The end of philosophy in 800 words or less

David Brooks gets under a lot of liberals' skin, but one thing I've always appreciated is that he seems to have a pretty deep interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and is willing to write about it in his op-ed columns. Even if a lot of what he says is not exactly cutting edge stuff, I think he's still performing an important function: introducing key concepts from the brain sciences to a mainstream audience. So when he writes an article called "The End of Philosophy" trying to get across the notion that the Enlightenment-era conception of the mind as the "seat of reason" has been shown by science to be completely inaccurate, I'm sympathetic.

However, plenty of people aren't so sympathetic, and in fact they have a pretty good reason not to be: Brooks' column is terrible. From John Cole's Balloon Juice:

David Brooks has another of his patented “science explains social things but I won’t tell you how or cite any actual articles” pieces today. This one is about the “science of morality.”

And, indeed, Brooks does not cite any articles, and many of the claims he makes are as vapid as they are pithy (e.g., "The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality... challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people." Huh?). While a person who is already familiar with philosophy and cognitive science (ahem) can charitably fill in the blanks, everyone else is left scratching their heads.

The problem, I think, is that Brooks is working in an incredibly constricted format--the newspaper op-ed. Consider all the advantages of a blog: there is no length limit, you can post as often and as much as you want, you can include links, you can include as many images as you want, you can go back and edit posts to make them clearer, you can dialog with commenters or other bloggers, you can vary the difficulty of your posts (as for example Krugman does with his "wonkish" versus non-wonkish posts), etc. Maybe if he were blogging Brooks would do a good job conveying all these difficult ideas to a mainstream audience--but as it is, he is trying to cram everything into 800 words of newspaper print, which I'm pretty sure would be impossible even for Socrates.

Oh, and in case you don't know who Socrates is or what he is famous for, let me give you the Brooks capsule summary:

Socrates talked.

Got that?

Jon Stewart: Gadfly

As I might have mentioned before, Socrates used to pass the time by accosting important and powerful people in the public square and annoying the hell out of them by asking them exactly what they meant when they spoke about things like justice, courage, honor, etc. Typically, the important person would start in on some explanation or another until they faltered under Socrates' questioning and contradicted themselves, thus revealing in humiliating fashion which bodily orifice they had been talking out of all along.

Predictably, this got Socrates executed. During the trial, though, he tried to explain to the jury why someone like him was beneficial to the state by likening himself to a gadfly that keeps a sleepy horse active and alert:

For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Today in America, 2400 years or so later, the national gadfly remains an important position and one that is vital to the health of the state. I imagine that the press fancies itself in this role, holding leaders accountable and asking them the hard questions, but I think for some time now the press has been symbiotically subsumed into the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash of Washington, and has fully bought in to its Orwellian obfuscations of language and contrived narratives.

And so the gadfly role has been filled, I think, by someone truly outside the Washington establishment: Jon Stewart. Nobody else gets down to the Socratic nuts and bolts of rigorously exposing blatant contradictions or asking those in power what they mean when they say X. For example, during the Republican convention we heard a lot about Sarah Palin's "small town values"--but only the Daily Show had the good idea of asking people what these values were:



And could Karl Rove--who is perhaps the best exemplar of the revolving-door relationship between the political establishment and the punditry--have been eviscerated like this by anyone other than Stewart?



It's a shame that the Daily Show has been on hiatus during this pig/lipstick flap. The response to it probably would have been pretty entertaining--and pretty good for the country.

What is honor?

Though I disagree with George Will's position on the housing/credit crisis, something else he mentions in that op-ed--something about John McCain--rings absolutely true:

McCain's only solecism is his loopy idea that mortgage lenders should make a "response" that is "similar" to General Motors' policy of interest-free financing immediately after Sept. 11. Patting himself on the back, as is his wont, McCain said he is too honorable to "play election-year politics" or "allow dogma to override common sense." Then he cast this issue as he casts too many issues, as a matter of patriotism, saying of lenders: "They've been asking the government to help them out. I'm now calling on them to help their customers and their nation out."

...

McCain practices the politics of honor: He thinks that whatever his instincts tell him is honorable must be so and that those who think otherwise are dishonorable. This makes him difficult to deal with but does no other harm, as long as it is kept separate from governing.

This indeed seems to be a pattern with McCain: he'll get it into his head that something is or isn't honorable/patriotic, and then get all bull-headed about it one way or the other. But the problem is, it is not as if he ever really explains exactly what he means by these classical virtues, nor how a particular policy position upholds them. George Will is right to question in what sense lenders owe borrowers lower interest rates as a matter of patriotism--if McCain is really committed to individual freedom and the free market, then lenders should be able to set interests at the market rate. It seems as though McCain is in the awkward position of advocating the principles of the free market, and yet condemning anyone who actually follows them as dishonorable or unpatriotic.

Maybe the purest example of McCain's arbitrary virtue-mongering is his bizarre fixation with banning Ultimate Fighting matches, even though his favorite sport, boxing, is clearly more brutal:

When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: "Don't people get killed all the time doing that?" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.

But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, "If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.

What is disturbing here is that McCain's reasons for wanting to ban Ultimate Fighting seem pretty unexamined--like he took one look at it, decided it wasn't genteel enough for civilized society, and so chose to do the "right" and "honorable" thing by trying to get the perceived barbarism banned. But I think he owes fans of Ultimate Fighting a reason as to why their sport should be banned besides merely that it disgusts John McCain.

But that's trivial. An issue that is actually important in which McCain's gut-instinct sense of honor comes into play is the Iraq War. He often frames withdrawal in terms of something that would be dishonorable to do--but the reasons why he thinks this is so are sort of ambiguous to me.

There seem to be two different rationales in play. The first is that--as an empirical matter--if we were to withdraw troops, then it would unleash chaos and genocide in the region. This would be dishonorable--not just because we would be causing harm to innocents, but because this action would constitute a breaking of an American promise to Iraqis that we would render unto them a functioning democratic society. Besides the fact that I might disagree with the empirical claim that it relies on, I don't really see a problem with this rationale--indeed, if for the sake of argument I grant the claim, then I agree with McCain wholeheartedly.

However, there seems to be another strand in McCain's honor rhetoric, one that is a lot more alarming: he seems to think that withdrawing from Iraq is dishonorable because it entails defeat, and that defeat is unacceptable in and of itself:

In a recent interview, Randy Scheunemann, who runs the McCain campaign's foreign policy shop, noted that "Vietnam had a huge impact on John." Obviously. Less obvious: "It's not about his personal experiences in the war as a POW," he said. "It's about leading a group of naval aviators [after the Vietnam war] when they had to cannibalize parts."

Mr. Scheunemann is referring to a chapter in Mr. McCain's life when in 1974 he took command of the Navy's largest naval air squadron in Jacksonville, Fla. Nearly 20 of the squadron's 50 jets had been grounded for lack of maintenance, and some hadn't flown in years. Mr. McCain eventually managed to get all his planes flying again, a professional triumph. But the condition of the post-Vietnam Navy turned out to be an abiding lesson to Mr. McCain about what happens to a defeated military.

For McCain, it is as though the ramifications of a defeat for the military are so dire that it is worth it to achieve a "victory" at great cost just to avoid "defeat". But this is sheer lunacy, a view of the world that could only come from someone whose life experience is overwhelmingly defined by the military life, by war, by victory and defeat. Most people in America are not life-long soldiers and don't care about these marshal notions, as such: no one wants to continue to send soldiers and money to Iraq just to achieve some abstract ideal of victory. If we do go to war, there better be a real substantive reason for it, like to protect national security or prevent ethnic cleansing--and if we find ourselves in a war in which no such objectives can be achieved, then we better withdraw. Some would call this defeat--and I suppose they would be right, generally speaking. But they'd be wrong to call it dishonorable. Defeat isn't dishonorable if it comes as a result of a valid realization that the war is not worth the fighting for; indeed, there can be nothing dishonorable, in my view, about valuing the lives of individuals in this way.

What would be great is if there were someone like Socrates around who could grill McCain on these questions about virtues. What Socrates would do back in ancient Athens is hang out in the public square and get into conversations with the local big-shots. He'd often start by asking them a simple-seeming question about a virtue--like "What is courage?" or "What is justice?" or "What is truth?"--and proceed to cross-examine them on it until his victim tripped up by contradicting himself. Often times Socrates' point wasn't so much to prove one theory or another, but to demonstrate that, though the public figure he questioned might talk a lot about this or that virtue, he couldn't actually give a coherent account of what it meant, exactly.

I wonder just how badly McCain would do under this kind of philosophical cross-examination. If the interview about the moral distinction between boxing and Ultimate Fighting is any indication, I'd say he'd do pretty poorly.