Focus

“If we look at history, it always will speed up. So that’s why I think the skill of focus, being able to know how to focus when it's necessary, I think is a very, very valuable skill to have nowadays.”

~ Oscar de Bos, co-author of a new book Focus On-Off

"Be interesting."

"Billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman has been mocked on X for advising young men struggling to find a date to go up to a woman in public and simply say: 'May I meet you?'

"Claiming that he found success himself with this technique, Ackman added: 'I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness. You might give it a try.'

"Some felt his advice was hopelessly naive and unrealistic. But at a time when 45 per cent of men aged 18 to 25 have never asked a girl out in person, he should be applauded for offering some kind of solution to our current crisis.

"Increasingly, we are seeing a generation of 'lost boys' opting out of education, employment, marriage and fatherhood, in favour of more dystopian pursuits, often found online.

"Scott Galloway, an NYU professor, investor and podcaster, published a bestselling book this month, 'Notes on Being a Man,' which highlights the problem and encourages men to 'get out of the house,' 'take risks' and 'don’t let rejection stop you.'

"I would add another piece of advice to this list for my fellow men: be interesting."

~ Rob Henderson from his column 'You Don't Need a Better Pickup Line. You Need a Better Life.'

"Logical fallacies are not the only errors that retard thinking. Conceptual fallacies do, too, and often in subtler, more destructive ways."

"Logical fallacies are not the only errors that retard thinking. Conceptual fallacies do, too, and often in subtler, more destructive ways. ..."[These f]allacies ... include package-deals, anti-concepts, frozen abstractions, floating abstractions, and stolen concepts. Below are definitions and examples of each, along with brief indications of the principles they violate. ...

"The fallacy of package-dealing consists in conceptually combining things that are superficially similar but essentially different and, thus, logically do not belong under the same concept. If and when we commit this fallacy, we muddle our thinking about the subject in question and make clear communication impossible. ... 

    "An extremely common instance of package-dealing is the mental blending of 'majority rule' and 'rights-protecting social system' under the term 'democracy.' ... 'Power' is a[nother] package-deal when used to equate 'economic power' with 'political power.' ...

"An anti-concept is a kind of package-deal, in that it combines ideas that logically don’t belong together. But an anti-concept is different from a regular package-deal, in that it is intended to cause conceptual confusion and harm. As [Ayn] Rand defines it, an anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term intended to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept(s) in people’s minds. ...

    "The alleged meaning of 'social justice' [for example] is 'the moral imperative of treating people fairly with respect to various social matters.' Its actual meaning is 'the moral imperative of coercively redistributing wealth and forcing individuals and institutions to act against their judgment for the sake of various groups whose individual members allegedly can’t think or live on their own.' In other words, 'social justice' is the soft bigotry of low expectations—fused with the hard coercion of a government gun.
    "The purpose of the anti-concept of 'social justice' is to obliterate the concept of actual justice in people’s minds. And, when people accept the phrase as legitimate and try to use it, that is what it does. ...

"The fallacy of freezing an abstraction consists in making a false equation by substituting a particular conceptual concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs. Like a package-deal, it involves integrating concepts in disregard of the need for crucial distinctions.
    "[Ayn] Rand’s seminal example of this fallacy is the equating of 'morality' with 'altruism' by substituting a particular morality (the morality of self-sacrifice) for the whole, general class 'morality.' ...

"Conceptual knowledge is hierarchical. Higher-level concepts, such as mammal, animal, mile, and tyranny, presuppose and depend on lower-level concepts, all the way down to first-level concepts, whose referents are at the perceptual level, such as dog, bird, inch, and force (e.g., a punch in the face). In order to know what a mammal is, you must first understand a chain of more basic concepts, including fertilization, reproduction, animal, and various kinds of animals (e.g., cats, dogs, birds, fish). Without this more basic knowledge, the concept of mammal wouldn’t and couldn’t have meaning in your mind.
    "This principle of hierarchy applies to all conceptual knowledge. Higher-level (more abstract) concepts can be understood and have meaning in someone’s mind only to the extent that he grasps the lower-level (more basic) concepts that give rise to them. And there are essentially two ways people can violate this principle: via floating abstractions and via stolen concepts. 

    "When someone uses a word or phrase that is not supported in his mind by a structure of more basic ideas that are ultimately grounded in perceptual facts, he is using a floating abstraction—an abstraction disconnected from reality in his mind, disconnected from the things the idea refers to, disconnected from the facts that give 't meaning.
    "For example: 'Everyone has a right to a living wage.' If someone uses the word 'right' this way, he doesn’t know what a right is. He doesn’t know what the concept means, what it refers to in reality. He doesn’t know the facts that give rise to our need for the concept. (Or, if he does, he is committing a more grievous fallacy; see concept-stealing below.) ... 'America is a democracy.' If someone thinks or says such a thing, he doesn’t know what “democracy” means (see “democracy” as a package-deal above). The term is a floating abstraction in his mind. 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.' If someone chants such nonsense, he has no idea what 'free' means. The term is a floating abstraction in his mind.
    "Floating abstractions abound. Be on the lookout for them in your own mind and in the claims of others. ...

"Now, if someone goes beyond merely using a concept that is disconnected from reality and uses a concept while denying or ignoring more basic, lower-level concepts on which it logically depends, he is committing the fallacy of concept-stealing.
    "Here, as with floating abstractions, the operative principle is the hierarchical nature of conceptual knowledge. Higher-level, more abstract knowledge is built on lower-level, more basic knowledge, all the way down to sensory perception, our direct cognitive contact with reality. Concept-stealing consists in using a higher-level concept while denying or ignoring a lower-level concept(s) on which it depends for its meaning.

    "Examples: ... When someone claims that an experiment has shown that determinism is true—that all human action is antecedently necessitated by forces beyond our control—he steals the concepts of 'experiment' and 'true.' ... When someone claims the senses are invalid, he steals the concept of 'invalid.' (Invalid, in this context, means 'incapable of delivering knowledge of reality.') ....

    "Stolen concepts are rampant in philosophic discussions. And they not only cause confusion; they also make way for much mischief and lead people to waste ungodly amounts of time pondering and debating things that don’t exist, don’t make sense, or don’t matter. Be on the lookout for them. ...

"Keeping your thinking connected to reality is essential to success in reality. And that’s the only kind of success there can be."

~ Craig Biddle from his post 'Conceptual Fallacies and How to Avoid Them'

“Culture is … “

“Culture is a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behaviour, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society. …
    “[I]t is important to distinguish between such terms as ‘culture’ and ‘institutions.’ … [I]t seems best to regard culture as something entirely of the mind, which can differ from individual to individual and is, to an extent, a matter of individual choice. … [whereas] institutions are parametrically given to every individual and are beyond their control….
    “Cultures are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.”

~ composite quote from Joel Mokyr’s book A Culture of Growth, and Thomas Sowell’s book Conquest and Culture

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 2 - Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way

 

PART 2 in a series explaining "identity politics." (Part 1 is here, answering the question 'What is Identity Politics?'.) 

Now all-pervasive, identity politics judges you not by your ideas or thoughts or choices, but instead pre-judges you by the group or tribe in which you allegedly belong. You speak not as yourself, but "as a" member of this group. 

If this stinks, it's because it's an outgrowth of a dead idea called "determinism" ...

Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way

"'Identity politics' . . . sorts individuals into groups based on gender, race or sexual orientation, as if such characteristics actually decide one’s political interests...    
    "Public intellectuals push for ever-expanding and cross-cutting segmentation of society into group identities. Rarely mentioned, let alone taken seriously, is the notion that ideas and principles can, and should, unite individuals of all physical types and cultural backgrounds, for the sake of the individual’s life and happiness. The [idea of the] 'melting pot' is now an object of mockery."
          ~ Tom Bowden

Determinism as a school of thought says that human being beings lack free will and the ability to make choices. Hard determinists say we're "wired" to do and think things, about which we have no choice -- as if, in the words of novelist Anthony Burgess, we're all just some kind of "clockwork orange." Realising the idiocy therein, “soft determinists” advanced the view that the faculty of free will is merely "under severe influence from outside factors such as one’s background and environment.” The theorists of identity politics turn this into an iron law, arguing that your background and environment -- your race, class, ethnicity and gender -- fully determine everything about you, from your emotions, to our perceptions, to your politics. According to this recrudescence of tribalism, you are your group.

According to tribalism [explains philosopher Tara Smith], the source of reality, of truth of value is the group. Truth resides not in the logic of the group's beliefs – in the validity of their ideas -- but in their groupness. Treat our claims as worthy because we’re us. What makes us –our  group -- a group worthy of respect? Well, we were born with this skin pigmentation. Or of this hereditary lineage or with these physical organs.  In this geographic area, Serbia, Bosnia, south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, notice you do not control these things. They're accidental… But tribalism maintains that's what's important about you. These accidental characteristics that you happen to inherit.

    Which implies that  individual reasoning, that free will, that action, that these things are not significant. Tribalism elevates the accidental over the chosen; happenstance over decision; the collective over the individual; feeling over reason; “we want it” as opposed to “we can prove it that it's the right way to go.”

    Tribalism represents the attitude “our group, right or wrong,” rather than “our group's view should be adopted because evidence and reason demonstrate its logic.” And because tribalism rejects reason … , you get ahead not by creating things based on reason and trading with others to mutual benefit, but by beating others, wresting the quarry from their hands. So it's an us-versus-them mentality based on a zero-sum picture that requires combat you get by grabbing.

Note how this idea reduces politics to a straight-out game of pressure-group warfare – with the pressure group into which you belong not even chosen by you, but assigned to you by the "group" or tribe into which you are allegedly born. [Assigned by whom, you ask? Ah -- that's where the political power comes from. More on that shortly.]

“What it reduces us to is members of a larger group,” explains US lawyer Steve Simpson in a panel discussion with Dave Rubin and Flemming Rose – a group that essentially functions just as a tribe does. This is the consequence, he observes “of many decades, even centuries, of very bad philosophy.”

Part of it is collectivism, and I think that the best way to describe it in today’s world  is tribalism: that you are a member of a tribe, and you should say only what that tribe says. 

And if you look at the way tribes function, they always rigidly enforce tribal adherence—because the whole idea is that there is no such thing as the individual. There’s only a member of a group. And your role as an individual is just to give yourself over and to sacrifice your life for the good of the group. . . .

Note the elements Smith and Simpson both identify:

•     You have no reality as an individual: your only identity is your group;
•     You do not choose your group;
•     Adherence to group norms is rigidly enforced by the group;
•     The role of every individual is submission, to the group. 

Consider the musty stale odour that this all starts to emit, the sort of smell generally associated with tribalism, and we can see why Simpson and others refer to it this way. It’s not meant as a metaphor: in many ways the philosophies that led us here are as primitive as the tribal idea itself. Any individual worthy of the name would run a mile from such restrictions – it smacks of what is sometimes called the “crab-bucket mentality” – “a way of thinking best described by the phrase ‘if I can't have it, neither can you.’"

The [crab-bucket] metaphor is derived from a pattern of behaviour noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.

Tennis ace Chris Lewis, who now trains youngsters to climb the sport’s mountains he once conquered, observes that “there will always be those who give up on their quest to climb life's mountains, and instead choose to remain at the bottom of life's bucket — which would be fine, as long as they didn't then devote their destructive efforts, like the crabs, to pulling the climbers back down.”

This is the mentality of the followers of identity politics, concludes Tara Smith, a lowest-common denominator form of collectivism.

A species of collectivism that groups people together, not on the basis of their thinking, their chosen beliefs … but on the basis of given physical characteristics. Tribalism is collectivism whose basis rests in blood, body chemistry, genes, geography, unchosen physical characteristics. So it's pre-intellectual. It's the love child of collectivism and anti-intellectualism. Tribalism is non-cognitive collectivism.

CONTINUED IN PART 3: 'Tribal Politics is a Zero-Sum Conflict'

PART 2 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Part 1 is here: 'What is Identity Politics?'

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 1 - By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

Good to see one of the Blue Team explicitly pushing back against identity politics. A rare thing, but necessary -- and especially good, because he clearly states the cure: individualism.

What is identity politics [writes National's Simon O'Connor], and why does it matter to you?
Well, the first thing to understand about identity politics is that you don’t matter. All that matters is what group, or tribe, are you are part of:
Are you black or white, Māori or Pākehā; are you gay or straight, young or old – in the fact, there are so many various and possible group identities are almost endless.
What isn’t included is you – your life, your experiences, your thoughts, desires, or ambitions.
To embrace identity politics is to say that the group is always more important than the individual. And so, all that matters is that you fit into some sort of group, usually based on your race, or gender, or ethnicity....
At the heart of identity politics is the rejection of you as an individual. You are no more than the groups you are assigned to. And once in these groups, there is no hope, there is no redemption. Just perpetual victimhood and oppression.
We should reject identity politics and intersectionality and instead celebrate everyone for who they are in their own right. Martin Luther King’s words are truer than ever – let us judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. 

Right on!

So, since Labour-Lite are finally realising they're little more than just Labour-Without-the-Identity Politics -- and pushing back on it -- and we're entering an election year in which identity politics is already front and centre -- as many "adult human females" and "middle-class cis white boomer males" might already appreciate -- it seems like a good time to repost (in several parts) an excerpt from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Today: What is Identity Politics?

“Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought but has now 

become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era’s most potent 

political forces. This is the revival of tribalism in thinking and politics.” 

~ Keith Windschuttle 

"If the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then 

civilisation is already irredeemably lost." 

~ Yaron Brook

[...]
This particular brand of nonsense comes under the bigger heading of “identity politics,” but it could just as easily, and more simply, be identified as the modern-day tribalism that it represents. It is a politics that identifies people by their group identity in order to effectively silence them – the Christchurch killings being a particularly gruesomely extreme example of what that can mean. Yet it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

I’m going to start by talking about what this thing called identity politics is, where it came from, how it has morphed since – how identity politics has been used to shut down speech -- and what you can do to counter it.

PART 1: What is Identity Politics?

“We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern coloured leaders 

in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, 

race men, and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and 

another is condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race, 

the motive may be good, but the method is bad. 

It is an effort to cast out Satan by Beelzebub.”

~ Frederick Douglass

I write this here today as a cisgendered, heterosexual white male[1]. So as everybody imbued with this notion would “know,” what I say here should only be taken seriously by other folk who share that identity. Because as “everybody knows,” your identity – your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class – these are the things that truly define you.

You speak “as a woman of colour.”

You speak “as a disabled lesbian.”

I speak, Galt forbid, “as a white man.”

In more-and-more meetings and debates in recent years, these words “as a/azza” have become not just the accepted way to begin speaking – like a reflexive cough at the start of every speech -- like some natty politically-correct version of reciting your whakapapa – but an implicit admission that one’s views will be irretrievably coloured (ahem), either positively or negatively, by the group of which one is an unchosen member.

American politician Ayanna Presley put it bluntly at progressive activists’ 2019 Netroots Convention, warning folk that only those raising the right voices, coming to the table “as a something,” were welcome there:

If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalised and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice!

Ayanna Presley is black. Her call – “brown face, brown voice; black face, black voice” – is “the very essence of identity politics.” Yet only five decades before, in the vanguard of change (or so he hoped) Martin Luther King declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

"One day"? King’s day has still not come. Judged by contemporary cultural affairs, that blessed day may have to wait a few more decades yet.

The morality of identity politics can seem benign, when for instance the new Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle guest-edits Vogue [as she did back in 2019], choosing for its famous cover not the usual stylishly sleek model but instead a rainbow coalition of appropriately figured stars (Fig. 2).

The message behind her choice of cover stars was clear enough [argues the Spectator's Joanna Rossiter]: you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are – be it female, transgender, black or freckled.

Yet that, right there, is the identitarian message: “you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are.” Because of the group into which you fell accidentally at birth.

The group into which one falls may be defined by race. Or it may be by class, by ethnicity, by disability – by freckles – by hair colour (if you’re a ginger[2]) -- or by geographical area. The important thing here however is that while you may choose your ideas and your values, you did not choose your group.

(And everyone is treated in this ‘lowest-common-denominator’ way; as if this is all about you that really matters.)

And also, as you will no doubt have noticed by now, while all groups are allegedly equal, there will be implied a clear sense of victimhood making some groups more equal than others.

There are some groups, we see, whose speech should not be set free. ["Cis white males" and "adult human females" increasingly prominent among them.]

We’ll discuss this galloping inequality shortly. But the fact your defining group (or groups) is unchosen is important here. It’s important because it ignores, and makes un-important, every human being’s defining attribute: which is their reasoning power. This modern tribalism serves to remove reason from modern debate, and to elevate instead the trivial, the accidental, the irrational.

Philosopher Tara Smith insists that “it's not irrational by mistake …. It's brazenly irrational. It's irrational on principle. It is anti rational.”

Its view is: we don't need reason. I don’t respect it. I don't go by reason. I go by race, ethnicity, geography, et cetera. Solidarity with my group is more important than evidence or logic. Tribe over truth.
    It erases the individual. You personally do not matter. [What’s important is] you “as a woman.” Now, you’ve always got to be on the lookout for the “azzas” – “as a woman,” “as a gay woman,” “as a white male” … “Azza.” But notice that you, the individual, Thomas, Maria, … You're a token. You're one of them – of your “azza” group.

By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

This in a nutshell is “identity politics.” It’s as if they think your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class are what determines your thought. And in fact, yes, this is precisely what “they” do think. Determinism is not dead, it has just shrivelled up and morphed its way into what’s now called “identity politics.”

CONTINUED IN PART 2: 'Determinism is not dead, it just smells that way'

[1] For those unaware of this nomenclature, “cisgendered” means “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”
[2] Tim Minchin, “Only a ginger can call a ginger ‘ginger’” – excerpt from ‘Prejudice’ (2009)

"Stoicism’s advice to steel yourself against the possibility of pain by killing your capacity to value. This is a recipe for destroying any possibility for happiness"

 

"Over the past decade, the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism has seen renewed public attention... There are good reasons, however, to steer clear of Stoicism as a philosophy of life...

    "Popular treatments of Stoicism universally stress the Stoics’ point that some things are 'up to us' and other things are not up to us, and that it’s crucially important to distinguish correctly between these... The problem, however, is that Stoicism endorses determinism — the view that our actions and choices are necessitated by factors beyond our control. So, strictly speaking, nothing is up to us. And if nothing is up to us, what use is ... anyone’s advice ... ? There is no philosophically consistent answer to that question, except: 'None whatsoever' ...
    "Stoic philosophy leaves us with no causal power to impact events, only at best the ability (so far unexplained) to voluntarily accept our leash and accommodate ourselves to the inevitable. This may provide a false sense of solace to some, but it isn’t exactly an empowering perspective on life. 

    "For a philosophy to be useful as a guide, it must at least acknowledge that we have some genuine, volitional control over our actions and choices — actions and choices that make a difference to where we end up in life...
    "[Volition for the stoic however] is not a matter of possessing the ability to control or impact the events of our lives — it is about being free from the frustration and pain that comes from wanting events to occur other than they do... [Stoicism] 'does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain.' ...

    "From a psychological perspective, this approach to values is fundamentally an attempt to avoid pain, frustration and loss in a world in which everything you might want or love or care about is short-lived, easily lost and precariously kept. To the extent that you invest yourself in things over which you have no control, they hold, you will be perpetually unhappy. 

    "Now, it is true that intensely valuing life and the things you love involves the possibility of pain, loss and disappointment, sometimes acute. Stoicism’s advice is to steel yourself against that possibility by killing your capacity to value. This is not a recipe for inner peace; it is a recipe for destroying any possibility for happiness... 

    "To take seriously and to benefit from advice about what is up to us and what is not, we would need to reject any form of determinism (Stoic or modern) and embrace the fact that we have free will — and that requires thinking carefully about what precisely is within our power to change and what isn’t so that we can formulate our goals and orient our efforts rationally...
    "Contrary to the Stoic worldview, we live in a universe in which the achievement of genuine happiness is possible, provided we understand what is required to achieve it and we put forth the thought and effort it requires. And thus life can be, and properly ought to be, an ambitious and unrelenting quest for personal happiness and joy because the pursuit and achievement of these values is what makes life meaningful and worth living."
          ~ Aaron Smith, from his article 'The False Promise of Stoicism'

RELATED READING:

• Stoicism: Smith, Long, and some quotations - Stephen Hicks

"That's just the way I am!"

"Saying 'that's just the way I am' is a missed opportunity for growth.
    "Personality is not your destiny. It's your tendency. No one is limited to a single way of thinking, feeling, or acting.
    "Who you are is not about the traits you have. It's what you decide to do with them."
           ~ psychologist Adam Grant [hat tip Jeffrey Young]

 

"I am disappointed that you do not recognise that Montessori has the antidote to racism and it has always had it..." [updated]

"To say that a person is inherently racist because of the group he belongs to (i.e. skin colour) is determinism — the view that a person has no free will, and therefore has no choice in how he thinks or acts. Determinism is the antithesis of Montessori’s view of human nature: 'Free choice is one of the highest of all mental processes.' 'A child chooses what helps him to construct himself.' (Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind) Social justice does not belong in Montessori.
    "I am disappointed that you do not recognise that Montessori has the antidote to racism and it has always had it — free will and individualism. Instead, you have turned Montessori into a tool for politics. Montessori is not politics, it is an educational approach for every individual child. It is universal for every child. Social justice, the idea that people are determined by their group or other circumstances, rather than their individual minds, will destroy Montessori."

~ Montessorian Charlotte Cushman, from her letter quoted in 'Montessori Teacher Fights 'Social Justice''

 UPDATE: Regular commenter Mark T has sent me a letter to the editor, published in the local Montessori Voices a few years ago, in which he addressed something very similar ...

Dear Editor

I was dismayed to read an article from Pam S---- in your previous issue that attempted to equate a Montessori class-room with the socialist welfare state.

That wasn't just because I disagreed strongly with the politics, but because it expressed a political view that is the antithesis of the value I see in a Montessori education. Examples include:

1. Montessori encourages self-reliance and self-responsibility. By contrast the welfare state encourages dependency and reliance on someone else to provide for you.
2. Montessori activities are self-correcting, encouraging children to learn from practical consequences. By contract the welfare state attempts to isolate people from the practical consequences of their actions. The welfare state version of the 'pink tower' would be a teacher rushing in every time a child gets the blocks out of sequence and holding the tower so it doesn't fall over - and then when we find the child learns nothing by this approach, concluding that more teacher interference is the answer.
3. Montessori protects the value each individual gets from completing their activity without interference from others. It is your activity and you take ownership of it. Contrast that with the welfare state where a large portion of what you create and earn is forcibly taken away from you in taxation.
4. Montessori generally allows children to go about their own individual activity when they want, and to engage in group activity when they want. The group activity is therefore spontaneous and genuine - not forced. This is in complete contrast to the welfare state where we are forced to support others whether they are deserving or not.

If we are going to talk politics there is a lot I could say on this topic - including the fact that welfare levels have not decreased since 1991 as Pam implies, and 5% of households now pay 47% of net tax in New Zealand. I could also explain how if this trend continues it will soon become unsustainable, as it already has in Greece.

But rather than go on about that, I suggest that your publication should leave politics out of it. We send our children to Montessori schools because we value the educational philosophy and the results it produces on our children. Anything published in Montessori Voices should focus on what we have in common, rather than dividing us with someone’s obvious political agenda.

Regards,
Mark T------
Christchurch 8024

 

Destiny?

 

“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the street.”

          ~ attrib. physicist Stephen Hawking

"Stoic philosophy leaves us with no causal power to impact events, only at best the ability to voluntarily accept our leash and accommodate ourselves to the inevitable. This may provide a false sense of solace to some, but it isn’t exactly an empowering perspective on life." #QotD

"Over the past decade, the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism has seen renewed public attention... There are good reasons, however, to steer clear of Stoicism as a philosophy of life...

    "Popular treatments of Stoicism universally stress the Stoics’ point that some things are 'up to us' and other things are not up to us, and that it’s crucially important to distinguish correctly between these... The problem, however, is that Stoicism endorses determinism — the view that our actions and choices are necessitated by factors beyond our control. So, strictly speaking, nothing is up to us. And if nothing is up to us, what use is ... anyone’s advice ... ? There is no philosophically consistent answer to that question, except: 'None whatsoever' ...
    "Stoic philosophy leaves us with no causal power to impact events, only at best the ability (so far unexplained) to voluntarily accept our leash and accommodate ourselves to the inevitable. This may provide a false sense of solace to some, but it isn’t exactly an empowering perspective on life."For a philosophy to be useful as a guide, it must at least acknowledge that we have some genuine, volitional control over our actions and choices — actions and choices that make a difference to where we end up in life...
    "[Volition for the stoic however] is not a matter of possessing the ability to control or impact the events of our lives — it is about being free from the frustration and pain that comes from wanting events to occur other than they do... [Stoicism] 'does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain.' ... "From a psychological perspective, this approach to values is fundamentally an attempt to avoid pain, frustration and loss in a world in which everything you might want or love or care about is short-lived, easily lost and precariously kept. To the extent that you invest yourself in things over which you have no control, they hold, you will be perpetually unhappy. 

    "Now, it is true that intensely valuing life and the things you love involves the possibility of pain, loss and disappointment, sometimes acute. Stoicism’s advice is to steel yourself against that possibility by killing your capacity to value. This is not a recipe for inner peace; it is a recipe for destroying any possibility for happiness... 

    "To take seriously and to benefit from advice about what is up to us and what is not, we would need to reject any form of determinism (Stoic or modern) and embrace the fact that we have free will — and that requires thinking carefully about what precisely is within our power to change and what isn’t so that we can formulate our goals and orient our efforts rationally...
    "Contrary to the Stoic worldview, we live in a universe in which the achievement of genuine happiness is possible, provided we understand what is required to achieve it and we put forth the thought and effort it requires. And thus life can be, and properly ought to be, an ambitious and unrelenting quest for personal happiness and joy because the pursuit and achievement of these values is what makes life meaningful and worth living."
          ~ Aaron Smith, from his article 'The False Promise of Stoicism'

RELATED READING:

• Stoicism: Smith, Long, and some quotations - Stephen Hicks

.

Quote(s) of the Day: What moves history?

 

“There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice.”
~ Ayn Rand, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period.”
~ Ayn Rand, from For the New Intellectual

.

"In dreams begin responsibilities"

Ten years ago, this was what I was blogging about...

Why don't people get excited about freedom?
I'm not talking about the people who used to risk everything going over the Berlin Wall to freedom, or those Cubans who in a bid for freedom brave shark-infested seas on inner tubes ...
I'm talking about most people in most modern democracies who have happily traded their liberty for a little temporary security, and in most cases have ended up with neither.

As Bob Jones once asked when fronting a party promoting 'Freedom and Prosperity!', why is it so easy to promote prosperity, and so damned difficult to get people excited about freedom?
The answer, dear reader, is that to be free means to be free to fail, and as HL Mencken observed, "most people want security in this world, not liberty."
To be free means to take responsibility for one's actions. Too frightening. Much easier, many people think, to hide behind Nanny's skirts instead.

As libertarians often point out, the flip side of freedom is responsibility.
If you are free to live your life as you choose, you must also assume responsibility for your choices. You cannot saddle someone else with that responsibility; in particular you cannot make him pick up the tab for your bad choices, for choices that have adverse consequences for you.
So, like teenagers still living at home when they're thirty, they demand a nanny who will make their choices for them.

It's amazing how far some people will go to escape responsibility, or to evade it.
It's amazing how much they will give up.
It's amazing how easy it makes them to round up.

• In a bid to get all heads into one noose, liberal intellectuals try to prove that responsibility is an impossibility by preaching the doctrine of determinism – i.e. that none of us can help what we do, that all of us are helpless playthings of our genes and our environment, and the successful businessman is no more responsible for his success than the criminal is for his dishonesty, or the politician for her power-lust.
• In a bid to tie us all to the state, politicians offer womb-to-tomb security, while relying on an all-care-no-responsibility get-out clause for their own innumerable failures.
• In a bid to smoke their pot and eat their cake too (and to mercifully overlook munchies metaphors like that last one) many advocates of marijuana reform like to ignore the health problems associated with the drug's use, and demand that others pay for their lifestyle choice.

Observes philosopher Tibor Machan:

There simply are too many people who want to take shortcuts, refuse to take responsibility for their own conduct and believe they can get away with this—and sadly often do—by calling upon the government to force others to shoulder burdens they ought to assume." But without responsibility there can be no freedom, and nor can their be any maturity. Like teenagers still living at home we must all, if we want to be fully human, someday spread our wings and feel the warm winds of freedom beneath us.

Taking responsibility for ourselves is not just the first step towards freedom, it is also the first step towards making those successes possible, and rewarding ourselves for them. In the modern parlance, it is 'taking ownership' of our lives. 'In dreams begins responsibility' said Yeats -- to truly live our dreams, we must begin to take responsibility for them.

Start dreaming. Start living.

REPOST: Where's my free will?

I don’t know about you, but when I tune in to the infantile ‘debate’ about obesity – about  who to blame when folk get fat and how ‘someone must do something” (for “someone” read “government,” and for “something” read coercion) – I find it disturbing that fatties and pollies alike find common cause in removing personal responsibility from their respective equations.
    If you're a fat bastard and you don't want to be, how about you stop blaming vending machines, your school, your parents, your genes and just try the 'don't-eat-so-frigging-much' diet. (Do you see many fat starving Africans in famine photos hiding at the back going, "Oh, I've just got big bones"? No? Is that a clue? Sheesh!)
And if you're a politician, how's about you implementing a self-imposed 'I-won't-poke-my-nose-into-your-business' week, and just leave us and our eating habits alone.
You see, it's not about victims, it's all about choice -- something you educated people want to remove from our understanding of human affairs.

Why would you choose to do that?

You've probably seen me mention a few times Tibor Machan's view on the basic errors made in the 'ongoing' nature/nurture debate (here for instance). As he's just blogged on how this error affects the 'obesity debate,' allow me to quote:

Where's my free will?

Since Leighton Smith is discussing free will this morning, and most of his callers have no clue what he’s talking about, here’s a re-post of an old piece on the subject explaining not just what it is, but where exactly the faculty is located.

Where's my free will?

     THE LIKES OF BRIAN EDWARDS still argue that criminals “can’t help it” when they do bad things—which means, conversely, that neither do heroes when they do good.
    Tell that to Thomas Jefferson. Or Nelson Mandela.
    But such is the incredulity of the determinist conclusion: that between them nature and nurture determine human behaviour, so humans themselves should be neither praised nor condemned.
    Sounds like horse shit to me.  But then, according to Edwards et al they have no choice about shovelling shit—and nor do you about taking it.
    So much for the nonsense of “hard determinism”—a theory that says man is nothing more than a piece of meat, controlled by forces about which he knows nothing.
Let us take the determinists at their word then: they know nothing—and by their own theory they’re constrained to demonstrate it.
    Ayn Rand used to reckon that the determinist argument—that you’re neither to be blamed nor lauded for your behaviour—is nothing more than “an alibi for weaklings.” 

Don't excuse depravity. Don't drool over weaklings as conditioned "victims of circumstances’ (or of ‘background’ or of ‘society’), who ‘couldn't help it.’ You are actually providing an excuse and an alibi for the worst instincts in the weakest members of your audience. . .
    . . . the best advice I can give you is never to regard yourself as a product of your environment. That is not the key to me, to you, or to any human being. It is not a key to anything, it is merely an alibi for weaklings.

Building on Ayn Rand’s observations on free will and the manifest contradictions in the determinists’ arguments, philosopher Tibor Machan points out that since the determinist argument utterly ignores free will—the faculty that allows us to make decisions for ourselves—it ignores the very faculty that truly does determine our character .
    While nature and nurture certainly play a part in forming our talents and personality, he argues, what we do with what we’re given is up to us.  It’s up to our free will-and the choices we make.
    In his argument, nature and nurture build our personality, but using our free will builds our character.
    But where does our free will come from?  Where does it reside?  How does it work?  To answer you, we’re going to have to go back to bed. . .

    THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE through the fog of sleep is a loud, ringing sound. As you rise up through the fog of sleep you recognise it as an alarm of some sort. Your alarm clock. You focus further and realise that it's not going to turn itself off. As you force yourself awake you direct your focus to your limbs, lifting yourself out of bed, and you turn off the clock on your way to the bathroom, making yourself shake the sleep from your mind as you go. It's the start of another day.
    As you shower, you set yourself thinking about what you need to do today and, as you do and as you shower, the scales of sleep slip ever further away. You understand you have an important day ahead, and you feel yourself rising up to meet it. You choose to. In a few short minutes, by your own direction, your mind has changed from an inert unconscious thing, one barely able to grasp what's going on around it, to one that is now focussed upon the events of the day and is starting to make plans to meet them ... and all this even before the first coffee!
    Most of us manage this process in a few minutes. Some take hours. Some will choose to stay unfocussed for days. But everyone who has ever experienced this -- which is all of us, at some time – even Brian Edwards and his criminals--has experienced what it is to have free will.
    Free will at its root is that process of choosing to focus, of deciding first of all to lift our level of awareness from a lower level to a higher one (or to decide not to), and then directing our focussed attention to something on which we've determined we need to pay attention. A lecture perhaps. Our alarm clock.  A book. A piece of music. A blog post on free will. Someone offering us a beer. At each stage of listening, reading, comprehending, trying to grasp a thought (as Vermeer's Geographer is doing in the picture above) we can choose to maintain attention and focus on what we're trying to take in, to weigh the thoughts and melodies and information that is coming in, or we can choose to float off in a vague fog and let everything just wash over us.
    The process of turning off our alarm clock and heading into a lecture shows the process in microcosm: choosing to focus more intensely at each new level of awareness we reach. From the fog of sleep right up to the intense awareness needed to focus on your lecturer (and spot her errors) every step of the way we’re choosing to focus more intensely.
    And even if we choose not to, we still have made a choice.
    The act of choosing to pay attention (or not to) is a volitionally focussed act by which we first say to ourselves, "I need to focus on this, to understand this," and then acting -- choosing to act -- so as to direct our minds to that on which we ourselves have determined that we need to understand.
    Observe your own mind while you’re reading this post. Are you focussing on the arguments in an attempt to understand and address them, or have you already drifted off into non-comprehension and evasion?
    As I've described above, the act of focussing is voluntary, and is almost like continually turning on a car. At each stage we can choose to go either to a higher level of awareness, or not; we can choose to focus, or we can choose to drift back off either to sleep, or into a state of unfocussed lethargy. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Equally, you can lead someone else's brain to stimulus, but you can't make it respond. That person must do that work for themselves.
    Volition is a powerful factor. Thoughts, values, principles aren’t just given to us out of the ether, or imprinted upon us by our genes; rather, they are things to identify and think about and grasp for ourselves. Or not. No one can do the thinking for someone else. With sufficient will we can work towards grasping the highest concepts open to us, or we can even sleep through the warning alarm clocks of our consciousness.
    That choice -- to focus or not; to switch on or not -- is contained entirely within ourselves, and from that choice made by each of us every minute of every day all human thought and all human action is the result. The fact that we are continually making this choice (or choosing not make it) every waking minute of every working day is perhaps why we sometimes fail to see that we're doing it. We've almost automatised our awareness of it, but honest introspection (if we honestly choose to do so) is all it requires to be identified.
   This is the nature of the volitional consciousness that each of us does possess, even Brian Edwards, and is the fact those who choose to deny free will wish to evade: that this great thinking engine resting on top of our shoulders does not turn itself on automatically. We ourselves own the keys to the engine, and it is in that fundamental choice -- to think, or not to think; to focus, or not to focus; to go to a higher level of awareness, or to drift in and out of awareness -- that the faculty of free will itself resides.
    So given that very brief discussion of free will -- to which, if you like, you can add previous similar discussions here, here, here, here and here -- what then do you make of this discussion from the former Sir Humphrey's blog.  Where does free will come from?  From her God, says Lucyna.

 "...if there is no God there’s no free will because we are completely phenomena of matter... we cannot be considered morally responsible beings unless we have free will. We do everything because we are controlled by our genes or our environment." [Comments by David Quinn in The God Delusion: David Quinn & Richard Dawkins debate]

Logically, if you are an atheist, you will believe that we are completely influenced by our genetics and environment. That there is no free-will, that moral responsibility has no ability to manifest in any human being. If you don't believe all of that, then you cannot be an atheist and you must have some inkling that God exists.

What do you make of that then? Let’s turn on our brains ourselves and examine it. "If there's no God then there's no free will"? And “If you are an atheist” then “logically” [logically?] you can't "believe" in free will?
    Doesn’t this sound like horse shit too?
    As I've suggested above, we don't need to "believe" in free will in the same way a Christian chooses to “believe” in the existence of a supernatural being; instead, to identify that we do have the faculty of free will all we have to do is introspect—to apply our cognition inwards (to choose to) and watch ourselves making choices.  (Indeed, you can do it right now as you weigh in your mind that last thought, and choose whether or not to accept it -- or whether to evade the effort or the knowledge. And recognise, dear reader, that if you choose not to accept it or to evade it, you've still made a choice.)
    So much for needing to believe in the supernatural in order to "believe" in free will.  As Ayn Rand identified:

That which you call your soul or your spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call your "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.”

We have consciousness. Consciousness is endowed by its nature with the faculty of free will. What we each choose to do with our own consciousness is up to us -- it's there that the discussion of morality really begins, yet without this recognition, it’s a discussion that could never even get off the ground.

RELATED POSTS: Nature v Nurture: Character is all - Not PC
The chemistry of love - Not PC
The fatalism of entropy. The dynamism of spontaneous order - Not PC
More on value judgements in art - Not PC
Excusing the 'bash' - Not PC