On Reasoning: Science and Experimentation

At the most basic level, what did the Enlightenment thinkers mean by reason and the sciences? In practice, what is rationality, critical thinking, and experimentation? What does it mean to seek truth, knowledge, and understanding? What changes in thought were happening that led up to the American Revolution?

“Franklin also learned as a youth that minds untrained in science could also experiment. He later recalled for Swedish botanist Peter Kalm an experiment done by his father, Josiah: noticing that herring would spawn in one particular stream that led to Massachusetts Bay but not in another , Josiah had guessed that the activity had to do with the geographic location where the fish had been hatched. To test the theory, one year at spawning time he transported fish to the second stream, where they spawned and died; the following year, as Josiah had predicted, their offspring returned to the second stream.”
~ Tom Shachtman *

That offers an insight into the early scientific mind. That is the scientific method in essence. Josiah Franklin made some observations, analyzed those observations, formulated a falsifiable hypothesis, and then tested it with an experiment. He even used controls with the same species of spawning fish in two separate streams.

What is the ability demonstrated with that simple hands-on experiment? Is it reason? Is it science? What processes of cognition and perception were involved? What conditions and factors of influence make that possible?

This was not anything new. I’m sure people were doing all kinds of basic experiments long before the Enlightenment Age. This is an inherent human capacity, involving curiosity and problem-solving. Many other species especially higher primates similarly experiment, although less systematically. Such behaviors obviously have practical advantages for species survival. The Enlightenment Age just gave new emphasis, incentives, and articulation to this kind of activity. Science then formalized and regimented it.

But what is reason, whether pure or applied? Are humans ever fully rational and genuinely free of cognitive biases? Is the human intellect more than being a clever monkey pushed to the extreme?

——-

* Source:
Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries:
The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment
by Tom Shachtman
Chapter 2: “Variola” in Boston, 1721-1722
Kindle Locations 598-602

There Are Always Reasons

“During the war, we all learned to stop looking for reasons why things happen.”

Those are words from the ending monologue of How I Live Now. The movie is about World War III. The storyline concludes with the conclusion of fighting and the return to living. It is shown through the very personal view of someone still very young. The viewer, like the protagonist, has no understanding of the war. It came and went, as if a force of nature with no human meaning.

My thought, upon hearing that monologue, was that there are always reasons. One may not like or comprehend the reasons, but they exist. She speaks these words in reference to death and violence that is, from her perspective, best forgotten. Completely understandable.

A retreat from reasons or from reason entirely is a natural response to the utter shattering of what had previously seemed like a reasonable world, a society of law and order, of stability and certainty, of family and community. All gone in an instant, as nuclear war begins and martial law is declared.

* * * *

I imagine revolution would feel very similar, maybe even more traumatic than even a nuclear bomb going off in a nearby major city leading to a World War. What is so horrifying about revolution is that it is the enemy from within, the danger lurking among us. Even revolution far away in a foreign country poses the threat that revolution might be contagious.

There is a strange dynamic of reason and unreason. When it comes to what feels like mass chaos, no reason ever seems satisfactory. Yet, in the case of the French Revolution, Reason itself was blamed by the counter-revolutionaries. It’s not as if the counter-revolutionaries lacked reasons of their own or lacked the capacity or desire to reason when it served their purposes. Many of the criticisms of Reason ironically take on the appearance of being reasonable.

The fearful vision of ‘Reason’ is an imagined demon haunting the collective mind. It’s symbolic of or, maybe more accurately, a conflation with something greater. But what is it pointing towards? Also, what makes the reasons of the revolutionary supposedly different and more dangerous than the reasons given by their opponents?

* * * *

The world is full of reasons. What the revolutionary does is question and challenge the reasons that have become unstated assumptions. Most reasons that motivate us go hidden and those in power wish to keep them hidden. That is the secret of power and its Achille’s heel. To question and challenge this is to pull back the curtain and show what is behind. This action, to those with power or aligned with it, is in itself an act of violence, even before a single drop of blood is shed.

Reasons can be scary things. The best and worst within humanity is motivated by reasons of all kinds. There is always a reason, usually many reasons. What revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries both understand is that ideas have power. A reason unleashed can destroy or transform entire societies. And, once unleashed, it is impossible to put it back in Pandora’s box.

It isn’t the violence of revolution that is so horrific. States in non-revolutionary times regularly commit more violence than any revolution. The fear is that reason will lead to unreason, that an ideal will lead to a Reign of Terror where the outcome is uncertain. The fear is the uncertainty. The everyday violence of police and militaries is predictable and known. Most of the time, we humans prefer the familiar, like an abused child who returns home everyday to a parent who both beats them and feeds them. It is all the child knows. To stand up to the abuse would lead to possibly unforeseen consequences.

Still, there are those who do stand up to abuse. In politics, these sometimes become revolutionaries. They have their reasons, of course, but ultimately it is the unknown that excites them or gives them hope. They refuse to accept the status quo, what is established and known.

* * * *

As argued by revolutionaries of centuries past, this world is for the living, not the dead. This is why many revolutionaries believed no social construct (whether property, patent, or law) should outlive the lifetime of a single generation. That is what defines democracy in its only true form. It’s the ideal of establishing revolution itself as the norm, every generation its own self-ruled governance, the future’s unknown made into a familiar element of present society.

No reason is a sacred cow, no matter how long it has been passed on nor how deeply institutionalized. It is easy to attack the other guy’s sacred cow, but to be consistently principled is something entirely else. This principled stance is what made the counter-revolutionaries so fearful of ‘Reason’. They realized that revolutionaries would make no exceptions, that if possible they would follow justice to its inevitable conclusion.

Conservatives and libertarians will judge harshly the views of opponents, even going so far as demonizing them. They say taxation is theft, except for the tax laws they favor and when used to fund their preferred policies and programs. They say that the state is oppressive, except when it’s oppression against their enemies and against convenient scapegoats. They say that government is the problem, except when it supports their agenda and serves their interests.

Liberals can have similar problems, although typically being more subtle in their hypocrisy. Liberals don’t tend to argue for principle, come hell or high water. Liberals at least openly admit that they aren’t against any of these things on principle. Their principle, instead, is moderation. They are less concerned about taxes, governments, and states as general categories, while being more concerned about what purpose these serve, what ends result. The failure of liberalism is within this moderation. The weakness of liberalism is a fear of going too far and so never going far enough. Liberals, pathetic and weak as they can be, often play into the hands of their adversaries. This is taken as excusing them of blame for their own failure.

Conservatives and libertarians might have a point in their complaints, if they were only to act as though they genuinely believed what they said. If conservatives followed their principles without exception, that could be seen as admirable and liberals might then merit the criticisms lodged against them. But, in that case, conservatives and libertarians would then be radicals instead.

Principled consistency is the sole possession of the radical. Only those willing to go to extremes are willing to both acknowledge the unanswered questions and demand they be answered. The answers, the ideals, the reasons they offer may be deemed wrong or undesirable, but it is harder to accuse them of avoiding the difficult problems that afflict both left and right.

* * * *

Those who wish to escape reason often turn to God or Nature. They say that is just the way the world is. They refuse to take responsibility for their own beliefs. Instead, they project their beliefs outward, just as they project their fears. Still, to less extreme degrees, we are all resistant to the demands of reason. Human capacity for reason is imperfect, but it is nonetheless very real. Reason exists within human nature as much as does reason’s failure.

No matter what our response, in this post-Enlightenment age, we all live under the dominion of reason. Revolutionaries won that battle, even as they lost the war. The new order of reason we’ve inherited is battle-scarred and shell-shocked. In the light of reason, even when a mere candle flame in the dark, our collective madness has a hard time hiding its true nature. But what are we to do with this unsavory knowledge? We can reason ourselves literally to the moon. What reason hasn’t achieved is peace and justice. We use reason to build more devastating weapons and yet we can’t find a way to reason ourselves into not using them.

Faced with self-induced horror, our instinct is to deny reason, to escape the sad truth that it would whisper in our ear, to blame the light for what it causes us to see. Yet to say there is no reason leaves us also without hope. There can be no return to Eden’s innocence. Existing without reason is not a choice available to us. But where will reason lead us? What reason, what ideal and hope will we put forth as a guiding light?

Our reasons form the path we take. This is why we should choose our reasons carefully and with awareness. The reasons we give for the past will determine the reasons that shape our future. There are always reasons and maybe that is a reason for hope.

The Enlightenment Project: A Defense

I once again have a thought-web rumbling around in my head and it will necessitate my writing it out to clarify exactly what it involves.

This set of thoughts is basically just more of my contemplating the issues of ideology and psychology. It might be helpful to think of this as a continuation of my recent posts about Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral foundations, specifically as found in his recent book, The Righteous Mind — see here for the first post in the series). However, the posts it might most directly relate to is the last post I wrote in which I posed liberal analytical thinking against conservative intuitive thinking and the post before that in which I described the negative side of liberalism or rather liberal-mindedness. I probably also should put my thoughts in the context of some posts I wrote last year about American anti-intellectualism, specifically the strange school of thought inspired by Rand and Rothbard (see here and here).

Despite my criticisms of liberalism, particularly in its political failings, I find myself attached to liberalism as a general worldview. In terms of my personal inclinations, moreso than the political tradition, what interests me is the intellectual tradition of liberalism (in which I would also include the liberal tradition of creative arts that underlies both the high arts and the counter-culture); and this is what I particularly see of worth that comes out of the liberal predisposition. Liberalism is ultimately more of a cultural vision than an ideological system, and for this reason it isn’t within politics that liberalism shows off its best potential. The social science research shows liberals apparently are talented at not being misinformed about political issues, but this obviously doesn’t lead to them creating a successful and stable liberal society or even simply an ideologically and morally consistent liberal movement. Knowing and doing are two distinct abilities. Liberals are maybe better at doing on the small-scale such as being good community organizers, therapists, service workers, nurses, teachers, scientists, etc. On the large-scale, however, liberals tend to only do good to the degree that these small-scale activities add up to and form the ground of larger collective or political actions. This limitation of liberalism, I would add, seems to me is a limitation of all liberal societies, specifically democracies: the larger the democracy, the more likely the dysfunction and corruption.

The core of my present thought is the human capacity for reason… which is itself at the heart of the Enlightenment project and a major strain of Western Civilization going back to the Greeks (the ideal of the individual thinker probably having its origin in the Axial Age, a societal shift that seemingly impacted all of civilization at that time). Liberals have a greater faith in this capacity for reason and conservatives have less faith in it.

(By the way, I assume that most people understand that by ‘liberal’ I mean ‘liberal-minded’. Liberalism shows it’s highest correlation to social liberalism rather than economic liberalism which means liberal-mindedness to varying degrees can be found among many but not all left-wingers, quite a few libertarians, and even some moderate or independent conservatives. I would assume the majority of people in a modern liberal society have learned to think to some degree in a more liberal-minded fashion, the difference mostly being a matter of degree.)

Without further ado, let me begin with this basic distinction involving rationality.

—–

How conservatives tend to counter reason is often through such things as anecdotal evidence. They have some personal experience or an example of an exception to the rule. They look for a reason that justifies their gut response.

There is something about conservative morality that is pre-rational, it simply feels right, it is right because it is perceived as always having been right (whether that perception is an accurate or romanticized appraisal of the past). To a social conservative, what feels right might be expressed as a religious belief or a moral truth, typically perceived as of ancient origin. To a fiscal conservative, however, what feels right might be expressed as an intellectual axiom or concrete observation.

(Before going further, let me re-emphasize a point. People are complex and so conservative morality is rarely found in its extreme form, it being particularly rare in liberal societies such as the US; for simplicity’s sake, I’m speaking about the extreme which represents the archetype of conservatism, the ideal form; but in reality the average conservative is more moderate, although the more vocal and more right-wing conservatives will tend to more closely fit my descriptions. Nonetheless, it probably is true that most conservatives rely more on intuitive reasoning than analytical reasoning, by which I mean relative to most liberals — this is the argument I’m making, anyway.)

This conservative-minded intuitive reasoning touches upon the reason why many liberals are less trusting of anecdotal data. Liberals realize it is easy for all people to fall into motivated reasoning with anecdotal evidence for it opens one up to confirmation bias, it being hard to tell apart intuitive reasoning from motivated reasoning. Scientific data that isn’t anecdotal has more protections against such personal biases, after all the purpose of the scientific method is specifically to filter out personal biases. Conservatives seem less aware or less concerned about the unreliable nature of anecdotal data and the intuitive reasoning that is typically behind it. This conservative preference for the anecdotal seems to be a clear example of motivated reasoning since anecdotal data is sometimes the only evidence they can use to challenge scientific data, and so it is just what is conveniently at hand in justifying and rationalizing what they already believe. There is a satisfying simplicity in pointing to a tangible anecodate, it being more on the human level of everyday experience.

It’s from my libertarian-leaning dad that I learned to better understand why conservatives mistrust reason or only see it as valid on a more constrained level (by the way, keep in mind that my dad is a relatively liberal-minded intellectual conservative and so he doesn’t go as far as a stronger conservative would in constraining and mistrusting reason; my dad makes a fairly rational argument for the limits of rationality and he overall maintains great respect for rationality). My dad likes to share something he read from Thomas Sowell. Basically, it is about how a person will worry more about his own finger being cut off tomorrow than he will about a large number of people who actually died and are suffering far away in another country (notice how this is a very concrete scenario that is easy to imagine as an actual anecdote from someone’s life). From Sowell’s perspective, the constrained vision is more accurate to human nature in that humans are imperfect and imperfectible, rationality included. From my liberal-minded perspective, it would seem to be more rational (in terms of the objective data and pragmatic results) to spend one’s time doing something to help a large number of people (donate money and supplies, fly to the location to offer help and services, advocate for policies that improve public safety during catastrophes, etc) than to sit around worrying about a future event that will only effect you personally. But Sowell’s point is that humans aren’t and never will be overly rational in this way. Liberals, of course, disagree. Liberals see the objective data (at least in this case) as more relevant partly because they also feel more empathy for strangers, something Sowell doesn’t take into account. Not all people are equally constrained in their empathy or equally constrained in their rationality about all issues.

So, conservatives such as Sowell and my dad seem to openly admit in their own way that they find anecdotal data more persuasive. It is in fact how they define human nature. Such conservatives probably aren’t basing their conclusions on the social science research I refer to, but in coming from a different direction they come to a similar conclusion, at least about the conservative mindset. The disagreement is that conservatives argue that their conclusion applies to all people, both conservatives and liberals, but that liberals in their unconstrained vision are denying human nature. The research, however, seems to show that both the constrained vision and unconstrained vision are correct in a more limited way. The constrained vision is (relatively more) true to the conservative predisposition and the unconstrained vision is (relatively more) true to the liberal predisposition.

That said, conservatives do have an advantage to their vision. The research has shown that (through fear, stress, and disgust) it is easier to get a liberal to think and act like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to think and act like a liberal. The latter, however, isn’t impossible, just in some ways very difficult to accomplish. A further thing shown by research is that most Americans are symbolic conservatives (persuaded by abstract notions of conservatism) while being pragmatic liberals (supporting and defending specific liberal policies). So, it is complex and impossible to say either side is completely right or completely wrong, at least in the court of public opinion.

My most basic point is that talking about the objective data often confuses the underlying issues. We need to first make clear the underlying issues before discussing the data. I’ve discovered it is unhelpful and frustrating to bring up the best available data when it may seem irrelevant or less relevant to the priorities of the other side. To speak in terms of a obvious example (that I brought up in my last post about the symbolic conflations of intuitive thinking): Is abortion an issue simply about the objective data of decreasing or at least not increasing the rate of abortions? Or is abortion an issue symbolic of a deeper issue such as the conservative vision of social order versus the liberal vision of compassion and freedom? Until such questions are answered, talking about the data is pointless.

—–

By the way, in light of Haidt’s theory of moral foundations, Haidt does mention Thomas Sowell in his recent book. He doesn’t directly mention the constrained vs unconstrained visions there, although I’m fairly sure his use of “parochial” in his book refers to Sowell’s constrained vision. The specific terms of constrained and unconstrained do get discussed in at least one paper he co-authored:

Running Head: THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICS
Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations
Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt & Brian A. Nosek, 12/9/08

“Haidt (2008) recently suggested an alternative approach to defining morality that does not exclude conservative and non-Western concerns. Rather than specifying the content of a truly moral judgment he specified the functions of moral systems: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible” (p. 70). Haidt described two common kinds of moral systems – two ways of suppressing selfishness – that correspond roughly to Sowell’s two visions. Some cultures try to suppress selfishness by protecting individuals directly (often using the legal system) and by teaching individuals to respect the rights of other individuals. This individualizing approach focuses on individuals as the locus of moral value. Other cultures try to suppress selfishness by strengthening groups and institutions, and by binding individuals into roles and duties in order to constrain their imperfect natures. This binding approach focuses on the group as the locus of moral value.

“The individualizing-binding distinction does not necessarily correspond to a left-wing vs. right-wing distinction for all groups and in all societies. The political left has sometimes been associated with socialism and communism, positions that privilege the welfare of the group over the rights of the individual and that have at times severely limited individual liberty. Conversely, the political right includes libertarians and “laissez-faire” conservatives who prize individual liberty as essential to the functioning of the free market (Boaz, 1997). We therefore do not think of political ideology-or morality-as a strictly one-dimensional spectrum. In fact, we consider it a strength of moral foundations theory that it allows people and ideologies to be characterized along five dimensions. Nonetheless, we expect that the individualizing-binding distinction can account for substantial variation in the moral concerns of the political left and right, especially in the United States, and that it illuminates disagreements underlying many “culture war” issues.”

Also, I’d like to note that Sowell got this idea from Adam Smith. However, if we go back to the entire quoted section of Smith’s writing, it isn’t clear that Smith would agree with Sowell’s conservative conclusions:

“Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration.”

To clarify the origins of some of my own thinking, this general misunderstanding between ideological predispositions first became clear to me through something else Haidt had written (something I read, by the way, long before my recent discussions of Haidt’s theory). The following explanation gave me an insight into the conservative mind that had previously eluded me:

What Makes People Vote Republican?
By Professor Jonathan Haidt, September 2008
Annotated by Dr. Bruce L Gibb, September 2008

“They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn’t think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to `thicken up’ the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.”

Even Haidt seemingly admits that the conservative position is less rational in terms of objective pragmatism involved in dealing with the stated issues that can be scientifically measured and analyzed. I think Haidt’s point here isn’t dissimilar to my own. He sees the real debate as happening on another level, that of values. What I think Haidt misses, though, is that at least one of the liberal values relates to intellectuality (scientific inquiry, neutrality, curiosity, honesty, etc). Liberals take those outward issues as relevant on their own merits. It matters more to liberals which methods will actually reduce abortions, rather than just arguing over what liberals often see as subjective values.

That is the sense in which conservatives are less rational. For various reasons, conservatives are sometimes less prone to speak directly about what they consider most important, instead using symbolic issues as proxies for the real issues they care about. This is a point of confusion that has often led to frustration for me and for many liberals (along with probably many conservatives as well). Abortion becomes a symbol of deeper issues, but to take the symbol at face value is to miss the point of the conservative argument. It would be immoral from a conservative perspective to put pragmatic results above moral purposes; as the Bible puts it, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

—–

In explaining my views as stated above, someone (who goes by the username ‘Sanpete‘ on Amazon.com) couldn’t follow my explanation of how conservatives (such as Sowell) have admitted that they’re more persuaded by anecdotal evidence. The person told me that the “main point about one’s finger being cut off seems to be that it’s one’s own, not that it’s particular.”

My response is as follows.

The particular and the personal are closely related. It is about an emotional response. People, especially conservatives, typically feel less of an empathetic response to distant strangers (maybe similar to how strongly religious people are less motivated by compassion in general, a distinction needing to be made between compassion and charity). Numbers of people hurt or killed is just data, specifically data that is both less particular and less personal. None of the people are real to the emotional experience in the way that the future potential of a finger being cut is real. The potential finger loss is real because it is perceived as real, even if just real in the mind. The feelings induced are real. As such, conservative moral intuition goes for this gut-level sense of reality. Even more rational-minded conservatives such as my dad will harken to this gut response, and they would even see this emotional ground as rational in that it is very close to personal experience, the anecdotal (or hypothetically anecdotal) evidence in this case is trusted or else seen as persuasive for the very reason it seems closer to observed reality whereas abstract data is seen as too disconnected from concrete reality or rather too disconnected from the personal experience of concrete reality.

—–

Here is what interests me most in thinking about this.

A more universal (i.e., less constrained) sense of rationality goes hand in hand with a more universal experience of empathy, the ability to think abstractly is connected to the ability to imagine empathetically (both requiring the ability to cognitively come to terms with what is beyond the personal level of concrete reality, whether concrete in terms of personal anecdotes or concrete in terms of the subjective experience of the five senses) — the scientific method requires this ability and more importantly requires trust in this ability, trust that through being systematically rational we can collectively reach greater rational results. This is what Haidt doesn’t understand about liberal morality. Rationality isn’t just rationalization, even though intellectual liberals understand the potential conflation. Rationality isn’t just at best a guide to emotion and intuition. Rationality stands on its own merits, as it should.

Like the liberal willingness to challenge authority and the liberal love of irreverent and playful humor, all of this goes back to liberals measuring high on the trait ‘openness’ and low on the trait ‘conscientiousness’. This cuts to a deeper level than Haidt gets at with moral foundations for these personality traits are psychological foundations that precede and make possible an articulation of moral foundations. This gets at the issue of how to interpret the moral foundations. Conservatives interpret them one way and liberals another way. What Haidt misunderstands is that liberals also value all the moral foundations, even if they interpret them differently. Haidt ignores the full sense of morality present in the liberal view and so he underestimates the importance of the liberal value of reason.

In my recent writings, I keep repeating one very significant point that Mooney presents so clearly in his book (The Republican Brain). When it comes to politics, liberals prove themselves to be more rational in that they use less motivated reasoning and that they are less misinformed (i.e., less prone to confirmation bias, backfire effect, and smart idiots effect; among other biases). As Mooney makes clear, liberals aren’t necessarily less prone to motivated reasoning overall. It’s only with political issues that liberal rationality stands above that of conservatives.

So, what makes political issues different? I’d argue that political issues are simply the issues that humans collectively come to think of as important. What this means is that liberals, when they think something is important enough, are capable of bringing reason to bear upon a particular issue. Liberals aren’t consistent in always being reasonable about all issues in all aspects of life, but at least they show a more consistent capacity when it really matters.

Being rational is very difficult. It takes effort and determination. Most of the time, it just isn’t worth it to go to such lengths. Humans are lazy in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to thinking. Most people don’t want to think about life and about politics. We have our biases and our beliefs. We already know what is ‘true’ according to our worldview. Humans aren’t born as rational beings, although humans are born with the implicit potential for rationality and even explicit early signs of reflective thought. For example, research shows babies are capable of seeing something from another person’s perspective and thus predict their behavior, and this demonstrates the connection between empathy and objectivity — objectivity is first and foremost the ability to see from a perspective outside of the directly subjective sensory experience, involving abstraction but an abstraction rooted in empathetic imagination.

The sad effect of Haidt’s theory is that it can be used to justify the position of those who would like to discredit rationality and so can be used to justify what I’d call intellectual laziness. Yes, it is easier to be intellectually lazy. Yes, most people most of the time will be intellectually lazy. But that is hardly a moral argument in defense of intellectual laziness, even when labeled as “intuitive reasoning”. Many liberal values are difficult, that is the very proof of their worthiness. On the political level, small ‘d’ democratic values and small ‘r’ republican values are what make modern societies liberal to the extent that they are. It was a difficult (not to mention violent and bloody) struggle to get to this point where liberal values could become accepted as part of the status quo and hence defended even by conservatives. If we don’t constantly struggle for these liberal values including most specifically Enlightenment values of rationality, then we will fail to live up to these values… and, like most liberals and most people in general, I’d rather avoid that if possible.

There are two issues at hand. Can we live up to such values? And do we want to? The two go together. Theoretically, we can live up to them, assuming we want to. Our values are dependent on our values and both are dependent on our psychology. It is proven that a minority of people are capable of rational thought (I’ve heard someone claim that it was 15% of the population that rates highly on “reflective reasoning”), but it isn’t yet proven that the majority of people can manifest this human potential. Human reason as a universal capacity of human nature, at this point, is still somewhat an article of the liberal faith… although conservatives have as much to lose as liberals if this liberal faith turns out to be wrong, after all we share the same liberal society.

—–

I think it ultimately comes down to culture.

People tend to fulfil the social expectations that culture puts forth, assuming those expectations are within human potential. Research shows that, when shown the Ten Commandments, most people will act according to those moral rules; they will tend to cheat less, lie less, etc — which is to say that they will act more moral according to some of the basic moral values conservatives and liberals agree upon, but it probably wouldn’t lead people to be more moral according to the exclusively liberal moral values such as intellectual honesty that goes beyond merely not lying. To manifest liberal moral values would require different social expectations than those stated in the Ten Commandments. Interestingly, recent research seems to show that behavior will conform to liberal moral values of rationality when analytical thought is intentionally elicited:

Logic Quashes Religious Belief, New Study Finds
By Dr. Douglas Fields, 4/26/12

“Gervais’ and Norenzayan’s first experiment tested the idea that analytical thinkers tend to be less religious. They recruited 179 Canadian undergraduates and gave them analytic thinking tests, followed by a survey to gauge their religious disbelief. As expected, the results showed that higher scores in analytical thinking correlated with greater religious disbelief. But this is just a correlation.

“To test for a causal relationship between analytical thinking and religious disbelief, the researchers devised four different ways to promote analytic thinking and then surveyed the students to see if their religious disbelief had increased by the interventions that boosted critical thinking. Varieties of these interventions had already been shown in previous psychological studies to elevate critical thinking measurably on tests of reasoning. In one intervention, when people are shown a visual image that suggests critical thinking (for example, Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker,” seated head-in-hand, pondering) just before taking a test of analytic reasoning, their performance on the test increases measurably. Subconscious suggestion about thinking apparently gets the cognitive juices flowing and suppresses intuitive processes. The researchers confirmed this effect but also found that the self-reported religious disbelief also increased compared with subjects shown a different image before being tested that did not suggest critical thinking.

“The same result was found after boosting critical reasoning in three other ways known to stimulate logical reasoning and improve performance on reasoning tests. This included having subjects rearrange jumbles of words into a meaningful phrase, for example. When the list of words connoted thought (for example, “think, reason, analyze, ponder, rational,” as opposed to control lists like “hammer, shoes, jump, retrace, brown”), manipulating the thought-provoking words improved performance on a subsequent analytic thinking task and also increased religious disbelief significantly.”

Religion & Brain: Belief Decreases With Analytical Thinking, Study Shows
By Greg Miller, 4/27/12

“Many people with religious convictions feel that their faith is rock solid. But a new study finds that prompting people to engage in analytical thinking can cause their religious beliefs to waver, if only a little. Researchers say the findings have potentially significant implications for understanding the cognitive underpinnings of religion.

“Psychologists often carve thinking into two broad categories: intuitive thinking, which is fast and effortless (instantly knowing whether someone is angry or sad from the look on her face, for example); and analytic thinking, which is slower and more deliberate (and used for solving math problems and other tricky tasks). Both kinds of thinking have their strengths and weaknesses, and they often seem to interfere with one another. “Recently there’s been an emerging consensus among [researchers] … that a lot of religious beliefs are grounded in intuitive processes,” says Will Gervais, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada and a co-author of the new study, published today in Science.”

[ . . . ]

“It’s very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe,” says Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton University who has done pioneering work on the contributions of intuitive and analytical thinking to human decision making. “All they have shown, and all that can be shown, is that when you’re thinking more critically you reject statements that otherwise you would endorse,” Kahneman says. “It tells you that there are some religious beliefs people hold that if they were thinking more critically, they themselves would not endorse.”

“To Gervais and Norenzayan, the findings suggest that intuitive thinking, likely along with other cognitive and cultural factors, is a key ingredient in religious belief. Greene agrees: “Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.” He says, “If you’re going to be unreligious, it’s likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.””

At that last article, a commenter (username: srheard) brought up a good point:

“The Catholic and evangelical religious communities discovered this over 40 some years ago in the aftermath of the post WWII GI Bill and the Kennedy challenge – i.e. the Education Boom. They could see the correlation between an emphasis of science and analytical studies in schools and universities- and a decline in church attendance. It became clear that a citizenry educated in analytical thinking posed an existential threat to fundamentalist (literalist) religious enterprises. Their act of “self defense” was a involvment in politics and a quest for an American Theocracy. The theocrats calls this the “War on Religion”. This is Newspeak for the “War on Thinking”. If theTheocrats win that “war”, the Republic falls. End of story.”

It seems to me that it is within the realm of possibility to create a culture of rationality. However, it is also clear to me that many people, especially those in power, realize that they might not personally benefit from such a culture of rationality. As individuals, they might not politically or economically benefit from a more rational playing field. And collectively, certain groups (whether fundamentalist churches or the Republican Party) might not benefit from a more rational citizenry.

—–

This isn’t to dismiss the basic point that Haidt makes.

Many liberals like Haidt are grappling with how to best interact with and live among conservatives in a shared society. It’s obvious that conservatives don’t value rationality in the same way as liberals. This has led some liberals to question the entire Enlightenment project and so devalue the role of rationality, whether out of a sense of cynicism or pragmatism. As Zach Wahls recently said (to paraphrase), “You can’t reason people out of what they didn’t reason themselves into.”

I understand this view. Being a rational-minded liberal doesn’t mean dismissing the non-rational aspects of human nature, rather it means seeing less conflict in the first place between the rational and non-rational. Maybe we are presenting a false dichotomy, false and more importantly unhelpful. Recognizing and even respecting the non-rational doesn’t require we stop striving for the full potential of rationality. There are some people who are as dogmatic about rationality as others are dogmatic about religion, but such people are certainly a very small vocal minority among liberals and the liberal-minded.

What I’m offering in this post is a view that should appeal even to moderate conservatives who have become fed up with the anti-intellectualism that has taken over much of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. It’s not conservatism I’m criticizing, at least not in terms of the average conservative who I suspect tend to be moderate and hence not overtly anti-intellectual. I would recommend to liberals to have respect for the non-rational and so it is in this context that I recommend to conservatives (along with liberals like Haidt) to have more respect for rationality. The difference, though, is that I think most people in this highly religious/spiritual country already have respect for the non-rational and so such a recommendation is maybe less necessary. The situation we face is a society where rationality (in terms of science and education) is constantly under attack, this not being a sustainable situation for a democracy such as ours, something must give.

There is one point I want to bring up, a point I’ve mentioned recently in other posts. From what I’ve seen in various data, conservatives are more polarized against liberals than vice versa. Liberalism, on its own terms, isn’t directly opposing conservatism. One of the weaknesses of liberalism, in fact, is how easy it is for liberals to act like conservatives.

This plays out on every kind of issue. On abortion, conservatives see liberals as being for abortion, but in reality liberals would love to decrease the number of abortions (in response to conservative EITHER/OR thinking, liberals want BOTH free choice AND fewer unwanted pregnancies and hence fewer abortions). On freedom, conservatives oppose positive liberty against negative liberty whereas liberals see the two as inseparable (liberals deny the us vs them attitude implicit in conservatives favoring liberty for those who already have it, negative liberty, while denying it to those who seek to gain it, positive liberty). On the issue of this post, conservatives are more likely to perceive the intuitive and rational as in conflict, yet this is less clear of a conflict for many liberals (it’s just liberals would rather the two sides interacted through more of a conscious choice than an unconscious conflation).

From the extreme conservative perspective, conservatives can only win by liberals losing and liberals can only win by conservatives losing. Most liberals, however, would prefer to seek win/win scenarios. The problem liberals face is that the conservative predisposition might make win/win scenarios impossible, so conservatives prove themselves correct by refusing the olive leaf offered by liberals. This saddens me. I don’t want to just gripe about conservatives. As I see it, even conservatives benefit from promoting a more rational society, even when they fight against it (such as their demonizing scientists and scientific institutions).

—–

Like most liberals and liberal-minded folk, I don’t dislike intuitive knowing, symbolic thinking, or the non-rational in general. In fact, I love such things when taken on their own terms, instead of being conflated with what they aren’t.

I would go even further. My defense of rationality is also a defense of the non-rational, the love of the latter motivating my love of the former. I have a mad fascination with the non-rational. I would daresay that I embrace the non-rational to a greater degree than even most of the more anti-intellectual variety of conservatives. It is my liberal-minded ‘openness’ that opens me up to the non-rational, leading me and those like me to seek out new experiences and alternative states of mind. I’ve previously explored this relationship between liberalism and the non-rational:

NDE: Spirituality vs Religiosity
The Monstrous, the Impure, & the Imaginal
Fortean Curiosity: Liberalism & Intelligence
American Liberalism & the Occult

So, it’s not that I want to live in a rationalist utopia ruled over by intellectual elites. Rather, I want to live in a world where all knowledge is respected and a love of learning is valued. That shouldn’t be too much to ask for. Let’s not give up on Enlightenment values before they’ve even had a chance to be fully tested. Modern liberal societies are still a young experiment.

Moral Righteousness: Intent vs Results

I had the issue of righteousness on my mind while writing a previous post (Conservative & Liberal Families: Observations & Comparison). In that post, I made two points in relation to righteousness.

First, there is a difference between the morality of intentions and the morality of results. To use the example of that post, there is a difference between having family values and valuing family. Intentions may correspond to results or they may not. My conclusion was that results are more important. Also, I speculated that intention when righteously held may actually undermine genuinely moral results. Or it could be that stated intention (rhetoric) can hide self-perceived moral failure (such as a minister teaching family values while using the services of a prostitute or a politician advocating against gay rights while being gay himself).

Second, I admitted to having some tendencies toward righteousness. I don’t think, for this reason (among others), that I’d make a good parent. Of the families I’ve known, those with relatively more righteous parents have had relatively worse results (in that their families are less close and less happy). In general, a righteously judgmental sense of morality is not conducive to creating a better society. My opinion is supported by the research I’ve seen and by books I’ve read such as George Lakoff’s Moral Politics and Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians. I have in the past shared some of the data correlating liberalism and real world moral results: Liberal Pragmatism, Conservative Dogmatism. I think liberals have more objective reason to be righteous on certain issues, but it’s just not in the nature of most liberals to be righteous or else to be loudly vocal about what they feel righteous about and to force it onto others. A notable exception are the New Atheists, but even the righteousness of the New Atheists pales in comparison to the righteousness of fundamentalists.

I too am a vocally righteous liberal. If a person lacks respect for others or for intellectuality, if someone uses sociopathic rationalizations or apologetic sophistry, I will not treat that person with an ounce more respect than they deserve (which is approximately zero). This doesn’t mean I immediately go on the attack with everyone I disagree. I can at times be aggressive because I see how rightwingers try to manipulate the liberal attitude of tolerance. It relates to how apologists pretend to be intellectual by using logical arguments as sophistry and selectively uses data.

What annoys me isn’t necessarily righteousness itself but how it’s used and what it’s used for. Of course, I’m annoyed by my own righteous tendencies and so I try to keep it in check. I don’t see righteousness as it’s own justification in the way that the fundamentalist sees righteous belief as it’s own justification. If I feel strongly about something, I check and double-check the facts. Before I let the chain out on my righteousness, I make sure I’m actually right. Righteousness is fine as long as it’s equally balanced by humility. I admit I can be wrong and I actively seek out evidence that can prove my opinions incorrect. I’m righteous about intellectuality, about clear thinking, about objective facts. To me, that is a moral application of righteousness. A belief, no matter how righteously held, doesn’t justify itself. Justification can only come from a larger context that includes other perspectives and other data. Righteousness should be used to break free of limiting beliefs and shouldn’t be used to enclose oneself within dogma.

Even more importantly, righteousness should always be turned toward oneself first: self-awareness, self-analysis, self-criticism. I think those who judge others are inviting judgment upon themselves by others. Also, from the perspective of Jesus’ teachings, righteousness should be primarily and most strongly directed at those in power. The Christian who likes to judge the poor and the homeless, the desperate and the disenfranchised is no real Christian. The Christian who defends the rich and powerful (whether Rand Paul defending BP or Catholics defending the Pope) and so forsakes the poor and powerless is no real Christian. In this sense, there seems to be a contagion of hyopcrisy among many social conservatives (certainly among the leadership anyways).

Righteousness is a useful but dangerous tool. It does no good to defend those in power who can defend themselves just fine. And it does no good to beat a man while he is down. Defending the wealthy elite while complaining about the “welfare queens” is just plain wrong and comes close to being evil of sociopathic proportions. Righteousness in the hands of dogmatic haters leads to 9/11 attacks and the shootings of abortion doctors. In the US, this righteousness is directly fueled by the rightwing pundits such as Bill O’Reilly endless calling Dr. Tiller, “Tiller the Baby Killer”. Surprise, surprise. A crazy rightwinger kills Dr. Tiller. And guess what? O’Reilly considers himself a good, righteous Christian. Why does O’Reilly have so much righteous hate? Abortion is bad? If O’Reilly were to look at the data (which righteous ideologues rarely do), he would know that countries with legal abortions have lower abortion rates. But, ya see, it isn’t about making the world a better place. The righteous ideologue simply wants to think of himself as being right… and damn the consequences.

Let me share two examples of liberal righteousness.

The first example is Derrick Jensen who is a righteous environmentalists. I think it’s obvious that he has plenty of justification for his righteousness. No rational and compassionate person (meaning everyone besides righteous ideologues) could deny the data he shares in his books. Jensen analyzes in detail the sociopathic tendencies of our society. However, he sometimes, out of frustration, pushes his rhetoric a bit far. It’s hard to know if he pushes too far or not considering the potential dire consequences of the present trajectory of our civilization. It’s not like Jensen is a fundamentalist warning about the end of the world because of his interpretation of biblical prophecy. Jensen is talking about the real world. He seems like a genuine intellectual and I sense he’d be open-minded about new info that challenged his own views. As far as I can tell, Jensen’s righteousness is based in the actual facts. So, it’s not a blind righteousness. Furthermore, it’s a righteousness directed toward those in power… meaning those who have the power to change the world for the better if they so chose.

The second example is Barbara Ehrenreich who is a righteous journalist. Like Jensen, she seems to base her righteousness on objective data and not mere ideological belief. I’ve seen videos of her speaking, but I’ve only just started reading her book Bright-Sided. In that book, she is criticizing a type of optimism popular in America which is superficial and which is too often used to rationalize egregiously immoral or otherwise dysfunctional behavior. I’m not sure she talks about righteousness, but I get the sense that righteousness would relate to her portrayal of positive thinking. She does go in some detail about Christianity and so makes the direct connection to belief as an unquestioning, uncritical mindset. It reminds me of research I’ve seen on positive thinking which shows optimists have a tendency to take credit when results are seen as beneficial or desirable (whether or not the optimist actually earned this credit) and optimists have a tendency to blame externalities (unforeseen factors, other people, etc) when reults are seen as having turned out bad. When an entire society embraces positive thinking, major catastrophes happen. Blinded by optimism, those responsible can honestly claim to not having seen it coming (despite all the evidence that should’ve been heeded as a warning).

The righteous are always right even when they turn out to be wrong. It’s like how social conservatives blame the failure of abstinence only sex education not on the programs themselves but on society. Society is seen as having failed the values preached by the righteous person, but the righteous person will never see themselves as having failed society. So, to go back to the original example, “family values” are believed to never fail even when the results would seem to point towards failure. Families fail and societies fail according to this view, but family values can never fail because the fundamentalist perceives them as having originated from thousands of years of righteous tradition or even from the righteous Word of God. This is righteousness as defensive self-rationalization.

The main moral purpose that righteousness should be applied to is righteousness misused. That is my ideal, anyways. I don’t know how often I live up to my ideal, but I try. Hopefully, my results correspond with my intentions.

Quotes: the Gothic, the Gnostic, and the Rational

The Secret Life of Puppets
by Victoria Nelson
pp. 18-19:

At the same time, however, this demonology is the only avenue open to the transcendental. “You can raise issues in the horror genre that you can’t raise so easily in other types of films,” a Hollywood screenwriter once ingenuously explained, adding, “Characters can talk about the existence of God in a horror movie, whereas in other films that would be incredibly pretentious.” Ironically, beacause of the old Reformation link between Catholicism and the supernatural, the only means for defending oneself against the Devil in these narratives is always represented as a potpourri of faux rituals rendered in Latin or Greek and always erroneously attributed to the Catholic Church, to the unending aggravation of that church’s worthies, who might be less upset if only they reflected on the unavoidable implication—that the Protestant mainstream unconsciously perceives its own rituals as utterly inadequate for warding off demons.

p. 19:

Lacking an allowable connection with the transcendent, we have substituted an obsessive, unconscious focus on the negative dimension of the denied experience. In popular Western entertainments through the end of the twentieth century, the supernatural translated mostly as terror and monsters enjoyably consumed. But as Paul Tillich profoundly remarked, “Wherever the demonic appears, there the question of its correlate, the divine, will also be raised.”

p. 28:

Far from being mutually exclusive, nous and logos share this common denominator of human consciousness, a field that remained constant while its content and focus have swung like a pendulum between the two modes. For the gnosis-oriented authors of the Corpus Hermeticum tractates, consciousness was not only humanity’s distinguishing characteristic but the special feature that connected us with the divine. This position was counterbalanced by the materialist views of their contemporaries the Stoics and Skeptics; indeed, many Greeks and Romans of the time openly mocked graven images. And, as Susanna Elm argues, far from being a “decline into belief” as is usually supposed, the radical iconoclasm of Judeo-Christianity, learnedly argued first by the rabbis and then by the early Christian fathers, represented a scientific revolution of rational discourse that supplanted the gnosis-dominated cults and religions of Late Antiquity analagous to the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation, which performed a similar function in relation to the Catholic Church a millennium later.

Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film
by Eric G. Wilson
p. 26:

Gnostic films understandably migrate toward the gothic genres—science fiction pictures devoted to ambiguous relationships between humans and machines; fantasy movies exploring blurred boundaries between dream and reality; noir movies hovering on the boundary between psychic projection and brute fact; horror films fraught with ambiguous meldings of monstrosity and miracle. There are historical reasons behind this connection between the Gnostic and the gothic. As Victoria Nelson has shown, ever since the early modern age, esoteric ways of knowing including Gnosticism, Cabbala, and alchemy, have been pushed to the margins of culture. There on the edges these heretical visions have attracted the aesthtic mediums rejected by mainstream institutions. This confluence of occult religion and underground expression reached full force in the pulpy sub-world of the twentieth century, the lurid realm of weird tales, comic books, and gothic movies. These historical connections are valid and interesting. However, as I have been suggesting, there are also deep epistemological reasons for the merger between Gnostic vision and gothic cinema. Both modes are dependent upon mental failure: the inability of the rational mind to reconcile opposites and of the physical world to transcend dualistic conflict. However, these failures offer success: the possibility of the mind finding knowledge beyond reason, of the world dissolving into a unity beyond time.

Integral, the Paleolithic, and the Liminal

Posted on Jul 1st, 2008 by

Marmalade

This is an extension to my previous blog post about Fictional Worlds and Fictional Drugs and a partial response to Balder’s blog The Wilber-Combs Lattice and the Pre/Trans Fallacy.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned Paul Shepard. His theories are ones that I come back to every now and again even though its been quite a number of years since I’ve read one of his books. It conflicts with the more optimistic vision of most Integralists. However, I see potential truth in both of them. Shepard sees that a misdevelopment occurred in humanity’s early development. Wilber doesn’t see this early misdevelopment, but rather places the blame of misdevelopment on later stages such as his theory of Mean Green Meme.

I’ve heard of one theory that could bring the two together. It was brought up in a discussion on Wilber’s site. The person was speculating that maybe Spiral Dynamics should be seen as descriptive instead of prescriptive. It is an accurate model describing how social development has occurred so far (in Western societies and non-Western societies influenced by Western culture). But this doesn’t mean that development couldn’t have happened differently nor does it mean that Spiral Dynamics represents the best possible outcome of development. These are the types of thoughts that came to me when I first studied Wilber. It seems an obvious possibility, but it rarely comes up in discussion and I haven’t yet seen it in a book about Integralism.

This seems to bungle up the workings of Wilber’s aesthetically elegant model. If we can’t be sure that the development model we have is optimal, then it undercuts other theories such as the pre/trans fallacy. How can we be sure that we have it right? From one perspective, the model is prescriptive, but maybe from another perspective it could be proscriptive. So, is their a larger context in which to place this all? Is their a perspective of perspectives that transcends and includes both idealism and pessimism?

I must admit that I’ve been more interested in the potential of a Theory For Anything (TFA) and less interested in a Theory Of Everything (TOE). But I don’t know what a TFA would look like. I reference back to Jung’s archetypes and personality types because it seems to give something closer to a morally neutral perspective and less hierarchical. I especially find personality types insightful because it clearly shows how often differences are just differences. This fits in with my criticism of Wilber’s model and those attracted to it being more Apollonian (MBTI NT?).

All of this interesting enough, but my mind has been focused on another set of ideas. I’ve just started the book The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen (here is the author’s blog and here is an article by the author about skepticism). This book brings some important questions to rationality. I can’t summarize this authors views at the moment, but let me pull out some quotes and ideas to give a sense of where he is coming from.

Okay… many philosophers have considered the mind to be binary and this goes back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander. From this tradition, we get Aristotelian logic with its binary opposition (a or not a) and its “the law of the excluded middle”. And one end of the binary opposition is usually privileged. We enter a different perspective with the liminal (introduced by Van Gennep and further elucidated by Victor Turner). “When a structure is subverted or deconstructed, there is a reversal of the positions of privilege or a blurring or collapse of the line dividing the pair.” (p. 62) This liminal between is the space that post-modernists see as empty, but which earlier anthropologists saw as being where the paranormal and supernatural can be properly placed.

“Deconstruction calls attention to ambiguity and uncertainty, and at its core, it is about the problem of representationin all forms.” (p. 76)

“Like magic, the problem of meaning is banished from the consciusness of science. Deconstructionism raises the issue overtly. It points out that meaning is neither neutral nor transparent. It asserts that language precedes science and thus has primacy over it.” (p. 377)

“The Issue of power again leads back to Max Weber. Weber’s discussion of authority was about power and domination. He identified three types of authorrity: charismatic, traditional, and bureaucratic. Pure charisma, the most fundamental, involves supernatural power. The other types are rationalized forms of it. One need only recall Weber’s insight that the process of rationaliziaion calls for the elimination of magic form the world (in actuality, elimination of the conscious awareness of magic by cultural elites). With the process of disenchantment virtually complete in the academy, deconstructionists (and everyone else) display an almost complete amnesia as to the primitive foundations of their school of thought. Neary all have forgotten the taboo areas, the liminal regions, those betwixt and between categories, the anomalous, the supernatural.” (pp 377-378)

In this, we can see the questioning of dualistic models. This is where the questioning can also be turned to Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy. I don’t fully understand the implications as of yet, but it opens up some space for further discussion about experiences that may not be dualistic nor either pre or trans. If all it does is bring up more unanswered questions, then that is fine by me. I’m looking more for a model of questions than a model of answers.

What I’m trying to figure out is how can we step outside of Wilber’s models to see them objectively. To the extent that we commit ourselves to a model, we can’t see it clearly. This is a problem because we can’t understand a model either if we look at it entirely detached. Does the liminal provide a space where we don’t get stuck too far in either direction?

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Tagged with: Ken Wilber, Paul Shepard, George P. Hansen, integral, pre/trans fallacy, spiral dynamics, paleolithic, liminal, trickster, rationality

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