Wednesday roundup

 This is the kind of piece one can mine for new insights with multiple readings. History professor and former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff looks exhaustively at what it means to think for oneself. There are a lot of aspects to the subject, as it turns out, such as what the quest for originality can do to one's prioritization of the truth, or the vastly different styles demonstrated by highly organized intellects and those of a more chaotic nature.

I'll just share enough such insights to tease.

How about this one?

For a start, we are confused about what thinking is. To think is not to process information. We have impoverished our understanding of thinking by analogizing it to what our machines do. What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection. It is so complex that neither neurologists nor philosophers have found a way to model it, and the engineers of artificial intelligence are still struggling to replicate some of the simplest forms of pattern recognition that human cognition does so effortlessly. We must beware that in our attempt to make computers think like us we do not end up thinking like them.

Nor is thinking a matter of expressing yourself or having opinions. It is not about turning on the fountain of our personality. It is an exercise in finding reasons to persuade yourself and others that something is true, or at least plausibly true. Thinking has truth as its goal and its organizing discipline. Bullshitters, as Harry Frankfurt told us, are precisely those who do not think: they simply express what comes into their minds, without concerning themselves with whether what they are saying has any relation to reality. Every university is, or should be, properly worried that their classrooms are training generation after generation of accredited bullshitters.

Nor is thinking about expressing your identity. It is not an intellectual achievement to parrot the truisms of our tribes. Indeed, thinking is about emancipating yourself from identity, insofar as it throws into question prior and unexamined ideas. Identity is a warm bath, but thinking is a discipline. Many important lines of thought are austerely impersonal, purged of the origins of those who thought them up. Think of mathematics, physics, and logic. These are great systems of thought made possible by thinkers who in the laboratory and the library discarded their identities altogether and lived, for years at a time, in the impersonal realm of signs and symbols. It doesn’t matter that perfect objectivity is impossible; imperfect objectivity, the progressive correction of biases, is certainly possible. Even in the social sciences, it is basic to our methods that we try to leave our personal biases, experiences, and histories behind, or in some way to bracket them, so as to see what the data tells us. In this work, thinking means leaving ourselves behind.

Or this?

If thinking for yourself is the goal of your life, then it pays to maintain a certain distance from the institutions in which you work and live. Distance implies wariness about received opinion, about fashions, about the recurring tides of certainty and urgency that course through the places where we work and soon have us all facing the same way, thinking the same thing. The larger point is about liberal society: if thinking for yourself is your goal, do not go looking for the warm bath of belonging or the certitude of faith. Do not expect a free society to provide these for you. Belonging is not the fondest dream of a serious intellectual. She dreams of other satisfactions first.

Lionel Shriver, writing at UnHerd, gives us a bracing upside-the-head entitled "How We Created a Self-Hating Generation." How we did it, she posits, is that we replaced character with identity as the focus of bringing up new citizens of our society:

I submit: the traditional concept of “building character” is out the window.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

Here's what we should say to a kid who says he or she doesn't know who he or she is:

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Brad Littlejohn contemplates what true authority might be. 

The year 2020 did not kill authority in American public life; it had been on life support for some time. This was merely the year authority tried to rise from its sickbed, in defiance of its terminal condition, and then expired from the strain. Needless to say, the Biden administration has not succeeded in resurrecting it.

Our contemporary crisis of authority runs much deeper than most realize. It is not just the product of institutional rot in Congress; of a swamp in Washington, D.C., that needs to be drained; or of inept leadership by grandstanding celebrity politicians. Nor is it simply the result of the radically democratizing effect of digital media, of a world in which likes and retweets matter more than credentials or even elections — although this is, as we shall see, a key part of the problem.

More fundamentally, our problem is that we no longer know how to recognize an authentic claim to authority, even if one dares show its face — which it almost never does. Without recognition of authority, there can be no legitimacy. Without legitimacy in our authoritative institutions, we cannot know how or why to act — a paralysis we experience as a loss of freedom even as we rage against the authorities we fear pose the greatest threats to our freedom.

He says it's crucial to distinguish between authority and power:

What is political authority? Before we answer, we must distinguish between two key concepts: authority and power. If we fail to do so, we will misunderstand the relationship between authority and freedom, perceiving them as antagonistic to one another when in fact they go hand in hand.

We may define power as a capacity for action in the broadest sense. The idea of power is thus quite close to that of freedom, for freedom clearly involves a capacity to act; indeed, we can use the phrases “power to act” and “freedom to act” interchangeably in certain contexts.

Some have disputed this characterization of freedom, arguing for a purely negative understanding of the term as the absence of compulsion. Yet under this definition, the quadriplegic is considered perfectly free to walk around so long as no one prevents him from doing so. This, of course, is absurd, and does violence to our well-grounded intuitions about what freedom must entail.

Because power and freedom are so similar to one another, they can readily stand in an oppositional relationship. One person’s power is perceived as (and quite often is in fact) a threat to another person’s freedom. There is, at least in some measure, a zero-sum game at work here.

That is not the case, however, when it comes to authority.

The concept of freedom adds to that of power the idea of rationality — freedom is the capacity for meaningful, rational action. We do not ordinarily think of the insane as “free”; indeed, it is precisely their radical un-freedom that can justify restraining or confining them. But from whence arises this meaning? Where do we find our reasons for acting? Not, as modernity is so fond of telling us, from within the freedom of our own will, for that is simply circular. No, it is authority (in the very broadest sense of the term) that provides us with reasons for action, and which thereby makes free action possible.

Authority is thus, in the pithy formulation of theologian Oliver O’Donovan, “the objective correlate of freedom.” Whereas one person’s power can limit another’s freedom by compelling him to act against his will, authority elicits free action by giving him reasons to act. Although it may be the authority that summons me to action, I can then recognize that action as my own. Power is thus far weaker than authority.

Authority gives us reasons for free action in two main guises: as epistemic authority and as political authority. Due to their systematic conflation over the past century, both types of authority are in a state of crisis.

In "From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism," Ruy Tiexiera says that as a society we did a good job of cleaning up actual pollution, but that alarmist swooning has diminished our capacity to address actual, specific problems and solve them.

A piece by Isaac Ariaril Reed and Michael Weinman at Hedgehog Review posits that as we as a society lose our grasp of any kind of common significance, we as individuals stake out positions we find comfortable, but that are untethered to evidence or reason. 

Coleman Hughes, writing at The Free Press, asserts that "Actually, Color-Blindness Isn't Racist." Such a statement ought to have a strong well-duh quality to it, but, in our age, it needs to be fleshed out in an essay.

At Precipice, I republished a Christmas-Eve piece I'd originally posted at Medium back in 2017. It's entitled "How I Made My Peace With God Being An Absolutist."