The Shrinking World of Ideas
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
-their theories aren't changing the world as fast as they want
-they didn't study the hard sciences that would allow them to understand the theories that are changing the world.
The older I get, the more I see this: outside of the young men whom the society annoints "whiz kids", the entire culture seems paralyzed by fear of math and science.
That's surely a generalization. I know at least one old classmate who's a quantitative historian and quite gainfully employed. But how many people are going into history for the quantitative angle?
Don't get me wrong, I think the humanities are important. But those who choose this route have got to level up if they want to play.
Marx and Engels took Hegel more seriously than he deserved. Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. Hitler took Neitzche more seriously than he deserved.
Insofar as that's arguably true of the 19th and 20th Centuries, its equally true of most of the centuries before those as well, and also so far of the one we've seen after that.
> Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved.
How seriously could Lenin have taken Marx and Engels to take the rhetoric of Marxism while throwing out its entire theoretical underpinning?
They saw themselves or strived to be "the Newton of __". Marx' theories of history an politics were treated as a theory in the same sense as darwin's was. They named the departments political science. We are still dismantling many of these ideas, especially in areas like economics or psychology where they use math or experimentation and seem more scientific.
Aside from a general political war on science from a certain faction in general (and not specifically on social science), I don't see dismantling of any of the ideas of science being applied in these domains. On the contrary, I see increased sharing of tools, mechanisms, and ideas between mathematics (including, e.g., computer sciences), the social sciences, the life sciences, the physical sciences.
There might be a rejection that Marx's work is good (or even methodologically valid) science -- but there was plenty of that from Marx's contemporaries, too. But there certainly is not a general rejection that the subject matter that Marx studied is amenable to scientific investigation.
Marx is a good example, he strived to (and claimed to have) put forward theories on politics, history, ethics & economics that were the somewhat like of Darwin's theory on the origin of species. That they could be validated and built on in the same way. Further theories and technologies could be based on them in the way that rockets can be built based on Newton's mechanics.
The left isn't unique here. Ayn Rand is almost a caricature of this point, partly because she actually deals with modernism as a subject matter. She claimed to have described a theory of morality derived from pure logic and politics derived from morality.
There are some fields where "scientific" endeavors produce some outcomes, but have never really driven the kind of progress that was hoped for or claimed. Psychology and economics are big ones, IMO. Early economists like Ricardo could pose theories that work logically and are somewhat available for experimentation or prediction-measurment, but the kind of theories produced by modern economists like Marx, Keynes or Friedman (to be balanced) are not testable. They also haven't really produced any decent technology based on them or a reliable understanding of the mechanics.
Whether or not "the humanities" or the areas between humanities and sciences are amenable to scientific investigation is a big question. I'm not confident in any clear answer but I suspect the truth is that there's a spectrum. I am pretty confident though that the subject matters have been, up until now, for less amenable to scientific investigation than biology, physics, chemistry, etc.
If I had to bet on a solution to addiction, I would place a bet on either a neuroscience approach or a totally nonscientific approaches (like AA or religion) over psychoanalysis. I have almost no confidence in the idea that a theorist will figure out a better form of government. The process that will drive these things will probably continue to be cultural emergence.
I'm not saying that humanities are useless. I'm a big fan of the humanities. I'm not saying that science is bad either, I'm a fan of these too. I am saying that modeling the sociology or genera sturdies departments on the physics one turns out to have been a mistake. It hasn't been productive and it doesn't produce science or its derivatives.
I think many of Marx' ideas are valid, particularly his definition of class. I think his (and most modernist "political scientists") insistence that his theories on history or political progression are based on logic and science or that they can be is like a monarchy's insistence that they are chosen by the gods. Bunk.
Curious, I've never heard of this link/reason before. Care to elaborate a little, or some links, please?
https://www.google.com/search?q=hitler%20nietzsche%20philoso...
Nietzsche was anti-democratic and anti-socialist, yes. In most of his works he goes to extreme lengths (almost pathetic lengths) to rant against German nationalism and German antisemitism. Nietzsche was, without a shadow of a doubt, one hundred percent opposed to the Nazis.
Indeed this was the primary reason for his split with (and apparent hatred of) his sister. The Nazis may have co-opted Nietzsche but they hardly be said to have taken him seriously.
From a draft letter to his sister:
After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!"
From Gay Science: [...]we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too open-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too "traveled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit[...] We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today
Indeed Nietzsche went so far as to deny he was German at all but rather of Polish descent even though this was almost certainly not true and he almost certainly would have known it, simply because of his opposition to the German nationalism and anti-semitism that had overtaken Germany - basically in a big F U.
Hitler reinterpreted Nietzsche's will to power, yes.
> It also seems to me that Hitler took the "superman" idea - the man who is above morality and can do whatever he wishes to those below him - but I'm less certain of that.
The ubermensch is not a moral nihilist who can do whatever he wants, he's the answer to the moral nihilism that is the inevitable consequence of the death of god. This is very hard to reconcile with Nazi ideology which promoted (their version) of Christian Protestantism and genocide for racial reasons, which Nietzsche maligned.
> The ubermensch is not a moral nihilist who can do whatever he wants, he's the answer to the moral nihilism that is the inevitable consequence of the death of god.
Yes and no. The ubermensch comes into a situation where there is no god, and therefore there is nihilism - there is no moral authority. The ubermensch creates a moral authority. But because there is no god and therefore no external moral authority, there really is nothing constraining the ubermensch to create any particular moral standard. The moral standard created is therefore essentially arbitrary. That is, by his choice of morality, he can proclaim that it is moral to do anything to others.
(Now, true, Neitzche said that the morality was supposed to be life-affirming, as opposed to other-world centered moralities that were not. But in a nihilistic context, there are few constraints on what "life affirming" might mean, and in practice it will come to mean anything the ubermensch might wish. Anyone wishing to say otherwise must not be coming from a nihilistic position, which means they must be either pre-death-of-god, or be ubermensch themselves.)
Yeah, if you think Stalinism is what Marx and Engels had in mind...
Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?
I can't say I didn't. But perhaps my subconscious finally prodded me to go beyond lurking and post my first comment so as to ensure I engage with the masses and thereby improve the clarity of my hermetically sealed self expression. So let me rephrase that: Stuff like great novels and the writings of Nietzsche can make you feel as alive as when you consider the findings from the LHC or read the "Selfish Gene". That being said, I think we should use the ideas of science, and philosophy of science, to improve our art and make it more meaningful and fecund for ideas. Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else. Obfuscation is one way to encourage the reader to really understand the context and layers of some piece of writing by making them dig deeper (there was an interesting link about this a few weeks back).
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "intrinsic" in this context? Also, does there have to be an absolute lowest level of anything?
As for the second question, to me, it makes sense that there has to be a lowest level of ontology, unless the lowest level is some sort of recursive structure (which in a sense would still be a "lowest level thing"). I believe most of us expect that there is some sort of monadic entity that is equivalent to Democritus's atom. In the standard model the quark is that sort of thing (if I'm not mistaken), but the string theorists hypothesize that a lower level (think more complete, i.e. not assuming zero dimensional entities in reality) object is the basis for a quark. Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.
It depends on how you define "science". If construed broadly, to mean using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims, then science tells us a lot. Is it better for the nations of Europe to strive to live in mutual cooperation with each other? Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost? Imagine posing that question to both pre- and post-enlightenment peoples and contrasting the responses.
>Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.
Science is presently the best cure for the voids that exist today. You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.
It takes some philosophy to decide how to do science. I prefer Popper's approach for the methodology.
>Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost?
I think we answer this question via the realization that every human is a subjective being and has a right to pursue happiness, a realization which comes from the humanities (a-hem) as much as it does from the theory of natural selection or quantum mechanics (and actually, we have no way of looking at a brain and saying it assuredly causes consciousness, so we can't even say who's a subjective being with science). Heck, the universe's "way of doing" might be a nearby gamma ray burst far harsher than any human war ;)
>You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.
I wholeheartedly concur, but there are already concerns that if something like the multiverse is the "explanation" for the constant values in our universe, then there might be aspects of existence inaccessible to our experiments. I will need much consolation if such a thing is true.
Troll detected.
Perhaps a more humble way to describe the pursuit of "theory of everything" is simply to uncover and reconcile contradictions and compromises between the theories that we've already got. The one that comes to mind is between quantum mechanics and gravity. So far as I understand what's going on, the term "theory of everything" is limited to that specific context.
Perhaps one way to think about it is: Are there different schools or beliefs within ontology, and would a unification of QM an GR help philosophers choose one of those schools from among the others, or develop a new school?
You need to separate literature from philosophy. There certainly are today and have been recently some excellent novels with interesting ideas in them. But for someone to pay large amounts of money to study novels or poetry or even history -- even the most privileged groups are expected to have practical skills and knowledge in a consulting position or running a company.
The relative lack of interest in politics, morality, better social organization, etc. I believe you can attribute to a few things. First, there is less hardship than in previous eras, which means fewer critics of social structure. There is also a relatively strong control over public (and private, to a degree) education that is reinforced by a powerful propaganda machine.
But the critics and ideas are out there. They are harder to find.
I'd argue that doing a biochemical reverse engineering of even one person's brains is impractical, and more likely to tell you about their food or companionship preferences than anything profound.
Just like newtonian mechanics is still useful in the age of quantum mechanics, classical philosophy and religion is still valuable, well tested, and empirically useful, even if it isn't verifiably true, as making a verifiable answer is far beyond (and likely will remain far beyond) our current capabilities.
The pro religion group could argue religion has had a civilizing effect on a species (homo-sapiens) that has compelled us collectivly to higher levels then our instinctual animal predecessors. The collective beleif in a set of shared moral values holds communities and societies together.
The anti religion group could argue that great atrocities have been justified in the name of religion. This group often argues that we should be basing our collective beleifs on science rather then religions. (Edit: I don't beleive there are any examples yet of a large society being held together by a common beleif in science. The efforts to come up with a set of policies around global warming might be the closest thing I can think of and we all know how well that is going, not very well unfortunatly.)
By my estimation the human condition and the struggles we all face leave lots of room for different view points.
It seems more likely to me that differences in society's communication structure and regular inability to determine who intellectual leaders are except retrospectively, are the main causes for the changes described by the author. Aside from that, there's probably more of a shift in what the author now considers an important idea than anything: the humanities and sciences address different subject matters. Scientific discoveries often serve to restrict the realm of viable philosophies (e.g. cognitive science's impact on the any theory of innate knowledge a la Plato), but if it ever says something positive on a philosophical subject, that subject is no longer philosophy proper—and there's plenty of room for philosophy still.
The rest of the humanities, from my understanding, is about communicating ideas about human life—often times about the experience of living it—using a different set of techniques than the sciences, and the utility of those techniques has not diminished.
The past is always glorified or at least seen as more significant, because only these parts stick. Its harder to spot a significant piece in real time, because the signal to noise is much worse.
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as...
Because executing an idea has never been cheaper and more accessible, it might seem that we're running out of fresh ideas. But as technology evolves, so are the ideas that go with it. I'm betting on an intergalactic ridesharing app for space monkeys somewhere in the next decade...
Science is that which explains and predicts.
See also Kuhn's paradigm shift, etc...