Reason's aversion to contingency is very strong

MY NOTING THE FAILURE OF "ENLIGHTENMENT" THINKING in riffing off of Hannah Arendt's great essay Lying in Politics is absolutely justified not only by her text, it is supported by another brilliant critic of the technocratic ideology of the time who cited exactly this essay, and who I will get to in a minute.  

Continuing on after what she said about advertising and the dishonest habits it instills, she said:

The second variety of lying, though less frequent in everyday life, plays a more important role in the Pentagon Papers.  It also appeals to much better men, to those, for example, who are likely to be found in the higher ranks of the civilian services.  They are, as Neil Sheehan's felicitous phrase, professional "problem solvers,"  and they were drawn into government from the universities and the the various think tanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analyses, and prepared, as they thought, to solve all of the "problems" of foreign policy.  A number of the authors of the McNamara study belong to this group and it is to them, after all, that we owe this truthful though of course not complete story of what happened inside the machinery of government. [The basis of the Pentagon Papers.]

The problem-solvers have been characterized as men of great self-confidence, who "seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail," and they worked together with the military of whom "the history remarks that they were 'men accustomed to winning.'"  We should not forget that we owe it to the problem-solvers' effort at impartial self-examination, rare among such people, that the actors' attempts at hiding their role behind a screen of self-protective secrecy (at least until they have completed their memoirs - which in our century have become the most deceitful genre of literature) were frustrated.  The basic integrity of those who wrote the report is beyond doubt;  whether he knew them or not, they could indeed be trusted by Mr. McNamara to produce an "encyclopedic and objective" report.

I will break in to point out that Arendt's characterization of the modern memoir, already true in her day has become such a flagrant and profitable practice that it is typical of those who witness the most serious of wrongdoing which they don't report but save up for their memoirs and "journalists" who will save stuff that a real reporter should be expected to report in a timely manner, so as to have it figure in the ending of wrongdoing instead of the profitability of the reporters' eventual book deal. I think we would all be better served if a ban on such book deals and a requirement for the timely reporting of crimes in office were a routine part of the hiring of all government workers.  The class of nest-featherers who save it for their book don't seem to make especially good public servants.

But these moral qualities that deserve admiration, clearly did not prevent some of them from participating for many years in the game of deceptions and falsehoods.  Confident "of place, of education and accomplishment,"  they lied perhaps out of mistaken patriotism.  But the point is that they lied not so much for their country, certainly not for their country's survival, which was never at stake, as for its "image."  In spite of their undoubted intelligence - it is manifest in many memos from their pens - they also believed that politics is but a variety of public relations and were taken in by all the bizarre psychological premises underlying this belief.

Still, they obviously were different from the ordinary image makers.  Their distinction lies in that they were problem solvers as well, hence they were not just intelligent but prided themselves on being "rational,"  and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above "sentimentality" and in love with "theory," the world of sheer mental effort.  They were eager to find formulae, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, which would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them,  that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be.

I'll break in again to point out this is a description of what could be considered the liturgical language of materialist enlightenment scientism in which the trappings of mathematical logic and science replace late classical Greek, late stage Latin, early Slavonic or otherwise dead languages and incense. In a Protestant context, early 17th century literary English.  Perhaps that was as deceptively and superficially persuasive to the men who generated it as they hoped it would be to their intended audience because of that. Such absurdity is certainly part of the stock-in-trade of the pseudo-social-sciences and other such over-attenuated fraudulent mimicking of scientific method and mathematics. If you object to me pointing out the pseudo-scientific nature of those things which pretend to deal with human behavior, something which is, in every way "man made" consider the next sentence and the rest of the paragraph.

However, unlike the natural scientist who deals with matters which, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and which therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian as well as the politician deals with human affairs which owe their existence to man's capacity for action, and that means, to man's relative freedom from things as they are.  Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past as well.  In so far as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until his theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts.  Instead they will be tempted to fit their reality - which, after all, is man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise - into their theory, thus mentally getting rid of a disconcerting contingency.

Reason's aversion to contingency is very strong - it was Hegel, the father of modern utopian thinking, who held that "philosophical contemplation has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental."  Indeed much of the modern arsenal of political theory - the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios, written for imagined "audiences," and the careful enumeration of usually three "options" A,B,C, whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes and B the "logical" middle-of-the-road "solution" of the problem - has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions.  The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, and therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgement for the multitude of real possibilities.  What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of these facts.  

It strikes me that this is also a huge temptation and common practice of the highest and most theoretical reaches of the legal profession, Oliver Wendell Holmes certainly wanted to do something like this in his attempt to make the law more like what he imagined to be science in order to achieve scientific predictability in the law.  That what might have been predictable was merely an illusion based on his dreamed of methodology, inapt to real life and certainly not producing justice would certainly not have worried such a lofty thinker.  The higher the judge, the more removed from consequences they seem to be.  The, I hope dying or dead, fashion of "neuro-law" that I read about about decade ago is probably an even more decadent development of something similar, aping, though, not physics but the "behavioral and cognitive sciences" as revealed in the man-made, artificial, multi-color brain images of fMRI.  In the Roberts Court the getting rid of facts is certainly the basis of most of its Republican-fascist majority opinions these days, many of those very obviously reliable facts disregarded those of science.

If you don't think I am almost irresistibly tempted to take up just about each and every point of this to point out that what Arendt criticizes reeks of 18th-20th century "enlightenment" thinking, you must not have read much of what I've written here.  She noted that the "problem-solvers" tried to copy what they believed physicists could do, one of my central criticisms of the "enlightenment" and all of those alleged sciences which operate far, far outside of the realms where you really can follow scientific method.  In that they prove they are certainly stuck in the 19th if not 18th century view of science because one of the greatest achievements of modern science and mathematics was to explode that myth that those most exigent fields of logic and scientific method produced an absolute view of reality.  

I will forego that long digression to point out something I didn't realize before last night, that I'd read some of her essay in reading Joesph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason, in which he cites this section of the essay to point the same thing out in a different context of popular and scientific gullibility.

Surely, much of what we today regard as good and useful, as well as much of what we would call knowledge and wisdom, we owe to science.  But science may also be seen as an addictive drug.  Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but as happens with many other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.  Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of a age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality.  Thus we have very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint.  Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hoards of professional problem solvers.  As Hannah Arendt said about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:

"They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being "rational" . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them;  that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not "judge" they calculated . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making."

And so too have nearly all political confrontations, such as those between races and those between the governed and their governors, come to be perceived as merely failures in communication.  Such rips in the social fabric can then be systematically repaired by the expert application of the latest information-handing techniques - at least so it is believed.  And so the rationality-is-logicality equation, which the very success of science has drugged us into adopting as virtually an axiom, has led us to deny the very existence of human conflict, hence the very possibility of the collision of genuinely incommensurable human interests of of disparate human values, hence the existence of humans themselves.

It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinnner argues.  If they are, then its presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do.  But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certainly knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.[I went through one of A. S. Eddington's essay which made the same point a few years back.]  When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations.  No such sets of correspondences can ever be proven to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of  set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empirically observed phenomena.  Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the sifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture and intuition.  It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the abandonment of that theory.  Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is the faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict.  In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.

The man on the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well proven as his own existence.  His certitude is an illusion.  Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion . . .

As Hanna Arendt derived from her reading of the Pentagon Papers, such faith in scientific method and logicality well outside of where it can honestly be applied is hardly just a habit of the common Person.  This denomination of scientistic faith is the real faith tradition of most of us with college credentials or merely an exposure to media, even those who deny some of the most well established science, such as the science of human caused climate change and it more than has its match in lawerly and, especially judicial arrogance which uses the same framing but with even very good science available to it, will dispose of both science and evidence and reality, though they will go through a charade of logicality, such as Alito does, a going through motions which some of his younger fellow "justices" seem to not feel they need to go through as a charade.  The habits of scientific method, the pretenses of modern educated thought to follow logicality in the decadent state of eutrophic "enlightenment" culture are, perhaps like those matters that Arendt notes are the object of public lying:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.

This pose of logicality, of scientific thought which, Weizenbaum notes that science is very much like a game in which the method is to follow the human made rules of the game. The pretense is that there is no other means of arriving at reliable truth that should be consequential in human law.  No wonder the Supreme Court so breezily lies about the nature of the Bill of Rights, misrepresenting when it doesn't totally ignore the legislative record of the 14th Amendment in their games of "originalism" and "textualism", the necessity of the Voting Rights Act in such a decadent intellectual environment which, nevertheless, poses as if it has all of the presumed virtues of both science and logicality while pursuing the most raw and ruthless of power and oppression.  

A Note: In what I said the other day about the role that cinematic and video fantasy and sci-fi play in such things as the crackpot idea that Biden and NOAA can control the direction of a hurricane, talking more about it, it occurs to me that the "science" in sci-fi often, maybe typically presents science and technology as ultimately powerful, either now or in some past long ago and far away or in some maybe even human future.  It is omnipotent and omniscient.  You can add that to the list of gods of materialism, I suppose.  That so many more People imbibe that non-reality than have much of a familiarity with real science and entirely more than who have any real knowledge of the actual limits of science is certainly not a trivial matter when it comes to the gullibility of up to millions of us to such delusions.  The insistence that such a thing could not have any significant effect strikes me as being just as absurd as the belief that science and technology have such ridiculously claimed powers now.