relentless. She agreed with Bruce Springsteen when he sang, “Poor man wanna be rich, Rich man wanna be king, And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.” This is a common view. I write now to show that it is a common misconception and that economics, the closest grasp on science that the social sciences has, can prove her wrong.

Economic theory has a well established understanding of the world called “decreasing marginal utility of return.” First, it is important to note that economists use the word “utility” as a B.S. word to mean happiness. Essentially, if you give $1 to a beggar he will receive much greater pleasure from your donation than George Soros will feel from the same $1 gift. Soros receives less and less pleasure from each dollar he earned throughout his life. His marginal utility of return curve is concaved.

It might be true that even a concave slope will have no limit, even though it will hit an asymptote, but even ignoring this mathematical prediction, eventually the marginal increase in utility by gaining a dollar will be outweighed by the marginal increase in utility from giving away a dollar.

What this all means is that human greed is not endless. At a certain point either the marginal increase in utility will be zero or the marginal increase in utility in giving away a dollar will exceed the increased utility from gaining another dollar.

Further, if we assume that humanity will continue to become more and more productive via new technologies then we can say that eventually all humans will get to a point where their greed is sated, thereby realizing the Marxist dream of shared wealth. This Marxist dream is not really his at all, but rather it is Fukuyama’s end of history. When abundance of wealth reaches a certain point no one will be poor because the wealthy will have no qualms in sharing their wealth. This effect is already seen today in that most, if not all, of the world’s richest people donate significant sums of money to the poor.

While I generally agree with myself, I can see a world in which the exploration and colonization of foreign planets as a frontier that elongates and extends the meaning of wealth, such that what it means to be rich is redefined by the infinite extent of the universe, which is to say that human greed would be paired with the infinite universe, thus human greed would again be infinite. So my little theory may only apply to the confines of earthly wealth.

It is not often that I read something that leads me to comprehend people in general and societies in particular so much better than it can only be called an epiphany. I’m not going to even hint at what the article below says, since I don’t want any judgments going in–it’s too important.

Jonathan Haidt interview from 2005.

Thanks so much to Vox Day for pointing me to this.