BTW, the 80% was a made up number. I’d be interested in the actual value, but of course that’s hard to come by. Suffice to say, television watching is very prevalent in our society.
Me’Corva
Hamish: Or it could be that the general state of affairs for most people was so bloody miserable that ‘depression’ was just a general state of affairs.
Likewise, I’ll bet there wasn’t a lot of ‘teen angst’ in subsistance economies. It’s tough to feel a lot of ‘angst’ when your senses are taken up by feeling exhausted and starvingly hungry.
I think is true for many people, but not for all. Some of us look inward for a sense of success.
But is happiness simply the satisfaction of needs?
I mean, we’ve come to accept this definition, most of us. But I’ve wondered about that, too. Over the course of our history, we’ve come up with dozens of definitions of happiness, including “a clean conscience,” or “a life of moderation.” I’ve found, personally, that these last two are more likely to give me what I call happiness, whereas getting what I want rarely does.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea of a hierarchy of needs. It seems to me I did the most thinking about right and wrong, the powers of reason, and happiness, during the three-year period where I was living at subsistence, and some weeks, below subsistence level, and was forced to consider whether it was all worth it.
And many societies that are continually threatened by starvation have rich philosophical lives.
But that’s precisely my point. In a humanitarian effort, reason can organize the structures, find funding, find food, discover medecines, find ways of getting food and medecine to those who desperately need it. But the one thing it doesn’t provide is the motivation to do so. It remains a “value judgement,” which in my mind is a perfectly good thing, but it’s not rational.
In the hands of someone of different values, Science provides the weapons and the polluting chemicals, and Reason provides the explanations. There’s a reason we refer to ignoring one’s conscience as “rationalization.”
**
A point I heartilly agree with 
**
I get the idea we’re actually arguing the same point. I believe Reason is only as good as the values that it’s used to support.
My problem is twofold.
First, we’ve placed Reason on a very high pedestal. So high, in fact, that when it’s used to rationalize our values away, we’re more likely to believe the well-reasoned argument than what we know in our hearts to be right. When it comes to a battle between the views of the experts and the evidence of our own senses, a disturbingly-large number of people choose the views of the experts.
Second, the existence of the soft sciences is evidence that we are still looking for happiness and a better society through science. These sciences – psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology – all seek to improve us or our society.
At their best, these are philosophies dressed up with dry statistics. It’s not enough to develop some key insight into, say, the human psyche or the realities of power. In today’s intellectual environment, these things have to be proved with numbers. Fortunately, social statistics are easy to find, and enough of them exist to “prove” every point.
At their worst, these are excuses for dogmas, cloaked in science’s respectibility. Take a little bit from the soft sciences, a little bit from the hard sciences, add the personal views of “social scientist” on human nature, and suddenly you have communism, faschism, laissez-faire capitalism, nationalism, and many other -isms besides.
By claiming scientific respectibility, these ideologies shift the debate from whether the philosophy in question will actually improve human lives, to whether the philosophy is scientifically “right,” and therefore inevitable.
Why can’t we just jettison the statistics and other trappings of science, and admit the “soft” sciences are just philosophy? Then we could judge them on their practical merits, whether they do what they claim to do. Besides, as long as we consder “sciences,” non-experts will be forever left out of the debate of whether these philosophies do or don’t improve their lives. Putting these big questions into the hands of the experts is probably one of the reason for the poverty of democratic debate. Anyone can be a philosopher. You ned qualifications to be an expert.
Why can’t we return happiness and better living to philosophy?
**
Precisely. Thank you
BTW, sorry for my long posts everyone. I just have a lot to say on this subject :o
A lot of people “feel in their hearts” that homosexuals should be shunned and denied rights, or that their child should not be allowed to be healed by modern medicine, or that abortion doctors are murderers and must be killed. Should the fact that they believe it in their hearts mean that any reason-based arguments to not believe as they do can be ignored by the holders of such beliefs with a clear conscience? You wouldn’t want them to choose the well-reasoned argument over the one that they feel is right, after all.
Being gay and pro-choice, of course not.
But well-reasoned, objective, libertarian arguments are dissolving the social safety nets of Canada and the United States, leaving the poor with little or no food and inadequate medical care. The disgust I feel over those events isn’t rational, but I certainly believe it to be right.
I never suggested we replace Reason with morality, only that the two be permitted to be checks and balances for one another. In a society that worships Reason, Reason has no check or balance. It’s the trump card in every game.
Do you have any examples of some poor people that have been left without food or health care? Any at all? Or is this just rhetoric?
Oh, and exactly which safety net has been dismantled? Do you mean welfare reform, which has been hailed as a phenomenal success by both the right and left, after being passed by a bipartisan vote? Or are you talking about something else? Be specific, please.
First, I disagree, but libertarianism and social safety nets are another topic.
Second, you seem to have simply believed libertarians when they have claimed that their position is based solely on reason. This is not true (although I doubt all of them would agree). Libertarianism generally accepts that no one has the right to initiate force or fraud on another as a premise. Libertarians may have different arguments for believing this, but somewhere along the line, they simply accept that this is the dividing line between right and wrong.
They probably try to make your views seem less logical by showing that they aren’t as neatly defined and divided.
Reason is incapable of ultimately deciding moral issues. It is useful for evaluating them and finding where they fall on your own scale of morality. Thus, libertarianism appears logical as it involves using logic to decide things, but there is still a desire to maximize individual freedom at its root, and that is every bit as irrational as your compassion.
Another thing is that many people arguing against libertarians can often be shown to want contradictory things. The only way for you to get out of this conundrum is to use reason to define what you accept right and wrong.
Okay, must to move this away from the medical advances just a bit, here are a few other advantages citizens of 21st Century First World nations enjoy:
[ul]
[li]Freedom of religion (including freedom from religion for those of us who aren’t religious).[/li][li]Freedom of speech and a free press.[/li][li]Access to vast reserves of information, including libraries, the Internet, widespread bookstores, etc. This includes a lot of schlock, of course, but also the world’s great literature and philosophy. And, in accordance with the above point, citizens can access this information without fear of political repercussions.[/li][li]Democracy, the power to participate in choosing one’s rulers and in making the laws which govern one’s life.[/li][li]Equal rights for women.[/li][li]Sexual freedom, including the right to marry out of love rather than in accordance with the economic or political interests of the tribe or clan or family, and freedom of sexual orientation as well.[/li][li]Freedom to pursue happiness in other ways as well; to choose where you want to live and what you want to do with your life. This is both a negative freedom–there are no laws like those of one of the Roman Emperor Diocletian mandating that children follow the same careers as their fathers–and a positive freedom, in that most First Worlders have sufficient material prosperity to[/li][li]Free public education, and widespread access to post-secondary education.[/li][li]The end of a whole host of injustices and evils and exploitations–chattel slavery; child labor; the legal establishment of racism, caste systems, religious or ethnic ghettos, aristocracies, etc.[/li][/ul]
Of course not everyone even in the First World fully enjoys all of these advantages. However, in the pre-industrial age, practically no one enjoyed all of them; with the rise of modern industrialized democracy, more and more people in at least a segment of the world now can. And even the poor in First World countries tend to be better off than most people are now or have been historically. Finally, if we haven’t yet extended the full benefits of modern civilization to everyone, does that mean we need to abandon those things which have worked so far to extend those benefits to as many people as now have them?
It’s probably simplistic just to attribute all of these things to “science”, or even “science and reason”. It’s more the whole interconnected complex of science, rationalism, technology, industrialization, capitalism, liberalism (in the broader sense of constitutionally-guaranteed individual rights and representative democracy, not necessarily the more partisan American sense), and liberalism (what the hell–this is Great Debates–so here I do mean it more in the partisan American sense of social restraints on unfettered capitalism). However, reason and science, and the fruits of science–technology and the economic advances made possible by technology–have a lot to do with it.
Finally–morality isn’t opposed to reason. What exactly should we use in trying to make our morality more enlightened if not our reason?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by MEBuckner *
[ul]
[li]Freedom to pursue happiness in other ways as well; to choose where you want to live and what you want to do with your life. This is both a negative freedom–there are no laws like those of one of the Roman Emperor Diocletian mandating that children follow the same careers as their fathers–and a positive freedom, in that most First Worlders have sufficient material prosperity [/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
To, um, pursue happiness and stuff.
Hamish,
By your remark on fundamentalism on the upsurge, did you refer to the last fifty or seventy odd years or the last ten or twelve. If you meant the last ten or so, I think you have put your finger on something.
Otherwise, I am suspicious of Reason’s prized position. Its near tyrannical dominance as mode of inquiry is restrictive. You have mentioned economic arguments already so I won’t repeat them.
It has also become a habit of thought: definitely doxa if not dogma. I challenge it on those grounds alone.
Also because the utopian rhetoric of the Enlightenment signals the Enlightenment’s blind spot…Reason the panacea to cure all things. It has not.
Finally, it’s the prepositions and binary oppositions in the defense of reason that bother me. As if there was some directive course to humanity upwards, downwards…with respect to what? You noted the prolifery of progress in medicine and the persistent supposition that the harder life in the olden days was worse. I generally view such claims as quickly deconstructed. It’s harder to conceive of a past society as being both exactly the same as we are and completely different at the same time. But I think the paradox is more honest than the hierarchies that humans tend to create in interpreting history.
So, deconstruct away.
I assume from your screen name that you’re female. You might want to consider the fact that practically no one will question your right to participate in discussions of politics or philosophy based on that fact, and compare that to how earlier societies (or some non-Western societies today) would have viewed the matter.
Your assumption of my gender doesn’t say much for progress!!
I feel so privileged to live in the twenty-first century.
Well, I’m just going by your screen name.
But if you aren’t female, then you still live in a society where you can adopt a female persona if you wish. Heck–assuming it turns out you are in fact a guy named “Bob”–you can wear a dress, and ask that everyone call you “Katerina”. Even in our more enlightened age, you will get some flack for this, but much less than you likely would have in many other times and places.
Yippie. A perfect example of why social sciences are so difficult. Laws of physics are at least constant, and don’t need to be interpreted so much. You are right, and also wrong. Need I say that the happiest people are people who strive to do what you do – but also, being in bad situations where everyone else isn’t is very isolating? And, in general, people don’t like it.
…
Yes, we are definately saying similar things, and we are getting bogged down in semantics. Your comment about values and my comments about values shows we are different people – moderation is not a word I understand! =:> But, we are both slowly learning what it takes to be happy.
I think the way I would say what you are saying is that sometimes, arguments boil down to value-judgements, and that isn’t clear based on the logic people use. Your capitalism example is a good one – some people say that capitalism is the most fair, etc etc etc. But, there clearly is a continuum between a society that rewards people too little, and a society that rewards people too much. After all, a society where it cost $1 million per child could be capitalism, but wouldn’t be fair. Where you draw the line between too little and too much is a value judgement, and partly explains the difference in philosophy between the views on poor in Canada verses in the States.
And, btw, the sheer volume of your post makes it a bit unfeasabile for me to respond to everything. :< Sorry.
Peace, Love, and Contra Dance,
Me’Corva
{fixed code. --Gaudere}
[Edited by Gaudere on 08-22-2001 at 09:51 AM]
Three hundred years ago:
Kings rule, aristocrats own, merchants buy and sell, peasants work, and that is how things work in the best of times and places. Changes in ones station in life are primarily mythical. Plagues kill double-digit portions of the population every couple of generations, and in between times child mortality is 35 percent, maternal mortality near twenty. Malnutrition provides a ready-made physical superiority for the tiny minority that is well fed enough to reach full stature as adults.
Five percent of the population can get information about their own nations current events. That information is provided by central ruling powers. Having an opinion on philosophical matters is a luxury that has never occurred to the vast majority of the elite male population of the world, and is not allowed for others. The vast suffering of millions of ordinary people is accepted, expected, and unremarkable, even to the best informed and reasonable.
The entire African continent and much of the rest of the world is a slave labor resource generator for the closely held economic powers of ruling classes in the “civilized” world. The ruling power claims, and exercises a manifest destiny to compel this continuing exploitation. Changes in that structure provide benefit only so far as including new elite groups, and then only by force of arms. Suffering among the slave peoples is unlamented, expected, and where such peoples resist, encouraged.
In the next three hundred years, the greatest single factor changing this unspeakable barbarity called civilization is the pursuit of reason, and the promulgation of learning. While it is not entirely successful, even to this day, in changing the unthinking cruelties men perpetrate upon men, it is the only thing that has begun to allow us to even see ourselves as we really are. The difference between the genocide in Rwanda and Tanzania at the end of this last century and the myriad other attempts at genocide in history is that the world found out about it. The world chose to do nothing. It chooses to do nothing still, in the Congo, in Sierra Leone, and in a hundred other places. But the world can no longer pretend not to know. It is a small difference.
More than all other things, learning will change the world. Fighting ignorance is an unending task, and most of the battles are lost. But it grows. Not the learning of a few, in the halls of great universities, but the learning of the many, in tiny villages and towns. In the next three hundred years, there will be a new balance of power. Guard well your right to learn, and to teach.
Tris
“Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” ~ Thomas Jefferson ~
Left without food? That’s easy! Me!
As pressure mounted in British Columbia to “crack down on welfare fraud” and “pay the provincial defecit” – two of the an increasingly-insane right-wing’s favourite terms for abandoning the poor – the qualifications for getting and staying on welfare became almost impossible to match. After I was forced to leave home, I had to go on welfare, but, unable to produce all the paperwork, I was more or less left to starve to death. I almost did.
Things are almost as bad in Quebec, where, when the economy was at its worst, I was again without a job. Because the right-wing lobby has made it impossible to collect Employment Insurance unless you’ve worked a ridiculously large number of hours, I again had to go on welfare. But because I was young, and therefore assumed to be a cheat, they didn’t give me enough money to pay for rent, the phone bill, and eat every day. I needed the phone because potential employers would need to contact me. I needed clean clothes and printed resumes. If it hadn’t been for a few sympathetic friends, I don’t think I would have survived that period.
Just after I got off welfare, they started making people on it pay a portion of their medication’s costs! How on earth are people already choosing between eating and paying bills going to pay for medication? I knew a woman who was HIV-positive and had been on welfare for for awhile. She said most people who go on welfare just stop buying their pills.
I hear constantly now about putting user-fees into our health system. About a two-tiered system. A friend of mine with a serious chronic illness has had to wait in line at the emergency room 12 hours to get a bed and some care, because our hospitals are so underfunded.
Those of us who are on the bottom get to see the drastic and brutal side of these policies. To governments and their corporate sponsors, these are matters of pure logic. The corporations see tax money as a drain on the bottom line. A few of them buy Milton Friedman’s abstract reasoning as to why a high rate of unemployment is necessary. They convince their political friends, sometimes with arguments, sometimes through campaign contributions. For these people, the human suffering is all theoretical. It’s the economy that matters.
I’ve had to see it! I’ve had to live it!
Do you know now why I question pure Reason?
:mad:
I was thinking more in the Canadian context. As for Welfare Reform in the U.S., there’s one group that doesn’t consider consider it an unmitigated success – those who are on, or need, welfare. But what do they know? I bet they don’t even have bachelor’s degrees, much less PhDs in political science, social work, or economics. Why should such non-experts be in the debate, eh?
Well said
I think it’s healthy to examine the foundations of one’s civilization, to ensure we avoid during those foundations into dogma.
I did note the first, though I’m not entirely sure I noted the second.
The medical improvements alone would make me prefer our time to theirs, to say nothing of certain social changes I choose to believe are improvements.
Medieval society had a richer intellectual life than we give them credit for, but I think I like the underlying dogmas of their society even less than I like those of ours.
It’s just I’ve never been able to buy the “lesser of two evils” argument. Sure, given the choice between the two, I’d argue for Reason. But why are there only two choices?
Besides, I think medieval societies would have found our romanticization of their time amusing. Almost all medieval literature I have read portrays their age as sort of trash heap between the glorious age of Rome, and the glorious Kingdom of Heaven to come.
Unfortunately, this example illustrates my point for quite a few reasons.
Firstly, we do know about genocide, and choose to do nothing. We know how we can at least try to stop it. We have plenty of statistics and videotaped evidence illustrating the horrors. We have laws and structures in place to deal with criminals. A modern system of information has ensured that almost everyone knows about these things.
We are not ignorant about genocide in our time. Isn’t our failure to do something a moral one, rather than an intellectual one? Rather than a failure of knowledge?
Second, there’s the roots of the conflicts. I’ll take the Congo, since I know far less about the situation in Sierra Leone. The genocide there is generally presented as simply two warring tribes who’ve resumed their conflict.
We usually don’t think too deeply about the West’s responsibility for the conflict. In the 19th-century, Europeans began to carve up Africa into chunks. The practical reasons for this were twofold – the Industrial Revolution made Africa’s resources appealing, and Europe now had the medical knowledge advanced enough to offer some measure of protection to Europeans from diseases they had no immunity to.
But there was also an ideological imperative – Europe was going to “civilize” the “savages.” The leader of this campaign to bring Reason to the “natives” was Cecil Rhodes, and it was Europe’s conviction that they were doing the Africans a favour.
To be fair, technology has brought much-needed medecines to Africa. On the other hand, it has also brought firearms.
Europe also delivered the worst kind of nationalism – racist and ethnocentric theories and social darwinism. Ideologies created by applying science to society.
To say that the answer is simply more Reason and more knowledge worries me. I can’t help but ask which knowledge? Used by whom? With what intentions?
Knowledge without morality can be dangerous.
Do personal anecdotes count? I live in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and walk to work everyday. I walk through a roadway underpass, and see signs that people sleep under there. And the day before yesterday during my lunch break, I climbed down the river bank to look more closely at a turtle. Amongst the foliage and saplings, I saw that a person or group of people had tied a few younger trees together and covered them with a blanket to make a canopy. There were rags and blankets on the ground, and adult sized jeans spread over bushes to dry, and booze bottles and beer cans strewn about.
Some people fall between the cracks of the new welfare reform project, possibly because of mental illness, addiction problems or other problems.
Well, I’ll add to the personal anecdote.
When I was in grad school, I was below the poverty line. I was borderline desperate but had access to loans, so I can’t personally complain. But then I became ill and additionally needed major surgery. My prescription drugs are more than 500 dollars a month. My surgery cost more than 15000 dollars and I had two of those. My insurance ran out in five months. What an eyeopener. If I hadn’t friends to offer me free room and board and if I hadn’t family willing to help me out, my only other option was loans loans and more loans. I will have meds costs of 500 dollars or more a month for the rest of my life.
I kept thinking about the people in the same income level as I who didn’t have access to the loans.
In the U.S., it takes one uninsured illness to break someone and put them on the street.
If you don’t have friends and family, you are up a creek without a paddle.
If I’d been born even sixty years ago, however, I would be blind now.