This is well-written, and it's fun in a through-the-looking-glass kind of way. I'd say that Perry's argument shows the falsity of her premises, which I reject entirely. Assuming that (1) torture, warfare, suffering, mutilation, or death are in some absolute way 'bad' rather than unpleasant and to be considered with seriousness when examining trade-offs and (2) consent is a universalizable and self-evident concept is just smuggling the conclusion into the premises.
Can you expand on this, particularly your remarks after (2)?
I'm not Sarah Perry, but I think she would argue that trade-offs do matter, but, that harms generally outweigh benefits in the moral calculus. If we lived in a world where suicide were free and easy (which she describes at the start of her book) then she might be less insistent on the harm of trapping a conscious being into a life which it doesn't want, and can't escape. She would probably still insist on the argument you saw here, though, that life is generally *about* causing harms, if not to itself, then to others around it.
That's an interesting thought. I would say that availability of suicide doesn't make a difference, because it takes a lot of mental suffering to get there (even in cultures that socially reward suicide under some circumstances).
No, what I mean is that the concepts of consent and harm-reduction are really not at all 'lindy'. Thinking being alive is better than being dead is practically the most lindy thing possible. Humans have always regarded existing an obvious good, to such a universal extent that it can be used as a premise to prove the immortality of the soul, according to the medieval Schoolmen.
Consent? You mean the idea that you should have some say in the things that happen to you? What is this? our ancestors would say: Fate compels even the gods, and all we can do is meet it with honor.
As for physical pain, disdain of it is the foundation of virtue. If I take an ancestral view, I expect this of myself and would not dishonor my sons by expecting less of them.
We can combine these views and say that life is beautiful even when it is painful, and that the human spirit shows its brightness not when times are easy and choices are free, but when times are dark and all a man can do is his duty, though he perish.
(A further 'lindy' [I dislike the term but it is ironical in its currentness] aphorism might be: don't read books on virtue ethics written by women: the /vir/ is in there for a reason.)
So when you said this was fun in a through-the-looking-glas kind of way, it must have been pretty far through the glass, because I seriously cannot understand you.
> the concepts of consent and harm-reduction are really not at all 'lindy'.
Lin·dy [ lin-dee ] noun, plural lin·dies. Also called lindy hop, Lindy Hop . an energetic jitterbug dance. verb (used without object), lin·died, lin·dy·ing. to dance the lindy.
*Before Paywall clamps down, implies Lindy has something to do with antiquity*
__________________
You say other things about the way things were long ago, which might be understandable according to this vague description implied by the New York Times. But (assuming I understand you at all) are you sure you're getting lindyness right? Classical cultures thought nothing of consent? This simply isn't true; see for instance Epicurus on the value of autarchy.
I *do* say some things in part 3 that you might agree with, if you're implying what I think you're implying with your mention of the syllable "vir," but the idea that we shouldn't read books on virtue ethics written by women really ought to be substantiated, rather than merely stated without explanation.
I suspect that both 'lindy' and 'vir' are (unintentional) shibboleths of some sort. Yes, I meant the "Lindy effect" [the longer something has been running, the longer we can expect it to continue -- humanty will still have Homer when Harry Potter is entirely forgotten] and the latin word for 'man' [from which we get the word 'virtue', thus excluding female opinions by default]. Put together there's a humorous effect going on: the heuristic 'exclude women from conversations about courage' is very old, and will still be practiced ages hence when 'feminism' is a concept that would require archaeology to explain. In this sense, it's an example of the meta-point that I was (over-subtly) making, which has to do with Chesteron's fences: if a concept (e.g. existing is good, disregard pain) is demonstrably ancient (and universal at sufficiently-ancient strata), stating it requires no justification at all of any kind. Rather, anyone who wishes to abrogate it must present very strong argumentation indeed and expect all her premises to be mercilessly interrogated. Sure, the ancients had some conception of political participation (i.e. nobody wants to be a slave) in the same sense that everyone has a sense that torture and death are bad (people tend to avoid these). But to elevate either principle above its station produces obviously wrong outputs.
I'm not trying to be abstruse, it's just that I'm only motivated to write (anything) if it contains a spirit of playfulness. You probably don't want me to try to paraphrase Taleb's "Antifragile" or Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of our Success". They're fun books and I suspect you'd like them.
Ah, but the moral of Chesterton's fence isn't that fences require no justification, rather, that we should try to determine what their justification was before tearing them down. The fact people commonly assert that life is good is easy to explain: people who believed the opposite tended to kill themselves, and simply passed the idea on to fewer other people. Perry explicitly denies that evolutionary processes have any kind of moral authority, and she wants to tear that fence down with her eyes wide open to the reason it was there.
When you talk about elevating principles above their station I might agree with you, but I tend to think less of levels, and more in terms of principles being "there" or "not really there."
I do get what you're saying, and I'm familiar with a stronger form (courtesy of Scott Alexander), which states that given the necessity of tearing down chesterton fences for human development over the last however many centuries you want to select for comparison, we should discuss rather the rate at which fences are scheduled for demolition -- everyone in a debate on some particular fence is glad various other fences came down.
However, my mention of Henrich goes in the opposite direction. The argument isn't merely that someone should think really hard before tearing down a fence (e.g. use of caribou-bone divination before hunting), but that literally none of the caribou-hunters using the practice could possibly have had the wherewithal to engage meaningfully with the question of whether or not to stop. Why? Because their form of divination worked as a randomizing element that counteracted human bias towards pattern-matching, which makes us much much better than our nearest primate relatives at some things but much worse at random-walking our way to where the prey hopes we won't be. Any early hunter who decided not to use this system, regardless of how good his reasons appeared to him to be, would not even be wrong in the sense that he wouldn't even be on the right topic.
Henrich gives many examples like this, and the whole point of the book is that we are a culture-gene co-evolved species that exhibits a collective intelligence on a milennial scale (not a personal intelligence on a decade scale). Taleb makes a similar point in his Incerto, exemplified best by the dialog between Socrates and Fat Tony.
Thus we can look at Perry and be sure of a couple of things: she is not smart enough to understand the fence she wishes to demolish; a traditional society would have silenced her, using the death penalty if nothing else worked.
I think this is why we need God. There just is no way to determine scientifically or logically whether life is a good or bad thing. We need God to tell us it is a good thing.
Wow, Tove - I thought you and Anders were hard core secularists!
OK, what do you propose? Or, what do you believe in? Is a pantheistic belief in Mother Nature good enough? (I know Sarah Perry doesn't like that, but there are ways of making it work.) Do you like Thor and Odin? Or something else?
Yes, you were right - I'm very much of a secularist.
Still I imagine that I understand very well what religious people are talking about when they are talking about God. I think I can feel what they feel. They perceive an otherwise inexplicable sense of meaning and I perceive that too.
As an evolutionist, I think that sense of meaning can be explained scientifically: People who perceive life as meaningful build better, more efficient communities and so on. Still, science is first and foremost supposed to be based on observation. So I'm a bit reluctant to light-heartedly explain my perception of meaning away as an illusion. Good scientists take their input seriously. And my perception of meaning is just as real to me as my other perceptions of the world.
>Do you like Thor and Odin? Or something else?
Nah, I'm not that picky. Generic God will do fine.
How interesting; this is essentially a pragmatic form of deism. I went through a brief phase as a deist after leaving Christianity, but my deism was more a "god of the gaps" kind of belief that invoked a Creator to explain the Big Bang and the carefully calibrated laws of physics.
But your attitude is very different, in that it seems to begin with atheism. But then rather than clinging to a godless universe, and either avoiding the problem of meaning, or biting the bullet and claiming there is none, or trying to patch it through secular means, it admits a religious claim that "meaning / morality / worthwhile things" come only from some numinous source.
What if it were possible to prove the existence of "meaning / morality / worthwhile things" that come from purely material sources? Would you then default to an atheist position?
No, it's not deism. More or less I just recognize that meaning is not a logical conclusion. It is an observation. Sarah Perry doesn't make that observation. I and many others do make that observation. You can't argue with observations, because they are the most basic part of science.
I think there is a good hypothesis that explains the existence of meaning/morality/worthwhile things that come from purely material sources. But I'm still in no hurry to conclude that God must be an illusion and all religious people must be misguided. I have read too much Richard Rorty/Michel Foucault/Immanuel Kant for that. I throughly accept that science is not the truth: it is just the most useful system we have to explain the world. Occasionally other systems will be better at explaining some observations. So I prefer remaining open-minded rather than squeezing in everything I observe in science for the sake of it.
If anything, I'm inspired by Simone Weil. She was an atheist who formulated an understanding of the God concept from observation.
Oh - maybe Weil's interest in your religion explains some of your writing about the attractiveness of Christianity here: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/do-you-like-your-ideas-then-have . Wikipedia has Weil starting as an agnostic, though; in this comment, you really sound like an agnostic too, rather than like an atheist.
But it's not really correct to say Sarah Perry doesn't observe life has meaning. (That's the downside to my focusing on Perry's ideas about suicide and the badness of life; I couldn't reproduce many of her arguments.) Perry actually spends a great deal of time arguing that most people perceive meaning in life, which (she says) turns out to be illusory, because while we need meaning, it isn't really there.
In just the same way that many moral anti-realists have gone on to attempt to construct an artificial morality, Perry has gone on to try to create meaning; the byline of a newer blog was "the search for patterns and the thickening of meaning." My sense is that her attempts have largely failed... but she at least seems to have an OK life now that she's married to her Paleo-dieting husband.
Apparently, you can have an OK life without apple pie too!
I'm skeptic to all assertions that "x is illusory". "Free will is illusory" is another of my anti-favorites. I perceive that human existence is meaningful, I perceive that there is free will and I perceive that the sky is blue. Someone might call all of them illusory in different ways, but I think that is to begin on the wrong side of things. Science is based on observation. That means we have to accept all observation in some sense. Also observations that don't fit easily with science.
>Oh - maybe Weil's interest in your religion explains some of your writing about the attractiveness of Christianity
I'm not a Christian. The idea of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit seems indeed very attractive, but I don't get it. I think Christianity is a successful viral idea because missionaries managed to sell in Christianity to everyone from the Inuits to the Amazonian native Americans. Somehow, people of very different backgrounds traded their traditional religions for Christianity. Like if Christianity is the easy part of Western culture while most of the rest is rather difficult to adopt.
This is well-written, and it's fun in a through-the-looking-glass kind of way. I'd say that Perry's argument shows the falsity of her premises, which I reject entirely. Assuming that (1) torture, warfare, suffering, mutilation, or death are in some absolute way 'bad' rather than unpleasant and to be considered with seriousness when examining trade-offs and (2) consent is a universalizable and self-evident concept is just smuggling the conclusion into the premises.
Can you expand on this, particularly your remarks after (2)?
I'm not Sarah Perry, but I think she would argue that trade-offs do matter, but, that harms generally outweigh benefits in the moral calculus. If we lived in a world where suicide were free and easy (which she describes at the start of her book) then she might be less insistent on the harm of trapping a conscious being into a life which it doesn't want, and can't escape. She would probably still insist on the argument you saw here, though, that life is generally *about* causing harms, if not to itself, then to others around it.
That's an interesting thought. I would say that availability of suicide doesn't make a difference, because it takes a lot of mental suffering to get there (even in cultures that socially reward suicide under some circumstances).
No, what I mean is that the concepts of consent and harm-reduction are really not at all 'lindy'. Thinking being alive is better than being dead is practically the most lindy thing possible. Humans have always regarded existing an obvious good, to such a universal extent that it can be used as a premise to prove the immortality of the soul, according to the medieval Schoolmen.
Consent? You mean the idea that you should have some say in the things that happen to you? What is this? our ancestors would say: Fate compels even the gods, and all we can do is meet it with honor.
As for physical pain, disdain of it is the foundation of virtue. If I take an ancestral view, I expect this of myself and would not dishonor my sons by expecting less of them.
We can combine these views and say that life is beautiful even when it is painful, and that the human spirit shows its brightness not when times are easy and choices are free, but when times are dark and all a man can do is his duty, though he perish.
(A further 'lindy' [I dislike the term but it is ironical in its currentness] aphorism might be: don't read books on virtue ethics written by women: the /vir/ is in there for a reason.)
So when you said this was fun in a through-the-looking-glas kind of way, it must have been pretty far through the glass, because I seriously cannot understand you.
> the concepts of consent and harm-reduction are really not at all 'lindy'.
?
__________________
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lindy
Lin·dy [ lin-dee ] noun, plural lin·dies. Also called lindy hop, Lindy Hop . an energetic jitterbug dance. verb (used without object), lin·died, lin·dy·ing. to dance the lindy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/style/lindy.html
*Behind a Paywall*
*Also just about my most hated website*
*Before Paywall clamps down, implies Lindy has something to do with antiquity*
__________________
You say other things about the way things were long ago, which might be understandable according to this vague description implied by the New York Times. But (assuming I understand you at all) are you sure you're getting lindyness right? Classical cultures thought nothing of consent? This simply isn't true; see for instance Epicurus on the value of autarchy.
I *do* say some things in part 3 that you might agree with, if you're implying what I think you're implying with your mention of the syllable "vir," but the idea that we shouldn't read books on virtue ethics written by women really ought to be substantiated, rather than merely stated without explanation.
I suspect that both 'lindy' and 'vir' are (unintentional) shibboleths of some sort. Yes, I meant the "Lindy effect" [the longer something has been running, the longer we can expect it to continue -- humanty will still have Homer when Harry Potter is entirely forgotten] and the latin word for 'man' [from which we get the word 'virtue', thus excluding female opinions by default]. Put together there's a humorous effect going on: the heuristic 'exclude women from conversations about courage' is very old, and will still be practiced ages hence when 'feminism' is a concept that would require archaeology to explain. In this sense, it's an example of the meta-point that I was (over-subtly) making, which has to do with Chesteron's fences: if a concept (e.g. existing is good, disregard pain) is demonstrably ancient (and universal at sufficiently-ancient strata), stating it requires no justification at all of any kind. Rather, anyone who wishes to abrogate it must present very strong argumentation indeed and expect all her premises to be mercilessly interrogated. Sure, the ancients had some conception of political participation (i.e. nobody wants to be a slave) in the same sense that everyone has a sense that torture and death are bad (people tend to avoid these). But to elevate either principle above its station produces obviously wrong outputs.
I'm not trying to be abstruse, it's just that I'm only motivated to write (anything) if it contains a spirit of playfulness. You probably don't want me to try to paraphrase Taleb's "Antifragile" or Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of our Success". They're fun books and I suspect you'd like them.
Ah, but the moral of Chesterton's fence isn't that fences require no justification, rather, that we should try to determine what their justification was before tearing them down. The fact people commonly assert that life is good is easy to explain: people who believed the opposite tended to kill themselves, and simply passed the idea on to fewer other people. Perry explicitly denies that evolutionary processes have any kind of moral authority, and she wants to tear that fence down with her eyes wide open to the reason it was there.
When you talk about elevating principles above their station I might agree with you, but I tend to think less of levels, and more in terms of principles being "there" or "not really there."
I probably understand you best when you insist that a spirit of playfulness makes writing worthwhile. I agree! In my defense, it can be hard to make that work on the Internet, even with people who know you. See for example: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/games-people-play-public-edition/comment/13163117
I do get what you're saying, and I'm familiar with a stronger form (courtesy of Scott Alexander), which states that given the necessity of tearing down chesterton fences for human development over the last however many centuries you want to select for comparison, we should discuss rather the rate at which fences are scheduled for demolition -- everyone in a debate on some particular fence is glad various other fences came down.
However, my mention of Henrich goes in the opposite direction. The argument isn't merely that someone should think really hard before tearing down a fence (e.g. use of caribou-bone divination before hunting), but that literally none of the caribou-hunters using the practice could possibly have had the wherewithal to engage meaningfully with the question of whether or not to stop. Why? Because their form of divination worked as a randomizing element that counteracted human bias towards pattern-matching, which makes us much much better than our nearest primate relatives at some things but much worse at random-walking our way to where the prey hopes we won't be. Any early hunter who decided not to use this system, regardless of how good his reasons appeared to him to be, would not even be wrong in the sense that he wouldn't even be on the right topic.
Henrich gives many examples like this, and the whole point of the book is that we are a culture-gene co-evolved species that exhibits a collective intelligence on a milennial scale (not a personal intelligence on a decade scale). Taleb makes a similar point in his Incerto, exemplified best by the dialog between Socrates and Fat Tony.
Thus we can look at Perry and be sure of a couple of things: she is not smart enough to understand the fence she wishes to demolish; a traditional society would have silenced her, using the death penalty if nothing else worked.
I think this is why we need God. There just is no way to determine scientifically or logically whether life is a good or bad thing. We need God to tell us it is a good thing.
Wow, Tove - I thought you and Anders were hard core secularists!
OK, what do you propose? Or, what do you believe in? Is a pantheistic belief in Mother Nature good enough? (I know Sarah Perry doesn't like that, but there are ways of making it work.) Do you like Thor and Odin? Or something else?
Yes, you were right - I'm very much of a secularist.
Still I imagine that I understand very well what religious people are talking about when they are talking about God. I think I can feel what they feel. They perceive an otherwise inexplicable sense of meaning and I perceive that too.
As an evolutionist, I think that sense of meaning can be explained scientifically: People who perceive life as meaningful build better, more efficient communities and so on. Still, science is first and foremost supposed to be based on observation. So I'm a bit reluctant to light-heartedly explain my perception of meaning away as an illusion. Good scientists take their input seriously. And my perception of meaning is just as real to me as my other perceptions of the world.
>Do you like Thor and Odin? Or something else?
Nah, I'm not that picky. Generic God will do fine.
How interesting; this is essentially a pragmatic form of deism. I went through a brief phase as a deist after leaving Christianity, but my deism was more a "god of the gaps" kind of belief that invoked a Creator to explain the Big Bang and the carefully calibrated laws of physics.
But your attitude is very different, in that it seems to begin with atheism. But then rather than clinging to a godless universe, and either avoiding the problem of meaning, or biting the bullet and claiming there is none, or trying to patch it through secular means, it admits a religious claim that "meaning / morality / worthwhile things" come only from some numinous source.
What if it were possible to prove the existence of "meaning / morality / worthwhile things" that come from purely material sources? Would you then default to an atheist position?
No, it's not deism. More or less I just recognize that meaning is not a logical conclusion. It is an observation. Sarah Perry doesn't make that observation. I and many others do make that observation. You can't argue with observations, because they are the most basic part of science.
I think there is a good hypothesis that explains the existence of meaning/morality/worthwhile things that come from purely material sources. But I'm still in no hurry to conclude that God must be an illusion and all religious people must be misguided. I have read too much Richard Rorty/Michel Foucault/Immanuel Kant for that. I throughly accept that science is not the truth: it is just the most useful system we have to explain the world. Occasionally other systems will be better at explaining some observations. So I prefer remaining open-minded rather than squeezing in everything I observe in science for the sake of it.
If anything, I'm inspired by Simone Weil. She was an atheist who formulated an understanding of the God concept from observation.
Oh - maybe Weil's interest in your religion explains some of your writing about the attractiveness of Christianity here: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/do-you-like-your-ideas-then-have . Wikipedia has Weil starting as an agnostic, though; in this comment, you really sound like an agnostic too, rather than like an atheist.
But it's not really correct to say Sarah Perry doesn't observe life has meaning. (That's the downside to my focusing on Perry's ideas about suicide and the badness of life; I couldn't reproduce many of her arguments.) Perry actually spends a great deal of time arguing that most people perceive meaning in life, which (she says) turns out to be illusory, because while we need meaning, it isn't really there.
In just the same way that many moral anti-realists have gone on to attempt to construct an artificial morality, Perry has gone on to try to create meaning; the byline of a newer blog was "the search for patterns and the thickening of meaning." My sense is that her attempts have largely failed... but she at least seems to have an OK life now that she's married to her Paleo-dieting husband.
Apparently, you can have an OK life without apple pie too!
I'm skeptic to all assertions that "x is illusory". "Free will is illusory" is another of my anti-favorites. I perceive that human existence is meaningful, I perceive that there is free will and I perceive that the sky is blue. Someone might call all of them illusory in different ways, but I think that is to begin on the wrong side of things. Science is based on observation. That means we have to accept all observation in some sense. Also observations that don't fit easily with science.
>Oh - maybe Weil's interest in your religion explains some of your writing about the attractiveness of Christianity
I'm not a Christian. The idea of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit seems indeed very attractive, but I don't get it. I think Christianity is a successful viral idea because missionaries managed to sell in Christianity to everyone from the Inuits to the Amazonian native Americans. Somehow, people of very different backgrounds traded their traditional religions for Christianity. Like if Christianity is the easy part of Western culture while most of the rest is rather difficult to adopt.