Science investigates reality, but reality is hidden.
Imagine there is a box before your eyes. You can see it, but you cannot see what is inside. No one knows what it contains and no one could open it and look. (Let’s say it would explode if anyone tried.) But you still want to know what is there.
Scientists also want to know and they employ all sorts of methods and form all kinds of theories of what might be inside that box. They strongly disagree among themselves and dispute it loudly. Sometimes one theory has many supporters, but then new research suggests that they are wrong, the theory will be discarded and another will emerge.
A skeptic might then conclude that no truth exists. “Today there is one thing inside the box,” he says, “but tomorrow there will be another. Clearly the whole exercise is meaningless because there is no right or wrong anyway.”
That person is of course a fool for whatever the box contains or does not contain, there is a definite answer to the question of its content. Something (or nothing) is inside, and whatever it is, it is objectively there. The fact that we can never know for sure what it is, is completely irrelevant to its content. The box does not care what we think; nature is indifferent to our knowledge about it; man is not the measure of anything.
Science is the search for whatever is inside those secret boxes; whatever is out there in the world or in the universe. Certain and definite knowledge cannot be reach about anything, but the right answer still exists even if we cannot find it and even if we cannot be sure when we have found it. The truth is objective.
What remains through the shifting tides, periodical elections and changing daily agendas, that is the establishment. It will always stick to its dominant position unless there is a profound social overturn; a revolution. In that case the basic structures of society crumble and something new (a new establishment) will have to be built in its place. If there is a revolution, that is.
The new populist movements are a curious brand. They are anti-establishment, that is their one common denominator, but there is no talk of a revolution.
It makes sense to be anti-establishment if your ideas about society differ widely from what exists in your country today. Then, in order to achieve the society of your dreams, the establishment will have to go. But the change of these structures would then only be a means to an end. The problem is not the establishment per se, but the fact that its frozen architecture is an impediment to the construction of your ideal society.
For the populist movements, on the other hand, the attack on the established order seems to be a purpose in itself. The dissatisfaction is general and without direction. They know something is wrong, but not quite what it is, and they imagine that curiously diffuse establishment to be the cause of their diffuse problems.
It is of course true that whenever there is something profoundly wrong in a society, the cause is to be found in its basic structures, in other words the establishment. But if one doesn’t know the essential content of what should be put in its place, a mere replacement of people in position is without meaning.
We all know that feeling: The thirst for revenge. We have been wronged, we have suffered injustice, and we want the wrongdoer to suffer in return. As we are familiar with the feeling, we may want to call it natural, but then any other human vice would also be natural. We have all felt greed and envy also and a number of other vices and even the saints are said to have struggled with them.
It is, by the way, also natural to feel physically ill, to have the flu or a cough, but inasmuch as that reduces the well-functioning of the body, it is not natural. In this sense “natural” means whatever makes nature work properly.
The thirst for revenge is therefore not natural. It gnaws on our mind and darkens our life and distracts our productive energies toward destructive aims. While harboring that feeling, we don’t work properly and neither will of course the object of our rage if those dark intentions are carried out.
Yet it is often considered natural and in some situations it is even officially encouraged. The justice system is in many ways a system of institutionalized revenge. It is called just retribution when an offender is convicted and the victim is then thought to have received a just compensation. People may exhaust themselves through heartbreaking trials only to make sure that the person who caused them injury will be found guilty and punished. Justice is fulfilled, they say, but only revenge is accomplished.
How can damage added to damage repair anything? It may satisfy our primitive inclinations just like any other vice has the immediate effect of satisfying a desire, but in the end it is unreasonable and self-destructive.
Politics is not a gentleman’s sport. It’s not about how you play the game, but all about winning and so it should be if we are to take the politicians seriously. After all, politics may ultimately affect the lives of millions of people and if a leader thinks he knows what policy would make the best solution to social problems, of course he should pursue that policy regardless of formalities.
Now this Trump, that new Emperor of the United States, certainly seems to think he knows what is right. I happen to disagree with him and I think his opinions on most issues sound disastrous, but that’s not the point here. I just can’t blame him for trying to do whatever it takes to get his program through. If that means taking shortcuts; if it means setting aside some of the regular procedures of policy making, so be it. If you really know how to cure many of the ills of this world, you can’t let etiquette and knightly notions of fair play get in your way; that would be selfish, wouldn’t it? A leader who is afraid of confrontation, is not a leader; he is just a caretaker.
If only Obama had not been such a gentleman, the world might have been a better place now. He had such pretty visions, but when he met obstacles he politely bowed aside. He sounded radical at first, but for fear of offending anyone he safely appointed mainstream assistants. His record is a pale display compared to what he promised.
And now there is Trump. Already he is acting like Napoleon singularly intent on getting his extreme measures through. We can only hope for Waterloo.
“It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice,” said Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese communist leader, and then he abolished communism. If economy were just about the economy, if it were just about producing goods and gaining wealth, if it were just about catching mice, then he would have been right.
The attraction of communism was never due to its superiority as an economic theory. No heart is set on fire by equations of GNP prospects and no one puts his life on stake for a more efficient industrial production. Communism is a system of beliefs and as any other ideology or religion its fundamental assumptions can never be proven wrong simply by appeal to hard facts. Even if it were demonstrated a thousand times that the poor have a greater chance of getting richer in a capitalist system, it would be an insufficient reason for rejecting communism.
A good society is not judged according to income level, neither on average nor for the lowest classes. “Good” in a social context always refers to justice and for a social system to be just it must be harmonious. That again means that each part must function as an essential ingredient of the whole. When something is in harmony, no part is dominating another and none is being exploited.
It is not about what one individual has in isolation from the rest, neither is it relevant simply to compare them. If one person owns a lot and another quite little, that in itself is not an issue relevant to justice. If they live isolated and in no way are related to each other, the poor man’s wish for a share in the rich man’s wealth may just be a case of envy, but if they live in the same society, the uneven distribution goes beyond their personal feelings. It’s a sign of social ill health if the gap between the rich and poor is too big.
The cat is not just a mouse catching machine, and society has more than one purpose.
Free competition in the market place does not necessarily lead to more diversity. The mechanisms of fashion tend to draw the products in a certain direction.
The news media and entertainment industry also oddly gravitate toward conformity when more options are added. Hundreds of television channels may be offered, but they are almost all the same.
Also in the realm of politics the same phenomenon may be observed. As a democracy advances and matures, the parties increasingly compete for the same middle ground, gradually looking more similar. That is the paradox: More options lead to less options.
In the age of globalization, that becomes a worldwide tendency and the only way to counteract it is to limit the influx of those dominant forces. Left to itself the political free market, what is normally called liberalism, will be drawn in whatever direction the political fashions direct, not because people really want it, but because it is perceived as inevitable.
But just like the tendencies of the free market economy can only be stemmed by active state intervention, the political market can also only be changed when the government intervenes and obstructs the liberal flow, that is, when it becomes more authoritarian.
Therefore the only way a country like Russia can establish itself as a real alternative to the West, is by implementing undemocratic measures and restrict civil society. That is unfortunate, no doubt, but it does make the world more diverse than it otherwise would have been and on a global scale at least, it gives an increased perception of choice.
Do animals have rights? It’s a weird question and it’s not so clear what it actually means. If human beings have rights (and even that is far from evident) it’s because they live in a system of mutual dependence with other individuals of their species. People may have rights if it has been granted them by someone, probably with the expectation that they contribute their share in the form of duties. The state may give rights within a system of citizenship and human rights are only conceivable with a full understanding of what it means to be human. Obviously animals are not and cannot be a part of a human interactive system; we cannot expect anything from them.
There’s a strange modern fashion that ethics has to be expressed in the language of rights. That is by no means necessary. Denying animals rights is not the same as allowing them to be mistreated. They are living things that are capable of suffering and we shouldn’t let any creature suffer if we can avoid it.
Where could a system of rights for animals possibly come from if it allows them to be killed and eaten and used for labor? We don’t imagine that we treat them the way they would have wanted if they could have expressed their view. Those imaginary rights are arbitrarily adjusted to human inclinations simply stating that you can treat animals however you like as long as it is necessary for your purpose.
Rights are either negotiable or fundamental, but animal rights can be neither. We cannot negotiate with animals and their “rights” are arbitrary.
Man is a fierce animal, no one can deny that. History is so full of reports of unfathomable cruelty that it is hard to imagine that those who committed such horrendous acts belonged to the same species as the friendly people we see around us every day. But apparently there is something in human psychology that makes them capable of such acts, something that luckily is hidden in normal situations. One can only wonder who among us could have been torturers in a Nazi concentration camp, but some of us evidently could.
We are subjects of our own psychology. That, however, does not in any way justify our behavior. If it did one could never blame anyone for anything since we are incapable of acting outside of our psychology anyway.
Still in certain circumstances people who usually are all too willing to blame their neighbors for trifles, withdraw their critique and become psychologically understanding even in the face of terrible atrocities. They are ready to excuse and explain away acts that are committed by their own side or by the side they for some reason support. What was done may have been bad, they say, but understandable due to the circumstances. That, in effect, sounds very much like an excuse.
People seem especially willing to condone what is perceived as legitimate retribution. The other side did something terrible first, so one can understand the wish and even the need for retaliation. The Nazis committed unspeakable atrocities, so clearly there was a need to get back at them after the war and one can understand it if it got a little out of hand when German women and children were deported and killed.
But one atrocity is no more or less entitled to our psychological understanding than any one other. A psychologist can probably understand the most vicious sadist and still condemn him and if we understand acts of cruel retribution, we should be no less condemning.
Is it better to die fighting for your beliefs or to sit patiently waiting for an opportunity to induce change? http://www.buzzle.com/articles/philosophical-questions-about-society-that-will-make-you-think.html
They fought for their beliefs. They fought and died. They fought for what they believed they were fighting for, but what did they actually fight for?Those poor idealists gave their life for some political conflict that was probably desperately short of idealism.
Politics is a cynical business, a ruthless struggle for power that honest individuals had better stay away from. And in normal times most of them do stay away leaving the politicians to their own filth. But sometimes, when politics gets so nasty that it even spills over into a real and bloody war, the idealists are willing to join the fighting. Why do they believe that violence and murder is an activity more worthy of their participation?
It may be better for an idealist to lose a war, for then at least he doesn’t lose his ideals. If the war is lost, no one knows for sure what is lost and one can still think they fought for a better world. But a victorious war is brutally revealing. Now the winners can realize that brave new world they had promised and for which so many had died. But what happens? The gruesome violence is followed by fierce politicking and whatever the outcome it will not be what anyone had wanted.
Look at any war in history and compare the outcome with what was promised before the war and the discrepancy is likely to be large. The communist utopia never materialized, the liberated colonies continued to be exploited.
At any time bitter veterans have probably looked back and asked: Was this really what we fought for?
They thought they fought for their beliefs, but they fought for something else. We shouldn’t make the same mistake.
Does it matter if a person is moral or not, if he/she is truly happy? http://www.buzzle.com/articles/philosophical-questions-about-society-that-will-make-you-think.html
Plato has already rejected that question for us: An immoral person cannot be happy. He will be at war with himself, different desires competing with each other, and he can never reach satisfaction. Plato is right; there can be no happiness without harmony.
Morality is about doing the right thing, but what is right is not to be defined in an abstract fashion disconnected from practical reality. What is right is simply what is healthy in the broadest sense of the term; healthy for mind and body, healthy for people around us, for society at large and for ourselves. Morality is the recommendation of whatever conduct is good for us, or at least what will make us avoid suffering and malfunction.
Included among the people who are affected by our behavior are we ourselves, and good moral conduct also prohibits us to cause suffering to ourselves. A moral person will therefore also strive to avoid pain for himself, that is, he will try to make himself happy. It is contradictory to imagine a truly happy person being immoral because such a person would be actively causing himself pain and making himself unhappy.
Doing what is right to others simultaneously means doing the right thing to oneself. A person seeking to take advantage of others will compromise his own integrity. He may be able to satisfy one specific desire, but he upsets his own healthy equilibrium, covets more, becomes colder in his feelings toward other human beings and thereby reduces his own humanity. An immoral person sacrifices his own happiness.
A Bear - Poles Apart 