Moral Currency

Recently, I've been looking a lot more at game theory, leadership, and how the two relate in the context of videogame criticism, as well as "real life." In terms of a discussion of ethics, the idea of "moral currency" seems particularly relevant to a discussion of a non-zero-sum n-person game system; in essence, when what you're "playing" for isn't a monetary, but a morally coded reward. Ian Bogost, in Persuasive Games (111), suggests that we already consider ourselves as members of a moral game with debits and credits:

In Lakoff’s view, we conceptualize well-being as wealth. Changes to our well-being are thus akin to gains and losses. Lakoff characterizes this metaphorical understanding of morality in terms of financial transactions. Individuals and societies alike have “moral debts” and “moral credits” that must sum to zero. Moral accounting implies the need for reciprocation and retribution; good actions must be rewarded and harmful ones must be punished. That punishment might include restitution, which can in turn take many forms, from contrition to prison. When we speak of criminals who have completed their sentences, we often say that they have “paid their debt to society.” In a moral system of this type, “the moral books must be balanced.”

In terms of game theory, this idea bears further scrutiny. In an ostensibly moral society, we think of ourselves as being fundamentally moral, or "in the moral black," which - I would argue - affords us the ability to spend our "moral credits" on minor infractions: speeding, taking a pen from work, little white lies, etc. There are some things, however, that are simply too "expensive" - murder, larceny, fraud, etc. - so as to be prohibitive. Except that in a society that values moral currency the same way we do monetary currency, people with more of one somehow are justified in spending more of the other (i.e. our celebrities are able to spend moral currency the same way they do monetary currency... and often do so at the same time). While Bogost suggests that our moral debits and credits are a zero-sum game, that does not seem to be the case. Rather, we expect a certain level of moral positivity - it isn't enough to be amoral in a society that fundamentally reflects a certain amount of Christian moral ethos. Rather, we need to remain more positive than negative in order to perpetuate an acceptable moral appearance (just as we need to remain financially solvent - in monetary as in moral wealth our desire is to always be positive). It is also the case in morality that - in theory - we need not exchange moral currency in order to gain or lose it: the game is non-zero-sum. While it may also be the case that a universal rise in moral currency would "reset" our perception of morality (just as a universal rise in monetary wealth "resets" the poverty line), nevertheless, the goal is ultimately to continue a universal increase rather than a positive-negative zero-sum balance. The real question is whether that is possible in either sphere.

Creating Reality

I am apparently not done with Ms. Penman yet. This next bit is just about as irritating as the claim I just posted.

Central to the new postmodern constellation of beliefs is the crucial role played by language and communication. In this world, language is not subservient to knowledge, as Locke would have it; rather it is the means whereby knowledge is created. Our knowledge of the world is created out of our communication about it. - Robyn Penman, “Making a Place for the Practice of Dissenting,” Dissent and the Failure of Leadership, p. 215

This idea, too, smacks strongly of relativistic thought – knowledge is certainly shaped by the language used to discuss and describe it, but the object of that knowledge does not change based on its linguistic construction. To borrow from Saussure, the tree remains the tree whether we call it a “tree” or a “rabbit.” The word/sign may describe and invoke the ding an sich (thing itself), but it does not alter the substance of that thing. Our knowledge – as a product of reality – is not created by language, although it may be manipulated and colored by it. While I will allow that ideologies are born out of language, discussion, communication, and - yes - dissent, objects are not. Objects are objects. We might connote those objects through language and communication, but we do not change their essence in the process. Similarly, we do not change knowledge through communication and language. We might alter the way in which we consider that knowledge, change the way in which that knowledge is related to other parts of the canon, manipulate the presentation of that knowledge, etc., but the knowledge itself - like Saussure's tree - does not alter based on the way we describe it, argue about it, or deny its existence. Yesterday, one of my students brought up the example of the creation museum in Kentucky. This museum frightens me on a fundamental level because it participates in this ideology of linguistic reification to which Penman also seems to subscribe. The idea that by denying evolutionary fact, we make creation "science" a reality is profoundly disturbing. This is not "dissent." This is "delusion." "Dissent" should be reserved for ideological conversations, not refusals of established fact. Similarly, we should never suggest that facts - knowledge - can be created out of our description and discussion of them. A fact is unalterable. Its meaning might be - and often should be - debatable, but there are things that are simply not up for discussion. They simply are.

Dissent and Relativity

during the seventeenth century, the philosophers of the day – most notably Descartes – made a number of fundamental moves away from the foundational beliefs of the Renaissance and the humanism entailed in that era.
First, the seventeenth-century philosophers moved from an oral mode of argument for making judgments to a written form of proof that could be judged in terms of formal logic. Rhetoric as a means of questioning the conditions and the circumstances in which arguments carry conviction was dismissed as a way of assessing the rational merit of argument. In such circumstances, the value of people arguing for and against ideas was dismissed. By extension, the role of dissent went as well. There was no place for the dissenting voice in the rationalist pursuit for truth.
Second, the seventeenth-century philosophers moved from a concern with the local, transient and particular aspects of life and language to a preoccupation with general, abstract principles that would apply across time and place. This set of moves took modern philosophers away from particular, practical problems to the search for abstract and timeless methods for deriving general solutions to universal problems. Implicit in this search for principles was the belief in the idea of certainty. If you applied the right methods, then you could be assured of the certain, right answer. This drive for certainty also militated against a role for dissent. It’s just not acceptable to laud the role of dissent, when it is believed there can be once certain universal answer. - Robyn Penman, "Making a Place for the Practice of Dissenting," Dissent and the Failure of Leadership, pp. 210-211.

My essential problem with this account is that seems to dismiss out of hand the written “voice” – just because rationalist arguments were being written did not inherently eliminate the “voice” of dissent: written dissensions of popularly held beliefs were commonplace among humanist philosophers and thinkers. In fact, one could argue that the advent of written (and printed) dissent made it all the more possible and commonplace, rather than arguing that it was eliminated.

Furthermore, the idea that there is a truth does not detract from dissent in the process of attempting to find that truth. Scientific thinking – which is what is being described in the second point – does not revel in the elimination of dissent; Penman here seems guilty of ascribing too much value not to dissent, but to relativism – to dissent for dissent’s sake, rather than to dissent as a vehicle for the improvement of knowledge, ethics, or society.

Michael Shermer, in Why People Believe Weird Things, points out that one can, in fact, be too skeptical: "The flaw in pure skepticism is that when taken to an extreme, the position itself cannot stand. If you are skeptical about everything, you must be skeptical about your own skepticism" (16). It seems that Penman has reached this point in her argument about dissent - that one must dissent even to one's dissent, or one is stifling dissent. But this isn't productive. There is no need to dissent simply to be the dissenting voice. To dissent a proven fact, for example, is non-productive, and could actually become harmful.

While in principle, I do agree with Penman's essential argument that dissent - and the opportunity to do so - is a good thing (I've certainly been a dissenter often enough), there comes a point when constant dissent undermines its own value. If the dissenting opinion is always put forth - even when absurd or fruitless - it has a similar detrimental effect to the oppression of dissent; in both cases, dissension becomes meaningless and useless, undermining its own position as a valuable check on our ideological paradigms.

Natural Zippers

"God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut. People would be shocked if..." The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers."

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World This passage illustrates - and explodes - one of the most conventional arguments for deity - "I feel that there is a God." Instinct. We rely heavily on instinct (and what we like to refer to as intuition, which is really just instinct given a nicer name to make it sound reasonable instead of impulsive) to guide us through the perils of our daily existence. Instinct can be good - it keeps us from falling off high objects, walking through bad neighborhoods at night, and being eaten by predators. But instinct has also led us very far astray. The world changes faster than our chemical and genetic makeup. Sometimes, instinct adapts. Most of us are capable of riding in a car at 50 mph or riding an elevator to the tenth floor without panicking. Most of us understand that despite our body's craving for fat and sugar, too much of it is bad for us. We relearn our instincts. We come to think of these things as normal, as natural. Like zippers on trousers. We want to think that there's a God because it gives things purpose - and if things have purpose, then it isn't our fault if they are out of our control. At least, we think, they're in someone's control. And if that someone happens to be benevolent and omnipotent, well, then, we don't have to feel bad about all the horrific things that take place in the world, because they're all under control. God is our psychic security blanket. Sometimes, we need to let those instincts go. To accept that zippers are as natural as trousers, and that trousers are as natural as rainstorms.

If Ignorance is Bliss... Idiocy is Heaven

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. -- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto

My question in response to this is fairly basic - why, exactly, is this a bad thing? If religion is the opiate of the masses, why object to its removal? Is the truth of human existence really so horrific that we would rather willfully deny it by covering it over with a veneer of an idyllic illusion?

Of course we would. We live in a world constructed around fantasy - the fantasy of religion, of the "American Dream," of a non-existent harmonious nuclear family. We surround ourselves with fictionalized accounts of heroism, drama, and knights in shining armor. We play games with no basis in the real world, full of dragons and aliens and space marines; we watch movies and read books about people that never existed in worlds that never could exist; we pretend to ourselves that when we die, we will go to a magical place where everyone is young and beautiful and where we'll be surrounded by our deceased pets.

This is not to say that I have any objects to fantasy itself - I'm an avid reader of fantasy, sci fi, and fiction. I have, in fact, made a career out of it. I love movies. I love video games. But I love them in full awareness that they are fiction. Yes, at the core of every fiction is some kernel of truth and commentary about the real world, but that's just the point. They know they're fiction and have accepted that as part of their essential existence.

In Marx's view, we should be allowed to believe our illusions are real. We shouldn't go through life with the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish creatures. We should continue to believe that there is a reward after death, that our interactions aren't governed by self-interest, that we aren't a group of social animals that seeks ways to place itself above other groups of social animals by means of race, class, gender, or cultural choice.

We are. We need to get over a lot of that - someone's socioeconomic or ethnic background should not and does not make them a better or worse human being than I am - but we can't stop committing acts of bias and bigotry until we accept the fact that we do not treat each other as equals. We should, but we don't. And I am willing to admit that I am as guilty as the next person of considering myself "better" than someone without access to the education I've had. I dislike stupidity - but ignorance is better than willful idiocy. And to deny the fact that our "illusions" help to perpetuate classism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and so on is willful idiocy. We know better. Now we should start acting like it.

Truth, Faith, and Nietzsche

Over the last week or so I've been plowing my way through the Kaufman collection of Nietzsche's writings, and several of them have struck me as particularly poignant. Now Nietzsche has quite a reputation for coming up with evil and villainous conceptions of human nature. He has been used as an excuse for racism, Nazism, general Antisemitism, and maligned for his philosophic atheism.

Thus far, I have seen nothing racist beyond what was typical for a nineteenth-century European, and, in fact, Nietzsche defends Judaism - in a racist way, admittedly, but in a way that clearly marks him as not Antisemitic, especially not in a way that should encourage the kind of Antisemitism practiced by the Nazi party in twentieth-century Germany.

His atheism, however, is quite evident, but this I have no problem with. And, given some more recent atheistic tracts and works I have recently read, Nietzsche is downright mild and non-confrontational. He phrases his atheism specifically in terms of truth, self-delusion, and hypocrisy.

One of the early points in the book is from On Truth and Lie:
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all... (47)
First, of course, Nietzsche raises the question of whether truth - objective, singular truth - actually exists at all. The understanding of truth he here presents indicates an awareness of the subjectivity of human morality (the idea that "truth" varies according to circumstances) but also implicitly asks whether if basic truth does not exist, then how can we claim that there is a higher moral truth.

Nietzsche compounds this question with the now-infamous assertion that "God is dead," but also with claims of religious hypocrisy, as when he writes, "when one opens the Bible one does so for 'edification'" (The Dawn 76). In other words, those who read the Bible - and, presumably, any holy book - do so because they already know what they think of it and are looking to it to confirm their beliefs. Of course, this applies to the non-believer as well as the believer and says more about the problematic nature of holy works and human contradictions than it does of the claims made by those books.

But Nietzsche is ultimately more interested in the hypocrisy of believers than he is in their books. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the titular philosopher says "Behold the believers of all faiths! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker; yet he is the creator" (135-136). What is most interesting about this idea is that it begins the introduction of the Ubermench (the Overman), the better future-human. Here, we see not only a critique of the faithful, but also a recognition that any creator - the deity that is worshiped, the founder of a religion, etc. - must by necessity violate the very rules of that religion.

It also establishes the idea that any future founder of something great - be it religion, scientific thought, government, etc. - must violate the rules of what already exists in order to do so. Implicitly, then, Nietzsche himself, in creating and articulating these new ideas, is a willing violator of the status quo. So break a few rules and make something new.

The Age of Anti-Enlightenment

Although I and many of the people I know best and love are all members, graduates, or products of higher education, I have been noticing a recent trend in anti-intellectualism among politicians, society in general, and even among the members of my own family. Admittedly, those to whom I am closest (parents, cousins, aunts and uncles) are mostly in accord with my beliefs, but there is something deeply disturbing about the discovery that family and acquaintances do not share one's fundamental belief systems.

I'm not talking about religion, per se (this time). I have friends who are Christian, Jewish, agnostic, secular humanist, pagan, Wiccan, atheist, etc. They do not ask me to conform to their beliefs, and I do not ask them to agree with mine. But we do all share an affinity for knowledge - whether in terms of education or simply the desire to learn.

It is a passion that is, unfortunately, not shared by many people in our country.

People ask, often, why they should bother learning this thing or that thing. Why it matters whether something is fact or fiction. Why history is important.

This is not to say that I think everyone should learn everything - that's not possible, and we all know it. But there's no reason to actively avoid education. And no reason why on earth the majority of people in this country are unaware that we were not founded on Christian principles. For goodness sake people, why are most Europeans more well-versed in our history than we are? That's just sad.

It's a symptom of what Charles P. Pierce in Idiot America terms "a war on expertise" (8). He says,
The rise of Idiot America today reflects - for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and the pursuit of power - the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. it also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. (8)
In other words, we can't trust a scientist to know science, a historian to know history, or a doctor to know medicine. We (speaking here in the "Idiot America" sense) should rather trust, like Sarah Palin, in our instincts to guide us, in our knee-jerk reaction against anything new or unique, in our "common sense" - which, I would like to point out, is usually light-years away from "sense," however "common" it may be - to tell us that what we've always been told is true, despite the factual evidence to the contrary staring us incredulously in the face. We should agree that the snake is evil and that the fruit it proffers us is terrible despite the fact that it will indeed make us as gods.

Because that's what the story in Genesis all boils down to. The idea that knowledge is bad. That it is somehow evil to wish to be the best we can. To know truth from falsehood. The idea that discernment and conscience - that maturity - are corrupting forces that will sully the ignorant infantilism in which we (again, as "Idiot America") would prefer to wallow, our thumbs stuffed in our mouths and a glassy, glazed look in our eyes as we gaze upward, waiting for the beneficence of a giant Santa Claus to pat us on the head and give us presents.

Because if we take a bite out of the apple we might realize that there is no Santa Claus. That we are responsible for our own actions. That with knowledge comes power, that with power comes responsibility, that with responsibility comes maturity, and that with maturity comes wisdom. But if we never take that bite out of the apple, then we remain children, and someone else is able to tell us what to do, where to go, how to live, why we exist, and even who we are. Without knowledge and all that springs from it we are trapped in servitude, not to those with knowledge, but to the bullies who choose force over knowledge and fight to keep us away from knowledge because, ultimately, knowledge - the proverbial pen - is indeed mightier than the sword.

Apple, anyone? I hear they make a tasty pie. And what's more American than that?

Brought to you by the letter "A"

In this case, the "A" is not a scarlet fabric representation of marital (or extra-marital) infidelity emblazoned upon my breast so that the world can read my shame and shun me accordingly. However, I am fairly convinced that in some parts of the country (and the world), the "A" to which I here refer would in fact earn me far worse treatment at the hands of the local population. Fortunately for me, however, I live in a liberal American city that permits my special brand of atrocity.

"A," as will come as no surprise to my few regular readers, is for "atheism." Over the last week or so I have been reading John Allen Paulos' irreligion (which, in a side note, has a "0" on the cover, not an "A" or even an "i"), and a few weeks past had my class discussing such hot-button topics as "evolution versus creationism," "science versus religion," and "eugenics."

Some of the results of this have been interesting. Paulos is one of the more rational, reasoned atheist writers out there (he is a mathematician and much less angry than, for instance, Richard Dawkins), since he refrains from disparaging comments about believers and uses logic and probability to make his points. This is not to say that he doesn't season his book with a good deal of snark - there's plenty of that in there - but he tries to be tongue-in-cheek rather than abrasive.

One of the more interesting points he raises that I haven't seen in before is this: "Embedding God in a holy book's detailed narrative and building an entire culture around this narrative seem by themselves to confer a kind of existence on Him" (62). In other words, we'd feel awfully stupid in following the deistic tenets of our societies if we didn't believe in a god because then there is absolutely no reason for some of our laws, idiosyncrasies, and habitual practices. In other words, we justify our belief through the traditions that have grown out of it. Like saying that "Mommy and Daddy wouldn't put out milk and cookies if Santa Claus weren't real." The act itself neither proves nor disproves the existence of Santa Claus, just as the presence of religion neither proves nor disproves the existence of god.

And from this also springs the idea that people now have come to believe because they were not capable - as children - of making the decision not to believe, since they had not yet developed an adult's incredulity. We tend, as a species, not to convert to a wholly new religion in adulthood (it DOES happen, certainly, but it is less common than a perpetuation of childhood belief) because we are creatures of habit. As Paulos continues, "Suspend disbelief for long enough and one can end up believing" (62).