Picture Post #20 Olber's Paradox raising insoluble questions

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Martin Cohen and Tessa den Uyl

A NASA  image from the Hubble Telescope looking into the 'Deep Field'

This is a patch of BLACK sky - empty when initially seen - even through the largest earthbound telescopes. Yet, with the  Hubble space telescope and a long-enough exposure time, even the darkness of space soon comes to glowing life. The point is, every bit of sky is actually packed with light - not merely with stars but with uncountable distant galaxies.

Heinrich Olbers (1758–1840) was a Viennese doctor who only did astronomy in his spare time, but realised that there was a bit of a logical problem about the night sky. And ‘O’ is for ‘Olbers Paradox’*,  which can be summed up by saying that if the universe is really infinite in size, the the night sky should not only be bright – but should be infinitely bright. Put short, we should see stars everywhere we look. So why don't we and why isn't the night sky all lit up ?

The paradox touches upon profound issues in cosmology, or the study and theory of the origins of the universe. Simply saying that most of the stars are too far away to see is not enough. Certainly it is true that starlight, like any other kind of light, dims as a function of distance, but at the same time, the number of light sources in the ‘cone of vision’ increases – at exactly the same rate. In fact, on the mathematics of it, given an infinite universe, with galaxies and stars distributed uniformly, the whole night sky should appear to be not black, not speckled, but white!

Olbers’ paradox is a ‘thought experiment’ in the very good sense that most of the reasoning is done by hypotheticals. What if the universe is infinitely large? And infinitely old? If the stars and galaxies are (on average) spread out evenly?

Various possible explanations have been offered to explain the paradox. Such as that stars and galaxies are not distributed randomly, but rather clumped together leaving most of space completely empty. So, for example, there could be a lot of stars, but they hide behind one another. But in fact, observations reveal galaxies and stars to be quite evenly spread out.

What then, if perhaps the universe has only a finite number of stars and galaxies? Yet the number of stars, finite or not, is definitely still large enough to light up the entire sky…

Another idea is that there may be too much dust in space to see the distant stars? This seems tempting, but ignores known facts. Like that the dust would heat up too, and that space would have a much higher. The astronomers who took this image claim it shows some kind of spectral shift into the red specturm. Or is it only the dust? The questions are not really resolved, even yet.

So what is the best answer to Olbers’ riddle? The favoured explanation today is that although the universe may be infinitely large, it is not infinitely old, meaning that the galaxies beyond a certain distance will simply not have had enough time to send their light over to fill our night sky. If the universe is, say, 15 billion years old, then only stars and galaxies less than 15 billion light years away are going to be visible. Add to which, astronomers say that the phenomenon of red shift may mean some galaxies are receding from us so fast that their light has been ‘shifted’ beyond the visible spectrum.

After reading this, and then standing here on planet Earth and watching the night sky, one might feel a little trapped by the questions. Our sight is limited and it always will be but maybe this is our hope for we can continue to philosophise: afte rall, what are we thinking? The picture above might as well represent pieces of coloured glass, under water visions where fluorescent life flows in deep dark sees, a pattern for printed cloth. Our brain only represents what we think we see, not necessarily the reality in which we live? In the incredible immensity of space, mankind has always been aware of this, even if, once in a while, the tendency is to forget.

---

* Although the paradox carries Olbers’ name,  it can really be traced back to Johannes Kepler in 1610.  In Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments, Martin’s book, which talks a little more about all this, 

Disruptive Finance

  Posted by Martin Cohen 

It seems like every day, President-elect Trump announces some outrageous new strategy, abandons some long-standing tenet of policy, or upsets long-standing conventions. And that’s of course BEFORE becoming President!

You’d maybe have thought, as a businessman, that he’d appreciate the need for research, consultation, and caution,. But if so, you’d not understand the kind of business circles that Donald Trump moves in. He’s not so much a shopkeeper, in the mold of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, whose father was called (albeit misleadingly) a corner-store grocer and whose motto was expenditures must match savings – as a financier in the mold of, well, Jordan Belfort  - the wolf of Wall Street.

Trump is part one of a new breed of super-wealthy and totally unscrupulous financiers whose motto is DISRUPTION. I followed the activities of some of  them in the UK, such as Edi Truell, founder and CEO of Disruptive Capital Finance, and the path led eventually to the spreading chaos (and high stock market prices) that is Britain leaving the EU. Where Trump’s plans will go is anyone’s guess – and that’s exactly how he likes it. Because in uncertainly – and upheaval – disruptive financiers make millions.

The film is based on the true story of Belfort - who ultimately came a cropper. But there’s no reason to suppose that possibility is worrying Trump or his circle of friends and advisors – like Britain’s Nigel Farage. To Americans, Farage is the man who persuaded Britons to vote to leave the European Union – but to those who know him better, Farage is a commodities trader whose worked in both London and New York. And Farage’s campaign to get Britain to up-end all its economic and political commitments was supported by a range of other figures from high finance.

Take Richard Tice,. CEO and a partner at Quidnet Capital. and co-chair of Leave.EU the official campaign for ‘Brexit’.

Tice, of course. still insists that leaving the EU can be pulled off without upending the economy. The former head of CLS Holdings Plc, a major property-investment firm, calls it a "very simple process" in which the EU would negotiate a new accord with a separate Britain in one to two years. "I don’t think there’d be any disruption at all." Fellow Brexit campaigners  Crispin Odey, founding partner of Odey Asset Management,  and former Tory party treasurer Peter Cruddas, founder of online trading company CMC Markets, all look to a new order in which financier s are freed from regulation. Do you remember the financial crisis of 2007-8 – the one that almost brought the Western world to collapse? Well, they evidently don’t. Instead their manta is about seizing control of the levers of political power  in order to increase the ability of speculators to make money.

As Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliott has said: “Far from the picture of gloom painted by the Government, it is clear the City of London would not only retain its pre-eminence as the world’s most important financial centre, but would also thrive after freeing herself from the EU’s regulatory shackles.”

In both the UK and the US, an influential cadre of super-rich have clear professional reasons for wanting to change the political norms: a dislike for what they regard as overburdensome – and profit-reducing – regulation.
According to one source close to the industry: “I think there’s a genuine conviction they have that all regulation is rubbish.” But, he says, the profit potential from leaving is also a factor: “They love taking a view ... Market dislocation is fine if you’re a hedge fund guy.”

Trump is not so much a reaction to the Obama presidency – as he is to the flood of regulation that followed the 2008 financial crash. And so, to understand what’s coming next ignore all the angry tweets and photo opportunities and instead recall that classic piece of political advice: follow the money. There may be more logic to Trump and his newly assembled band of bankers and financiers’ desire to shake things up than people give him credit for. But it’s the opposite logic to what he claimed to stand for.

---

And a poem

one drizzled day
donald and nigel
over buttered egos
and hot crumpet
thought to exchange keys

‘you live in my house
& i in yours donald’
said nigel
‘on the contrary
i in mine you inside’
replied donald


From: the booklet: 45th President Elect, by Ken Sequin

---

Disruptive Finance

  Posted by Martin Cohen 

It seems like every day, President-elect Trump announces some outrageous new strategy, abandons some long-standing tenet of policy, or upsets long-standing conventions. And that’s of course BEFORE becoming President!

You’d maybe have thought, as a businessman, that he’d appreciate the need for research, consultation, and caution,. But if so, you’d not understand the kind of business circles that Donald Trump moves in. He’s not so much a shopkeeper, in the mold of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, whose father was called (albeit misleadingly) a corner-store grocer and whose motto was expenditures must match savings – as a financier in the mold of, well, Jordan Belfort - the wolf of Wall Street.

Trump is part one of a new breed of super-wealthy and totally unscrupulous financiers whose motto is DISRUPTION. I followed the activities of some of them in the UK, such as Edi Truell, founder and CEO of Disruptive Capital Finance, and the path led eventually to the spreading chaos (and high stock market prices) that is Britain leaving the EU. Where Trump’s plans will go is anyone’s guess – and that’s exactly how he likes it. Because in uncertainly – and upheaval – disruptive financiers make millions.

The film is based on the true story of Belfort - who ultimately came a cropper. But there’s no reason to suppose that possibility is worrying Trump or his circle of friends and advisors – like Britain’s Nigel Farage. To Americans, Farage is the man who persuaded Britons to vote to leave the European Union – but to those who know him better, Farage is a commodities trader whose worked in both London and New York. And Farage’s campaign to get Britain to up-end all its economic and political commitments was supported by a range of other figures from high finance.

Take Richard Tice, CEO and a partner at Quidnet Capital. and co-chair of Leave.EU the official campaign for ‘Brexit’.

Tice, of course. still insists that leaving the EU can be pulled off without upending the economy. The former head of CLS Holdings Plc, a major property-investment firm, calls it a "very simple process" in which the EU would negotiate a new accord with a separate Britain in one to two years. "I don’t think there’d be any disruption at all." Fellow Brexit campaigners Crispin Odey, founding partner of Odey Asset Management, and former Tory party treasurer Peter Cruddas, founder of online trading company CMC Markets, all look to a new order in which financier s are freed from regulation. Do you remember the financial crisis of 2007-8 – the one that almost brought the Western world to collapse? Well, they evidently don’t. Instead their manta is about seizing control of the levers of political power in order to increase the ability of speculators to make money.

As Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliott has said: “Far from the picture of gloom painted by the Government, it is clear the City of London would not only retain its pre-eminence as the world’s most important financial centre, but would also thrive after freeing herself from the EU’s regulatory shackles.”

In both the UK and the US, an influential cadre of super-rich have clear professional reasons for wanting to change the political norms: a dislike for what they regard as overburdensome – and profit-reducing – regulation.

According to one source close to the industry: “I think there’s a genuine conviction they have that all regulation is rubbish.” But, he says, the profit potential from leaving is also a factor: “They love taking a view ... Market dislocation is fine if you’re a hedge fund guy.”

Trump is not so much a reaction to the Obama presidency – as he is to the flood of regulation that followed the 2008 financial crash. And so, to understand what’s coming next ignore all the angry tweets and photo opportunities and instead recall that classic piece of political advice: follow the money. There may be more logic to Trump and his newly assembled band of bankers and financiers’ desire to shake things up than people give him credit for. But it’s the opposite logic to what he claimed to stand for.

---

And a poem

one drizzled day
donald and nigel
over buttered egos
and hot crumpet
thought to exchange keys

‘you live in my house
& i in yours donald’
said nigel
‘on the contrary
i in mine you inside’
replied donald


From: the booklet: 45th President Elect, by Ken Sequin

---

Is Violence Therapeutic?

Posted by Bohdana Kurylo

In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, the theorist of colonialism Frantz Fanon provides an unprecedented legitimation of violence – passing beyond mere self-defence or the removal of an oppressive social system. Violence becomes a necessary therapy to address the ‘systemised negation of the other’. Yet to what extent is violence really therapeutic? There seems to be a fine line between its utility and its harm.

Fanon offered three major reasons as to why violence is crucial for resistance:

• Violence may be a liberating force. From his observations of the behaviour of the colonisers, he concluded that the oppressed are not considered to be of equal human value. In contexts where one party possesses a clear dominance over another, universal values, such as justice or equality, apply only to the more powerful. Within this context, nonviolence is not an option, since it simply sustains the violence of the oppressors, whether physical or mental. The struggle, for the oppressed, is only a distraction from the concrete demands of emancipation.

• Violence may be a cleansing force. It rids the oppressed of their inferiority complex. Fanon claimed that the belief that emancipation must be achieved by force originates intuitively among the oppressed. He observed that, through generations, the oppressed internalise the tag of worthlessness. Anger at their powerlessness eats them from the inside, begging for an outlet. Violence becomes psychologically desirable, as it proves to the oppressed that they are as powerful and as capable as the oppressor. It forces respect – but more importantly, it gives the oppressed a sense of self-respect. By cleansing them of their inferiority complex, violence reinstates them as human beings.

• Violence may be a productive force. On a grander scale, Fanon saw violence as the means of creating a new world. Through violence, a new humanity can be achieved. Violence is instrumental in raising collective consciousness and building solidarity in the struggle for freedom. This creative characteristic of violence could bring a new political reality that comprised the creation of new values.

Ends justify means for Fanon, who accepts even absolute violence for the purposes of liberation and regeneration. Although he built on the specific case of colonial oppression, his ideas can be applied to violence against any regime in which a group’s rights are severely and systematically violated, whether there be cultural, gender, or economic oppression.

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) often referred to Fanon to justify its terrorist violence. One may recall how the partition of Ireland was followed by social, political, and economic discrimination against the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. The attempts of the British government to suppress the IRA by force only reinforced the need to find an outlet for the accumulated frustration and internalised violence. Indeed, Fanon himself claimed that terrorism may be an ‘unfortunate necessity’ to counter the retaliation of a regime after the initial revolt of the oppressed.

Nevertheless, to the extent that the violence of the IRA can be explained by Fanon, this case also disproves Fanon. In particular, the IRA experience disproves the justification of the use of violence as the only means of creating a new culture of politics. Lasting for more than thirty years, the Northern Ireland conflict shows that violence often leads to stalemate, and is unable to deliver the desired results.

The eventual willingness of the British government to recognise the legitimacy of the insurgents’ demands, however limited, offered more possibilities for creating a new culture of politics than continued bloodshed. After all, the fact that Algeria is still torn apart by violence today illustrates that the efficacy of violence in the short term can be mistaken for its efficacy in general. The danger is that the means may overwhelm the ends. Thus Fanon’s belief that, after a period of confrontation, the door would eventually be open for a modern and peaceful society seems unrealistic.

Most importantly, Fanon failed to see that reusing the methods of the oppressor is antagonistic to the idea of creating new values. For Fanon, violence signals the point of no return to the dehumanised past. Yet he was vague as to how a capitulation to anger can help establish a new humanity, for there is nothing new about the use of violence to achieve one’s aims. In fact, is it not merely an imitation of the enemy? A new system of values is rotten from the inside if it is founded on mimicking the perpetrator’s actions.

Poetry: The Name Card

The Name Card

---

 A poem by Chengde Chen 

Attending a conference,
you receive some name cards.
Sorting through them, you care about
not the name, but the title,
which is the weight of the card.

From it, you assess the function,
estimating the time and place
for any possible uses.
If there is no direct application,
indirect values are explored.
For instance, to refer it to a friend –
there may be a potential return
of some kind in future…

To imagine a relationship from a card
is unlike fantasizing sex from pornography,
which is, more or less, poetic.
The most non-poetic essence
of imagination
is to have interests deduced
from symbols!

---

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Picture Post #19 The Pillars of Creation

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Keith Tidman

Picture Credit: Hubble Space Telescope (NASA)

A dynamically ‘living universe’ with its own DNA captured by the Hubble space telescope. The image opens a window onto the cosmos, to wistfully wonder about reality.

Among the iconic images of space captured by the Hubble space telescope is this Eagle Nebula’s ‘Pillars of Creation’—revealing the majesty and immensity of space. The image opens a window onto the cosmos, for us to wistfully wonder about the what, how, and (especially) why of reality.


The image shows the pillars’ cosmic dust clouds, referred to as ‘elephant trunks’—revealing a universe that, like our species, undergoes evolution. One thought that intrudes is whether such an immense universe is shared by other ‘gifted’ species, scattered throughout. By extension, Hubble’s images make one wonder whether our universe is unique, or one of many—undergoing the ‘creative destruction’ of these pillars.

Does the image evoke a sense of relative peace—like our own speck in our galaxy’s outer spirals? Or a universe more typically characterised by the distantly familiar roiling, boiling violence—expressing itself in the paradoxical simultaneity of creation and destruction?

The ‘Pillars of Creation’ are—were—some 7,000 light-years away! They may even no longer exist; due to the time that light takes to get to Hubble. An ironic twist of fate, given the name. The ‘shape’ of the universe’s content is thus transitory – like our own bodies, as time elapses and we react to the environment.

For some, the ‘Pillars of Creation’—their church-like spires—inspire thoughts of divine creation. Alternatively, evidence suggests our universe rests in science. Where ‘nothingness’ isn’t possible and ‘something’—a universe—is the default.

God: An Existential Proof

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Ernest Hemingway has one of his characters say, 'The world breaks everyone.' In crafting this now famous line, did he hand us a new proof for the existence of God?

It all rests on the way we are motivated, and the changes our motivations undergo in the course of a lifetime.

What is it that motivates me to plant a garden (and to plant it thus), to embark on a career, or to go to war? Today there is little disagreement that, basically, I am motivated when I hold up the world in my head to the world itself. Where then I find a difference between the two, I am motivated to act. It is, writes neuropsychologist Richard Gregory, the encounter with the 'unexpected' that motivates me.

Now consider that, in one’s early years, one's motivations are fresh and new. The world in one’s head seems to offer one high hopes, pleasant dreams, a good view of humanity, and enthusiasm to spare. Yet as one progresses through life, 'the world breaks everyone'. It breaks them, not so much through the hardships it brings to bear on the body—if this should matter at all—but because of the way in which it assails the mind and emotions.

Disillusionment sets in. And this, presumably, means coming to see things for the way they are. As we grow and mature, we come to see that the world is a place where hopes wither, dreams die, good turns to bad, and our energies are sapped. We become jaded, tired, and disinterested. 'My hopes were all dead,' Charlotte Brontë has one of her characters say. 'I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing. They lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.'

With no world now to hold up to the world, because we have finally seen the world for what it is, we lose our motivation—ultimately all motivation—because motivation is the 'unexpected'.

And so we lose the ability to live. Ernest Hemingway had no motivation to go on. He famously shot himself with a double-barrel shotgun. It is 'the very good,' he wrote, 'and the very gentle and the very brave' who go first. As for the rest—they, too, shall be found.

What then to do, when we are broken? How may a person restore any motivation at all, when they have come to see the world as it is?

It needs to be something beyond this world—and though we here 'appeal to consequences'—the argument that it must be so—indeed it must be so. We cannot go on with a view of this world which is born of the world itself. Small wonder, then, that it is central to religious thinking that 'whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord'. We continue to strive—but we strive for something which is other-worldly.

There may be another, logical possibility. If not something beyond this world, then we need an interventionist God who through his being there, changes our expectations—a God who reaches down into our reality—a God who acts in this world. The world is not, therefore, all that I expect it to be. This, too, is a dominant religious theme: 'For by you I have run through a troop,' writes David. 'By my God have I leaped over a wall.' He could turn the tables, through his God.

What then is that motivation which lies beyond this world? What then are the interventions of God? This would seem to lie beyond the bounds of philosophy, and in the realm of theology.

Paradoxically, if we accept the 'God option' as the basis of all true motivation, then this would seem to be the option of deepest disillusionment—at the very same time as it offers us the greatest hope. One has no need for a new and fundamentally different motivation, in God, unless the world in one’s head is no longer found to be worth holding up to the world.

The Silence of God

Posted by Eugene Alper

Perhaps God is so silent with us for a reason.  If He were to answer, if He were to respond to even one question or one plea, this would spell the end of our free will.

For once we knew His preferences for us, once we could sense His approval or disapproval, we would no longer exercise our own preferences, we would not choose our actions.  We would be like children again, led by His hand.  Perhaps He did not want this.  Perhaps He did not create us to be perpetual children.  Perhaps He designed the world so we could think about it and choose our actions freely.

But mentioning free will and God's design in the same sentence presents a predicament—these two ideas need to be somehow reconciled.  For if we believe that God designed the world in a certain way, and the world includes us and our free will, its design has to be flexible enough for us to exercise our free will within it.  We should be able to choose to participate in the design or not, and if so, to which degree.  Should we choose to do something with our life—however small our contribution may be—maybe to improve the design itself, or at least to try to tinker with it, we should be able to do so.  Should we choose to stay away from participating and become hermits, for example, we should be able to do so too.  Or should we choose to participate only partially, every third Tuesday of the month, we should be free to do so as well.

This thinking smacks of being childish.  We want God's design to be there and not to be there at the same time.  We want God to be a loving father who is not overly strict.  This is how we created His image in the Old Testament: God is occasionally stern—to the point of destroying almost the entire humankind—but loving and caring the rest of the time.  This is how we created His image in the New Testament, too: God so loved the world that He sent His own Son to redeem it.  Maybe all we really want is a father again; whatever beings we imagine as our gods, we want the familiar features of our parents.  Maybe we are perpetual children after all.  We want to play in our sandbox—freely and without supervision—and build whatever we want out of sand, yet we want our father nearby for comfort and protection.

There is no need to reconcile anything.  This is how it works.  Our free will fits within God's design so well because it is free only to a degree.  Time and space are our bounds.  We have only so much time until we are gone, and we have only so much energy until it runs out.  Gravity will assure that we can jump, but not too high, that we can fly, but not too far.  We cannot cause too much damage.  Sitting in the sand, we can fight with other players, we can even kick them out, we can build our own castles or destroy theirs, but we cannot destroy the sandbox itself.  Maybe this is the secret of the design. 

Individualism vs. Personhood in Kiribati

By Berenike Neneia

The French philosophes thought of the individual as being 'prior to' the group. This has been a point of strenuous debate ever since. But whatever the case, individualism is characteristic, in some way, of the whole of our Western society today.

I myself am privileged to belong to a society which would seem to have been stranded in time – and while individualism now influences us profoundly, the cultural patterns of the past are still near. This short post serves as an introduction to a concept which is central to my culture in Kiribati: te oi n aomata.

Te oi n aomata literally means 'a real or true person'. It includes all people, whether men or women, young or old. This is not merely a living person who has concrete existence, but one who is seen by the community which surrounds him or her to have certain features, whether ascribed or acquired. Therefore it is by these features that a community's recognition of a person is 'weighed': as to whether they are an oi n aomata, 'a real or true person', or not.

Since Kiribati society is patriarchal, there is a distinction between how a man (oi ni mwane) and a woman (oi n aine) are seen as oi n aomata. Men will be considered oi n aomata through their material possessions, while women will be known as oi n aomata by their conduct – which is meant in the sense that a woman will be well mannered, respectful, obedient, and so forth. It is rare for a woman to possess or inherit the family’s vital assets such as land, house, taro pit, and canoe. The only exception is a woman who is an only child.

Prior to the coming of Europeans to the shores of Kiribati, a man who was regarded as an oi n aomata or oi ni mwane (a real or true man) was 'renowned' as one who came from a good family (which is, a family disciplined in cultural norms), in which he had a good reputation. He would be the first-born or only child, he would have many lands, and he would have a 'house' of his own: not of European design, but a cluster of structures used for meeting, cooking, sleeping, and relaxing. These belongings were very valuable, as they indicated that a man was 'in the community'.

In relation to such possessions, a man would further have the skills and the knowledge of how to fish and how to cut toddy, which were vital to the sustenance of his family. He would also know how to build his 'house', and to maintain it. As a man, he was the one who would protect his family from all harm.

These were some of the important skills which characterised an oi n mwane or 'real or true man'. He was very highly regarded in communities.

Similarly, to be an oi n aomata or oi n aine (a real or true woman), a woman had to come from a good family (again, a family disciplined in cultural norms). She would be well nurtured and well taught, and she herself would behave according to Kiribati cultural norms. She would know how to cook and to look after her family well. This means that everyone in her household would be served first, while she would be served last.

She would know how to weave mats, so that her family would have something to lie on. She would know respect and not talk back, especially to her husband, her in-laws, and elders. Crucially, a woman would remain a virgin until she was married, since this involved the pride of her family. Therefore, she would give no appearance of indiscreet or suspect behaviour.

A woman had to maintain her place within the home, and look after her family well. As such she was considered an oi n aine or 'real and true woman', since she was the backbone of her family.

Today when one speaks about people, there is a saying, 'Ai tiaki te aomata raom anne,' which refers to those who are 'no longer an (ordinary) person'. Rather, they have acquired, inherited, and possessed important things in the context of our culture, which make life much more enjoyable, much easier, and much better for all (with less complications, and less suffering).

However, where globalisation is now at the shores of Kiribati, the definition of an oi n aomata, 'a real or true person', is evolving in relation to changing patterns, norms, and life-styles of the Kiribati people. We see now the effects of these changing patterns – from a communal life to a more individualistic life-style. While this has brought various benefits to society, in many ways it has not been for the better.

Pseudo Ethics

Posted by Thomas Scarbrough

Jean-François Lyotard proposed that efficiency, above all, provides us with legitimation for human action today. If we can only do something more efficiently – or more profitably – then we have found a reason to do it. In fact society in its entirety, Lyotard considered, has become a system which must aim for efficient functioning, to the exclusion of its less efficient elements.

This is the way in which, subtly, as if by stealth – we have come fill a great value vacuum in our world with pseudo values, borrowed from the realm of fact. Philosophically, this cannot be done – yet it is done – and it happens like this:

The human sphere is exceedingly complex – and inscrutable. It is one thing for us to trace relations in our world, as by nature we all do – quite another to know how others trace relations in this world.  While our physical world is more or less open to view, this is not the case with worlds which exist inside other people's minds – people who further hide behind semiotic codes: the raising of an eyebrow, for instance, or a laugh, or an utterance.

A million examples could not speak as loudly as the fact that we have a problem in principle. Like the chess novice who randomly inserts a move into the grand master's game, as soon as we introduce others into the picture, there is a quantum leap in complexity.  Small wonder that we find it easier to speak about our world in 'factual' terms than in human terms.

Further, in the human sphere we experience frequent reversals and uncertainties – war, famine, and disease, among many other things – while through the natural sciences we are presented with continual novelty and advance. In comparison with the 'factual' sphere, the human sphere is a quagmire. This leads to a spontaneous privileging of the natural sciences.

We come to see the natural sciences as indicating values, where strictly they do not – and cannot. That is, we consider that they give us direction as to how we should behave. And so, economic indicators determine our responses to the economy, clinical indicators determine our responses to a 'clinical situation' (that is, to a patient), environmental indicators determine our responses to the state of our environment, and so on.

Yet philosophers know that we are unable, through facts, to arrive at any values. We call it the fact-value distinction, and it leaves us with only two logical extremes: logical positivism on the one hand, or ethical intuitionism on the other. That is, either we cannot speak about values at all, or we must speak about them in the face of our severance from the facts. 

We automatically, impulsively, instinctively react to graphs, charts, statistics, imagining that they give us reason to act. Yet this is illusory. While the natural sciences might seem to point us somewhere, in terms of value, strictly they do not, and cannot. It is fact seeking to show us value.

Thus we calculate, tabulate, and assess things, writes sociologist James Aho, on the basis of 'accounting calculations', the value of which has no true basis. Such calculations have under the banner of efficiency come to colonise themselves in virtually every institutional realm of modern society – while it is and has to be a philosophical mistake.

Of course, efficiency has positive aspects. We receive efficient service, we design an efficient machine, or we have an efficient economy. This alone raises the status of efficiency in our thinking. However, in the context of this discussion, where efficiency represents legitimation for human action, it has no proper place.

The idea of such efficiency has introduced us to a life which many of us would not have imagined as children: we are both processed and we process others, on the basis of data sets – while organic fields of interest such as farming, building, nursing, even sports, have been reduced to something increasingly resembling paint-by-numbers. It is called 'increased objectification'.

With the advance of efficiency as a motive for action, we have come to experience, too, widespread alienation today: feelings of powerlessness, normlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation, which did not exist in former times. Karl Marx considered that we have been overtaken by commodity fetishism, where the devaluation of the human sphere is proportional to the over-valuation of things.

Theologian Samuel Henry Goodwin summed it up: 'We are just a number.' Through pseudo values, borrowed from the realm of fact, we are dehumanised. In fact, this must be the case as long as we take numerate approaches to human affairs on the basis that they are 'indicated' by facts. Cold fact encroaches on the complex and subtle relations which are represented by the human sciences – in fact, by life as it is lived.