Are you good or evil? How do the moral codes of LOTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and co. fit into the ethics of real life? Where does religion fit in?

Does good and evil have any meaning in today’s society?  Haven’t we moved Beyond good and evil, according to Nietzsche and many would-be followers?

Many of our most cherished modern myths, including Star Wars, LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and the like, are based around a fairly obvious confrontation of good vs. evil.  But is real life like that?  When it comes to actual human functioning, many people who will unswervingly root for the good guys find themselves swamped in a morass of relativism, which makes it very difficult to see what is good and what is evil.  It used to be, that the church and religion gave us fairly strict rules on good and evil, and while many of these were fairly useful, others provided a strong framework for abuse–most of the wiser parts of society have realized that this kind of ‘absolute’ guidance, because it necessitates a hierarchical social structure and encourages people to obey rather than to be critical minded, is not really the best path towards personal fulfillment, let alone some notion of what ‘good’ might be.

At the platonist, we assert that in fact, good and evil are every much as important in ‘real’ or ‘daily’ life as they are in our modern fairy tales:  this is why we cherish these fairy tales so much.  We all instinctually know what is good and what is evil (as Plato taught):  much of this is due to the fact that some rules of ‘good’ behaviour are better evolutionarily.  Other aspects of this are not so easily explained by behaviouralism (though as a scientist I can’t really commit to anything genuinely ‘platonic’ as a cause of this).

What then is the practical definition of good and evil?  We might start with the Satanic Bible, which unequivocally states that being selfish is the essence of evil.  Ayn Rand and the Satanic Bible both attempt to make a virtue out of selfishness, which quickly ends up creating a rather illogical moral code that no serious philosopher can endorse.   With this as a basic guide, we can quickly create a slate of questions that can test our personal goodness and evilness.

1)  Are you most driven by empathy for others, or by selfishness?

2)  Does your work involve duping or exploiting people for personal gain, is it mostly neutral,  or does it involve helping people?

3)  Do you think that it is OK to dupe or exploit people for your gain, because the ‘system’ justifies it?

4) Do you, essentially, have hope that the human condition can be bettered, or do you essentially despair?

5)  Do you follow a creed or lifestyle because it gives you personal power, or do you follow a belief system which is genuinely based on a desire to see more good done for more people, whatever may be your role in the process?

6)   It is ok to wish physical comfort for yourself:  you cannot do good things or be good without it.  But, do you desire money simply as a means to personal comfort and actualization, or do you desire it to gratify base desires, such as gluttony, or to dominate others in terms of ‘showing off’ your superior physical possessions, or to dominate others psychologically or physically (i.e., to be a head honcho, to hire and fire people, to be a landlord in the sense that this gives you power)?

7)  Is your political philosophy predicated on your desire to see your own ‘in group’ remain, or come into, power, at the expense of ‘the other’?  Or do you seek to ensure your ‘in group’s comfort and safety, while seeking to exploit and profit from ‘the other’ as little as possible?  (Too much altruism, i.e., extreme tree huggers who would eradicate humanity to save this or that other species,  is a form of despair and so is also, technically, evil.)

8)  Do you believe in humanism? or some form of authoritarianism?  If you believe in humanism, then you will try to maximize the happiness actualization of the maximum number of people.  Your only enemies then are those who wish to do ill under the guise of their despairing, egomaniacal, or authoritarian beliefs.  If you believe in authoritarianism, then, in some way or another, you believe that certain groups of people should be discriminated against, or exploited,

9)  Do you believe that love is essentially egalitarian/shared, or essentially hierarchical/authoritarian/exploitative?

10)  Do you believe that friendships are essentially egalitarian/voluntary, or essentially authoritarian/dominance-based?

11)  When you argue, can you admit that you are wrong?  Good people realize they are fallible.  Evil people are so concerned with appearing to be right, so worried about losing dominance, that they will even argue with their wives over the composition of waffles, when their wives are obviously right and they were wrong.  This is perhaps the greatest failing that otherwise good people have in real life:  it’s a true test, of whether you can be more like Qui-Gon Jinn, or more like Darth Maul.    

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The basic human motivators. Competition, dominance, and sex in an ideal society.

So it’s an ongoing project here at the Platonist, to come up with the ground rules for what would ideally become a book, setting out a Grand Unified Theory (if we may), of how to create an ideal economy, politics, and society.  This is essentially an update of Plato’s Republic, moving beyond earlier utopian or dystopian literature and taking into account what we’ve learned in the last few decades, since advances in the social sciences have been tremendous, and very inspiring if you know where to look.  This is especially true  in our advances in the theory of egalitarianism, and the discursive elements of this, since Foucault.  And of course our ‘system’ has to move beyond being a system, since one thing we’ve learned is that imposing systems doesn’t at all work.  What we would suggest in this rewriting of the Republic, would be a series of concrete policies that would be designed to maximize happiness, through existing democratic and legal institutions, and maximize opportunity, for those who would want it, without imposing anything on anyone (since this would never be better than our current system–freedom is key).  In essence, we’d be continuing the current and ongoing explorations in the social sciences, whose goal, we would argue, is to find ways to help us to live better.  To explain what has worked, and why, and what hasn’t, and why, with the aim of furnishing us with wisdom to make the right choices, ones that are of course naturally obvious.  For example, it’s quite obvious now that democracy works better than any true monarchy or one-man rule, for a whole host of reasons.  This was not so obvious 300 years ago.  This is the sort of thing, only using newer discoveries, that we are aiming to highlight here.  Economics, in particular, is a rich field for this, since  the marxist-capitalist conflict of the 20th century arguably blinded most economic thinkers by turning them into partisans, instead of scientists.  Economics has been dominated too much by polemics, and not enough with the business of maximizing happiness and opportunity.  It is still in the hands of the anti-marxist, pro plutocratic elite, and we need to reclaim economics from them –  - real economics, scientific university economics.  The book ‘prosperity without growth’ is part of this new trend.  It is happening.

At any rate, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to any would-be set of principles for improving the way things work (since surely there are quite a few problems we have yet to address as well as we could if only we worked it through) is the fact that we’re still pretty much hardwired for hierarchy as I have said in another post – i.e., we still carry strong tendencies to act according to pack and troop principles, which got us through our millions of years living as beasts.  These instincts aren’t however often so great for creating an egalitarian, maximum-opportunity society.  Psychologists and anthropologists have now identified a lot of these, but let’s spell them out here, so that we can get them out in the open, and grapple with them as we discuss and shape our economic and political wish list.

1)  The desire to be cool.  This used to be called ‘honor.’   It’s probably our first instinct, once we move beyond toddlerhood, and stays with us until senility.  You want to have the people immediately around you like you, and act positively towards you.  This is because in primate troop society, this meant you were  ’alpha.’  Everyone fawns over you, does stuff for you, laughs at your jokes.  This translates into personal power.  The Fonz snaps his fingers, and people do stuff for him.  (Jeff Winger in “Community” being an updated version of the same).

2)  The desire to be sexy.  

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How to find your ideal soul mate.

So you’ll have to help me with this one, but I thought that it might be useful to start a list of the things that you yourself should be, and that you should do, in order to find an ideal soul mate.  I wrote in another post on marriage that, for some reason, we keep getting married; and I concluded that the ideal of it seems to be hardwired into our biology, and we find it fulfilling in many fundamental ways:  that is why we consider it to be the ideal.  Not least of these includes the idea that except in exceptional circumstances, kids want their parents to stay together, not just for a while, but for all time; even when parents get divorced when kids are in their 30s, kids get adversely affected, and begin to despair that their own marriages must be somehow doomed.  Even elderly seniors divorcing have serious negative repercussions on younger folk who can’t help but look to their example to see whether it is possible to ‘live happily ever after.’  A recent onion article, in typical parodic fashion, ends up listing the traits of an ideal marriage, and incidentally notes the fact that most of us continue to see the ‘happily ever after’ thing as an ideal.

Of course, in order to live happily ever after, you need to find a soul mate first:  it’s no fun to live happily ever after with someone who is only sort of suited to you:  the ideal of course is to be with someone so in tune with you, that you can’t imagine being not around them for more than a few hours here and there.

And, as any councillor or psychologist will tell you these days, the main thing that determines whether or not you find a soul mate is you.  You’re almost entirely in charge of your destiny there.  Yes, it may be hard to meet people in certain situations, but, if you were doing things differently, you would find them, and relatively quickly.  So how do you do it?  Let’s try making a list and see what we come up with.

1)  You have to believe in love, as the horrendous autotuned song goes.  I.e., you have to be willing to have faith, and trust, and not be essentially cynical about relationships and marriages.  You have to believe that it is possible for people to live happily ever after.  If you’ve convinced yourself that marriages, relationships, etc are doomed, and that all members of the opposite sex are mercenary, lying, cheating scum, well, guess what?  However, there are at least a third of people out there who manage to live life in stable, healthy, happy marriages, and a decent number of these folks are eternally in love, and would vastly prefer the company of their partner to anyone else, to death do them part.  So yes, it’s entirely possible, and so, if you want it, you gotta believe in it first.

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Are Song Lyrics Poetry?

Why yes, yes they are.

I was at a poetry reading by a “famous” (in the poetry world) Irish poet named Paul Muldoon, whose most famous poem’s refrain is something like “with a rinky-tink dinky-tink link link,” or something like that.  For such work, Muldoon has won a Pulitzer prize in poetry, which to my mind says something about the state of the arts at this point, but we’ll get to that in a moment.  Inevitably, perhaps, during the question and answer period one of the undergrads in the audience asked Mr. Muldoon:

“Sir, do you believe that song lyrics are poetry?”

And Mr. Muldoon said:  ”Well, no, son.  Not really.”

And I wanted this supposedly world-famous, ultra-talented spokesman for modern poetry in the world to explain for us, why, indeed, this was not so.  All that he could manage, however, was something along the lines of, “Well, poetry is different; it’s more complex, and it often has forms which are not compatible with simple song lyrics.”

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Why were artists and poets seen as the equal of scientists until, say, 1950?

So this just came to me today, as I was playing piano.

I realized that between the renaissance and about 1900, artists, musicians, and poets were instinctually worshipped as though they were demigods, in the same way that scientists were (in fact, often moreso).

This is primarily because, these artists were seen as revealing the mind of God, just like the scientists.

Let me explain:  between 1500 and 1900, most people in the West believed that the Christian god had created the universe, and made it according to a definite and logical set of laws, which however remained to be discovered by humanity.  Many believed after 1500 that it was the purpose of mankind to discover these laws – this would make him more reasonable, more perfected, and he could thereby overcome some of the ill-effects of the fall.  Pico even said that by discovering the laws of god, we became gods ourselves – and many secretly agreed with him, even if it was blasphemous to say it outright.

So, the point is, that scientists, such as Galileo, Newton, the inventors of the telescope and microscope, etc., were seen as ‘revealing the mind of god.”  I.e., God was one with the universe – he created it, he was it, he was in it, all around it, but he was also the universe itself.  So the idea was that if you discover the laws of nature, i.e., the laws of physics, you are discovering the laws of god – even, perhaps, how his mind itself works.

And, at the same time, it was known that musicians were discovering the laws of harmony, which were considered to be related to the “music of the spheres,” i.e., the mathematics which made gravity and the laws of physics work – or rather which ordered them, and explained them, and were the building blocks of them.  So, the laws of music, the laws of harmony, of major and minor scales, of thirds, fifths, and the rest, were considered to be the same laws that were written into the code of the universe – and this is why some notes are inherently pleasing (e.g., a fifth), while others are inherently jarring (i.e., a half step, or a series of notes out of scale).

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Twentieth-Century Art. (Draft Post)

So, class, today I’d like to discuss why it is that twentieth-century art has been so important (considering that most people consider art to be worthless and at best frivolous), at the same time that it sucks.  So let’s start with a simple and obvious proposition:  twentieth-century art sucks.  Then, we can go into why it has nonetheless been hugely important, and we can end with some observations on the positive impacts that it has had, basically despite itself.

Before we can discuss why this art sucks, we should discuss the ideas and the technological underpinnings which have by and large shaped the direction of twentieth-century art.

First, some definitions.  What do we mean by twentieth-century art?  Well, we are speaking in the broadest meaningful terms.  In general, we can talk of this art as the sum of the cultural movement which has come under the rubric ‘modernism’ and which started about the time of the first world war.   Under this heading we can put classical music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature, including whatever sub genres you like.  All of these fields have been influenced in broadly the same way, and followed broadly similar trajectories, since the dawn of European culture in the middle ages, and they have continued to do so up to the present day.

Thus, we come to the ideas that have shaped this art.  First is obviously the western cultural tradition, which has been evolving since the middle ages, and has taken the form of a dialogue between plato and aristotle:  between the idealism of plato and the scientific desire to continually improve one’s knowledge represented best by artistotle.  Since the renaissance, at least, European artists have seen themselves as being part of a continually evolving, and usually improving, tradition, where artists of the present are in dialogue not only with their peers, but with their forebears.  Up until about 1900, artists in this tradition believed for the most part that by improving their art, they were striving and perhaps reaching ever closer towards the platonic ideals of truth, beauty, and beauty.  They also, many of them, at least paid lip service to the notion that these platonic ideals were also the ideals that formed the best parts of the christian tradition:  in other words, when Bach wrote  “ad maiorem gloriam dei” at the top of his compositions (“to the greater glory of God”), everyone shared his sense that he was making things beautiful because one of God’s commandments to huanity was that they should continually try and achieve the perfection which He embodied (viz, truth, beauty, the good, justice, etc.). 

After about 1910, however, everything changed in the art world:  in general, it became fashionable, due to the influence of Marxism, to see “traditional” art (i.e., all art before 1910) as “bourgeois,” and thus as part of the culture of “oppression,” which had previously dominated all societies.  And this makes sense on many levels:  because the cathedrals and churches which were the centres of so much western art were so obviously just monuments to the oppression of clerical elites, and arguably of theocratic voodoo pushers who wished merely to keep the masses dumb by feeding them opiates, it was not too difficult for an increasingly sophisticated intellectual elite to grasp the notion that all previous art had been the product of oppression.  Even neoclassical art was the product of “bourgeos” rulers who wished to awe the people into thinking that they were the “most reasonable” and obviously had a monopoly on beauty, harmony, and truth.   So, sure, this was one reason to suspect previous art.

Another reason was the recent “death of god” proclaimed by Nietzsche, which was shored up by the findings of Darwin, Freud, and Marx in their respective fields (which together covered most of human knowledge).  If God had always been the underpinner of the platonic ideals of truth, justice, and beauty, but he was now dead, then were these ideals of truth beauty and the good just farcical lies?  If god was just a big lie perpetrated on the people by ruling elites, then were not the very ideals of truth, justice, and beauty just sublimations of the same thing?  One had to throw out all the old notions of beauty if one wanted to create a “new art,” which alone would be “free” and alone would be “liberating” to “the people.”

So 20th century art was born in a notion that it would:

a) expose the lies of the bourgeoisie (i.e., show that they had been for centuries creating a property system, a capitalist system, which mimicked feudalism, insofar as it exalted a rich few who exploited the masses for their labour and stole their birthright from them). 

b) find new modes of expression which were based on a truer and freer truth than ever before.

c) in doing so, it would create a “new beauty” of its own which was not defined by theocrats, or some long-dead culture’s notion of what God is, but rather a beauty of proletarian solidarity.

Note that, after the 1980s, these ideas are seeming pretty stale, these notions of the proletariat, etc.  This is because economists have realized, even left wing ones, that Marxism doesn’t really work that way, and so the underpinnings of a proletarian beauty have been proven to be wrong.  Not to mention, we’ve all now had ample experience of where a quest for “other forms of beauty” gets us:  both communist regimes,. and twentieth century artists have now spent decades proving to us that their quest was sorely misguided.  The rusty i-beam sculptures which ruin many public parks across the world are eloquent testimony to that, as are the architectural skylines of almost any city built between 1930 and 1990 (when things started to pick up, a little). 

Note, too, that pretty soon after the initial rebellion against beauty, most artists kind of forgot the original purpose of these movements, but instead just followed what they learned at art school, which was that what their art teachers did was the fashion. 

Now, we can talk about the technological underpinnings of twentieth-century art.  

1)  Painting vs. Photography.  One of the key components of 20th century art which few people remember to discuss is that changes in a few basic technologies drastically and permanently changed the nature of art, the relationship between people and artistic media.  By about 1900, photography had become so common and convenient that it began to supplant painting.  Remember that prior to this, for thousands of years, the only way to record, or remember a person or place was to paint it.  Thus, prior to about 1900, painting was a necessary art form, which filled a basic functions that could not otherwise be fulfilled.  Nowadays, it’s an extravagant luxury.  After 1900, however, painters began to develope some pretty radical reactions to th efact of photography chasing them off the field of usefulness altogether:  the surrealists attempted to take painting into a place that photography couldn’t easily go.  Again, it’s arguable if this was very useful, since for at least 60 years now painting has had next to no cultural signficiance.   

2) Music in the age of the phonograph.  Argument:  classical composers, live performance, and the orchestra form, became mere luxuries, instead of being necessary to the production of music.  A few stars could now monopolize the market.

3) Poetry in the age of the phonograph.   Argument:  poetry was killed by recorded music. 

4) Drama in the age of television.

5)  Literature in the age of television and movies.   

So, we’ll have to leave it here for now.  This is a draft post, but the issue is a complex one, so it may take a while to finish.  In the meantime, if you are inspired to do so, please comment! 

-trivium.

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More than just pointy ears: why do people like elves, vulcans, and jedi so much?

Why do people like Tolkien’s Middle Earth so much, and why do people like Star Trek so much?  And, for that matter, why do they like Star Wars so much?  These are clearly the top 3 fictional universes that were created in the 20th century; they are very much alive in the mentality of my entire generation.  In many countries of the world, they are perhaps the core mythology of thinking people under 50–more than any religion.  These universes are, in Lennon’s words, “bigger than Jesus,” and inspire much more, seemingly longer-term, devotion than any rock band, including the Beatles.  And they look to be equally captivating for the generation just now coming to consciousness.  So, why? 

Pundits have speculated endlessly, and you usually get the following answer:  They deal with issues of “good vs. evil.”  And they pose moral quandries. 

Well, yes, but then again, so have about 1,500 other fictional universes.  So that can’t be it.

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How does education work? Why is college useful?

It’s a pretty taboo idea, these days, to suggest that someone in the US is a better person than someone else.  This has come about for very good reasons:  in general, society works best, and everyone feels most happy, when most people do not discriminate against other people, and tend to view them as the Declaration of Independence loftily put it, as being essentially equal.  In the past 30 years we have made great strides towards finally creating a society in which people who aren’t white males are not seen as inherently inferior; and the tendency throughout history has been so much in favour of the dominant male caste, that we are understandibly loathe to create distinctions between people.  However, in the process, we can forget how to talk about things which could arguably improve many, if not most people, such as education. 

In other words, it is one thing to say that people are inherently dumber than other people, or that some are uglier than others.  These things are facts which cannot be changed, and so it is best and most humane, until we can genetically engineer people to all be smart and good-looking, not to dwell on them.  But education, on the other hand, can be applied to improve almost everyone, even if the end results will vary widely based on one’s natural traits.

Still, there are many people, including many university students, who are quite foggy on just what education does, or why it might be useful.  Most people in our business-driven society tend to view things merely in terms of “utility” that is:  I learn stuff so that I can get a better job, and earn more money.  And that’s it.  But the fact is, that the very wealthiest and most talented people in our society mostly tend not to study things which are useful:  Prince William did not major in engineering, or veterinary medicine, or in being a computer technician; rather, he spent several years studying art history.  And at Yale, the most common major is history.  Why do all of these talented and very smart people waste their time on something which is not at all useful?  The answer is, of course, that it is useful, in a way that the wealthy instinctually get, but which I am attempting to articulate here, so that the less wealthy might benefit from it.  My purpose, then, is to convince you that it is worth getting a more general education, because it will put you on a par with the wealthy, who rule our society.

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The surprising and intimate relations between the arts, the sciences, engineering, and business.

Most people in the US, including college administrators, believe that the arts and the sciences are entirely different–basically opposite–fields of study.  Why in the Hades, then, are they always lumped together in the same “college”?  Throughout the US, the standard is to have a “college of arts and sciences,” a “college of engineering” and a “college of business.”  So what gives?  Why don’t they just separte the arts and sciences, since they are so radically different?  Many people suspect that the arts people just want to keep them together so that their college doesn’t seem entirely irrelevant, so that it gets phased out altogether.

A step backwards, and a longer term point of view, however, will help us to understand the relations between these fields which tend to remain hidden to people who accept current dogmas on the subject.  Once we have understood the relation between these two general fields of study, we can then properly relate engineering and business to the arts and sciences.  But to start with the arts and sciences.  Most people come to the conclusion that the arts and sciences are entirely different because the sciences are based on math, while the arts are based on language.  That is broadly true, and it is a signficant difference (though in reality there are many crosseovers).   However, the methodology employed by both disciplines is the same:  they both employ systematic logic, that is, the scientific method.  They both accumulate knowledge based on the gathering of facts, and subject existing hypotheses to peer review, which then allows them to advance understanding further.

In this way, we can see that the arts and sciences are basically two branches of the same methodology.  In the middle ages, scholars understood this, in part because the sum of knowledge was so much less that it was easier to see the forest for the trees.  As it explains in the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, both the arts and the sciences began life during the renaissance, as two branches of philosophy:  the arts were what we today call “philosophy” and the sciences were called “natural philosophy.”

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Why censorship is essential to a healthy democracy, and why the left needs to rethink it’s childish all-or-nothing stance on the issue.

It’s kind of unbelievable how many of my friends, and how many liberal journalists, write as though censorship _of any kind_ is somehow anathema to human life, when in fact, if they just took a minute and stepped back to think, they would realize that they are all very much in favour of all sorts of censorship.  They’re just not used to thinking of it that way– and this has led to some pretty big problems in our society, which need fixing quick.  So let’s look at the problem in a bit more detail…

Since the 1970s, the left’s knee-jerk reaction, which has since become very mainstream, about the question of censorship, has been to baldly state that “censorship is always bad.”  Just the other day on the Guardian, some commentator or other was saying the same thing about violence in movies, and violence in art:  “of course artists should be able to say whatever they want.”  It’s high time, I think, to ask, as a person on the left:  is this really the right ideological position to adopt?  Is this actually the best way of fostering humanism, rationality, science, dignity, respect, self-worth, respect for the environment, and all of the other core “liberal values?”

In fact, I would argue that the core “liberal values” are pretty much a direct application of eighteenth-century enlightenment values (i.e., those of the American and French revolutions, and of the Enlightenment), only now written in a 20th and 21st century context, where we have since realized that these should not be applied only to rich white men, but to everyone, of whatever colour, gender, sexual orientation, etc. 

This is not a minor issue, but is arguably rapidly turning American society into one which is not only violent, (where life is “nasty, quick, brutish, and short?”), but which is morally unfit to rule the world. 

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