Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.

That is to say that New Yorkers, by and large, are maximizers rather than satisficers. The distinction comes from the economist Herbert Simon, and was recently popularized by positive psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. In brief: maximizers try to weigh every option and ensure that every choice is the best they can make, to get the best result. Satisficers, on the other hand, make choices quickly and don’t mind the idea that their choice might not have been the best.

I notice this problem in particular with respect to food. I love international food, and to me that’s the most wonderful thing of all about New York – it has a wider variety of food choices than just about anywhere else in the world. New York has Surinamese and Bajan and Xinjiang restaurants; in Manhattan you can get Burmese and Senegalese food delivered to your door, often 24 hours a day. Food writer Calvin Trillin lives in the food paradise of lower Manhattan, in some respects for exactly this reason. But in Trillin’s work one finds little gratitude for this extraordinary and unprecedented variety. Instead he maintains a list of all the food he can’t get in Manhattan, and calls it his “Register of Frustration and Deprivation.” Trillin, in other words, is a maximizer, who will never have enough and never be satisfied – and that seems to me characteristic of New York life. Even when you have the best in the world – maybe especially when you have the best in the world – it’s still not going to be good enough.

In many respects this was the lesson I learned in my youth in Thailand. What makes you unhappy is not that you don’t have enough, it’s the desire for more, itself. The Second Noble Truth again: suffering comes from craving. To live in New York seems to feed that craving.

New York makes me think of the myth of Eden – and the view, going back to St. Ambrose, that the fall from Eden made us better off (“O felix culpa.”) While there are perhaps few places in the world that are less like the Garden of Eden in a literal sense, New York shares with Eden the feeling of being a place where all desires can be satisfied. It seems to me that, if there ever had been an Eden, Adam and Eve would not actually have been happy there – they would have found ways to want more. (Indeed why else would the fall have happened?) At least for a city-lover like me, choosing to live outside of Eden, or outside of New York, is accepting and living with the fact that you can’t always get what you want – even within Eden.

New Atheists often don’t want to admit this point. When they accept common-sense views at odds with their exultation of science as the only true way of knowing, they do it by equivocating on their definition of “science.” One finds the point in a recent exchange on P.Z. Myers’s blog. Responding to Larry Moran, Myers attacks what he calls:

the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.

“Critical, rational examination,” eh? If that’s all science is, then every theologian is a scientist par excellence. I don’t think that’s a claim the New Atheists want to be making. Rather, the “science” they are defending is a) completely empirical, and b) based on the controlled experimental testing of hypotheses. So John Pieret responds to Myers by saying:

Really? What tests did you do on yourself to see if you love your wife and children? Hormone testing, eegs, what? Thinking about things is not “science” per se. Science is empiric investigation. Nor is the question whether “love” can be scientifically investigated, the question is whether individual scientists do it before they decide who they love.

Myers’s response:

John, yes, we carried out a long period of empirical investigation. It’s called “dating”. Both my wife and I studied the problem carefully, and if I’d been a jerk or she’d tormented me cruelly, we’d probably have reached the rational decision that we shouldn’t marry.

I really don’t understand how people can fail to recognize that we do carry out critical examinations of others and ourself. Love doesn’t just pop into existence in the absence of knowledge or experience.

And as I predicted, you do have a naive view of what “scientific” means. It does not mean hormones and eegs. You don’t have to put on a lab coat to do it. It’s simple, rational, evidence-based thinking.

An excellent point by Chris Schoen skewers Myers’s attempted defence:

We’re all aware that the practice of science, while it perhaps has some blurry edges, generally relies not just on empirical observation, but also on the testing of hypotheses, and also to the related practices of replicating the results of such tests, and publishing such results for the scrutiny of other scientists. Eliding any number of these steps is a sure way to have your findings (or “findings”) mocked. And it is on these shoals that most “pseudo-sciences” founder. There is plenty of what a lawyer would call circumstantial evidence for things like ESP and homeopathy. What there is not, in support of these phenomena, is hypothesis testing, controlled experiment, and peer review.
…
No doubt the probability of denial was bound to increase in proportion to how personal the counterfactual is (your wife.) But it is remarkable how much a scrupulous scientist has left out of his definition. White lab coats aside, without hypothesis testing and publication and replication of results, Myer’s courtship is about as scientific in its method as UFOlogy. Probably less, given the number of publications devoted to the latter. Which is not to say, of course, that PZ’s love is not real, or that his knowledge of it is flawed.

Pieret and Schoen do a solid job of demonstrating that Myers’s love for his wife is not based on “science” – not, at least, on the kinds of criteria that scientists use to distinguish science from pseudoscience. In the further comments to Myers’s post, he and his defenders try to argue that Myers’s love was still better than “religion” because it was based on empirical evidence.

But this hardly satisfies. When one is dealing with individual issues in particular lives, the evidence can lead to conclusions that would be unscientific in any sense of science accepted by New Atheists. A grad-school colleague of mine, who was proclaimed a reincarnated lama in Tibet, told me that he as a child had been able to recite things he had no way of knowing without his being a lama. Based on the evidence of his life alone, rebirth was the best explanation. He had based this view on the empirical evidence of his life. I don’t imagine it would hold up under hypothesis testing in controlled conditions; but it was based on as much empirical evidence as Myers’s love for his wife.

Beyond this point, I don’t think it can be said too many times that empiricism is self-refuting. Can statements only be true if they can be empirically tested, even in the sense that Myers tested his love for his wife? Well, the statement “statements can only be true if they can be empirically tested” cannot be empirically tested. Therefore, if it is true, it is false. The appeal to empirical evidence won’t get you out of the hard work of assessing the logic of individual claims made by both “science” and “religion.”

At lunch I talked to a professor who was surprised to find that students had a hard time using a wiki; other attenders tweeted their surprise that most students had never used blogs before, when the students text and tweet and use other technologies so regularly. How could the students have a hard time with these technologies when they’re so tech-savvy?

Here’s the trick: undergraduate students are not “tech-savvy,” not in the sense that previous generations think of that term. The older we are, the likelier we are to equate “uses lots of technology” with “loves technology.” But 20-year-olds are not tech-heads. They do not, as a group, “love” Facebook any more than older generations love cars or telephones. For them these technologies are simply there, and useful, just like books and staircases. Texting and wikis do not fall under the same category in their minds, any more than books and staircases do.

I’m old enough to remember when information technology per se was new and exciting, when computers were not just a part of life. But they’ve been a part of my life for long enough that I don’t put them in a category, the way people older than me do. At a job interview a few years ago, the search committee asked me: “How do you use technology in your classes?” The question blindsided me. I set up online discussions and had my sessions videotaped for online learning and used PowerPoint-like presentation software and stored readings as online PDFs and did my gradebook on a spreadsheet and sent paper grades by email, but I had never grouped all of these together. To do so felt a little bit like Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia”. Far as I can tell, the undergrads feel the same way as I did, but more so.

And so I wonder whether we should simply try to stop talking about “technology,” even “information technology.” Making predictions is a dangerous game, but I bet that in 30 years, when my generation are the old hands and today’s undergrads are in charge, colleges and universities will not have departments of “information technology.” Instructional technology, the field I’m trying to enter, will just be a part of pedagogy, of teaching and learning; tech support will be grouped with facilities management, the people you call when the classroom temperature is too high. Technology will be categorized by function, not by the fact that it is “technology.”

Technologies are tools. I’ve previously admired the wonder and gratitude that older people feel for technology. But youth have a wisdom of their own. They know that Twitter is useful for some things, texting for others, pencils for others, glasses for others. They don’t need to be told the thing we keep hearing at conferences in the field: that instructional technology needs to be about the instructional and not the technology, digital humanities about the humanities and not the digital.

At a panel on blogging in the classroom, Elaine Garofoli tweeted: “blogs strike me as being very old tech. Been there, done that.” Many other participants retweeted and seconded and thirded this claim. But what’s wrong with old tech? We might think we need to switch over to all the latest technologies to keep up with Twittering and texting 20-year-olds. But they still use cars and pencils and staircases. It’s just that for them, instant messaging and Google Buzz are part of the same toolkit as the staircases.

The problem: this view is almost the opposite of what the classical Indian Buddhists – including the Buddha of the Pali suttas – actually taught. To be sure, the autonomous, independent selves that we would like to believe in are an illusion. We must indeed recognize the dependent co-arising (paticca samuppāda or pratitya samutpāda) of all things, acknowledge that everything arises out of a circle of mutually dependent causes.

Here’s the thing: this circle of causes is bad. The first of the twelve links in the chain of causation is ignorance; and out of this chain comes suffering. All of the things conditioned by causation, the First Noble Truth says, are suffering, dukkha. The hope offered by the Buddha, in the Third Noble Truth, is to offer us a way out of this suffering interdependent world of saṃsāra – to get us to nirvana, something unconditioned, in some sense even independent. You usually won’t hear this part in Yavanayāna affirmations of interdependence. Early Buddhism offers us a worldview strikingly similar to the Jainism that preceded it and the Yoga Sūtras that followed it; and these are probably the strongest integrity traditions there are, more “Cartesian” than Descartes himself. We progressively reduce our dependence on the world around us until we transcend even dependence on life itself, entering the ideal state, the Jaina and Yoga version of nirvāna, which is called kaivalaya: aloneness.

Neither does this integrity orientation change where one might most expect it to change: the rise of other-oriented Mahāyāna, where one remains in the world to free others. In Indian Mahāyāna thinkers like Śāntideva, this freedom is itself understood as independence. Śāntideva teaches the importance of the kalyāna mitra, the good spiritual friend – but this friendship is understood in a necessarily unbalanced and hierarchical way. When I was a TA for Diana Eck, she gave me some wise advice about the proper boundaries for a teacher: “You can be your students’ friend, but they can’t be your friend.” And this is exactly the way the kalyāna mitra works. The kalyāna mitra is a guru, someone more liberated than you are; you can trust, rely on depend on this guru, but the guru can’t depend on you. Ultimately, the goal is to become a kalyāna mitra for others, to allow them to depend on you – but they can depend on you because you are advanced enough not to depend on anyone else.

Where all of this does change, as far as I can tell, is in East Asia – where the intimacy worldview was philosophically entrenched long before Buddhism arrived o the scene. I’m no expert on East Asian Buddhism, but as I understand it, schools like Huayan do indeed stress the world’s interdependence and see it as a good thing. This point, however, seems to have much more to do with East Asia than with Buddhism. It’s part of the reason I see Buddhism as the exception that proves the rule in Asian philosophy, the constant between South Asia and East Asia that does more to show their differences than their commonalities. Buddhism is an integrity philosophy like Jainism and Yoga when it’s in India alongside those philosophical systems; it’s an intimacy philosophy like Confucianism when it’s beside Confucianism in East Asia. Macy, however, tends to act as if the Theravāda Buddhism she has learned from is Confucian in this way, when it really isn’t, and she’s not alone in thinking that way.

Now why stress this point? I do think that acknowledging our dependence is a good thing in many ways, especially if we’re not going to try and go it alone in a monastic lifestyle. Yet at the same time, there’s something important to the idea of controlling our emotions and reducing our attachments. Feminists of the boomer generation, like Macy, fought against the stiff-upper-lip ideal of men who repressed their emotions, and there’s surely something to their critique; at the same time, there’s something to that ideal as well. It’s valuable to get our emotions under control so they don’t control us; that doesn’t mean we need to repress them. Similarly, as much as we do need to acknowledge our dependence on others, we also need to cultivate some amount of healthy independence, to be comfortable in our own skins independent of what others think of us, to be the “rock” that others can lean on. In my view, classical Buddhism as it was, and Macy’s distortion of it, both tend to be one-sided.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. Not all of what follows is said directly in Doull’s work, but it is inspired by it, and I think it is faithful to his spirit based on conversations with Doullian friends.

I’ve seen the point now particularly with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes, which Doull refers to and which I recently taught in my intro religion class at Stonehill. Ecclesiastes paints a picture of the world that differs greatly from more familiar books of the Hebrew Bible. The very message of the book of Exodus, for example, seems to be that God acts in history, that his presence in our lives is real and palpable, working his miracle everywhere one turns, bringing about cosmic justice for his chosen people if not others. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, gives us a remote and distant God, in a world where the wicked triumph and the unjust perish. There isn’t even an afterlife for the expectation of justice; all the dead go to sheol, “the grave” where they know nothing. It’s a moving text, and one which seems to fit the experience of our post-Darwinian age where God’s very existence seems questionable at best.

And yet. In the midst of this God-bereft world, where there is no justice and no reward for virtue, Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us: “fear God and keep his commandments.” It seems, in its way, to be the paradigm of ethical externalism. One wants to ask: why? No reward awaits us for keeping God’s commandments, in this world or the next. And the approach to knowledge, if relatively untheorized, is similarly externalist: the truth is out there in God, whether we know it or not.

A couple centuries before this, Doull notes, the Sophists had innovated by presenting the opposite, internalist, position. Man is the measure of all things; everything, ethical and epistemological, is up to us. But this view runs into the problems I have addressed in recent posts about truth and contradiction. If we have no standards beyond our existing motivations, we have no grounds on which to change others’ behaviour, or our own.

For Doull, it is Aristotle who first resolves this problem, above all in the theory of eudaimonia – a human flourishing constituted by both virtue and happiness. But Doull agrees with the points Alasdair MacIntyre regularly makes about Aristotle – that this flourishing was embedded in the political context of the Greek polis, a community formed around shared ethical standards and practices. When the polis degenerated into a large and impersonal empire, virtue could no longer count on reward; so virtue and happiness became separated in the Stoics and Epicureans, who would define happiness entirely in terms of virtue (the Stoics) or vice versa (the Epicureans). But for both of them, as for Aristotle, internalism and externalism (in the sense of my previous post) remain united: our own motivations and the absolute ethical principle end up taking us to the same place. They could make this move because, unlike Aristotle, they dismissed the importance of external goods: our internal states were all that mattered. Sure, virtue doesn’t get you a public reward, but it gets you the internal state of undisturbed peace.

But the Stoics and Epicureans are in tension not only with each other – is virtue or happiness really the more important one? – but with the world itself. Our virtue is often lacking in spite of our best efforts of will, not enough to make us really happy; and some virtues (like friendship) seem constituted by external conditions that make them possible. This is part of the criticism that Martha Nussbaum has recently made of these Hellenistic thinkers, on quasi-Aristotelian grounds; but historically, the figure who made the point stick, on quite different grounds, was (Saint) Augustine – with help from the Jewish worldview that gave rise to Ecclesiastes.

Augustine accepts what seems like the commonsense view that virtue and happiness are not analytically equivalent. He notes that in this world, so full of suffering and misfortune, virtue is not rewarded with happiness; but further, neither real virtue nor real happiness can be adequately reached in this world, where humans are frail enough that they fall far short of the virtue and happiness they seek. Augustine’s solution is to put it all off into the next world, a world for which we can hope after death.

I haven’t yet been able to follow Doull’s story past this point. Which is something of a shame, for there’s an obvious problem with the resolution in Augustine’s time: we have no more evidence to believe in an afterlife of reward than we have to believe the virtuous are rewarded in this life. Wishful thinking is not an adequate basis on which to build a life. Neither is Pascal’s Wager, the argument that we should believe in God and follow his law just in case there is an afterlife; for it could just as easily be that the afterlife rewards vice. (MacIntyre in God, Philosophy, Universities goes so far as to say he doesn’t think Pascal himself believed the wager was a good argument.)

What appeals to me in all of this is a spirit that, in at least one respect, seems the opposite of analytic philosophy as normally practised. One could call Doull’s work synthetic philosophy: rather than cutting ideas up into ever smaller pieces, he puts them together. It’s an approach that I suspect leads ultimately to conclusions that are both truer and more satisfying. This isn’t to bash analytic philosophy or say there’s no place for it; but I do welcome a view that takes this larger scope.

There are, I think, two basic classes of answer to this question, which analytic philosophers classify as internalism and externalism with respect to ethical motivation. On an internalist view, to have a reason to do something is to have a motivation, perhaps even a desire, to do it. If you don’t at some level want to do something, or at least feel or believe that you should do it, then you shouldn’t do it. On an externalist view, by contrast, reasons are independent of us. There are things we just should do, period, whether or not we have any desire or other motivation to do them.

Each position faces wrenching difficulties. The externalist view is always subject to the laughing, scathing criticism of a Nietzsche. If you can’t tell me why I would want to do something, then bollocks to your “should.” I’ll do what I want instead. External reasons don’t feel like real reasons; Bernard Williams, indeed, has argued that they only really become reasons for action if we acquire motivations to do them. Yet the internalist view seems to collapse into relativism and conservatism. If our existing motivations are the only source of reasons for action, then how can those motivations ever be criticized? On what grounds can you tell Pol Pot he’s doing the wrong thing by killing his citizenry? You run, effectively, into the problems with classical relativism, which show up in a variety of ways, such as the political problems of postmodernism, or the problems of contradiction for spiritual growth.

Some way of reconciling internalism and externalism, without the problems of each, seems necessary. But what way?

What makes the question of ethical internalism and externalism still more intriguing is that it seems to parallel a very similar theoretical question about truth. Could there be a truth we can’t know? Say, a kind of knowledge only achievable by gods and not humans? If so, on what grounds can we say that something really is a truth, if we can’t know it? If not, do we not collapse back into the problems of relativism, where everything is subjective, since knowledge is reducible to our own minds?

Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.

As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)

The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.

The second comparison is a bit more far-reaching, and I think more intriguing. The more I read about Speculative Realism, the more this thought came to me: the basic goal of Speculative Realism is to make Western thought less Indian and more Chinese.

A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (rūpa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.

Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)

Either way, though, the lack of attention to the subjective world in classical Confucianism is striking. Aaron Stalnaker’s comparison of Augustine and Xunzi is instructive here. Both Augustine and Xunzi are deeply concerned with the bad tendencies in human nature; but for Xunzi this remains almost entirely at the level of behaviour. Not for him Augustine’s pained reflections on memory, worrying that he still enjoys the memory of past sins even after he’s stopped sinning; nor Augustine’s worries that he still sins in his dreams. The problem for Xunzi isn’t with what we think and feel; it’s only with what we do. On a first glance at Speculative Realism, this Confucian world seems a lot like the intellectual world they’d like to create. Nor is the nonsubjective world of Chinese philosophy limited to Confucianism; Ch’an Buddhism itself attempts to decentre the subject in favour of the natural world (rather than the mental aggregates of Indian Buddhism).

I recall Harman once saying something on his blog to the effect that you could tell the essentials of any philosopher’s thought from that philosopher’s aesthetics; and the point seems very much validated by classical Indian and Chinese aesthetics. Anne Monius once pointed out to me that classical Indian aesthetics are extraordinarily anthropocentric. Until the medieval Indian Muslims, and perhaps even after that, one does not find any paintings or statues depicting the natural world by itself, or even at the centre of a picture. The centre of every art object is a human or humanlike being. The closest one gets to a painting of a nonhuman is anthropomorphic animal deities like the monkey god Hanumān. It is the human(oid) subject that matters. The most characteristically Chinese style of painting, by contrast, is the landscape, in which human beings’ presence is tiny. This is object-oriented art.

I don’t know nearly enough about Speculative Realism to say anything about whether they’re right. My sympathies usually lie with Indian over Chinese philosophy, and strongly against eliminative materialism; so I view this new tradition’s ideas with considerable caution. But I’m not trying here to engage with them constructively yet – just to see if I can get a first grasp of what they’re up to. And it does seem like the idea, put crudely, is to make us less Indian and more Chinese.

The claim that there is no truth is false. It contains a contradiction that cannot be resolved unless one takes it to mean something very different from what it appears to mean. Nor is this one of that narrow group of paradoxes which could be taken as true on the grounds of Graham Priest’s dialetheism. Priest tries to argue that most of the problems with contradiction stem not from accepting some contradictions, but from accepting all; but if one accepts “there is no truth,” one comes much closer to allowing all contradictions in. Indeed postmodernists often approvingly quote the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend in telling us that “anything goes.”

It is not true that there is no truth. What is crucial about this and other postmodern claims, however, is that its truth value is not the point. Like Stanley Fish, postmodernists shift our attention away from contradiction and truth entirely, claiming they’re not the important thing. (Caputo at one point approves one of his opponent’s moves because “it drops the stuff about contradiction and actually addresses the issues.”) Drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, postmodernists will argue that the reason to make such a claim against truth is its performative dimension. The point, that is, is not what the sentence says, but what it does.

It is on this last point, however, that the evidence against postmodernism seems strongest. What, exactly, has postmodernism accomplished? I have previously mentioned cognitive dissonance and spiritual transformation as reason to be concerned about contradictions. But these are typically not at the forefront of postmodern concern. Rather, most postmodern writers express some sort of concern for marginalized political groups – women, gays, transgendered people, the poorer or working classes, people in nonwhite racial groups, people from colonized societies. But what has postmodernism actually done to improve their situation?

Among the most widely cited exemplars of real political change on behalf of the disenfranchised are the nonviolent activists Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi. Both of these men believed in an absolute truth. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail takes its authority from “the moral law or the Law of God”; Gandhi continually cited a Truth he identified with God as the heart of his ideals. Neither were relativists of any stripe. And it seems to me that, given their accomplishments, it could scarcely have been otherwise.

It is not merely that their faith in something bigger than themselves gave them strength as they were jailed and persecuted (though I have no doubt it did this). It is also that a strategy of nonviolent resistance relies heavily on persuasion, on appeals to justice, on making others see the case for your side. Such appeals depend on recognizing the normative force of non-contradiction. If, like Fish, you think contradiction is no big deal, then it’s far easier to ignore the appeal of a King or a Gandhi. In one sphere of your political life you preach the value and benefit of the British mission to civilize the colonies; in another, you order your soldiers to shoot colonial subjects who disobey arbitrary measures. Sure your actions contradict each other, but you don’t need to think about that. If contradiction matters, by contrast, then we must pay attention to those who note how we fail to live up to our own ideals.

Without a respect for contradiction, one can certainly achieve violent social change. One can overthrow a government by force and not be bothered by anything anyone else has to say about it. But violent social change has a harder time being a force for good. Lenin and Mao were idealists like King and Gandhi; but their names are remembered far more ambiguously, for good reason.

On this point consider the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. While Thrasymachus agrees that the conclusions of Socrates’s arguments make sense, he never really agrees to accept them. When Socrates presents Thrasymachus with his final conclusion – that “injustice is never more profitable than justice” – Thrasymachus does not acknowledge its truth or display a conversion, as so many of Socrates’s interlocutors do. Instead he merely seems to shrug and take an “agree to disagree” approach: “Let that be your banquet, Socrates, at the feast day today.” This argument to justice might be your opinion, Socrates, but no matter how rational it is, it will never be mine. Such a view is where the likes of Caputo lead us: I don’t care what reason says, I just keep my views.

The problem with such a conclusion, however, is expressed in the views that Thrasymachus himself is expressing. It’s not coincidence that Thrasymachus tells us justice is the interest of the stronger. For indeed, if we do not feel the normative force of non-contradiction, if we do not allow ourselves to be convinced by reason and truth, then politics must necessarily be Thrasymachean. Without an attempt to convince people rationally of the value of their positions, as Gandhi and King did, then the strong rule. But the oppressed and marginalized, those whose causes postmodernists claim to take up, are weak effectively by definition.

The rule of the strong, then, is what we might expect to see accompany postmodern thought. And is it in fact what we do see? Well, the rise of postmodernism as a theory, in the ’80s through the ’00s, coincides with the rise of right-wing politics worldwide. Social programs for the poor and dispossessed were cut everywhere; patriarchal and oppressive cultural tradition made a comeback everywhere from George W. Bush to Lee Kuan Yew; while the right wing pushed its agenda aggressively, left-leaning governments made little of the major initiatives to support marginalized groups that characterized the post-WWII era. Is all of this merely a coincidence? Causation is always hard to establish, and it would be difficult ever to say for sure. I can’t help but note again, though, that one of the first of the new wave of right-wingers, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was endorsed by Michel Foucault. That great friend of gay rights wound up endorsing a state in which homosexuality is punishable by death.

A recently popular slogan among political activists, one that Gandhi and King could easily endorse, is “speak truth to power.” Yet the whole point of Foucault’s work seems to be to tell us that there is no truth but only power – in other words, to speak power to truth. Foucault and Derrida’s views most often seem to be taken up on the grounds of challenging oppressive structures; but they are, as far as I can see, no friends to the marginalized or oppressed. Whether judged by its effects or by its truth value, postmodernism comes up lacking or worse.

But when my yearly contract with JustHost runs out in a couple months, I don’t intend on using them again. They didn’t give me any warning about this, and their email tried to say that because of the high CPU usage I need to move my account to a dedicated server – a shift in cost from $4 a month to $150 a month. They also continually try to “upsell” me, getting me to pay for more services I don’t want. My best impression is that all this is because they’re a gimmicky cheapie service, offering a price (the aforementioned $4 a month) that’s too good to be true. I want to move my service to somewhere I pay a bit more but get treated honestly. (If I’m starting to use too much of your resources, give me a warning, and then let me move up to a different plan that costs a little more than the previous one.)

Readers, do any of you have self-hosted blogs? If you do, what hosting service do you use? How long have you used it? Are you satisfied with it? Have you had problems like this?