Is A Reason for Hope

 I ride my bicycle to work, or I go to the gym and listen to podcast 'Philosophize this!' and I feel like it is a reason for hope.

I am sympathetic if not convinced by a kind of progress-skepticism, in the specific domain of moral-progress. I cannot explain it better than wikipedia's summary of John Gray's most recent philosophical position:

Central to the doctrine of humanism, in Gray's view, is the inherently utopian belief in meliorism; that is, that humans are not limited by their biological natures and that advances in ethics and politics are cumulative and that they can alter or improve the human condition, in the same way that advances in science and technology have altered or improved living standards.

If true, this is, or should be, I assert - depressing. And certainly I experience it as depressing, for example my state is heading to an election this year and I live in the seat of the leader of the Liberal Party of Victoria. I haven't followed any of the polling but I suspect the Liberals will win, literally for no better reason than voter fatigue of the Labour party that has now been incumbent for like 12 years.

But as a point, the Liberal Party are Australia's party of Neoliberalism. The party of deregulation, privatisation, deunionisation, globalisation etc. They predate on the general public's widespread economic illiteracy and as such they are literally proposing in their 10 year economic plan, policy that will exacerbate the housing affordability and cost of living crisis. 

That is the USB mindset of the human mind incapable of making moral progress, visible in two-party democracies around the world. Discontent cannot drag a political institution anywhere because voters just keep flipping that USB stick over, figuring if it didn't work one way, it must work the other.

I spent over two weeks writing my last post, on how the fascist intuitions show up in the left-wing of politics where the investment our collective education made in educating us about World War II failed to prepare my own generation to fucking understand fascism.

So yes, I am persuaded of the depressing notion, that human moral progress is not cumulative in the way material progress is. When a student goes off to a higher learning institution to learn aerospace engineering, they don't need to build the Wright Brother's plane and work their way up to the Airbus T1000. I imagine they are taught some theory like "air goes down, plane goes up" and are shown the powerful supercomputers that can simulate the aerodynamics of the state-of-the-art 3d welded best strength-to-weight ratio airfoils drawing on biomimicry of the best flying organisms after 3 million years of evolution in 3-4 years.

Scientific progress (at least the Natural Sciences) is cumulative, which is to say, each successive generation can stand on the shoulders of giants, restricted only by patent laws and shady international agreements that allow corporations to sue sovereign nations if their profits are harmed in any way shape of form.

Moral progress is not cumulative however, because individuals have to be taught morality, each and every one of them, each and every time.

That teaching program is also hugely decentralised and disorganised. Flight may be handled by Aerospace engineers now expanding their skill set to incorporate automation to augment pilot judgement, but moral instruction is coming from all directions, including religious traditions, folk wisdom, pop culture, and for a cloistered few - academia.

And within say, religious traditions, there are then a whole bunch of sects, that can be further broken down into individuals exegeses.

On top of that, we then get multiple schools of ethics - from nihilism to consequentialism with sub-genres like utilitarianism and pragmatism, realism, non-consequential ethics like deontology, divine command etc.

Environmentally there are huge variations in the population in their capacity to be ethical, some with underdeveloped neo-cortexes, lack the impulse control (or 'free-wont') to make moral choices, others may have personality disorders that limit their ability to recognise other's intrinsic value, considering them only instrumental.

Then there is the umbrella-amnesia effect, which a concept like Chesterton's fence might guard against, where having lived your entire life dry, under an umbrella, you retro-myopically view the umbrella as pointless, and dismantle it.

Intuitions can get you far, don't get me wrong. Particularly when there are competitive firms competing on making their products and services "user friendly" including intuitive UIs and UXs. 

However, the counterintuitive also exists and that's what'll get ya. An example being free speech which I've been lead to conclude, is simply too complicated for most people to understand. Free speech is counterintuitive, because it argues and has proved that you are better off, if you are regularly offended.

That's counterintuitive, as is allowing your enemies to coexist and so fourth.

Yes life is common sense, but it is also common nonsense.

So enough already, what gives me hope in John Gray's world?

A benefit of cumulative scientific knowledge culminating in a podcast like "philosophize this!" that's what. It is the butterfly that comes out last from pandora's jar that is the internet. A truly apolitical philosophy explainer that has allowed me to catch up, in a compressed amount of time on the history of philosophical thought.

Now, it has some flaws, for example - one shouldn't think because somebody explained to them the Sartre-Camus dispute, that they understand it like an expert. However, the podcast can crush ignorance, one half of the dangerous combo of ignorance + confidence that defines for example Philosophytube.

Another flaw, if that having listened to an episode on Simone De Beauvoir's "Ethics of Ambiguity" I was intrigued and borrowed a copy from my local library. Stephen West is a philosophy communicator, and something he compresses is the dimension of clarity with which Philosopher's write. For example, De Beauvoir's contemporary Simone Weil's essay on factory work, is a very accessible piece. 

De Beauvoir's "Ethics of Ambiguity" is a quite inaccessible read, brimming with jargon I suspect it presumed an academic audience, for one it pretty much assumes you have read Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" but the podcast flattens what I feel is important information.

It is great that a podcast can make Hegel as accessible as Nietzsche, and make Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" as accessible as "The Genealogy of Morals" and I haven't gotten up to the episode on Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" where the experience of reading inaccessible vs. accessible works tells you something crucial by feeling what it is like to be communicated to with contempt.

I have no intention of throwing out De Beauvoir's observations of the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer etc. But something is lost through West's interpretation of the texts to put it on equal footing with other works that were intended not for an elite in-crowd, but for everyone, by the author from the outset.

Perhaps tellingly is that Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" are so accessible despite being written in Greek by an Emperor of Rome to an Emperor of Rome (himself) and intended for no other audience, that it is much more readable than De Beauvoir. 

Third, is that a podcast is bingible. West is kind of so good, that it becomes a problem, because you can easily listen to far more philosophy than you can meaningfully absorb. Interesting idea gets replaced with interesting idea in the course of two hours, and these things need time and space to digest.

I try to limit myself to an hour a day

But that is it, and it gives me hope, because the entire history of thought, even all the early episodes on pre-socratic metaphysics, can at least somewhat catch up an individual on moral progress in a very democratized fashion.

It also gets around a limitation of "Scout mindset" where you need to hear the arguments of the right oponent. This is to say, if you are moderately conservative and want to learn about Feminism, reading Valerie Solanas' SCUM manifesto is simply going to convince you of the rightness of your position, just as if you are moderately leftist, reading Curtis Yarvin's proposal that Democracy be replaced with a CEO-King will only convince you to stay left, West presents the Enlightenment thinkers, and the Post-Structuralist thinkers in an unpolarized way, simply looking at the ideas on their merits in the spirit of curiosity.

He has covered Adam Smith and Marx, so it gives me hope that technology can be used to compress the learning experience and produce more people who know more than just their own side of an argument.

Hope in this case, is reasonable.