Apocalypse Now?

The mysterious case of hydroxychloroquine seems to illustrate a grave problem in our current world. It may or may not work to cure COVID-19. But how is it that we still do not know? First reports of it being effective are almost as old as first reports of the virus. How is it that, six months in, nobody has conducted a proper trial? While prominent authorities, without good evidence, keep declaring that it does not work, or is dangerous.

And there have been no proper trials despite the outlay of huge amounts of public funds to try all possibilities.

There seem to be two problems here: first, that Trump was an early advocate, so that if it works, it makes him look good. That is intolerable to the professional class in general. Second, that the drugs used for the hydroxychloroquine treatment are out of patent and readily available, so that nobody can make much profit if they work. Moreover, if they work, they remove the opportunity of making large profits on some other drug.

Why would this affect even public funding? Milton Friedman long ago explained. Governments must rely on those with expertise to regulate professions and industries. That means industries regulate industries, and professions regulate professions. Public money gets allocated as advised by the big drug companies.

We evidently cannot rely on either public-spiritedness or morality. Those in charge are letting vast numbers of people die rather than prejudice their own interests. Power may or may not corrupt; but the people in power now are corrupt.

Just as something has to be going on with hydroxychloroquine, something has to be going on with Jeffrey Epstein, his island empire and his death; and with the fact that we have heard so little since about it. Something has to be going on with the Durham probe, the apparent attempt to subvert the government through false claims of Russian collusion; and the fact that we have heard so little since about it. Something was going on with Cardinal Archbishop McCarrick, and the resistance in the Vatican to looking any further into it. These are not conspiracy theories; these are proven conspiracies. Nor is this just a problem with the US civil service, the “Deep State.” The Vatican is not part of that. Nor is this a problem with “capitalism.” Professions and unions are at least as corrupt as businesses, it seems, and government as corrupt as private funding. Nor is this corruption just at the top; the same rot is seen as mobs burning and looting in America’s streets. There is the same lack of any sense of responsibility to one’s neighbours or one’s polis. Everyone grabs what they can get.

Probably all of us have seen, too, in our own jobs and our professions, how pervasive corruption has become. Journalism is perhaps the most visible example, operating as it does in the public eye. Nowadays the news itself is grossly biased, often fake, little more than clickbait, published in utter disregard of stated journalistic ethics. TV anchors say things on air they must know are untrue.

Was the world ever thus? Is it just that, with better communication, it is more visible?

Perhaps in part. But major outlets like the Economist, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, really did hold themselves to real standards even a few years ago. There was a distinction between news and editorial pieces. Facts were checked, and both sides quoted. Headlines resembled what was in the story. I am not imagining this; I have done such fact-checking professionally myself. You can go back and read past issues in various places online.

Comparable decay seems evident everywhere. It is as apparent in the arts. The high-tech sector used to be a moral place, leaving aside Microsoft, and Google used to use the motto “do no evil.” Now all the tech giants are deeply political, and seem to be alarmingly interested in power. I am equally aware of the rapid decay in academics, another long-term home. Marks are no longer awarded for merit; academic subjects are often content-free, or the content is completely different from what the fields advertise it to be. Nobody seems to be in it for the sake of human knowledge or pursuit of truth. Only out of self-interest and class interest.

And it is not at all hard to understand why. Postmodernism; it began in the academies. Unfortunately, all other fields have, over time, channeled their initiates through the academies. It was a perfect environment for the virus to spread. It all began 140 years ago, with Nietzsche declaring God was dead. This was picked up quickly enough by intellectuals, and his influence has only grown since.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed. 

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his stare. "Where is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. … Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. 

... 

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. …. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Nietszche advises,

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.

The intellectuals, the scribes and Pharisees, pulled the plug seven generations ago. Seven generations to move through the grad schools, then the colleges, then the public schools. All else follows. Beginning with Fascism, a kind of vanguard movement.

Yeats saw it in 1937:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Our civilization is in moral decline. This is how cultures and civilizations end. Ibn Khaldun mapped it all 600 years ago. Lack of morality is like rust in the gears of everything, that will sooner or later bring it all to a crashing halt. Perhaps we are finally seeing it happen now.

And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future: It is murder.

With no God, at least no God we took seriously, we stopped teaching morality to the young. We stopped caring about the young. We started killing the young. We progressed, a progressive lot, to declaring that morality did not exist, it was only something we agreed upon among ourselves in small groups. Love became to us only sexual gratification. Then we moved to declaring all morality oppressive, and grew hostile to any hint of right or wrong. Things were simply “appropriate.”

Next, we rape and eat one another.

Is it over? I hold some hope for salvation from the East: Christianity, and so Judeo-Christian ethics, is actually growing worldwide, especially in East Asia and in Africa. This could include China, the moment its present government fell and the floodgates were opened. Here there is vitality and optimism, and perhaps social cohesion. Christianity has also been reviving in Eastern Europe.

And there is another possibility.

Apparently, forty years ago, an odd American, deeply devout, living near Rome, had a mad vision, a vision at least as mad as that of Nietzsche’s madman. I take no responsibility for it; I merely report. He believed that a man had already been born who had been chosen by Providence to lead his homeland, the United States, back to God. It was an improbable choice; but then, God’s choices are always improbable. Moses was a stuttering murderer, David was a mere shepherd, a murderer and adulterer. Jesus was an ordinary carpenter, and Peter an uneducated fisherman. Augustine was a narcissist and, he says, a sex addict. Saul aggressively persecuted Christians.

The man he thought he had been told of? A celebrity playboy. A man named Donald Trump. 

The Road to Postmodern Hell

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, seems to state the postmodernist position plainly.

It is impossible, he says, to imagine what we have not experienced.

“We – generally speaking -- cannot imagine what we haven’t experienced, even indirectly.”

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?

Or, in a human context, can a dweller of the steamy Amazon imagine life in the frozen Arctic? Or vice versa?”

Then he goes further:

“Of course, arguments based on reason and logic don’t prove anything either. If they could, science and philosophy would both have ground to a standstill centuries ago.”

The postmodern position is usually given as: “there is no truth.”

Xerxes is stating it etymologically: “we cannot know truth.”

Either way, the claim is self-refuting. If there is no truth, then the claim “there is no truth” also cannot be true. Or, if we cannot know truth, we cannot know that it is true that we cannot know truth.

There are actually many truths that we can know, and irrefutably. We know our own thoughts and perceptions. Descartes was able not only to prove that “I think, therefore I am,” but that he was unquestionably thinking all the thoughts that he was thinking. That gives us a mental universe to work with. 

Cartesian dualism.

Descartes took as model the truths of mathematics. All of math is proofs; all of math is proven. Yet mathematics has not ground to a halt as a result, as Xerxes suggests should happen. We cannot seriously or legitimately doubt that 2 + 2 = 4, nor the Pythagorean theorem.

Science is a bit more complicated. It is true that science can’t prove anything, and does not claim to. But it can disprove things. You propose a theory: say, that disease is spread by perfume smells. Then you devise an experiment to test the theory. If the experiment is well-designed, it can then positively disprove the thesis. This is what Popper calls “falsifiability.” It is the entire business of science.

This gives us real and certain knowledge, of a negative sort. Disproving, by the way, the common claim that “you cannot prove a negative.”

Over time, as a result, the probability of our positive knowledge increases parabolically as well. You can quibble that things like the law of inertia or gravity are not proven, but for all practical purposes, so what? That is as meaningful as insisting that because a cup is not full if it is not filled precisely to the brim, all cups are empty. This is simply an issue of living in a real rather than an ideal world.

On to philosophy. Philosophy can disprove things yet more efficiently than can science—by showing a claim is internally inconsistent, logically fallacious, or self-contradictory. Like the claim that “there is no truth.” It can also efficiently prove things positively: this is what a syllogism does. It is a formal proof.

I have certainly heard it argued that philosophy has in the end proven nothing. It has been argued often by philosophers themselves: Hume, or Nietzsche, or Hobbes. 

To Hume it may concern...

Whenever philosophers do this, however, they are immediately self-contradictory, in just the same way as is postmodernism saying “we cannot know truth.” Were this true, their own writings are of no more value than random grunts. It is easy to refute them.

Having studied philosophies both East and West, it seems clear to me that there are certain inevitable philosophical conclusions, that have emerged clearly and independently in Europe, India, and China. It seems that everyone who is intelligent enough and who makes the effort to think the matter through will arrive at the same set of conclusions about life, the universe, and everything. These are matters of certain knowledge.

One of the great benefits of cross-cultural studies is that it helps throw these basic universal truths into relief.

Among them are the categorical imperative, the foundation of morality: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The purpose of life being the quest for the moral good, for truth, and for beauty. The intrinsic desirability of these qualities. The truth that the soul is beyond its own comprehension. The necessary existence of a divine intelligence. That justice undergirds the cosmos and will not ultimately be denied. And so on.

Xerxes is also wrong to suppose we are unable to empathize with what we have not experienced. This error is surely behind all the current talk of “cultural appropriation” being illegitimate. And the common assertion that “white people cannot possibly imagine what it is really like being black”; or “men cannot possibly imagine what it is like being a woman.”

These claims are, of course, also automatically self-contradictory. For if a white man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being black, it must be equally true that a black man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being white, and so he cannot possibly imagine what a white man can or cannot possibly imagine. And so with the sexes.

Silly wabbit.

But this kind of thinking leads to nasty racist notions too: that other humans are forever alien to us.

If it were true; but of course it is not true. Of course, we all can imagine. This is what imagination means.

I only the other day heard a fascinating scientific datum. For years, scientists here and there have been working with chimps and gorillas, teaching them sign language. We used to think that language was what divided us from the animals. It turns out this is not so: other higher primates can learn to talk. So can some birds, and maybe dolphins.

Yet in the years this has been done, in the years this has been studied, apparently no ape has yet ever asked a question.

It may be, then, that the imagination is what makes us immortal souls: we are able to think of what is not, and so can ask why.

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?”

No; but that question is missing something, isn’t it? They cannot, because they are not human. But a human certainly can imagine being a butterfly, or an eagle.

If we were indeed unable to imagine experiences we did not personally have, we could have no interest in reading fiction, or watching movies, or listening to stories. And yet they enthrall us. While engaged with them, we all can, and do, to a greater or lesser degree, but often to a very great degree, fully imagine being someone else. Perhaps animals cannot.

Given that it is close to being self-evidently wrong, why is this idea that there is no truth, or that we cannot know any truth, so popular and persistent?

I think because it seems empowering, liberating. If there is no truth, and no right or wrong, we get to do whatever we want. We become as gods. This is pretty obvious, for example, in Nietzsche. He says as much. 

Nietzsche gone mad.

But this makes life only and all about the lunge for power. It makes it bestial. It looks to me as though all these philosophers who pushed the “no truth” gambit led totalitarian places politically. And that is no mistake. Nietzsche was the philosophical underpinning for the Nazis. Many are eager to insist that he was not himself a Nazi, but that is not the point. Perhaps he had not yet thought it through. He was too preoccupied going mad. Which is itself not a good sign. Hobbes argued for the absolute right of kings over the populace, whose only option if they did not like their government was suicide. Hume looks harmless enough, but I think the argument can be made that he bred Rousseau, and Rousseau’s pulling up the tent peg of reality and morality led to the totalitarian aspects of the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror and Bonaparte. Edmund Burke thought so. 

Hobbes' goblin.

And that is the path down which we, or at least those on the left, currently trundle, pushing or in our handcarts.

Jordan Peterson: Sounding the Tocsin

Nietzsche in his final madness.

Suddenly Jordan Peterson is everywhere. On YouTube, he offers hours of lectures. He is being interviewed by everyone. His book is top of the NYTimes bestseller list, and similar lists in Canada, Australia, and Britain. How did this happen, so quickly?

A lot of us feel we owe Peterson admiration and support for his principled stand against Bill C-16 and compelled speech. I myself recently gave him high praise for his performance in a debate/discussion with William Lane Craig on the meaning of life.

But now that I have seen more of what he says on YouTube, I begin to be alarmed. He obviously has a lot of positions on a lot of other issues beyond free speech, and he is eagerly exploiting his new fame to push them. It is almost as if the free speech thing was a gambit to get the publicity and the opportunity. It is almost as if he had it all waiting to ship.

And these other views look alarming.

To begin with, I am concerned with the simple and basic fact that he is giving out “Rules for Life.” That is a pretty pretentious thing to do. What gives him the authority? Or, more precisely, what makes him think he has the authority? It speaks of narcissism. He now seems to have an opinion on almost everything, and his opinions do not seem on the whole to be backed up with reasoned arguments, but are stated as if intuitions or revelations of the truth.

I have checked him on a few now, and they seem to be unsupported by the facts or by the current research. Some are, some are not. It does not seem to matter.

But the big red banner is that Peterson keeps quoting Nietzsche. And with high praise. Good people, quite simply, do not cite Nietzsche as their authority or inspiration.

Nietzsche leads by a pretty direct path to Nazism.

Yes, I know, you will have heard he has been exonerated of this accusation. The Nazis misinterpreted him. His sister, his literary executor, was a Nazi, and she twisted things. He was not an anti-Semite at all. No, no! He was against anti-Semitism.

This misses, or deliberately avoids, the datum that Nazism was about more than anti-Semitism. No, it would not have all been okay if Hitler had just left the Jews alone.

There is no way, surely, to read Nietzsche as other than a bad man promoting evil.

The core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, his key assertion, is that all philosophers before him were not actually seeking or asserting truth. No, they were just asserting what they wanted to be true. Philosophy was wish-fulfillment.

If Nietzsche is right, then this must also apply to his own philosophy. Including this assertion, this claim about other philosophers. We have a right, therefore, to dismiss it; Nietzsche just wants it to be true.

But then, we need to accept that everything else in Nietzsche’s own philosophy is just wish-fulfillment. This is necessarily true whether or not Nietzsche is right about anyone else. If Nietzsche is right, his philosophy is just wish-fulfillment, and has nothing to do with reality. But if Nietzsche is wrong, his philosophy is just wish-fulfillment and has nothing to do with reality. It is perfectly self-refuting.

But Nietzsche’s core assertion here, nonsensical as it is, is the central premise of all narcissism: Things are true because I want them to be true. Things are good because I consider them good for me.

This, then, is the essential rule for living Peterson is promoting.

It is also strikingly similar to Hitler’s basic argument in Mein Kampf. But perhaps I digress.

One you hold this view, that you are the ultimate arbiter of truth, and truth and good is whatever you want, you face an obvious and immediate problem. What about everybody else? There appear to be other human beings around you, and some of them do not accept “your truth,” or are not giving you whatever you want. So what are you supposed to do?

Given Nietzsche’s assumptions, you have every warrant and right to either silence or destroy them.

There is no way this does not end in Holocaust.

Among other fun ideas, Nietzsche despised Christianity and Judaism as “slave morality.” The superior man follows a “master morality” instead. This is much better. It basically means he gets what he wants, if necessary by subjugating others. Being master, he gets to make all the rules, and they get to be whatever he wants.

According to Nietzsche, of course, most famously, “God is dead.” He has been defended as not really an atheist by people claiming that he was not happy about this. Does not stand scrutiny: to assert that it is possible for God to die is to deny he ever existed. It is to presume he is a human creation.

“Christianity,” Nietzsche wrote, “is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity.”

Hitler was on about pity in the same way. The goal is to be pitiless—and to destroy anyone weaker than yourself. It is a direct appeal to resist your own conscience.

Nietzsche titled a book “Beyond Good and Evil,” and declared the division of acts into good and evil a “calamitous error.” If this is not a clear call to do evil, I cannot imagine what is. This is the devil talking, with a contract in his hand, and urging you to sign on the dotted line.

If good and evil, or conscience, or compassion, are not to guide our actions, what is?

Nietzsche says “the will to power.” Hitler took this one to heart: “The triumph of the will.” Life is all about trying not just to achieve your own will, but to ensure others do not achieve theirs. That is what “power” consists of. Making others do things they do not want to do.

And then there is Nietzsche’s concept of the “ubermensch,” the “superman.” He based this on Darwin, and this is the reason so many religious people have for so long been so concerned about Darwin. No, it has nothing to do with a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. It has to do with the risk of seeing Darwinism as a moral guide. Based on Darwin, Nietzsche explicitly rejected the concept of human equality. Of course humans are not equal; some are smarter, stronger, than others. The logic of evolution says these smarter, stronger people have the right and the duty to kill all the weaker ones so that only they reproduce. They are creating a new species, the “superman.” And, indeed, everyone has the natural right to assume they are this “superman,” and to destroy everyone else with whom they cannot breed. Their success in this endeavour is enough to prove their righteousness in this endeavour.

“The superman does not follow morality of common people since that favors mediocrity but instead rises above the notion of good and evil and above the ‘herd.’”

So, by declaring yourself a superman, you get to do whatever you like, and have a moral right to take whatever you consider in your own interest from anyone else. And, if you do not do this, you are simply proving yourself inferior and worthy of destruction. You, and other such weaklings, are only pissing in the gene pool.

It worries me in this context that Peterson is so big on “bucking up” and taking personal responsibility.

Nietzsche:

“You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss ... what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

This is a direct and explicit rejection, not just of Christian morality, but of all morality. Kant said, morality consists in treating other human beings “not as a means, but an end.” “Love thy neighbour as thyself” says essentially the same thing in different words; as does “do unto others.” Nietzsche says the opposite: treat all others as a means, not an end. They exist only to be useful to you in your struggle. Your kampf.

Nietzsche went full-tilt mad, psychotic, in his later years. His supporters are adamant that this had nothing to do with his philosophy. It was long claimed that this psychosis was all due to syphilis. More recently, however, it has been pointed out that his symptoms were not consistent with syphilis. Had he had syphilis, for example, he should have died within months of the onset of psychotic symptoms. He lived like this for eleven years.

I think it is only too obvious that his madness was directly related to his philosophy. I was simply the philosophy stated plainly; the philosophy is mad. Nietzsche had set himself up as God: he had the right to do whatever he liked, and since reality was a matter of will, he had created the world, the universe, himself. Perfect narcissism. This is exactly what he says, in what are called his “mad letters.” He declared himself the god Dionysus, and Jesus Christ, and simply “God.” He says he created the world. He orders the pope jailed and the Kaiser shot. After all, both have impudently claimed power over him. It all follows.

“God is on the earth. Do not you see how all the heavens rejoice? I have just taken possession of my empire, cast the Pope into prison, and let Wilhelm, Bismarck, and Stöcker be shot. [signed] The Crucified.”

I hope I am wrong, but it looks as though this is what Jordan Peterson is pushing. This is apparently what he has to sell.

It may be that he is not a “white nationalist,” as is so often claimed. Just as Nietzsche was no anti-Semite. But we seem to be missing the forest for the trees. Peterson actually looks far more dangerous, to his followers and to everyone else, than a mere “white nationalist.”