Issues analysis
The fatal mistake of modernism
The great fallacy about how man knows

The intellectual leaders of the West took a sharp turn in the wrong direction in epistemology during the period 1750–1800, as a result of disillusionment with rationalism without understanding the fallacies of the rationalist philosophers. Empirical philosophy was offered as a substitute for rationalism, which had equally serious fallacies

After 1800, the general culture began to show the effects of this change in thought. The unraveling of Western culture in the twentieth century is in no small measure the cumulative effect of two centuries of bad epistemology.

After 1800, the general culture began to show the effects of this change in thought. The unraveling of Western culture in the twentieth century is in no small measure the cumulative effect of two centuries of bad epistemology.

Contrary to Modernist claims, it is impossible to think logically without presuppositions that provide a starting point for thought.

Ordinary folks get first principles from their world view that imparts a general impression of the nature of man and the world, and a sense of the rightness and wrongness of various ideas.

every rational man on earth regards some ideas as unthinkable and other ideas as unquestionable — and this is true of the Modernists themselves.

The Modernist rejection of the idea of faith-based first principles leads to the artificial separation of faith and knowledge. This separation can be fatal to both faith and knowledge, because the two are designed to function in tandem.

The myth of the closed system originated with seventeenth century rationalists. The myth of bottom-up reasoning began with seventeenth century empiricists.

Scientists unconsciously or secretly reason top-down to create their models, but publicly claim to have reasoned from the bottom up. They must follow this myth of Modernism because almost every science teacher indoctrinates his class with the bottom-up myth.

In his youth, Einstein absorbed the pantheistic rationalism of philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632 -1677). Some of the presuppositions that he built into his model of General Relativity came from Spinoza. That is why Einstein's model assumes that the cosmos is a closed system in which everything — matter, energy, time, and position — are interlocked in an orderly way — and that nothing exists outside the system. His idea of a closed system indicates that Einstein hearkened to Spinoza, an eccentric pantheist, instead of to his friend Godel.

He was following the old rationalist dream of drawing a line around everything that exists, and defining everything within that circle in a determinist and reductionist manner. The work of countless careers have been wasted pursuing this vain dream.

There is no empirical evidence to support the existence of dark matter. The dark matter phantom is pursued from a desire to save the model and make the mathematics work. Instead of revisiting Einstein's presuppositions or throwing out his model as unworkable, scientists have invented an imaginary universe to fit the model.

God, who created the world, subsists outside of the world. The system designer is outside the system. Some people know by faith that the invisible God is the Creator. Others have become ingrained creatures of the visible world and live material, sensual, bottom-up lives and imagine the world to be a closed system with God left out. This leads them to magical thinking and deception. In contrast, people of faith live according to reality and are capable of founding civilizations.

"I must believe in order that I may understand"

The above words were spoken by Saint Anselm (1033–1109) — theologian, scholarly abbot, and Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm was the founding father of the European culture partly because he was intellectually influential at the very time that European civilization was emerging from the Dark Ages.

Anselm's disciples founded the University of Paris and developed scholasticism, the prevailing mode of philosophy and theology during the High Middle Ages. One might assign the year 1100 to be the start of the era of reason in Europe, because by then the intellectual culture of Anselm's monastery had been transplanted to Paris and been established in an institution that was quickly gaining international prestige and historical traction

Luther's theological revolution actually strengthened the top-down approach, in the ultimate sense, even though he unintentionally opened the door to a greater intellectual individualism.

A top-down world of reason and spirituality, inspired by the views of Aquinas and Luther, prevailed in Europe during the period 1600–1750, which I like to define as "Baroque Civilization." Although the word "baroque" comes from architecture, the baroque style of music, running from Monteverdi to Bach, perfectly fits the 1600–1750 time-frame. The music was in perfect accord with the spirit of the age.

Human culture is rooted in the mind and the spirit, qualities that were unusually powerful during Baroque Civilization. It was the age of absolutism, involving the divine right of kings, partly due to the prevailing hierarchical view of the world. Because of, or in spite of, the rise of the monarchy, it was also the golden age of high culture.

Interestingly, the great compositions in Baroque music had mostly come to an end by 1750, the approximate time when rationalism ceased to be the prevailing mode of thought in Europe. Handel's Messiah, the best loved of the great Baroque works, was published in 1741. Vivaldi died in 1741, and Bach died in 1750, bringing the brilliant era of heavenly harmony to an end. These voices were silenced just as Europe began to take its fateful wrong turn away from faith and reason.

In contrast, the memorable rationalists of the seventeenth century were much fewer in number, and their famous works were blemished with logical fallacies and tainted by inflated presumptions and eccentric self-absorption. Some of them were not really top-down thinkers, in spite of their heady intellectualism. Worst of all, they all tried to create closed systems.

The four greatest rationalist philosophers — Rene Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christian Wolff — were so different from one another (with the exception of Leibniz and Wolff), it is misleading to place them in the same category.

What the four men had in common was the Modernist dream of drawing a circle around everything that exists and creating a comprehensive philosophy to explain everything. Therefore, the seeds of Modernism were sown by these rationalist philosophers. However, the urge to draw a circle around everything did not become a widespread passion of Western thinkers until the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, the epistemological crisis of 1750 began as a disillusionment with the comprehensive systems of the rationalists.

Frances Bacon and John Locke, the pioneers of empirical philosophy, invented the bottom-up approach to knowledge as one of the key ideas of Modernism. Modernist epistemology has two legs: comprehensive closed systems — pioneered by Baroque rationalists; and the bottom-up approach — pioneered by Baroque empiricists. Immanuel Kant subsequently harmonized these two approaches.

Francis Bacon (1561–1623), invented the bottom-up approach to science. He originated the idea of an ascending staircase of inductive ideas beginning with facts, proceeding to ideas that are gradually more general as one ascends the staircase, and finally reaching general principles at the top.

Bacon claimed that his approach to knowledge is the only way man can have certainty. He said that his method should replace all other methods of thought — a claim of epistemological imperialism.

Presuppositions invade every stage of the journey — while the scientist fools himself that he is following the facts to see where they might lead. The concealment of secret agendas in the bottom-up method makes it one of the most uncertain of all the paths for seeking truth.

Descartes was highly skeptical about knowledge claims as was Bacon, but unlike Bacon, Descartes trusted in reason and distrusted empiricism. Like all rationalists, Descartes had to start with presuppositions. However, he distrusted scholastic philosophers and refused to accept their authorities to establish first principles and presuppositions. He did not trust his world view to provide first principles, because he regarded it as tainted with illusions of the popular culture.

Descartes was a mathematician, and mathematicians start with self-evident truths when they build theorems. Self-evident truths cannot be proved, but also cannot be disproved or doubted once they are understood. Descartes searched his mind to find a self-evident truth that he could not doubt.

Slowing economy should ease inflation
Southern Standard - 15 hours ago
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that record high oil prices are a concern, but that a slowing economy should moderate inflation down the road. Still, he didn't close the door to further interest rate increases. ...
dc: one of those indictors good for somee, bd for most.

I can understand, to some teeny tiny extent, the way many of these former liberals reacted to the far left’s knee-jerk response to 9/11. I thought the far left’s knee-jerk response to 9/11 was a knee-jerk response myself, and though it was well informed about American imperialism, it didn’t do very much to explain (a) the rise of militant Islamism, the origins of which had very little to do with American anything, or (b) the fact that none of the more immediate victims of American imperialism (from, say, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, East Timor, Palestine, or the Cherokee Nation) were involved in the attacks of that day. But my differences with the far left on that score did not lead me to abandon the American left that fought for the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, the weekend, Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Clean Air and Water Acts, unemployment insurance,

It's not surprising then that the more reports appear on the treatment (or mistreatment) of detainees around the world, the less they bother to offer us the light of day; and the more all-black pages that enter the world, the less the public knows -- except about the nature of the Bush administration itself. Shrouded in secrecy and adamant about the right not to reveal, the administration stands defiantly behind its darkened pages. And so here we stand, too, the text of our world becoming increasingly unreadable as words turn into massive inkblots, and black spaces overcome white ones. The dark, it seems, continues to swallow the light.

Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law and Security,

PROGRESSIVE REALISM....Last week I skimmed through Robert Wright's New York Times op-ed about a new school of foreign policy he calls "progressive realism." I wasn't able to make much sense out of it, however, so yesterday I read through it more carefully. I still find the writing a bit muddled and opaque, but I think I understand the outline of what he's saying. Here's my nickel summary:

• The world is interconnected enough that "national interest" includes a lot of things it didn't used to include. Keeping countries from becoming failed states and terrorist havens, for example, is clearly in our national interest.
  

This sounds a lot like neoconservative idealism, but two things make it "progressive":

• A strong belief that promoting economic liberty is the best way of promoting political liberty. This means support for globalization and free trade. Human rights activists and labor unions will object to this, but they can be brought on board by agreeing to give international bodies the authority to regulate not just trade, but also things such as labor and environmental issues.

• A renewed devotion to international institutions such as arms control regimes and the United Nations. As Wright puts it, "the national interest can be served by constraints on America’s behavior when they constrain other nations as well." However, the extent to which we should bind ouselves to these institutions is left a bit fuzzy.
  

Unfortunately, the rest of the essay is oddly disconnected from these main points, especially since it never really addresses head on the problem of non-state terrorist groups. It's also less persuasive than it would be if Wright had presented some examples of past events in which progressive realism has been a success.

There is a group of people who will say whatever it takes to cast doubt on global warming science. But if all else fails, their default position is that even if global warming is real and dangerous, trying to solve it wouldn’t be worth the economic cost. For example, here’s our old friend Jason Steorts in the National Review:

Even if warming is predominately the result of human activity, and even if its harms will outweigh its benefits, the question is whether it will be bad enough to justify the economic castration that significant greenhouse-gas reductions would require.

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Sebastian Mallaby efficiently dispenses with this argument:

In 2004, for example, the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration analyzed a carbon-cutting plan advanced by Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, which aimed to stabilize greenhouse emissions. The energy administration estimated that reaching this target would cause U.S. GDP to be 0.4 percent less than it would otherwise have been in 2028. Since GDP was projected to grow by 90 percent between the time of the study and that year, this meant that the nation could address climate change and still experience growth of 89.6 percent over the period.

In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most prestigious authority in the field, carried out a similar exercise . It calculated that stabilizing carbon emissions at an acceptable level — defined as slightly higher than today’s — would cause world GDP to be 4 percent lower than it would otherwise have been in 2050. Again, that is a modest cost — roughly one year of decent growth for the world economy.

Even on a global level, combating global warming is relatively affordable. Of course, what’s always missing from the analysis of those who insist that our climate policy should be determined by cost-benefit analysis is the cost of doing nothing. I wonder why?

But it's important to remember that many industries don't rely on the weird economics of information products. Take the oil industry, which Anderson doesn't discuss, but whose significance is obvious—compare Exxon's $371 billion in revenues in 2005 to Google's $6.1 billion. The Long Tail doesn't seem to tell us much about the future of the oil biz.

What are the Long Tail's limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences. When these two conditions are satisfied, a company can radically enlarge its inventory and make money raking in the niche demand.

The Wrong Tail

How to turn a powerful idea into a dubious theory of everything.

By Tim Wu

Sen. Gary Hart: Even If We Had An Admin. That Took Diplomacy Seriously…Our Integrity Will Remain Compromised By Our Oil Dependency…

Iraq 1921-2006

RIP

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, meets Tony Blair in London today as violence in Iraq reaches a new crescendo and senior Iraqi officials say the break up of the country is inevitable . . .

Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B."

He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.

The announcement by Secretary of State Condi Rice that she was going to the region, but would not seek direct meetings with Syria, the country the US claims to be at the heart of any “solution” to the Lebanon crisis, has sparked much international criticism, and rekindled debate in the US over the basic lack of Bush Administration policy.

US policy, under Bush, is largely whatever the Israeli government says it wants. So the long term effect of this on US-Arab relations generally, and the US ability to be constructively involved in any serious peace process, is once again under debate.

Bill is in CT to help Lieberman... but not for Lieberman's sake. Rather, Bill is up here to sit Joe down and tell him that he can't run as an independent, and if he does, he will lose and be villified far worse than he currently is. Bill and Hillary may want Lieberman to win the primary, but they also want to make sure that this contest isn't used against Hillary. They don't want the CT (general) election to be about issues, they want it to remain a Democrat vs Republican affair.

That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.