The previous Essay, Theory IV, was about Metaphysics from inside the Ivory Tower looking out: a rough-and-ready DIY version of an Ivory Tower, but nonetheless that kind of building. This Essay is about the Metaphysics of the Street; from within a Workman's Caff, or a Fast Food Joint -- but also the Bistro, or the exclusive Restaurant; it makes little difference. This is Life as she is lived by all but a very few: Existence where attempts at conceptual discrimination don't occur; where the Mass Media are dominant; where what passes for thought is entirely derivative, is no more than imitation, or merely random or purely responsive mental activity; where feeling continuously dominates psychic space, and reason only occasionally holds the floor.
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Presuppositions and Action:--
When examining the Metaphysics of the Street the nice distinctions between Absolute, Relative and Customary Presuppositions are of little use. I shall collapse all three into one category: Operational Presuppositions. Operational, since emphasis will be on illumination of action and behaviour.
Below are examples, for each one of the above three reasons:--
(a) The OP is truly Absolute, an Ultimate, being intrinsically unverifiable.
We have now posited that it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be.
[Aristotle: Metaphysics, Book Gamma 4 ... Trans. W. D. Ross.]
This OP is intrinsically unverifiable in that you have to presupppose its truth and be constrained by its truth in trying to test it; you can't make a meaningful statement of fact without abiding by it.
For example: This computer is, and is not. The statement doesn't make sense, since 'This computer' is a meaningful term only if the object does actually exist.
(b) The OP is essentially a Factual claim, and therefore verifiable, but investigation is proscribed or hindered, and the communication space is controlled and flooded.
| Christianity | Socialism |
|
In the Beginning: Eden / Happiness |
In the Beginning: Primitive Communism / Equality and Happiness |
|
Original Sin: Misery and Woe |
Faulty Institutions: Inequality, Misery and Woe |
|
God is Transcendent: I am that I am |
God is Immanent: The State |
| Faith in God | Faith in the State |
| The Christian Life | Equality, via State Power |
|
Civitas Dei /
Civitas Terrena [Heavenly City / Earthly City] |
Civitas Dei in Terra [Heaven on Earth] |
Ever since observation taught me temptationThe West, as seen and recorded by Auden in 1969.
Is a matter of timing, I've tried
To clothe my fiction in up-to-date diction,
The contemporary jargon of Pride.
I can recall when, to win the more
Obstinate round,
The best bet was to say to them: "Sin the more
that Grace may abound."
Since Social Psychology replaced Theology
The process goes twice as quick.
If a conscience is tender and loth to surrender
I have only to whisper: "You're sick!
Puritanical morality
Is madly Non-U.
Enhance your personality
With a Romance, with two.
"If you pass up a dame, you've yourself to blame,
For shame is neurotic, so snatch!
All rules are too formal, in fact they're abnormal,
For any desire is natch.
So take your proper share, man, of
Dope and drink:
Aren't you the Chairman of
Ego, Inc?
"Free-Will is a mystical myth as statistical
Methods have objectively shown,
A fad of the Churches: since the latest researches
Into Motivation it's known
That Honour is hypocrisy,
Honesty a joke.
You live in a Democracy:
Lie like other folk.
"Since men are like goods, what are shouldn'ts or shoulds
When you are the Leading Brand?
Let them all drop dead, you're way ahead,
Beat them up if they dare to demand
What may your intention be,
Or what might ensue:
There's a difference of dimension be-
tween the rest and you.
"If in the scrimmage of business your image
Should ever tarnish or stale,
Public Relations can take it and make it
Shine like a Knight of the Grail.
You can mark up the price that you sell at, if
Your package has glamour and show:
Values are relative.
Dough is dough.
"So let each while you may think you're more O. K.,
More yourself than anyone else,
Till you find that you're hooked, your goose is cooked,
And you're only a cypher of Hell's.
Believe while you can that I'm proud of you,
Enjoy your dream:
I'm so bored with the whole fucking crowd of you
I could scream!"
How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their courses there, and trains thunder off to it -- but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole, or of any one of its innumerable islands.Who were the inmates of the camps? Right from the start very elastic criteria of selection were formulated, by the first of the Socialist Emperors: Vladimir Lenin himself. He set himself the task of "purging the Russian land of all kinds of insects." (A.S. / p. 27). And who were these "insects", these vermin? At first all those who could be seen, however remotely, as potential enemies of the new Regime. But, quite soon, anyone at all could be classified as an "insect". This may seem irrational, but it was not. If you rule by Terror it's essential that everyone -- including your most fervent supporters -- be continuously terrified. You must not let up.
Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.
And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest. [A. S. / p. 3]
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekov [d. 1904] who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
Yes, not only Chekov's heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the [20th]century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party [ancestor of the (Bolshevik) Communist Party], could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Milhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might nave been used against ten or twenty people during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great [d. 1796], was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century -- in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared -- not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims. [pp. 93-94]
......
Here is what Y. Doyarenko remembers about 1921. [Remember: the great Lenin was still alive and in charge; this was before Stalin took over.]
The Lubyanka [Leningrad] reception cell for those newly arrested, with forty or fifty trestle beds, and women being brought in one after another all night long. None of them knew what she was supposed to be guilty of, and there was a feeling among them that people were being arrested for no reason at all.
...
The first question asked by Yagoda [Deputy Head of NKVD/GPU]: "Well, what are you here for?" In other words, you tell me, and help me cook up the case! And they say absolutely the same thing about the Ryazan GPU in 1930!...
Not knowing what to pick on, the interrogator asked: "What was your job?" Answer: "A planner." The interrogator: "Write me a statement that explains 'planning at the factory, and how it is carried out.' After that I will let you know why you've been arrested." (He expected the explanation to provide the hook on which to hang a charge.) [p.96]
...
In 1952 Anna Skripnikova was undergoing her fifth imprisonment, and Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her: "The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That's too low, you bitch! We're going to drive it up to 340 so you'll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We'll just not let you sleep." She was in her fifties at the time. And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: "Open your eyes or I'll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up." [p. 98]
...
Yes, yes, Minister of State Security Abakumov himself did not by any means spurn such menial labour... He was not averse to taking a rubber truncheon in his hands every once in a while. And his deputy Ryumin was even more willing ... The office had imitation-walnut panelling on the walls, silk portieres at the windows and doors, and a great Persian carpet on the floor. In order not to spoil this beauty, a dirty runner bespattered with blood was rolled out on top on the carpet when a prisoner was being beaten ... "And so," said Ryumin politely, stroking his rubber truncheon, which was four centimeters -- an inch and a half -- thick, "you have survived trial by sleeplessness with honour." (Alexander D. had cleverly managed to last a month "without sleep" by sleeping while he was standing up.) "So now we will try the club. Prisoners can't take more than two or three sessions of this. Let down your trousers and lie down on the runner." The colonel [assisting] sat down on the prisoner's back. A. D. was going to count the blows. He didn't yet know about a blow from a rubber truncheon on the sciatic nerve when the buttocks have disappeared as a consequence of prolonged starvation. The effect is not felt in the place where the blow is delivered -- it explodes inside the head. After the first blow the victim was mad with pain and broke his nails on the carpet. Ryumin beat away, trying to hit accurately. The colonel pressed down on A. D.'s torso -- this was just the right sort of work for three big shoulder-board stars, assisting the all-powerful Ryumin! (After the beating the prisoner could not walk and, of course, was not carried. They just dragged him along the floor. What was left of his buttocks was soon so swollen that he could not button his trousers, and yet there were practically no scars. He was hit by a violent case of diarrhea, and, sitting there on the latrine bucket in solitary, A. D. guffawed. He went through a second and a third session, and his skin cracked, and Ryumin went wild, and started to beat him on the stomach, breaking through the intestinal wall and creating an enormous hernia through which A. D.'s intestines protruded. The prisoner was taken off to the Butyrki hospital with a case of peritonitis, and for the time being their attempts to compel him to commit a foul deed were suspended.) ...
But the most awful thing they can do with you is this: undress you from the waist down, place you on your back on the floor, pull your legs apart, seat assistants on them (from the glorious corps of sergeants!) who also hold down your arms; and then the interrogator (and women interrogators have not shrunk from this) stands between your legs and with the toe of his boot (or of her shoe) gradually, steadily, and with ever greater pressure crushes against the floor those organs which once made you a man. He looks into your eyes and repeats and repeats his questions or the betrayal he is urging on you. If he does not press down too quickly or just a shade too powerfully, you still have fifteen seconds left in which to scream that you will confess to everything, that you are ready to see arrested all twenty of those people he's been demanding of you, or that you will slander in the newspapers everything you hold holy. ...
And may you be judged by God, but not by people. ... [pp. 126-128].
So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? ...
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die -- now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me."
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.
Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory. ...
Well, they managed to turn some individuals from the Berdyayev circle into puppets for a trial, but they didn't succeed with Berdyayev. They wanted to drag him into an open trial; they arrested him twice; and (in 1922) he was subjected to a night interrogation by Dzerzhinsky himself. [Head of the NKVD] ... But Berdyayev did not humiliate himself. He did not beg or plead. He set forth firmly those religious and moral principles which had led him to refuse to accept the political authority established in Russia. And not only did they come to the conclusion that he would be useless for a trial, but they liberated him ...
N. Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbour on the Butyrki bunks in 1937. They kept on interrogating her every night. Two years earlier, a former Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, who had escaped from exile, had spent a night at her house on his way through Moscow. ... "To whom did he go when he left Moscow?" "I know, but I won't tell you." At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman's face, and she replied, "There is nothing you can do with me even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other ... But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute." [pp. 130-131]
We have lost the measure of freedom. We have no means of determining where it begins and where it ends. We are an Asiatic people ... By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives. [p.143].And what about us, we British? Are we also rabbits? As a test I'll use the example of passive smoking. (There are many other examples I could use.)
All the most comprehensive studies, carried out in accordance with objective scientific disciplines ... come to exactly the opposite conclusion: that the consequences of inhaling other people's tobacco smoke were so negligible that they had little or no effect on health at all.And who was it who told us that passive smoking was dangerous? Our Rulers and Educators told us: the Establishment; the Westminster Village plus the Media; the whole lazy, muddle-headed, wilfully ignorant, duplicitous, self-serving, cynical, sentimental, contemptible bunch of them. They told us and, on a wave of self-righteous hysteria, the MPs passed a Law to protect our delicate lungs. And we, servile, timorous, and equally lazy and culpable, did not laugh them to scorn. We obeyed the Law.
[Christopher Booker and Richard North; Scared to Death / 2007 / p. 270].
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Long before Aristotle formalized the procedures of Deductive Logic, people had a grasp of them in practice. Likewise for the procedures of Inductive and Empirical Logic in the transactions of everday life and in the practice of Natural Science. I'll single out for commentary a few of the tests that apply to claims, theories, beliefs. Often people sense there's something fishy, that they are being manipulated, but can't say exactly how. I'll analyse, exemplify, and attach some names.
Consistency; Coherence.
(1) Self-referential coherence.
A theory must not discount, must not undercut, itself.
Apply this to the Debunker, the Inside Dopester.
There's a kind of 'insight' journalism -- very popular: it appeals to the envious and the cynical; and also it seduces by flattery; it makes the reader feel special -- where the subtext is: Everyone has an axe to grind; everything a speaker says, therefore, should be discounted, taken with many grains of salt, since it is designed only to further his interests.
OK, but then one should also discount the debunker's words, since he too has an axe to grind. One is left with nothing.
Every belief is a product of the believer's emotional needs. ... Sigmund Freud.
Again we are left empty-handed, since this belief of Freud's (about belief) has itself only a subjective emotional foundation. How does Freud himself know his statement is true, since he says you cannot stand outside your beliefs and test them?
Freud's claim may sometimes be true about the genesis of a belief, but it tells you next to nothing about correspondence with reality. It may happen that you believe that the Moon really is made of green cheese. And you believe this because your mother held you lovingly and fed you with green cheese and honey when you were a wee mite gazing at the full moon: It's just the same up there, love. However, your belief relates to an empirical claim; and here Inductive Logic is dominant, not Deduction. It's an astronaut you need, not a psychoanalyst, an astronaut who will journey up and out and, after he lands, take an exploratory bite out of the lunar landscape.
(2) Self-assumptive coherence.
A theory must be compatible with beliefs we have to assume to know the theory to be true.
Apply this to Radical Materialism. All things are exclusively material.
But the last sentence just above has a linguistic meaning, beyond its material representation as marks on paper. 'Linguistic meaning' is a non-material property whose existence I have to assume, in order to apply it in making sense of the original statement.
(3) Self-performative coherence.
A theory must be compatible with any state or situation without which it could not be produced.
Personal existence. I do not exist. Descartes considered, and rejected, this possibility, using the above test, since he couldn't have had the thought unless he did exist. Cogito, ergo sum.
(4) Self-performative social coherence.
An extension of test (3).
A belief system of Person A must not entirely reject the belief system of Person B, if the life-style of the latter constitutes one of the necessary social underpinnings of the life-style and beliefs of the former.
First, the self-styled 'Beautiful People' (of the 60s). Make Love, not War. Down with Squares. Hang Loose, Baby.
The easy living Beautiful People rejected discipline, yet took for granted material affluence: an efficient transport system; a guaranteed food supply; telegraphed money-orders from Mom and Pop in New York or San Francisco; a plethora of ingenious electronic devices. These facilities were created and were maintained by people with belief systems radically different from those of the Beautiful People.
Next.
Person A : a North London Graphic Designer, and Writer; a delicate soul who shrinks from brutal roughnecks unlike himself. He lives in an elegant flat, and drives a smart little motor car. A Pacifist Vegan, in his writings he often fulminates against War, and the Eating of Meat.
Person B1: An Irish roadmender, outside in the street, on the end of a jackhammer; very carnivorous.
Person B2: A member of the SAS; a specialist in extreme violence; a lover of 17th Century Paintings -- Old Masters. He helps to guarantee the integrity of territorial borders. He too is a carnivore.
These three need each other; they prop each other up. Certainly it's true that type A needs type B1 and type B2.
This kind of social incoherence is prevalent nowadays. It was less common in the past, since pre-industrial societies didn't depend so completely on a multiplicity of narrow specializations; people were more versatile, and also they bumped into their neighbours all the time. Nowadays most people lead enclosed, insulated, narrow lives. It's not easy to live any other way, and a considerable degree of social ignorance and self-delusion is the rule, not the exception.
(5) Integrity, Hypocrisy.
Theory, and professed belief, consistent with Practice. Words and Deeds in harmony. Practise what you preach. Rather than: We preach; you practise.
In the Middle Ages a common criticism of the Church was that many of the Clergy wallowed in lives of rich indulgence while preaching doctrines of Holy Poverty.
The same criticism in more modern times against Socialist leaders who profess solidarity with the Workers in their comparative poverty while themselves living lives of greed and luxury.
In our time: the Celebrity apostles of the doctrine of Man-made Global Warming, who recommend a low-technology, anti-industrial, ascetic life-style. And yet they themselves live like Lords, and depend upon jetplanes and other sophisticated industrial gadgets in order to spread the Word.
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Causation is part of the analysis of Time, and the interconnectedness of states and events; it's about chains of happenings in the World. Causation is dynamics, which includes direction. But only one direction. In the real, tangible world the Arrow of Time points down a one-way street: Time Machines are strictly fantasy, mental adventure.
Every happening can be seen as the Effect of a Cause.
The best narrative illustration I know is "The Old Woman and the Pig."
An old woman was sweeping her house, and she found a little crooked sixpence. "What", said she, "shall I do with this little sixpence? I will go to market, and buy a little pig."
There are other items: fire; water; ox; butcher; rope; rat; cat. This last one is the key player. He asks for milk and, after lapping it up, initiates the sequence.
As she was coming home, she came to a stile: but the piggy wouldn't go over the stile.
She went a little further, and she met a dog. So she said to the dog: "Dog! Dog! bite pig; piggy won't go over the stile; and I shan't get home to-night." But the dog wouldn't.
She went a little further, and she met a stick. So she said: "Stick! stick! beat dog! dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and I shan't get home to-night." But the stick wouldn't.As soon as the cat had lapped up the milk, the cat began to kill the rat; the rat began to gnaw the rope; the rope began to hang the butcher; the butcher began to kill the ox; the ox began to drink the water; the water began to quench the fire; the fire began to burn the stick; the stick began to beat the dog; the dog began to bite the pig; the little pig in a fright jumped over the stile, and so the old woman got home that night.
There are various senses of the word 'Cause'; three of them are especially important.
Sense I: The free, deliberate act of a conscious agent. Causing him to act means giving him a motive to act.
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Determinism:--
Everything is interconnected; every happening is the result of antecedent events, leading to the constellation of forces present at any moment of time. This is how we see the World, under the Category of Causality. We have learnt to see it that way, over the period of hundreds of thousands of years as our Minds have developed. Those who see the World differently -- for example those who regard sequences of events as entirely arbitrary; anything might happen -- we see them as mad. Collectively they don't constitute an Alternative Society. They couldn't survive without the Society of the Sane -- they would starve to death. Insofar as they are opposed to the Sane majority they are Parasites.In this minimum sense of 'Determinist' -- a thoroughgoing acceptance of the Category of Causality -- everyone is a Determinist. And we all, unthinkingly but with unerring appropriateness, distinguish between the three Senses of Cause as we go about our affairs. Practical Life, both everday and specialized: Technology, Science -- all of these are pervasively Determinist. This fact is especially obvious in an Industrial Society, saturated as it is with mass-produced artifacts, embedded within routine social sequences. If you have any doubts, just go through in your mind the linking of your actions, with the attendant presuppositions, as you switch on the kettle to make a cup of tea, or make a telephone call; or, alternatively, as you arrange to meet a friend at a specific time.
Along with the mad, I'm also excluding those who routinely invoke God, or gods, to explain individual happenings. This is not how our Society works. Charged with murder I would not get far by explaining that God put the knife in my hand, and compelled me to stab that man to death. In the Iliad, in Homer's World, it often seems that this is the kind of explanation that is being invoked. But we don't live in 850 BC, we live in the 21st Century AD. And, in spite of the preachings of the Multiculturalists, or the Archbishop of Canterbury -- incoherent, but also dangerous -- you cannot live in two Cultures, two different Societies, at one and the same time. People could try, of course, but in that case there soon wouldn't be any Society at all. You might as well go and live in Zimbabwe, or any other of the failed States that the West has helped so much to create.
To repeat: Everyone is a minimal Determinist. But not everyone is a maximal Determinist. Who is defined, briefly, as one who maintains that we can do without the notion of Free Will. There are two gross and obvious objections to such a doctrine.
Firstly, it denies any validity to Praxeology, to the Sciences of Human Action, most notably to History and Economics. [See History 13 : Theory I.] This is a very big denial.
Secondly, it is two-faced: knowingly, or unconsciously, deceitful. Maximal Determinists live, and muddle along, in exactly the same world as all the rest of us; which means that they actually do use and rely upon the notion of Free Will a thousand times a day, every day of the week.
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There's not much point in attempting exactitude in expressing this Materialist doctrine because, with rare exceptions, its proponents despise philosophy and philosophical precision. Typically they take for granted the truth of the doctrine; and they never spell it out systematically. They make assertions; they don't argue.
This Materialist doctrine, expressed or implied, has been of vast social and political significance in the West over the last couple of hundred years. I'll make some comments, and give some examples to show the range of application.
Comments.
There do exist a few modern philosophers who have tried to enunciate a sophisticated and coherent version of Materialism, but I shall not consider them. They are socially of little relevance, just as, say, Sufis are of little relevance in the conflict between the West and Modern Islam.
I have met professed Materialists, but never anyone who lived his life as even a halfway consistent one. The nearest have been autistic children and adults I have known. They avoid the complexities of human interaction. I don't do relationships , as one of them put it. However, the existence of the autistic doesn't prove that Materialism is a viable way of life since, like the psychotics, they are not self-sufficient as a group; they also are parasitic on the rest of society; they drag it down.
Materialists have a habit of protesting too much; they tend to hog the floor, and to shout. I think this arises from the most patent flaw in the doctrine, which relates to the concept of Meaning. All communication between persons presupposes that the terms used have Meaning. Without Meaning a term is dead; it is mere gibberish. But Meaning is a non-Material concept. You can't perceive it, eat it, weigh it, etc.
To violate continually the basic presupposition of one's doctrine-- that everything is Material -- is an egregious and incorrigible fault. It is an ever-present dilemma if you can't do without something which is presupposed not to exist; to depend upon a ghost, at every turn, is unsettling. Materialists, therefore, have something big to hide; which is one reason why they are characteristically and instinctively activist, always in motion. Like a conjuror they have to move fast.
The other reason, overlapping, is an inevitable concomitant of the denial of significance to Mind, which flourishes best in an ambience of stillness, order and contemplation, not in the Global Madhouse -- disorderly, frenetic and cacophanous -- into which Materialists have transformed the Modern World.
Materialism and Idealism are two rough but indispensable metaphysical terms: the first emphasizing Matter as primary, the second emphasizing Mind as primary. The historical boundary lines are vague, but I think it is correct to say that, up until the 18th Century the West, centred on Christianity, was Idealist, but after that it moved steadily away from that position. Nowadays Western Culture is predominantly Socialist, and therefore de facto Materialist: the aim in life is individual happiness, and happiness consists in material satisfaction.
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