Remembrance Day: What exactly do we remember?

This is a lazy post, in fact a year-old repost from before I started this blog, that I thought readers might find interesting. It’s explictly a moralistic sort of piece, not a political analysis (no war but the class war! etc).

To listen to most endorsements of remembrance day, and to most poppy-related appeals for money, one would be forgiven for thinking that the job of a soldier was to die. It is not: the job of a soldier is to kill people. Those people fall into approximately two categories: firstly, civilians, and secondly, other soldiers. The number of dictators, politicians, generals, etc. who are killed by soldiers is negligible.

It’s true that courage was not uncommon among the armed forces, and that many (though probably well under half) of the last century’s fallen soldiers were fighting for something better than what they were fighting against; it’s also true that most responsibility the blame for the horrors of war lies with high-level decision-makers – and the average soldier is usually in a situation of very limited freedom. But people are always free and people who kill are responsible for deaths, even if others bear equal or greater responsibility. Consequently it seems ridiculous to look on soldiers with an attitude only of praise, and not utter a word of blame or condemnation. That condemnation should be limited by the very limited perspective, the limited power, the limited opportunities, of average soldiers – but it cannot be simply dropped altogether.

Of course there is huge variation among individual soldiers, ranging from the truly discriminate soldier who shoots only those shooting them, and fights only for good causes, down to those who participate in irregular massacres – to deny this variation would remove the whole point of speaking of freedom. What is wrong is to ignore the whole issue, for this imputes to them a uniform purity.

Fluff: People find me when they are looking for octopus skeletons.

Hmm. I felt I should post something but I don’t really have the energy. That’s been true for the last weeks now, which is why my frequency of posting has declined relative to the previous months. This is likely to continue for a while yet, but hopefully posts will turn up every now and again.

I particularly felt like I should have posted for at least one of: Halloween, Guy Fawkes’ day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, and Remembrance Day. Maybe I will. But probably you will just have to decide for yourselves what to think. Actually that said I recall writing something about remembrance day last year at a previous location so I may paste that up.

In the meantime, why don’t I share some of the search terms by which people have found this blog?

In the last month, I’ve been found by fully 30 people searching “take over the world”, for whom I regret having no useful advice.

I’ve also got a dozen or so people searching “octopus skeleton pictures”, for whom I regret that nobody will ever grant them what they desire.

Perhaps more worryingly, several people have come here through searching “octopus sex”. O_O

They were joined by a single individual looking for “cross species sex youtubes”. *sigh*

There have also been half a dozen or so people with search terms such as “black man controls white man’s wife” and “arabs in control of white women”.

But perhaps the oddest fetish that I seem to have attracted attention from is “incomprehensible bdsm stories”. I can understand why someone might want bdsm stories, but incomprehensible ones? It sounds like needlessly putting yourself through tiring, difficult, and even painful ordeals just for the sa- ah.

Search terms less unsettling than just odd include:

“ugly fox”, “suspicious mongoose”, “how does capitalism exploit Znet”, “christmas thoughts”, and “naked complex” (better than naked simple, I imagine).

But probably the most worrying of all is – well, I’ve posted about the star-nosed mole, and some people find me by searching for that. And I’ve also posted about the naked mole rat, and some people find me by searching for that.

But just yesterday I noticed in my blog stats: “star nosed mole rat”.

To whoever is researching this possibility – combining the only eusocial mammal with the fastest-eating mammal – I beg you, reconsider. The possible consequences don’t bear thinking about.

The Natural World Does Not Exist

It occurred to me in a recent conversation that although I consider myself an environmentalist (whatever that means), and although I am abidingly fascinated by life and its various forms, and committed to the idea of ‘respecting’ a fairly large class of them, I’m not really comfortable talking about ‘nature’, or putting points in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’.

You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals.

In fact, I don’t think I believe that such an entity exists.

Let me put it like this: the way the word ‘nature’ is often used, it seems to be supposed that visiting a Caribbean coral reef and swimming with dolphins, visiting a Tibetan mountain to photograph eagles, and and camping in a pine forest in Norway, are all ways of having contact with ‘nature’.

This almost suggests, though, that when I get to the eagles, I in some sense am more familiar with them because I met the dolphins, and when I am in the forest I’m closer to it because of being in the mountains. That is, it suggests that there’s something in common between the three.

But there isn’t – the coral reefs are as foreign to the mountains as they are to the heart of London. Dolphins have as little in common with eagles as they do with humans. When I turn up in the forest and disturb some bear, it will not care in the slightest that I am on good terms with the frogs of Indonesia.

All that is common is something negative: they are areas that are not heavily populated with humans. Note, it’s not even that they’re therefore populated with lots of other species – because 1) there’s no definition of ‘populated’ that puts coral reefs in the same league as mountains, and 2) cities, the paradigms of human settlement, probably contain more non-human animals than many remote ‘wild places’.

So the word ‘natural’ means something like ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’: it’s not something that applies to things themselves, but rather characterises our relation to them. Things are different from what I’m familiar with – and this I designate by calling them things like ‘foreign’ (when I’m focusing on nationality) or ‘nature’ (when I’m focusing on species).

Does this make me a killjoy?

At a rally for cheaper education. A chant starts up:

“The students! united! will never be defeated!”

My first thought: Wait, is that true? No, that’s not remotely true. You could easily get all the students together and have the rest of society crush them with impunity.

My second thought: In fact, doesn’t that drain all significance from the original chant, ‘the workers, united, will never be defeated’? The significance being, that it’s actually true, and that disunity and disorganisation of the working class is a necessary condition for capitalism.

But now apparently any group with a cause to push is happy to declare itself the invincible revolutionary agent. *sigh*…

Does Moral Philosophy Make a Difference?

Missives from Marx has a series of posts up in which he suggests, in essence, that

“There’s something really stupid about the meta-ethical arguments about whether or not legitimations for ethics are absolute or not, and, if not, whether people can still be ethical…most people just don’t give a shit about meta-ethics.”

This is of interest to me, among other things, because I’ve recently been doing a certain amount of work on meta-ethics (i.e. what is ethics? what do words like ‘good’ mean?) and will, with luck, be presenting to a conference in mid-November, arguing that the foundations of ethics (in at least one sense) are absolute (in at least one sense) in what I think is a fairly novel way. If that goes well I will probably post on it. So I don’t think the whole issue is ’stupid’.

Of course Missives has a point, which is that people are not waiting with bated breath for some philosophers to finally announce whether truth is beauty, or whether, in fact, beauty is truth. Most of the actions that we call ‘moral’ (in at least one sense) are motivated by something other than metaphysics – they’re some psychological impulse or other, whether empathy, disgust, fear, etc.

But I think this point can be over-stated. The question to ask, I think, is not so much ‘does philosophy affect people’s behaviour?’, but rather the two questions ‘does philosophy affect ideology?’ and ‘does ideology affect people’s behaviour?’

A Follow-Up: Religion, Authority, and the Dangers of Optimism

In observing certain conversations sparked by yesterday’s post, I felt stimulated to add some further thoughts, especially in trying to put religion in a broader context.

As I presented it yesterday, the essential process of reasoning that led to “all human beings deserve to be tortured and killed” is something like this:

1) Overall, everything is good.

2) But in cases x, y, z, etc… things are bad.

Therefore, 3) The specific people involved in x, y, z, etc… are bad and have themselves produced what happens to them.

We could put it in more visual terms by saying that because evil has been excluded on principle from the grand over-arching structure of the world, it has to be ‘localised’ as an intrinsic feature of those affected.

But the thing is, this isn’t at all unique to theism. Of course theism has the most extreme possible version of ‘overall, everything is good’. But other less metaphysically extravagant versions are also possible.

Challenge: Suggest a more evil principle than this one

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently listening to people talk about, and talking about, the ‘argument from evil’. To put it in its simplest possible form, it goes like this:

1) If the creator of the world is good and omnipotent, then the world should contain only good things, and a minimum of evil necessary for greater goods.

2) Have you looked at the world recently?

Therefore 3) There is probably no good, omnipotent, creator, i.e. no God.

This initial atheistic part of the argument is pretty simple (everybody accepts that P implies Q, not-Q, therefore not-P is a logically valid structure), so the bulk of the discussion then becomes a matter of theists arguing that actually, the world’s pretty great, the evil things in it are perfectly justified and necessary, and everything is for the best, and atheists trying to resist that.

I could rehearse the arguments here, and why I think the atheistic side is correct. But I suspect they’d be fairly old. Maybe some other time if people are interested. But there’s something else I get in these sorts of discussions sometimes that’s a bit less intellectual. I think I’ve reached the point where ‘defenses of God’ are not just unpersuasive, but hard to stomach.

That is, I feel not so much like I’m in the presence of a position I disagree with, but a mindset which is hostile to humanity as such. And today this reached a sort of beautiful conclusion, when one of my theistic interlocutors summed up the principle underlying it all. But that principle can be seen as growing out of pretty much every theistic strategy employed here.

The Political History of Punishment: Who Feels Retributive?

A few recent posts have discussed the idea of retribution – the conviction that regardless of what benefit it might secure, for them or others, those who have done something wrong should suffer for it (or should be punished for it – is there a difference?)

The discussion so far has been largely ahistorical, abstracted from any particular social realities. In this post I want to change that by asking: what is the class significance of retribution as an idea? Does it characterise the attitude of any particular social groups more than others? And how might this have changed over time?

I also have in mind, when asking this, some recent posts about Foucault and his account of the ‘genealogy’ of punishment – and, behind that, the earlier ‘Genealogy of Morals‘ by Nietzsche.

How I want to proceed is by laying out some postulates, which you need not think are true, and then drawing out what they would predict, and observing that it (I think) seems to match up with a lot of what we do observe.

Some Observations from a Conversation

I just came out of an extended conversation with a group of philosophers that centred around ‘the problem of evil’ in philosophy of religion (most of them were theists). A few interesting observations struck me.

One observation was observing, in quick succession, someone being willing to explain away and justify all the evils in the world in order to retain the idea that ‘God is perfectly good’, and then say that they considered humans (the crowning pinnacle of God’s creation, remember) were naturally bad in quite a strong sense – which, though I didn’t press them, would probably involve explaining away and debunking all the apparently good traits of humans. Coincidence?

Another was that one person, to support the idea that different sorts of moral standards apply to us as apply to God, tried to say that it’s commonplace for different people to be held to different sorts of morality. When asked for examples, they gave parents punishing children and governments governing their subjects – two relationships of authority.

And a third was perhaps less striking, but perhaps still worth mentioning. One of them (a theist), in explaining away various forms of suffering, said that the suffering of animals seemed fairly irrelevant to them; and when I said, by way of contrast, that ‘it is bad that animals suffer needlessly’ was so obvious to me as to be axiomatic, this seemed to provoke more surprise in the other participants than their dismissal.

Of course maybe they were right and I was wrong. Just making observations.

Also, those who are waiting for replies to comments (who are principally: Quentin, Quentin, and Quentin), I will reply tomorrow. After sleep. And a sufficently long time without doing work. Hopefully.

The Psychology of Punishment: What makes us retributive?

In a recent post I argued that the retributive conception of punishment, though it can make sense in particular cases, from certain perspectives, is overall incoherent and confused, and we should aim for a situation where it has no hold on people. But this will remain a meaninglessly abstract piece of moralism unless it is translated into political and historical terms. So let’s do that.

I think this will require a psychological treatment – though this doesn’t in itself make what we speak of ’subjective’, any more than a psychology of what factors affect people’s understanding of mathematics makes maths subjective. EDIT: so the psychological remarks ended up taking the whole post. That’s ok. Political stuff coming next post then. Stay tuned!

What factors will influence people’s tendency towards retributive feelings?

1) Most fundamentally, the confidence of the victim in their own worth (or whatever exactly the ‘crime’ has denied) makes retribution seem less necessary. Why do I need to ‘teach them a lesson’ if I’m really sure of the content of that lesson? At that point the ‘teaching’ simply becomes rehabilitation. To put it another way, inner strength makes forgiveness proportionately more possible.

2) In relation to particular actions, the extent to which someone’s identity is invested in what is denied and ignored by that action – what strikes at our heart makes more of an impact than what, though it might harm us, leaves our sense of ourselves and the world untouched. But this will tend to average out across people, I think.

3) The more the ‘dignity’ and ‘moral authority’, that must be defended and vindicated, is bound up with actual power, real or desired, the more sense retribution will make – because though beatings and cagings are crude instruments for demonstrating moral truths to be, they are very good at demonstrating power.