Grand Strategy Annex

Philosophy Institutionalized

Sat, 25 May 2013 04:09:06 -0700

Philosophy in the Age of Nation-States

If we consider carefully the nature and development of philosophy in the age of nation-states, a pattern of geographical distribution becomes obvious — that is to say, a pattern of regionalism in philosophy is to be discerned.

Modern philosophy, dated from the work of Descartes and his epistemological turn in philosophy, dates from roughly the same period of time as the origins of contemporary nation-states. Both the Cartesian epistemological turn and the political nation-state development took centuries to come to fruition, and it could be argued that both achieved a kind of maturity in the twentieth century.

Twentieth Century Nation-States and their Ideologies

The twentieth century saw one mortal ideological conflict following another — fascism vs. communism followed by democracy vs. communism — with the nation-state as the locus of ideological organization. And what is an ideology but an institutionalized philosophy?

Nazi Germany represented the nation-state embodiment of one ideology; Soviet Russia represented the nation-state embodiment of another ideology, while the US and Western Europe represented the embodiment of yet a third ideology. While fascist ideology was defeated in WWII, and communist ideology was defeated in the Cold War, the ideologies themselves are reflective of perennial facets of human nature. They will be back, in some form or another, like it or not.

Institutionalized Ideologies

Not only did the twentieth century represent the maturity of the nation-state international system, as formalized by the creation of the United Nations, but it also saw the development of a much more subtle institutionalizing of ideology.

Whereas in the early modern period, when both modern philosophy and the modern nation-state were being born, philosophers had all manner of backgrounds and professions — Descartes was a professional soldier, Hobbes was a tutor, Spinoza ground lenses, and Leibniz was a private librarian — in the following centuries more and more philosophers were academics, until we come to the twentieth century when almost all philosophers were academic, and it became most definitely the exception to the rule, and curious eccentricity, for a philosopher not to be a professional academic.

Even figures as non-conformist as Wittgenstein, or as radical as Paul Feyerabend, or as far left as Herbert Marcuse, were all full time professional academics. This institutionalization of philosophy almost exclusively as an academic discipline had consequences for the wider culture — not the least of which was the wide perception of philosophy as utterly irrelevant to ordinary life, much as was the case with religion and theology wherever there is a state-sponsored church.

Analytical and Continental Philosophy

One of the great divisions in philosophy today is that between the analytical tradition and the continental tradition.

The analytical tradition largely derived from Hume, Comte, and the techniques of mathematical logic and linguistic analysis. This tradition gave us positivism, logical positivism, logical empiricism, ordinary language philosophy, and their contemporary successors, which I like to call post-positivist thought.

The continental tradition, so named because it is largely native to the European continent, is more diffuse and less focused in the creation of particular “isms,” but generally speaking the tradition is dominated by the influence of Marx, Freud, and existentialism. Marx’s work ultimately turned out to be politically abortive, and Freud’s work was scientifically abortive, but both went on to spectacular posthumous philosophical careers.

If we trace the history of existentialism back to its roots in phenomenology — which latter was, for all intents and purposes, the theoretical source of existentialist thought — existentialism and mathematical logical both have their source in Mitteleuropa.

Institutional Philosophy During the Cold War

There is a book that is a detailed study of Cold War philosophy in the US — How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic by George A. Reisch — which focuses on how left-of-center European philosophers, who were refugees from Nazified Europe, came to contribute to a profoundly apolitical philosophy of science once they engaged upon academic careers in the US.

Thinking about the thesis of this book recently, and its pervasive tone of a kind of lost philosophical utopia that never came to be in the US because of Cold War anti-communist hysteria, I realized that, despite this particular development of philosophical thought in North America, at the same time in continental Europe a completely different kind of philosophy was being institutionalized. Whereas Hegel had once said that, in order to be a philosopher, once must first be a Spinozist, one might have said of European philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century that, in order to be a philosopher, one must first be a Marxist.

The pervasive Marxist (though not specifically communist) thought of Western Europe reached the point at which it was regarded as eccentric and possibly damaging to one’s career in Europe not to be a Marxist. One must read Foucault in this light, since Foucault resolutely refused to identify with either the political left or the political right.

At the same time that North America was developing an institutionalized apolitical logical empiricism, and Europe was developing an institutionalized (and highly politicized) Freudian-Marxist synthesis, official communist ideology was being taught in all schools throughout the Soviet republics of the USSR. Every school, even every high school, had an obligatory philosophy class, which really wasn’t anything more than state-sponsored communist indoctrination.

Philosophy After the Cold War

Philosophy during the period of the international consolidation of the nation-state system, in the aftermath and settlement of WWII, became as rigidly geographically defined as the nation-states in which such thought flourished, and the universities of which nation-states served as the faithful ideological superstructure of the nation-state system.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been some movement away from this rigidity, and one now finds analytical philosophers in Europe and continental philosophers in the US and elsewhere, but in large measure the geographical boundaries — including linguistic geographical boundaries, as it must be noted the analytical philosophy prevails in former territories of the British Empire — remain intact.

In the context, and at a time when trade globalization and information globalization via the internet are calling the geographically-defined nation-state into question, it is interesting to speculate upon the direction of philosophical thought in this brave new world and into the future.

The Future of Philosophy

Will the future of philosophy, with every imaginable doctrine universally and globally available over the internet, descend into a diffuse pluralism, in which no idea stands out as individually recognizable, or will something emerge from this welter of ideas and leave an impression that suggests a particular direction to philosophical thought?

Unfortunately (at least for me personally) I think that the academic tradition in philosophy will continue to quite some time, and this institutionalization of philosophy within university departments will continue some of the momentum of the familiar ways of thought, and will serve as a focus that will counter-balance the radical pluralism and diffuseness of the internet as universal medium of communication.

But there are definitely other trends that are beginning to show themselves, and I have written about these on my other blog in The Emerging School of Techno-Philosophy. There are other philosophical movements today of the greatest interest, including a robust school of Object-Oriented Philosophy (which was influenced in its conception by object-oriented programming, i.e., computer science), as well as a school of experimental philosophy, which takes its methods quite directly from science.

In these contemporary movements mentioned above — techno-philosophy, object-oriented philosophy, and experimental philosophy — there is a common thread, and that common thread is not at all difficult to discern: it is the relationship of thought to the relentless expansion of industrial-technological civilization.

The challenge, then, for the immediate future of philosophy is to further develop these fascinating perspectives on industrial-technological civilization while sedulously avoiding being transformed into an institutionalized ideological superstructure of the same.

Wisconsin Nuclear Plant Retires Early Because of Market Forces and Federal and State Government Policies

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:54:06 -0700

Wisconsin Nuclear Plant Retires Early Because of Market Forces and Federal and State Government Policies:

I was very interested to see this new piece of “analysis” from CSIS about the US nuclear industry. I put “analysis” in scare quotes because CSIS has a track record of less than objective analysis of the nuclear industry.

Some time ago in Analysis and Advocacy I wrote about another piece on the nuclear power industry that was featured by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which otherwise does pretty good work, but when it comes to the nuclear industry they seem to have a strange blindspot.

It beggars belief to see an analyst of the nuclear power industry discussing the subsidies that other forms of power generation receive without even bothering to mention the subsidies, tax credits, insurance exemptions, and even guarantees that canceled nuclear power plants will be paid for — and paid by ratepayers, no less — granted to the nuclear power industry.

The authors of this piece of advocacy masquerading as analysis, Michael Wallace and George David Banks, conclude with this:

“We expect natural gas to benefit the most from the departure of coal from the grid, but fuel switching from coal to natural gas will increase prices for that feedstock, which will improve the outlook for nuclear in some merchant markets.”

So still, for the authors, the dream of nuclear power remains, as the authors see the outlook for nuclear power improving. Again, this beggars belief. If there were ever an industry without a future, it is the commercial nuclear fission industry.

If you’d like to read a really good article on the contemporary nuclear power industry, then read How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing by Peter A. Bradford in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Bradford lays out the whole sorry story of the nuclear power industry, without partiality and without sentimentality. And let us make no mistake on this point: the dream of a future for the commercial nuclear fission industry is mere sentimentality at this point.

Intrinsically Arithmetical Realities

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:02:00 -0700

There are many ways to analyze the world into its constituent parts, and one among the divisions that might be used to decompose the world into fundamental bifurcation is the distinction between the continuous and the discrete. This fundamental bifurcation is institutionalized in mathematical thought, in which geometry studies continuous phenomena and arithmetic studies discrete phenomena.

It was Descartes who first formulated analytical geometry and so demonstrated a systematic translation of algebraic equations into geometrical forms and vice versa, doing much to overcome the ancient division between arithmetic and geometry, or the discrete and the continuous.

Nevertheless, the division continues. One of the great unanswered scientific questions of our time is that of the relationship between quantum theory and relativity. Quantum theory is a discrete physics, whereas relativity is a continuous physics. No one yet has a satisfactory way to formulate both quanta and relativity within a single theory, and this is in part a reflection of the ancient division between arithmetic and geometry.

Quantum theory isn’t really the best example of a discrete theory, however, since quantum theory is notoriously difficult to understand, with its fundamental particles equally describable as waves (which are a continuous phenomenon). On a macroscopic level, however, there are many intrinsically arithmetical realities that present themselves to us as individuated, countable units rather than as continua not clearly distinguished from other parts of the same whole.

While continua present us with all kinds of problems (such as where any part ends and another begins), intrinsically arithmetical realities are not without their problems also. All sorites paradoxes are based on adding or subtracting discrete units from a whole composed of these units (grains of sand in a heap, individual hairs on a head, etc.) so that sorites paradoxes would seem to be intrinsically arithmetical paradoxes, which suggests a purified formulation of the paradox that would not invoke any empirical examples. (How much is too much? How much is not enough?)

Derek Parfit has formulated a counter-intuitive instance of arithmetical quantification that has been used by Nick Bostrom in his exposition of existential risk. Here is Parfit’s idea:

I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:

1. Peace.

2. A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population.

3. A nuclear war that kills 100 per cent.

2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3 is very much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilisation began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilised human history. The difference between 2 and 3 may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second (Parfit, 1984, pp. 453–454).

One wonders if when writing this Parfit had in mind an often quoted opening from a commencement address by Woody Allen:

“Mankind is facing a crossroad — one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction — I sincerely hope you graduates choose the right road”

This is, in fact,the distinction that Parfit is contemplating: that between despair and utter hopelessness (99 per cent of the world’s population killed in a nuclear war) and total extinction (100 per cent of the world’s population killed in a nuclear war). Parfit takes Allen’s joke at face value, and gives an answer.

The lesson here is that a difference of 1 per cent may, in some contexts may be more significant than a difference of 99 per cent. However, we could reformulate this in terms of extinction and make it intuitively clear that the distinction between 1 and 2 is the difference between civilization and its subsequent ruination or unrecovered collapse, while the difference between 2 and 3 is the difference between survival and extinction.

Parfit’s counter-intuitive arithmetical quantification of populations cannot be generalized in a straight-forward way, since it is easy to find counter-examples to his counter-intuitive example, and even to find examples that roughly correspond to the difference between something and nothing, which is the counter-intuitive idea that Parfit addresses.

For example, suppose that x has $0.00, y has $1.00, and z has $1,000,000.00. In this example, z has a million times more money than y, but y has something while x has nothing at all. Aren’t y and z, who both have some money, on a closer financial footing that x and y, who are only separated in their capital by one dollar? I would say no: x with nothing is financially more like y with one dollar than y is like z with a million dollars. But I can easily imagine that someone might disagree with me. This is a thoroughly ambiguous example, and that is why I have employed it here.

In any case, populations and dollars can be counted in terms of discrete units, and so they constitute instrinsically arithmetical realities. Intrinsically arithmetical realities are subject to all kinds of paradoxes and problems, but they are spared the problems and paradoxes of intrinsically geometrical realities.

When intrinsically geometrical realities are forced into the mould of intrinsically arithmetical entities, then we get all of the problems associated with the “quantification of the qualitied world” which I discussed in Quantification and its Discontents.

The Stratigraphy of Civilization

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:07:27 -0700

One of my favorite passages in Darwin’s Origin of Species is one in which he compares the fossil record to a book:

For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations.

Darwin himself notes that the metaphor goes back at least to Lyell.

Given that hominids have been evolving for at least five million years since we split off from the other primates, and perhaps for as long as eight million years, the history of our direct ancestors is sufficiently long that it, too, participates in this metaphor.

That is to say, human history is a history imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect. Of this history we possess only the final volume — ourselves. If we attempt to read the book of our history knowing only the language we speak today, that history will rapidly become incomprehensible to us. It has been said that the past is a foreign country — they do things differently there. They also speak another language. We must learn to speak the language of the past in order to understand the past on its own terms.

In the fullness of time, should a confluence of good fortune and responsible action preserve our civilization so that it, too, someday possesses a history sufficiently long that that history becomes part of the geological record, then the history of civilization, too, will be a history imperfectly kept, written in a changing dialect.

Each word of this slowly-changing language, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of civilization. In historiography, we speak of these abrupt changes in the history of civilization as periodization.

In the case of the stratigraphy of civilization, however, the metaphor will be made literal, as our methods of record keeping, which have gained in sophistication, completeness, and comprehensiveness since the advent of this historical period sensu stricto, make the book of the history of civilization an actual book — except that (to make yet another qualification) by the time civilization is millions of years old, an “actual” book is not likely to be “actual” at all, but rather “virtual.”

A Point of View: Tom Ripley and the meaning of evil

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:43:09 -0700

A Point of View: Tom Ripley and the meaning of evil:

Just a few days ago in Leaving Gormenghast: A Point of View I mentioned philosopher John Gray’s BBC piece about the Gormenghast novels, and now I see that Gray has another BBC piece, this a bit more ambitious in scope, taking Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels as a point of departure for a meditation on the nature of evil.

Gray notes that many readers find Ripley to be a deeply disturbing character because of his amorality. He kills in a business-like manner, not for the joy of killing but simply to maintain his lifestyle.

Gray quotes Highsmith on her character, and develops the point further:

“The psychopath,” she writes in her notebook, “is an average man living more clearly than the world permits him.” In becoming a criminal, she believed, Ripley was living more lucidly and more purposefully than most human beings are capable of doing.

In so far as the individual of ordinary conscience finds Ripley to be a psychopath, he is, in a sense, mindless, and what Highsmith is here describing is essentially mindful mindlessness. It is no wonder that people find the Ripley character to be disturbing.

Then Gray makes an odd non sequiter by appealing to a contrast between Highsmith’s Ripley and Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. The latter, Gray says, still lives in a world of theologically-shaped morality, whereas the former no longer does.

Gray concludes his piece in the same spirit:

Secular thinkers imagine that religion can be dropped like belief in fairies, while morality continues much as it did in the past. If people behave differently in a post-religious world, it can only be an improvement. Morality itself won’t radically change.

More rigorous in her unbelief and more sceptical of human goodness, Highsmith saw things more clearly. Giving up the moral outlook inherited from religion means a vast transformation. A world without the idea of evil might in some ways be a better world, but it would be different from any we’ve ever lived in — and from any that high-minded believers in humanity could imagine.

One wonders whether Gray had Sartre in mind when writing this, as it closely echoes a passage in Sartre’s well-known essay Existentialism is a Humanism:

The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.

Even the recourse to Dostoyevsky is continuous between Gray’s BBC piece and Sartre’s essay, but we all know that Sartre (during this period, at least) considered existentialism to be ultimately optimistic in its “good news” that human beings are in control of their own destiny.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Gray or Sartre on this point, but my agreement seems to be a mere technicality. Both use the example of Dostoyevsky to make a highly tendentious point that might be made much more clearly without reference to theology or a theologically-based morality (i.e., the straw man of a naive divine-command theory of morality that few theologians today would defend).

I agree that in a post-religious world things will look very different, and I agree that one must be skeptical of human nature and of overly high-minded accounts of it. That being said, a post-religious world will not be a world without good or evil. Good and evil will be palpably present, although present in a secular form.

Let us not kid ourselves about this: every epoch of human history, whether pervasively religious or not, has seen a procession of horrific crimes. It is the fact that we recognize them as crimes that demonstrates that the moral sense is intrinsic to human nature, even if it is notably absent in a shocking number of human beings.

One could despair in observing that the world will never be without the idea of evil, but at the same time the world will never be without the idea of good.

Token Skeptic

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:23:00 -0700

At the request of a friend I went to the McMenamins’ 14th Annual UFO Festival at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, Oregon. I’ve just returned from the event and am writing this while my impressions remain fresh in my mind. It was a pretty weird feeling, like being the only atheist at a tent revival or being an observer at a political rally for a candidate whose candidacy one opposes.

I heard more than an hour of looney UFO conspiracy theories from Linda Moulton Howe, who is apparently a wildly popular speaker on the UFO lecture circuit, I met Nick Pope, and Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center introduced himself to me and showed himself to be an affable and pleasant fellow, notwithstanding my presence as a token skeptic.

After Mr. Davenport patiently explained some particularly intriguing recent sightings to me, I dismissed it all by saying, “facts have no meaning outside a theoretical context” (i.e., the familiar philosophical idea that all observations are theory-laden). He said that this was a sweeping statement to make, and I agreed that it was.

Most people, of course, regard the UFO fest (supposedly one of the larger of such get-togethers in the US) as a source of fun and as a way for local businesses to make a little money, but I think that my friend believed that if only he could get me to listen to some presentations that I might be “converted.” Not only did I remain obdurately skeptical, but seeing and hearing UFO conspiracies up close makes me all the more likely to react against something I would otherwise simply ignore.

I felt physically ill when Linda Moulton Howe was telling her audience that human beings are the result of genetic experiments by space aliens, and sicker still to see her audience’s enthusiastic response to this claptrap.

Ultimately, however, I am a Jungian when it comes to UFOs: things are seen, and the fact that things are seen points to something important in the human experience. There is no question in my mind that the whole vast network of interconnecting conspiracy theories (I recommend A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America by Michael Barkun if you’d like an introduction in how these conspiracy theories overlap and intersect, to employ a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase) is a modern mythology, as Jung called it.

It has become more and more obvious to me as I have been thinking about Big History over the past few months, that people routinely employ whatever conception of “big history” they happen to have on hand in order to contextualize their knowledge and to give meaning and value to facts. Not surprisingly, the big history conception that most people “happen” to have ready to hand is comprised by the traditional eschatoloogical views they learned as a child and have mostly not thought to question. This is the theory with which their observations are laden.

While there is a vigorous and vocal contingent of individuals in our time who believe in literal interpretations of traditional eschatologies, there are far more people who realize the inadequacy of these views while still hesitating to ditch them entirely. Thus it becomes an incredibly powerful cultural idea to borrow ideas and images from traditional eschatology and combine them with bits and pieces of contemporary thought, which is exactly what you find when people like Linda Moulton Howe tell an nodding audience that Jesus and the Buddha and other great figures from the religious tradition were space aliens, and then the space aliens can then be contextualized in turn in bits and pieces of contemporary science.

All of this is a textbook case of what I recently wrote about in Scholarship and Bullshit: an indifference to the distinction between the true and the false that Harry Frankfurt identified as the essence of bullshit. But it is more than “mere” bullshit, because it is bullshit that resonates with contemporary audiences, and it resonates with audiences because it is a modern myth drawn from modern experiences.

Quantification and its Discontents

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:53:16 -0700

Recently in Existential Risk and the Death Event I quoted philosopher Edith Wyschogrod regarding, “the quantification of the qualitied world,” which process is one of the central and distinctive features of our industrial-technological civilization.

We have scientific, social, and legal institutions that quantify time and space. We quantify temperature with a thermometer; we quantify wind speed with a anemometer; we quantify snow pack with a simple measuring stick. Economists try to quantify all kinds of subtle features of the world that are problematic in the extreme to quantify (like the dollar value of a life). We quantify effort and interest. If we go to a therapist, we are asked to quantify our pain or our anxiety on a scale of one to ten.

Even as the institutions of our industrial technological civilization push us in the direction of ever greater quantification of the qualitied world, we know that we are falsifying features of the world even as we quantify them, and we know that the “data” we produce in the activity of quantification has definite (perhaps even quantifiable) limits in terms of its accuracy and efficacy in delineating the world.

We use this data to improve our manipulation and our organization of the world; we even construct computer programs to systematically “mine” this data for unexpected insights. We do all of these things even as we know that our data are “wrong.” It has been said that, “round numbers are always wrong.” And so they are. Statisticians and other quantifiers of data are well aware of the limitations they face, and so they have named the particular errors that are intrinsic to the quantification of the qualitied world.

There are “finite precision errors” which result from the rounding of numbers (even if it means rounding at the tenth decimal place) and there are “finite dimension errors” which result from breaking up a qualitied continuum into discrete portions, as when we divide the rainbow into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. We know from recent work in chaos theory, focusing on sensitivity to initial conditions, that the finite precision errors of rounding can result in very large differences once these very small rounding errors are added up by a sufficient number of iterations, and we know that, however detailed our color wheel, it is never going to capture the continuity of color as we experience it.

Science is replete with theoretical abstractions, useful over-simplifications, formal and conceptual thought, and the use of mathematical models, all of which are familiar devices of rationalism. We have good reason for employing these devices of rationalism — they are effective both in predicting and controlling nature — even while we know that the scientific map we have constructed of the world is not identical to the territory. We employ the devices of scientific rationalism knowing their limitations, and our knowledge of their limitations is part of what makes them effective, and keeps us honest about what we’re doing. But we do not say that these limitations are falsifications any more than we say that science is a lie because it makes use of concepts that falsify the world. It would be tendentious in the extreme to say, “Science is a lie.” In fact, if we did say so, it would be a metaphor meant to communicate something other than the relationship of science to facts.

I mention the explicit formulation, “Science is a lie,” not as a thesis for consideration, but as a parallel to the equally explicit formulation, “Mythology is a lie,” which is something that Joseph Campbell talked about. As a scholar of mythology, Campbell apparently encountered this attitude with some regularity, and in some of his books he described some particular episodes in which he found himself in conversation with individuals who baldly stated that mythology is a lie.

There is a typically amusing passage from Campbell in which he described his experiences during a radio interview on a book tour. The radio interviewer began the exchange by asserting that a myth is a lie:

   “The word ‘myth,’ means ‘a lie.’ Myth is a lie.”
So I replied with my definition of myth. “No, myth is not a lie. A whole mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and the fulfillment of a given culture at a given time.”
   “It’s a lie,” he countered.
   “it’s a metaphor.”
   “It’s a lie.”
   This went on for about twenty minutes. Around four or five minutes before the end of the program, I realized that this interviewer did not really know what a metaphor was. I decided to treat him as he was treating me.
   “No,” I said, “I tell you it’s metaphorical. You give me an example of a metaphor.”
   He replied, “You give me an example.”
   I resisted, “No, I’m asking the question this time,” I had not taught school for thirty years for nothing. “And I want you to give me an example of a metaphor.”
   The interviewer was utterly baffled and even went so far as to say, “Let’s get in touch with some school teacher.” Finally, with something like a minute and a half to go, he rose to the occasion and said, “I’ll try. My friend John runs very fast. People say he runs like a deer. There’s a metaphor.”
   As the last seconds of the interview ticked off, I replied, “That is not the metaphor. The metaphor is: John is a deer.”
   He shot back, “That’s a lie.”
   “No,” I said, “That is a metaphor.”
   And the show ended.

Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, Chap. 1, pp. 1-3.

So there you have it. One could easily imagine a similarly unproductive conversation between a scientist and an interviewer, with the interviewer stating, “Science is a lie,” and the scientist responding, “It’s not a lie, it’s an abstraction.” In fact, these kind of conversations go on all the time, although they don’t often reach this level of explicitness. Usually, the fundamental disagreement remains submerged and the result is mere confusion.

Recently, and most famously in the work of Richard Dawkins, a number of contemporary thinkers have decided to treat the phenomenon of religion as a failed scientific hypothesis. This is the idea behind Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and several others have followed suit, such as Victor Strenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Not surprisingly, this is not a very helpful approach to the study of religion. This is the contemporary equivalent of saying, “Myth is a lie.”

Anyone reading this who has read anything else that I have written will be aware that I would have far more in common with Dawkins than with any of Dawkins’ critics, but the scientific naturalism that I share with Dawkins does not blind me to the fact that, whatever religion may be, it certainly is not a scientific hypothesis, and to treat it as a scientific hypothesis is certainly to get it wrong. But it is understandable how this confusion came about. To invoke Joseph Campbell again, Campbell often noted that it is an exceptional feature of the Western tradition — the same tradition from which science and methodological naturalism emerged — to insist upon the historicity of its mythology.

The danger here is that science can be given precisely the same treatment, mutatis mutandis, as the scientific debunkers of religion are giving to contemporary mythology. There is a precise parallel between the quantification of the qualitied world and the historicity of the ahistorical (or eternal) world. To treat science qualitatively when it approaches the world quantitatively would be to get science as wrong as one gets religion when one treats mythology scientifically. And I say this not because I want to spare the hurt feelings of religious believers, but rather because I do not want to see a mess made of science if science should be asked to be something that it is not.

Addendum on Technological Unemployment

Tue, 14 May 2013 02:44:00 -0700

The Ongoing Revolution of Production

Recently in Technological Unemployment and the Future of Humanity I didn’t manage to touch on all the themes that I had wanted to review, and of course the idea of technological unemployment is a large and complex phenomenon that admits of detailed treatment.

Industrial-technological civilization, with its continual change of science creating new technologies that are engineered into new industries that replace old industries, is not only unprecedented in human history, it continues to be unprecedented as long as it endures because (to put it in Marxist language) the industrial processes of a technological economy continually revolutionize the means of production. And not only production: capitalism revolutionizes industrial organization, distribution of goods and services produced, and all aspects of the industrial economy.

The factory system of the early industrial revolution revolutionized production, and then the emergence of a class of white collar workers in private industry revolutionized industrial organization, and then the shift to a service economy revolutionized the role of services in the economy. There may be latent potentialities in the industrialized economy, waiting to be revolutionized, that we, today, do not even recognize.

The Danger of the Stationary State

At present one of the central concerns with the revolutionizing of production is continued automation, which is steadily eroding the position of the human laborer. With increasing structural technological unemployment over time there will be enormous political pressure to create “make work” jobs in order to try to maintain the economy status quo, and to tolerate static or declining productivity in order to accommodate the retention of established jobs.

Sabotaging productivity to retain inefficient jobs in the workplace is a lot like protectionist legislation: everyone can see the irrationality of it, until it is their job that is eliminated or their industry receiving protection or subsidies. The end result is the same: economic stagnation, and all the institutions of feudalism recreated in the context of an industrialized economy.

What happens when a society makes a decision that stability and continuity is more important than innovation and technological change, whatever advantages these forces may have? You get what John Stuart Mill called “the stationary state.” (I wrote about Mill’s conception of the stationary state at some length in my book Political Economy of Globalization.)

Mill was concerned to convince his readers that the stationary state wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Here is what Mill wrote (in part) about the stationary state:

A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

This is a truly fascinating passage, since it shows Mill to be an environmentalist before anyone spoke of environmentalist, to be a theorist of the end of history before Kojève and Fukuyama had worked this Hegelian vein, and to be a bell weather of unchecked population growth long before this became a political issue. In short, Mill was prescient.

The painful reality of creative destruction

The revolutionizing of production that Marx observed was called “creative destruction” by Joseph Schumpeter. The creative destruction of capitalism entails not only the destruction of obsolete industries and obsolete production methods, but also all of the employment opportunities predicated upon the products produced by obsolete industries and by obsolete production methods.

The painful reality of capitalism’s creative destruction is that individuals must seek new and unfamiliar forms of employment for which they are probably not fully prepared and at which they are probably not entirely competent. It is much easier to continue to day the same thing, day in and day out, than to master a new task, hence the socio-political pressure to maintain a stationary state.

Why, then, do we allow the process of creative destruction to revolutionize societies the structures of which are predicated upon the structure of industry? If you look at the way the vast majority of people lived 300 years ago and compare it to the way the vast majority of people live today, the answer to the question should be obvious.

Whatever moral or social criticisms we may make of capitalism and the industrial-technological civilization that it has built, we must honestly acknowledge that most people live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives as a result of this ongoing revolutionizing of production. The social transformations entailed by this revolutionizing change are often painful, but ultimately rewarding in a very concrete way.

Sauntering Toward the Division of Labor

In a famous passage of The Wealth of Nations in which Adam Smith discussed the difficulty of passing from one task to another in the manufacture of a product, in order to demonstrate the superiority of the division of labor, Smith wrote:

A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work, he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. The habit of sauntering, and of indolent careless application, which is naturally, or rather necessarily, acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life, renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application, even on the most pressing occasions. Independent, therefore, of his deficiency in point of dexterity, this cause alone must always reduce considerably the quantity of work which he is capable of performing.

A similar observation might be made in regard to passing from one career to another, or passing from one economic paradigm to another: a man “saunters” a little when passing from one job to the next (and in our time, with unemployment benefits guaranteed by law, employees may “saunter” between jobs as long as their unemployment benefits last), and entire populations “saunter” when more or less forced to make a change from one economic paradigm to another.

Because Adam Smith explicitly recognized the productivity and efficiency of the division of labor, that does not mean that he was blind to the downside of the kind of work, and the kind of workplace, that resulted from the effective elimination of “sauntering.”

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

Smith didn’t put it like this, but it is human nature to saunter, and when forced by the circumstances of one’s work to apply oneself in a way that does not come naturally, it is an understandable response to retreat into oneself and to relinquish any idea of the greater good or conceptions of the world beyond merely private interest.

Gödel’s Lesson for the Future of Industrialized Society

The revolutionizing of production that Marx recognized and the creative destruction of which Schumpeter wrote are not confined to industry: they shape the whole of industrial society. In other words, society is revolutionized and society on the whole experiences creative destruction. These forces even reshape our intellectual life, which Marx would have dismissed as the “ideological superstructure,” but which must be recognized as at least co-equal with the economic infrastructure.

It follows from this that our ideas of society and social organization must be continually revolutionized or well will not be able to understand what is happening to us, and we will have no conceptual infrastructure capable of expressing the changed conditions of industry, work, and labor. If we continue to employ our outdated concepts we will, most certainly, get our analysis of our contemporary society wrong, and our prescriptions for ameliorating whatever evils follow from that society will be at least as mistaken and misleading.

It is at this point that we see the true dangers of the Millian stationary state — a danger Mill himself did not see. Another name of the stationary state might be “the finite state.” If we limit ourselves to a finite conception of the world, we relinquish the possibility of forming new ideas ad infinitum which can advance the condition of our thought to keep pace with the restless change in life imposed by capitalism.

In my post Gödel’s Lesson for Geopolitics I quoted Gödel as follows:

“Turing … gives an argument which is supposed to show that mental procedures cannot go beyond mechanical procedures. However, this argument is inconclusive. What Turing disregards completely is the fact that mind, in its use, is not static, but is constantly developing, i.e., that we understand abstract terms more and more precisely as we go on using them, and that more and more abstract terms enter the sphere of our understanding. There may exist systematic methods of actualizing this development, which could form part of the procedure. Therefore, although at each stage the number and precision of the abstract terms at our disposal may be finite, both (and, therefore, also Turing’s number of distinguishable states of mind) may converge toward infinity in the course of the application of the procedure.”

“Some remarks on the undecidability results” (Italics in original) in Gödel, Kurt, Collected Works, Volume II, Publications 1938-1974, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 306

And I commented:

To suppose that human moral evolution had come to an end with the advent of the idea and implementation of liberal democracy, however admirable this condition is (or would be), is to suppose that we had tried all possible ideas for human society and that there will be no new ideas (at least, there will be no new moral ideas unless we change human nature through biotechnological intervention). I do not accept either that all ideas for society have been tried and rejected or that there will be no fundamentally new ideas.

And…

Gödel is right. The human mind is always developing and changing. Because the mind is not static, it formulates novel ideas on a regular basis. It is a fallacy to conflate the failure of new ideas of achieve widespread socio-political currency with the absence of novel ideas. Among the novel ideas constantly pioneered by the dynamism of human cognition are moral and political ideas. In so far as there are new moral and political ideas, there are new possibilities for human culture, society, and civilization. The works of the human mind, like the human mind itself, are not static, but are constantly developing.

What I wrote in that post, under Gödel’s influence, about social and political ideas holds also for the economic ideas that are central to industrial-technological civilization: the mind is constantly developing and changing, and because of this the mind is capable for formulating novel economic conceptions.

An obvious example of this is that, when Mill wrote, he did not even consider the possibility of earth-originating economic activity expanding into the endless reaches of space; Mill’s imagination failed him, or maybe he had the idea as a passing fancy, but realized that it would be dismissed as fantasy, just as today it is still dismissed as “science fiction.”

It is fallacy to suppose that we are stuck with a finite stock of ideas, just as it is a fallacy to suppose that there are only a finite number of possibilities for political society, for economic organization, for the administration of justice, for social institutions, or or any other human activity.

We do not need to settle for a static, stationary conception of the human future; our aspirations can be as dynamic as our imagination is free to conceive as-yet-unactualized possibilities.

A Point Of View: Leaving Gormenghast

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:01:53 -0700

A Point Of View: Leaving Gormenghast:

I was both surprised and pleased to see this meditation on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels by philosopher John Gray.

As fantasy novels, Peake’s trilogy is most often compared to Tolkien’s Lord of the RIngs trilogy, though it has never been as popular. The Gormenghast novels were made into a four hour BBC production (I have it on DVD), though this is nothing like the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the three enormous Lord of the Rings films.

Peake’s Gormenghast novels deserve to stand on their own, and not in the shadow of Tolkien. Peake’s novels are among those very few modern books that exude so much atmosphere that opening them is like a kind of perfume. Frank Herbert’s Dune is like this too.

Also like Herbert’s Dune, Peake’s Gormenghast manages to straddle that difficult literary divide of being, on the one hand, sprawling and magnificent, while on the other hand human, all-too-human, even to the point of pettiness. It is the synthesis of the sprawling human majesty that draws in the reader.

This appreciation of Gormenghast by John Gray was thus most welcome.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:54:00 -0700

I just had the good fortune of attending the first night of the book tour for Annalee Newitz’s just published book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (a book so new, in fact, that the official publication date is still officially in the future, on May 14, or May 31, depending on which source you consult). Newitz is also the founding editor of the popular website io9.com — a website that I have referenced in several posts. The event was held at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland.

The author began her talk by saying that she began her book with the assumption that humanity is doomed, and she would simply spell out the mechanism or mechanisms by which we would reach our certain end. As her work progressed, her point of view developed and she became more confident of the future survival of humanity. She said several times that she doesn’t think there is really any serious question as to whether humanity would survive.

In studying mass extinctions, she came to note that there are always survivors, and she thought that human beings are well-placed to be the survivors of any future mass extinction events. I agree with this. Although she did not cite David Quammen’s essay Planet of Weeds, this was quite similar to her point of view — human beings are the “weedy species” par excellence, and as a result we are likely to endure far longer than other, more fragile, more vulnerable species.

Another interesting observation the author made was how completely the world is biologically transformed by a mass extinction event. She said that the recovery of ecosystems after a mass extinction event was the recovery of an essentially “new” planet — for example, we live on almost a completely different planet than that inhabited by dinosaurs. This is the fungibility of the biosphere on a very large scale.

While the author didn’t use the term “existential risk,” this is what the book is about, although the author choose to consider those existential risks that have been posed to earth-originating life since its beginning — impacts, vulcanism, radiation, and most of all climate change precipitated by other events. Since climate change might be triggered equally by carbon in the atmosphere released by massive volcanoes or carbon in the atmosphere released by the burning of fossil fuels, mass extinctions so triggered might be anthropogenic or non-anthropogenic.

Not long ago in my post on the BBC story How are humans going to become extinct? I mentioned that Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is focusing on “threats we have no track record of surviving,” The author, by contrast, spoke about those existential risks that are well established throughout the long history of life on earth, and the resiliency of life on earth despite repeated mass extinctions was the basis of her optimism for humanity’s survival of mass extinctions yet to come.

In the strict sense of existential risk, these known risks are pricisely the existential risks against which we can effectively “insure” ourselves against if only we have the responsibility to take the appropriate action. If we widen our scope, however, to pass beyond existential risk to existential uncertainty, one’s confidence level cannot be so high, precisely because we have no track record of survival, and no knowledge of what exactly we are facing.

Vatican declares Mexican Death Saint blasphemous

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:40:00 -0700

Vatican declares Mexican Death Saint blasphemous:

This fascinating BBC article made me aware of the cult of Santa Muerte — Saint Death, or Holy Death — which is a textbook-perfect instance of religious syncretism, as native elements of Mesoamerican religious thought have blended with official Catholic doctrine over the centuries since the European contact with the Western hemisphere.

The cult of Santa Muerte is also a perfect example of how folk religious ideas are often much more contemporary and keep religious practice up to date as compared with the static and ossified doctrines of theologians proclaiming official doctrine of a religious institution.

The Wikipedia article on Santa Muerte says that the saint is the patron of:

homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, transgender persons, love, against assaults, against gun violence, against violent death, prostitutes, people in poverty, police officers, smugglers, drug dealers, taxi drivers, mariachi players, bar owners

In other words, Santa Muerte is the patron saint of a wide range of individuals, social classes, and categories of identity that are nowhere recognized in official doctrine and rites.

The dispossessed of society — perhaps even to a greater degree than those fully enfranchised by established religious institutions — desire some doctrinal continuity with the community of which they inhabit the margin, and if no official avenues are provided, people will create such continuity themselves in order to locate their own community within the larger social body.

It is also significant that the above-linked BBC article emphasizes that the cult of Santa Muerte enjoys its greatest popularity in those regions of Mexico most affected by the violence of the drug wars. Popular experience of trauma and widespread human mortality, just as in the case of the Black Death during the European Middle Ages, prompts individuals to fill in the lacunae left by established and traditional religious practice with innovative practices that speak directly to the people and to the times in which they live.

The Catholic Church may condemn the cult of Santa Muerte as blasphemy, but the relevance of Santa Muerte today can scarcely be questioned.

The Post-Carbon Economy Delayed

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:40:00 -0700

There were several items of interest in the Financial Times today, starting with a cover story (”Obama backs rise in US gas exports”) on US government approval of natural gas exports. Industries wanting cheap gas lobbied to keep the gas in the US and to limit exports, but sanity (and a competitive global market) seems to have prevailed (for now).

The Financial Times story by Richard McGregor in Washington and Ed Crooks in New York says,

The North American shale revolution over the past decade has unlocked large reserves of gas that were not previously accessible at commercially attractive rates. US gas prices have fallen to levels about one-third of the cost of LNG imported to Europe, and one-quarter of the cost of LNG in Asia, a development with the potential to upend global markets.

Strangely, the Financial Times story on US natural gas exports is subtitled, “New weapon in national security arsenal,” which seems to harken back to the mercantilist era, during which international trade was considered a disguised form of warfare. What the story really meant, however, was that the US wants to use its potential energy leverage in the way that petroleum exporting nation-states used their energy leverage to obtain political concessions.

Again, to quote from the article:

Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, said late last month that the US’s new “energy posture allows us to engage [with the world] from a greater position of strength”.

On the front page of the second section of today’s Financial Times was another story on the continued expansion of the fossil fuels-based economy, “Repsol to help Angola map its vast oil reserve” by Guy Chazan in London.The correspondent notes that this initiative in Angola is partly due to Repsol having been burned recently in Argentina:

The deal with Sonangol highlights Repsol’s intensified focus on exploration in the wake of last year’s seizure of its YPF unit by the Argentine government. That move deprived the group of one of its biggest generators of cash. Since the expropriation, Repsol has been selling assets in an attempt to cut its net debt and keep its investment grade credit rating.

This is something that I wrote about in The Persistence of Populism: Re-Nationalizing YPF in Argentina.

More to the point for the burgeoning carbon economy, the particular technology that Repsol will employ in Angola (a proprietary technology it has not previously allowed any other company to use), training Sonangol technicians in the use of its subsurface imaging technology, may have applications in other “pre-salt” potential oil fields offshore Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico.

The article includes this quote:

“The eyes of the industry will be on Kwanza,” says Didier Lluch, Repsol’s exploration director for east and west Africa. “It has all the makings of another Brazilian pre-salt.”

With the expanding shale gas industry, and the oil industry exploiting new technologies for oil exploration, it seems that peak oil is not yet on the horizon, and that peak carbon-based fossil fuels is even farther in the future.

This is good news for “business as usual” in the economies of the industrialized nation-states, as we are seeing increasing transition of transportation infrastructure being fueled by natural gas (even as diesel prices continue to climb), but it is problematic for global climate change.

Although natural gas is a far cleaner burning fuel than oil or coal, it is still a fossil fuel, and its burning still produces CO₂ and contributes greenhouse gases and hence to the warming of the planet.

The vigor of the fossil fuel economy means that there will be plenty of time for alternative technologies to be improved and to come down in price until they are competitive with fossil fuel technologies.

However, burning fossil fuels at always increasing rates for the coming decades, perhaps for the next century or two, means ever greater greenhouse gases and a greater threat that we might pass over a threshold and experience rapid global warming, which would result in sea level rises that would threaten all the world’s major coastal cities and the vital port and shipping services that they make possible, and which in turn keep the global economy humming along.

Nobody knows the answer to the problems posed by continuing to burn fossil fuels at increasing rates, and if anyone pretends to know they are a fraud. Recently I read somewhere (I can’t recall the source) that the sudden release of carbon stored up over millions if not billions of years of the early terrestrial ecosystem soaking up sunlight and storing it, now released over the past two hundred years of industrial-technological civilization, is a vast geophysical experiment, and no one knows how it will turn out.

Just as significantly, we can’t close Pandora’s box — or, if you prefer another mythological metaphor, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle — because we can’t just shut down industrial-technological civilization with the flip of a switch. There is no “off” switch for civilization.

Moreover, the consequences of shutting down civilization, even if it were possible, would be sudden and catastrophic, while the threat from the fossil fuel economy is incremental and gradual. Due to human psychology, which orients us to the immediate danger, because that is what threatens our survival and our reproductive success, we cannot viscerally feel the longer-term, incremental danger, therefore we cannot respond to it with the same urgency.

Human evolutionary psychology is as much a matter of our evolutionary history as fossil fuels are part of the planet’s evolutionary history. We will now see, in the coming decades and centuries, whether these evolutionary histories, now tied together by industrial-technological civilization, can long endure.

The Singularity of Fools: A special report from the utopian future.

Sat, 04 May 2013 04:16:55 -0700

The Singularity of Fools: A special report from the utopian future.:

In the above-linked longish article in Foreign Policy magazine David Rieff skewers those whom he calls “techno-utopians.”

Rieff casts a very wide net that includes Kevin A. Hassett, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Ethan Zuckerman, Indur Goklany, Byron Reese, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, and Francis Fukuyama, whose latter’s book The End of History (which I have discussed many times) Rieff says was, “rightfully dismissed as post-Cold War triumphalist nonsense.”

With such a diverse group of “techno-utopians” it is more-or-less inevitable that there will be some humorous and wide-of-the-mark predictions, and Rieff admits that he takes a certain pleasure in pointing these out.

In Addendum on Automation and the Human Future I observed that the problem with a lot of futurism is that predictions are often formulated in terms of some familiar span of time like 25 years when we should be talking about 250 years. This would be less emotionally satisfying, since we won’t be around in 250 years to see the changes, but we might be around in 25 years to see the changes — and the lack thereof.

If we can get ourselves to the point in thinking of the future on an order of magnitude beyond the usual journalistic scope, futurist predictions are not as strange or as unlikely as they sound. To the world of 250 years ago, we are today inhabiting a futurist world that would have been strictly incomprehensible to the past. We have passed beyond too many prediction walls.

We are also, taking this larger scope of time, inhabiting a world that embodies all the ambiguities and the moral horrors that the past contemplated as impossible or unthinkable. So when anyone says that something can’t happen because it offends our sensibilities (this is the charge made most often against transhumanism), I know that human sensibilities change and that we have come to inhabit world that would offend the past as much as visionary accounts of the future offend the present.

One of the things that I have come to like about Foreign Policy magazine is their willingness to entertain diverse points of view (Harper’s used to be like this years ago), and so in a companion piece, Who’s Afraid of Cyberoptimism? Why David Rieff’s cynical attack on “cyberutopians” misses the point by Ethan Zuckerman, one of those skewered by David Rieff, responds in a measured piece that carefully avoids the familiar leitmotifs of utopianism so as not to lay himself open to further charges of being excessively optimistic about the future.

There is something a little sad about someone making an effort to be taken “seriously” by trying not to appear too optimistic, but, of course, I understand the motivation.

Scholarship and Bullshit

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:07:50 -0700

Twenty Articles on the Practice of Science

1. There is an essential and fundamental difference between good scholarship and poor scholarship.

2. There is always something to be learned from good scholarship even if one rejects its arguments and its conclusions.

3. One learns nothing from poor scholarship even when (if not especially when) one agrees with its arguments and its conclusions.

4. Poor scholarship may actually have a negative value in terms of being misleading and in terms of the opportunity cost involved in investing one’s time in a dead end.

5. Although there is a fundamental difference between good scholarship and poor scholarship, the line between the two is not always clear.

6. Science today (which is the dominant form of scholarship in our time) is such a large enterprise, with so many different people of different temperaments involved in the production of scientific knowledge, that much science is of mixed value because it draws upon both good scholarship and poor scholarship in consequence of its prolific diversity and rapid growth.

7. Some science is very well defined conceptually and theoretically, but suffers from poor experimental and empirical work.

8. Some science has excellent experimental and empirical work, but suffers from being poorly conceptualized and having a weak theoretical framework.

9. Because of the many ways in which science can go wrong, transforming earnest effort into poor scholarship, there is no clear line of demarcation between good scholarship and poor scholarship in science.

10. Some science is mostly good, but shades over into poor scholarship, while other science is mostly poor, but contains occasional worthwhile insights and valid observations.

11. Between mostly competent science and mostly incompetent science there lies a broad region of would-be knowledge that shapes our world from the smallest personal decisions to the largest public policy initiatives, and much of this would-be scientific knowledge is problematic.

12. The fact that there can be a clear difference between instances of essentially and fundamentally distinct principles even though there are problematic cases that blur the same principled distinction I call the truncation principle (cf. The Truncation Principle and An Illustration of the Truncation Principle)

13. Quality of scholarship, then, follows the truncation principle in so far as there are clear and unambiguous cases of good scholarship, clear and unambiguous cases of poor scholarship, and there are additionally problematic cases in between the clear examples that involve both elements of good scholarship and elements of poor scholarship.

14. Given the diversity of scholarship, as well as the enormous amount of research that goes on today, one must be highly selective in the scholarship one employs to shape one’s own views.

15. Even though scholarship of mixed quality offers occasional insights and valid observations, we are justified in neglecting mixed quality scholarship because of its failure to be able to distinguish, within itself, between intellectual competence and intellectual incompetence.

16. Contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt (who wrote a book titled On Bullshit) has defined the essence of bullshit as an indifference to the distinction between truth and falsehood.

17. A bullshitter may be telling the truth, and just as well may be telling a falsehood. The important point here is not that there are elements of truth in the bullshitter’s story, but that the bullshitter makes no distinction between the true and the false.

18. So it is with mixed scholarship: it may contain insights and observations individually of value, but the overall effect of the mixed scholarship is that of an indifference to the distinction between intellectual competence and intellectual incompetence.

19. Problematic science of mixed value is indistinguishable from bullshit.

20. There is no excuse or justification for scholarship that falls short of the most rigorous standards of intellectual competence.

Technological Unemployment and the Future of Humanity

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:58:22 -0700

The Ongoing Discussion of Technological Unemployment

Recently on my other blog I wrote a couple of posts on what is now with increasing regularity called “technological unemployment” — Automation and the Human Future and Addendum on Automation and the Human Future. This is simply the idea that increasing automation will replace human labor — perhaps entirely, in the fullness of time.

The topic of technological unemployment continues to generate a lot of comment. An article by Jason Dorrier at the Singularity Hub — Robots Will Do Everything You Do Now Only Better—What Then? (brought to my attention by Andrew Gorospe) — makes some interesting points on technological unemployment.

In addition to making the important point that employment is always a trailing indicator in the recovery of an economy after bottoming out during a business cycle, there is this well-made observation:

Before the 20^th century, most folks in the West farmed. Now, thanks to massive productivity gains in agriculture, virtually none do. To a 19^th century farmer that would imply nothing less than the collapse of the economy. Why? Because the thing most people did back then was farm. Our farmer might understandably wonder, “What will we do when machines perform our jobs for us? How will we make money? How will we survive?”

As Dorrier notes, we cannot yet say that technological unemployment is structural. But almost everyone today agrees that automation may become a source of structural unemployment in the future — it is simply a matter of how far in the future we extrapolate continuing automation.

The “Job of the Gaps” Argument

I have discussed elsewhere the perennial futurist fascination with an economy of maximized abundance in which the work week shrinks from 40 hours to 30 hours, from 30 hours to 20 hours, until eventually human labor is no longer relevant to economic production. This vision of automation has been around so long that it had pretty much become as much of a joke as jetpacks and flying cars.

That perception of automation is changing. Since the time of the earliest predictions of maximized abundance we have had a revolution in telecommunications and computing which has made rudimentary AI (in the form of expert systems) a reality in many industries.

While at present, many jobs cannot be automated, this pool of non-automatable jobs is incrementally shrinking, and human beings will increasingly need to find jobs in the “gaps” between automated labor. Employment in these economic gaps will slowly shrink over time.

This is not a problem that will become unmanageable in the near future. When the global economy returns to significant growth, and employment eventually picks up, people will laugh about predictions of technological unemployment, but in the next business cycle the recovery will be even slower, returning fewer people to work, and so on, over the decades, until each business cycle chips away at the jobs available for human beings.

Will the devil make work for idle populations?

Every futurist who has considered the question of technological unemployment has asked what people will do with their time when everyone has a life of leisure. There are obvious social problems that will follow from such a scenario, not to mention the possibly of an even more disruptive period of transition when many jobs are automated even while some unpleasant jobs remain to be done by human hands.

We have all heard the old saying that the devil makes work for idle hands. We think of this as the possibility of getting involved in mischief when one is insufficiently busy, but there is an entirely different meaning that the phrase may come to take on.

With increasing structural technological unemployment over time there will be enormous political pressure to create “make work” jobs in order to try to maintain the economic status quo, and to tolerate static or declining productivity in order to accommodate unproductive jobs just because they are jobs and they keep people busy.

Sabotaging productivity to retain inefficient jobs in the workplace is a lot like protectionist legislation: everyone can see the irrationality of it, until it is their job that is eliminated or their industry receiving protection or subsidies. The end result is the same: economic stagnation, and all the institutions of feudalism recreated in the context of an industrialized economy.

This “permanent stagnation” (one of Nick Bostrom’s qualitative categories of existential risk) would mean the end of the expansion of human civilization, declining standards of living, and reduced opportunities for everyone.

A Curiously Selective Skepticism

And for a quick note on how not to think about employment, technology, and the economy of the future… I find it quite remarkable that so many people can be so skeptical or even outright dismissive that industrial-scale energy generation can be achieved with solar, wind, or fusion, even while they act like the economy is going to be transformed overnight by 3D printers, iPads, and Google glasses.

The fact is that the impacts of all of these technologies will be felt over time — over decades and over centuries — just like the impact of technological unemployment. And the interaction of these opportunities, some of which will create new industries while others destroy old industries, will create the economy of the future.

A Different Perspective on Technological Unemployment

Instead of asking what an idle human population will do with its abundant leisure time, or, worse, asking how we can slow down the transition to a fully automated economy, we would do well to learn to think about human activity in different terms — which will almost certainly happen anyway over the long term.

It may well turn out to be the case that industrial-technological civilization is best expanded, extended, and maintained by agents that are themselves products of industrial-technological civilization — i.e., robots, and automatons of one kind or another. We should face the fact that machines have a comparative advantage in building a machine-based civilization. Accept it and move on. Let human beings do other things.

The idea of a “job” is a relic of the “factory system” of the early industrial revolution, and it is probably the least healthy way for a human being to spend a lifetime: inside a building, putting in countless hours of mind-numbing labor, and being too tired after a day’s labor to appreciate anything other than mind-numbing television programming.

Many people have made similar observations; there is nothing new in this. And I am not going to tell you that everyone is going to become an artist or a writer or a philosopher. Most people simply aren’t suited to such pursuits. But there are pursuits for which human beings are eminently suited.

Human Beings and the Comparative Advantage of Being Human

Just as machines are perhaps the most effective agents for a machine-based civilization, it could be argued that the terrestrial biosphere is best expanded, extended, and maintained by agents that are products of that biosphere.

Even as technological agents build industrial-technological civilization into a behemoth that dwarfs the kind of civilization that can practicably be built by human beings, organic agents of the biosphere — in this case, human beings — may be best suited to returning to traditional pre-industrialized ways of life in a variety of forms as the universe is opened up to settlement by the expanding scope and ability of industrial-technological civilization — that is, if we allow it to continue to expand, not crippling it by restricting productivity, and this is best done by handing this civilization over to machines themselves.

Hominids, since their origins in Africa, and even before the emergence of homo sapiens, have exploited their bipedal gait to walk the entire surface of the Earth, and they have used their free hands to row canoes around the world long before there was any civilization. We are, at bottom, nomads — we are a species at home in the world, but only when we have the freedom to roam.

Let us continue to roam, but farther afield. There are many, many lifeways of pre-industrialized peoples that may be applicable on a far larger scale made possible by industrial-technological civilization when it allows us to expand beyond our homeworld: homesteading, pastoralism, transhumance, and so on.

Some of us, of course, love our relationship to the soil, and will want to settle and farm one piece of ground. There is certainly room enough in the universe for this, too.

The Place of Humanity in the Milky Way

I have observed elsewhere that seven billion human beings on the Earth is a lot of representatives of any one species, but spread out in the Milky Way we would be very thinly distributed in our home galaxy.

There are about 300 billion stars in the Milky Way (more than 40 for every human being), and we know now from recent exoplanet research that planets in orbit around these stars are plentiful.

In fact, it has recently been theorized that small, rocky planets (once thought to be relatively rare) are even more common than gas giants, because gas giants need to form relatively early in the history of a solar system before the hydrogen and helium get blown away by stellar winds. The protoplanetary disc needs to be of a higher metallicity to facilitate the rapid growth of planetary cores that could result in gas giant formation. (Cf. Alien Earths Could Form Earlier than Expected)

What this means is that only later generations of stars with higher metallicities (population I and II) can form gas giant planetary systems, whereas small, rocky planets might have been formed earlier in the history of the universe, even around population III stars.

In any case, if we suppose a future global population of 10 billion, and we take a minimum human community size of 500 individuals, each minimum human community would have at least 15,000 stars to choose from to find an appropriate planetary system to settle. That’s a wide of range of choice.

World Enough, And Time

Now, I realize that these numbers are not likely to bear much of any relationship to likely facts on the ground in the future. People will mostly want to stay on Earth, and people who leave for other planetary systems will want to live in communities of more than 500 persons. My only point in this thought experiment is to demonstrate how much room there is for us in the universe — or that little corner of the universe that we call “our” galaxy.

All of this is ours for the asking. All we need do is allow industrial-technological civilization to continue on its course of expansion, and not cripple even those developments that seem to pose terrible dilemmas for human beings, and the growth of that civilization will give us opportunities that we can scarcely imagine today.

If the growth of technology includes the technologies that will ultimately allow for off-world expansion, we need not even count on or think about the industrial-technological civilization that we turn over to our machines, or the alienating and oppressive forms of timeclock labor to which it subjected many generations of human beings.

With a spacefaring civilization, a very different niche for human “employment” opens up to human beings — a niche as different from the jobs of industrial-technological civilization as peasant farm labor was also different from the jobs of industrial-technological civilization.

We will have the opportunity to “return” to our human, all-too-human roots, farming or roaming or tending herds as we prefer, but with far greater opportunities, far fewer discomforts, much longer and healthier lives, and greatly expanded knowledge.

In such a world, there will be something for everyone, and no need to create “make work” because we will all be so busy being human.

Tokamak design fusion reactor. I tried to include this image in...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:24:00 -0700

Tokamak design fusion reactor. I tried to include this image in my previous post about an article in the ITER project but (for some reason) couldn’t make it work.

One giant leap for mankind: £13bn Iter project makes breakthrough in the quest for nuclear fusion, a solution to climate change and an age of clean, cheap energy

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:10:00 -0700

One giant leap for mankind: £13bn Iter project makes breakthrough in the quest for nuclear fusion, a solution to climate change and an age of clean, cheap energy :

Having just written about the natural technology of fusion I was interested to see Steve Conner writing in The Independent about recent develops at ITER, the international effort to harness fusion as a commercial energy source by way of a tokamak reactor (i.e., employing the technology of magnetic confinement).

Conner has compared the project to the Tower of Babel for the inevitable confusions and misunderstandings that have arisen from the participation of scientists from 34 distinct nation-states, but the pretext of the article is that crucial parts of the reactor have been given the go-ahead so that the enormous reactor itself can literally come together, with actual assembly of the reactor having commenced.

The article quotes Brain Machlin:

“There are a million parts to the Iter machine and this will be the most complex and technically challenging assembly task. The tokamak reactor is 30 metres tall and consists of 18 toroidal magnetic coils weighing hundreds of tons that will each have to be positioned with a precision of less than two millimetres.”

Reading this I was reminded of a documentary I watched recently, Journey to Palomar, based on the book The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope by Ronald Florence. In this detailed account of the design and construction of the Mount Palomar 200 inch telescope this great scientific instrument is called “the perfect machine.”

Given all that has been put into ITER, and all that is likely to go into the project in the coming years, we might well call this tokamak fusion reactor “the perfect machine” of our time.

The Vacuous Identity Principle

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:06:00 -0700

Constructivism without Constructivism

While I was recently in Uruguay I wrote a post on constructivism – Constructivism without Constructivism – in which I proposed a way of thinking about constructivism that I have since realized can be generalized as a distinct principle of reasoning.

Agreeing in Principle

We all know what it is like to “agree in principle” even while continuing to disagree over facts and details, and indeed disagreeing about everything other than the principle under consideration. This was the approach that I suggested for thinking about constructivism: that we might agree in principle that imposing limits on formal thought in order to ensure the consistency and coherency of such thought, even while not agreeing to the particular limitations proposed by contemporary constructivism.

Constructivism and Kantian Discipline

Constructivism seeks a more disciplined approach to formal reason than that of classical eclecticism (the latter term I have taken from Torkel Franzén). To speak of discipline in connection with reason immediately suggests Kant’s characterization of discipline near the end of the Critique of Pure Reason:

“The restraint which is employed to repress, and finally to extirpate the constant inclination to depart from certain rules, is termed discipline.”

But to understand the formal discipline advocated by constructivism through the lens of Kant’s conception of discipline is problematic, since constructivistic thought itself can be understood as a deviation from classical rules of logic (intuitionistic logic is sometimes identified as a deviant logic), so that discipline might be required to restrain the impulse to depart from classical rules of reasoning (such as tertium non datur, or P or not-P).

Yet the spirit of Kant’s conception of discipline, and its essentially constructivist character (in harmony with Kant’s oft-noted proto-constructivism), is revealed in the immediately preceding sentence to that quoted above:

“…where the limits of our possible cognition are very much contracted, the attraction to new fields of knowledge great, the illusions to which the mind is subject of the most deceptive character, and the evil consequences of error of no inconsiderable magnitude—the negative element in knowledge, which is useful only to guard us against error, is of far more importance than much of that positive instruction which makes additions to the sum of our knowledge.”

The constructivist’s focus on limiting classical eclecticism to a more disciplined subset of formal reasoning techniques is clearly an instance of, “the negative element in knowledge,” and, in so far as discipline must be employed in order to extirpate the tendency to depart from the constructivistically acceptable rules of formal reasoning, just so far is constructivism disciplined.

Constructivism and Cantorianism

Given that limitation is the essence of constructivism, it is no wonder that Cantorianism is the bête noir of constructivists, with Cantor’s transfinite numbers as symbolic of the epistemic hubris of non-constructive thought that recognizes no limits, no boundaries, and no intrinsic finitude to human cognition.

Set theory and transfinite numbers have long been singled out for particular execration by constructivists. Cantor himself was personally singled out. Kronecker called him a “corrupter of youth,” which puts Cantor in the excellent company of Socrates. Cantor felt the opprobrium leveled against him no less than did Darwin, not withstanding Cantor’s sincere piety and his sincere efforts to make his thought theologically palatable. Both Darwin and Cantor knew that they were offending to the intellectual pieties of their time, even as both transcended the limitations of their time.

Despite the great many differences among constructivists themselves, and the many paths proposed to constructivism, all can agree that Cantorianism is beyond the pale. Intuitionists, predicativists, finitists, all hold in common their rejection of infinitistic reasoning. (Just as many of Darwin’s contemporaries agreed in principle about evolution, but rejected the mechanism of natural selection.)

Do constructivists really completely reject Cantorism? The story of constructivism since its inception has been a story both of the growing sophistication of constructivist methods, and the growing number of non-constructively discovered results that can be reproduced by constructive methods. But I will leave this aside for the time being, perhaps to recur to this interesting observation at some future time (a time not specifically identified and therefore a non-constructively identified time).

The Constructivist Consensus

Given that the many different schools of constructivism, which are legion, and which are, many of them mutually incompatible, agree in principle that non-constructive and infinitistic reasoning is fatally flawed, there is something more to constructivism that mere limitation — or perhaps I should say that constructivism is essentially concerned with the kind of limitations to formal thought that yield finitistic reasoning.

Well, I can even go this far in agreeing in principle with constructivism. Logic and mathematics must be thought by finite human minds, and yet I still reject that particular constructivist constraints placed upon formal thought.

Introducing the Vacuous Identity Principle

This possibility of agreeing in principle without agreeing in fact I will call the Vacuous Identity Principle. When two or more individuals agree upon a principle, but agree about nothing other than the bare principle itself, they accept the identical principle, but without instances in common the principle is vacuous.

From the standpoint of pragmatism, the vacuous identity principle is no principle at all. If in logic and mathematics, as elsewhere, we are to observe the principle by their fruits ye shall know them, and the formal fruits of two logicians or mathematicians who assent to the vacuous identity principle but agree on nothing else, remain distinct, then we cannot “cash out” the identity of principle.

To turn this around, we can see how much of our thought, even in purely formal matters, is pragmatically driven, given that a purely formal assertion of agreement in principle may have no practical consequences.

Vacuous Identity and Vacuous Distinction

In formulating the vacuous identity principle I realize that I have previously come across the contrary of this principle, and this was an assertion by J. L. Austin that, “A distinction which we are not in fact able to draw is — to put it politely — not worth making.” (a line I also quoted in my post Of Distinctions, Principled and Otherwise)

These principles — my Vacuous Identity Principle and Austin’s rejection of vacuous distinctions — are two sides of the same coin, and if we recognize the validity of the vacuous identity principle, we also ought to recognize the validity of distinctions that make no difference, i.e., that have no practical consequences — in other words, the Vacuous Distinction Principle.

The vacuous identity principle is a principle of generalization, while the vacuous distinction principle is a principle of formalization.

An Indispensability Argument for Vacuous Concepts

An identification without identity is an identification not worth making, one might say, as one might also say that the distinction without a difference is not worth making — except that I think it is worth making. Thus in asserting the Vacuous Identity Principle I am asserting the legitimacy of vacuous concepts, and I think this is important to recognize, since vacuous concepts often play a significant role in formal reasoning.

The distinction made between a unit set and its only member is dismissed by some as a vacuous distinction, and an overly-subtle distraction in set theory, but I don’t see it like this at all. I think it was Frege who pointed out that the concept “natural satellite of the Earth” is a set with one member, while the concept “natural satellite of Venus” is a set with no members, and therefore, in a sense, a vacuous concept — but a perfectly legitimate concept.

Any concept of which we can predicate the number zero is a vacuous concept, but contemporary mathematics could not get by without the concept of zero. Therefore there is an indispensability argument for vacuous concepts, and therefore also, presumably, for both vacuous identities and vacuous distinctions.

How are humans going to become extinct?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:00:23 -0700

How are humans going to become extinct?:

Existential risk is in the news again. Not long ago Foreign Policy magazine published a story on existential risk, Doomsday Preppers by Joshua E. Keating, and now the BBC has an article, How are humans going to become extinct? by Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent. As of this writing, the BBC story has 725 comments, which demonstrates a real interest on the part of the public.

The BBC article rightly focuses on “threats we have no track record of surviving,” which are also those risks that Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is highlighting. Mostly these are anthropogenic existential risks.

While the article of course mentions Nick Bostrom and Sir Martin Rees, it also identifies less well known members of the Oxford institute such as geneticist Seán O’Heigeartaigh and machine intelligence researcher Daniel Dewey.

While the topics covered by the Future of Humanity Institute sound dizzying in their complexity and sophistication — the anthropogenic existential risks produced by advanced industrial-technological civilization tend to be at the outer edge of science and technology — it really comes down to the problem of unintended consequences and the “sorcerer’s apprentice” scenario: will we create something we can’t control, and which gets so out of hand that it has catastrophic consequences.

Media treatments of existential risk tend of focus either on the “doomsday” aspect, which has a certain Hollywood-esque appeal, or the regulatory aspect, which asks what kind of laws to do have to put in place to control the potentially uncontrollable.

It is great the existential risk should be getting public attention, but I would also like to see existential risk mitigation efforts that don’t fatalistically focus on doomsday or bureaucratically on regulating technologies perceived to be “out of control.” It would not be going too far to say that doomsday fatalism and the pretense of being able to control the direction of industrial-technological civilization are, in themselves, existential risks of no small order.

Peace, harmony and oil: Despite assertions to the contrary, Iraq’s Kurds are inching towards outright independence

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Peace, harmony and oil: Despite assertions to the contrary, Iraq’s Kurds are inching towards outright independence:

A few weeks ago in Iraq 10 years on: Good times in Kurdish Irbil I wrote about a BBC article by Ahmed Maher of BBC Arabic, Irbil, and now The Economist has an article, Peace, Harmony, and Oil, that reiterates the news from Iraqi Kurdistan: things are good, and getting better.

The relative success of Iraqi Kurdistan brings with it both risks and opportunities.

There are risks of conflict with the surrounding regimes that are concerned that their own minority Kurdish populations will look toward the homeland the Kurds have created for themselves in Iraq and will want to be a part of this, and there are risks of confrontation with the central government in Baghdad.

There are also many opportunities. The Economist article says that 4,000 trucks a day now cross the Turkish-Kurdish border, despite Turkey’s long history of tensions with its own Kurdish minority. As happens so often in human history, trade trumps fear.

The instability of surrounding regimes has actually played into the Kurds hands, rather than destabilizing the region as one might expect under other circumstances. Many of the refugees that Iraqi Kurdistan has taken in have been fellow Kurds, who are able to rapidly integrate into Kurdish society because of their shared ethnicity.

This is, after all, the original idea of the nation-state, but it is an idea that has become lost as the ideological superstructure of the international nation-state system ossifies and departs ever further from the realities on the ground. (Something I have pointed out repeatedly, as in my post Geopolitical Irony.)

And so it is that the Kurds, who really are a nation-state in every sense that counts, do not have a nation-state officially recognized by the international nation-state system, even while Iraq, which manifestly is not a nation-state in any meaningful sense, is an official recognized nation-state.