mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Your search for error central returned 10 posts.
“Neither a pathology nor an index of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor.”

Avital Ronell. Is she right? Remember: both knowledgeability and intelligence have willed and unwilled components (including: genetics, class, development, luck). If intelligence has a moral quality because of its impact on the participatory polity, then stupidity is a moral lapse due to its effects.

This means that whether stupidity is “willed” or not, whether it is the result of developmental aberrations or a lack of access to education or a lazy preference for partying or a poverty of inspiration or a resentful incuriosity, its negative impact on the public good makes it immoral. Whom shall we blame, morally, for stupidity?

Ronell includes in that paragraph, from her book Stupidity, a mention of Hannah Arendt’s frustrated effort to determine how stupid Adolf Eichmann was and what the effect of that stupidity really was on his deeds. The effort to assess how error affects “the most dangerous failures of human endeavor” reminds me of my favorite Errol Morris quote: “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

Errol Morris asserts, and I believe, that intelligence offers only very flimsy protection from error; I see much historical and contemporary evidence that it is nearly as likely -in some of its contortions, likelier- than stupidity to produce disaster.

Tags: philosophy morality stupidity avital ronell errol morriss
“Think that you might be wrong.”

Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.

The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.

Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).

Tags: karl popper new orleans errol morris milan kundera

Morality

Although I am an atheist, I am very fond of religions and respect belief in them completely (for reasons I’ve discussed previously). Much, though not all, religious tradition is codified morality of a very fine sort, the sort imbued with an otherworldly detachment from ends. While the practitioners of religious morality -being human- have often been deviously barbaric, the ideas themselves and their interwoven mythical justifications can be both beautiful and transformative.

Ordinary morality, concerned with praxis and outcomes, is problematized by subjectivity as well as human nature; as Nietzsche noted, “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” From the start, any individual or collective assessments of reality and their according moral deliberations are debatable, endlessly so. This does not mean that nothing is good or that nothing is evil, but it does multiply the gradations of gray between those poles. And since “error is the central feature of human existence,” the most important moral decisions about when we may kill, when we should die, how many civilians we may incinerate incidentally and for what ends, are in my view fundamentally indecent to make. We are too likely to be wrong to take life. As J.U. Neuf put it in 1950, “The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.”

When I say pure morality is unconcerned with ends, I mean it is concerned only with means, with the conduct of the individual. The state of the world is never within your control; only your behavior is. A pure moral system -which arbitrates your relationship with the world- cannot depend at all on variables beyond your control or it is worthless, contingent, ungoverning. Thus pure morality has little to say about justice or peace or other political concepts involving the group; rather, justice and peace emerge from aggregated individual morality.

(This is why efforts to “legislate morality” are deeply problematic. As social morality is an emergent phenomenon, it is not within our capacity to lead the horse with the cart by enforcing ends; we must be and inspire moral individuals, a process nearly impossible except on the interpersonal scale).

Long ago, I asked my father what was extraordinary about Jesus’ willingness to be crucified. After all, I asked: if I proposed to him that he might die painfully but would in doing so give eternal and blissful life to every human being who wanted it, wouldn’t he say yes? Given the context of the Gospels, wouldn’t he be elated to save sinful humanity? I ask this of parents: wouldn’t you die to give your child infinite life without suffering? Wouldn’t we all love to have this: a chance to sacrifice for the good of all humanity, a chance to redeem the world? And to know while doing so that an afterlife awaited you?

If we posit that there was a heroic and incontestably valuable end, we reduce the power of his self-sacrifice, though not completely. (My father proposed that Christians assume Jesus was so fully human that he didn’t know or couldn’t believe in those aspects of his mission, particularly while on the cross; if that is the case, I regret proposing my analysis).

In World War II, Gandhi advised Jews threatened by Nazism that they “…should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife… They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… Collective suicide would have been heroism.” We shudder at his morality, but that is purity: the “hatred of the world” Kierkegaard spoke of, the refusal to engage in any defense of self, family, or friend at the expense of another life. Gandhi will not defend Indians; Jesus will not save the crucified thieves. (This is why the Buddha felt that children were chains: they bind you in love to the world your status in it; you cannot, for example, martyr yourself resisting the SS if you have a family who will suffer for your deed).

This morality is difficult if one hopes to improve the world-which I why I would never engage in political action- and I admit that in any material sense it is indefensible. Civilization is the result of ever-improving efforts at implementing broader moral systems (efforts with fits and starts, to be sure), which is another reason why moral teachers and prophets are typically renunciatory: they have no business in society.

The world cannot and perhaps should not be composed of such people: pure in moral austerity, willing to die, willing to let kin die, willing to let the world do whatever it may without ever resisting, mindful of the fact that to fight for is always to fight against and disinclined therefore to fight at all. In extremity, morality becomes unacceptable to us; Gandhi’s ahimsa seems loathsome when we think of Hitler. And indeed, what would we say now to Jesus, who would not kill Bin Laden, or even assassinate Hitler himself?

This morality seems inhuman, practically, but it is in this morality that I am most interested, in how it problematizes the affairs of state, the laws we enact, the deeds we condone, and most of all in how in emulating the exemplars of this morality we achieve the very ends we’ve turned away from in doing so: justice and peace.

Hence Gandhi’s wonderful quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Do not seek it; do not legislate it; do not fight for it. Be it.

Tags: morality politics religion friedrich nietzsche errol morris gandhi soren kierkegaard
“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”

David Hume, quoted by the always-fascinating Langer. I think this is one of the most interesting statements I’ve read; it immediately invites a slew of critical questions which, were it not Hume writing, one might assume the author had not considered; since it is Hume, it’s likely he had in mind answers to the following:

What are “errors in religion”?

Do we mean instances in which religion contradicts evident reality, such as counterfactual claims about the history of the physical universe? Or do we mean instances in which a religion is internally inconsistent, in which its own assertions violate one another?  Or do we mean errors in interpretation, as when someone suggests that “jihad” means the slaughter of innocents?

Many of these last errors, interpretive errors, result from texts remaining the same as culture evolves through centuries, so that what is reasonable to infer in one century is unacceptable in another; does Hume consider these to be a special class of error? How is one to avoid this sort?

Why religion and philosophy?

Hume was writing before ideology replaced religion as the primary credential system in human life.  In more recent history, errors in both religion and philosophy have been dwarfed in impact by “errors” in politics. As politics has replaced religion as the driving ideological force in the world, politics assumes responsibility for world wars and genocide, even when religious pretexts are used.

In Hume’s time, this was not as much the case; perhaps that is the reason he restricts himself to these fields. Nevertheless, it is a hole in his assertion: it seems that it is not errors in “religion” but errors in what we believe, what we hold sacred: that is no longer purely religious for many. Credential errors are the problem.

(And again, Errol Morris is right to say: “Error is the central feature of human existence,” errors in science, in reason, in faith, in love).

Power and danger

Last, is Hume interested in why errors in religion and ideology are dangerous while those in philosophy are not? The answer seems obvious to me: philosophy for some time has been in the habit of trafficking in the arcane and the pedantic, matters of import to few and emotional resonance to fewer. Religion, and now ideology, are where meaning is molded and made manifest in human life; when they are corrupted, as they often are, the consequences are serious.

People live and die and kill and love for their beliefs. Who can seriously imagine dying for Derrida?

Tags: philosophy religion

KB, who took down her awesome post about geodes and spoiled my enthusiasm for the Wednesday photo-meme, posted the above TED talk, which I think is essential viewing for anyone who cares about the Iraq War.

Deborah Scranton speaks about the making of her Iraq documentary, “The War Tapes,” the footage for which was filmed by soldiers in-country.

“It will be a better country in twenty years because we were there. I hope.”

Of the many thoughts it provoked, some relate to the post below. Scranton, who gave cameras to soldiers in Iraq and had them shoot their own video and then worked with them and their diaries to fill in an unbelievable account of the war on the human scale, relates some anecdotes that I consider significant.

She tells of a soldier approaching her after a showing and describing what is evidently a rather common -and heartbreaking, symbolic- problem: the accidental running down of civilians by Humvees. While his gunner threw candy to children, one ran too close to the vehicle and was killed:

“I killed a child, and I have children; I haven’t been able to tell my wife; I’m afraid she’ll think I’m a monster.”

It’s one of the saddest and most exemplary illustrations of the problem with conflicts borne of strategic planning and intellectual determination to refashion the world politically. She hugs the soldier and says it will be all right; what else is there to do but be good to one another? She asks of those who say “I oppose the war but support the soldiers,” “When you support someone, are you a friend to them?”

I had a philosophy professor fond of relating the story of the early Christian apostle John, who when too old to walk was carried by the arms into the church in Ephesus to speak; at each meeting, he said only one thing: “Little children, love one another.”

Tired of hearing the same message -and from someone who could speak to them about Jesus directly!- the congregants asked why this was all he said; he answered, “It is the Lord’s command, and if this alone be done, it is enough.”

By referring to us all as “children,” I think the text echoes Errol Morris: error is the central feature of our lives, and we are perpetually incompetent, weak, lost, and dangerous. All there is for us is love, but should we have it it is enough.

Sterling Powers:

“The private life is dead…” from Doctor Zhivago

I have been trying to explain for some time to Bunnynico and others why it is, precisely, that I loathe everything political; many of the reasons are immediately evident: no matter whom you like, after a few cycles of slip-up and fake indignation, everything is a talking point and all sides are “playing the game,” for example.

But it’s not simply disgust with the practice of politics that bothers me; nothing could be more naive than hoping for a politics without points-scoring and petty posturing. In a democracy, where popularity is power, all the worst elements of social interaction and media refraction are inevitable, for Obama as much as for, say, Nixon (however better the former may be than the latter).

No, what I hate about politics is that it is antithetical to the personal: to the local arena of human compassion and action that has actual transformative power. In massing humans, politics reduces their humanity and transforms them into expressions of ideologies and systems. It takes what is real and makes it facile, reductive, and subordinate.

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in talking about Hegel, touched on this rather well: the articulation of systems -of class relations, power dynamics, historical dialectics, political theologies- is inevitably false, as it obfuscates the only reality: that of the human. It is a falsity of scale, of scope, and of specificity.

I love this scene in Doctor Zhivago, because the Communists were right within their framework of analysis, as are all intellectuals, from Marxists to Neocons: the personal is not important when we discuss politics, so forget about poetry and casualties. For the sake of victory in class struggle, some innocents must die, they say; for the sake of security against Islamofascism, some civilians must be incinerated accidentally, others add.

You have no doubt heard of the question posed to Republicans: “Whom would Jesus bomb?” I like this question, though -as I note often- I am not religious. I also like this question: “Do you wish George Bush had been assassinated before assuming office?”

If you do, know that you -as they- believe that some political platforms justify violence, perhaps even the platform of non-violence, and thus are in my mind distinguishable from those you oppose only in degree, not in kind. But what about Hitler, you might ask? Do you oppose his assassination, too?

I do not deny that some wars are just and some are not, and that perhaps sometimes ends justify means; but isn’t the entire problem of humanity and power a problem of ends and means?  Isn’t ethical idealism preferable to what we wreak when we rule?

I am aware that in the politics of the United States, rarely are deaths the consequence of elections (at least domestically). But the principle that unites all political movements -that there are right ideas, and that those who oppose them are imbeciles and ought to be killed, disenfranchised, or at least shouted down- is a principle to which there are few rebuttals.

I do not like the world of intellectuals or the world of power. I like the world of the personal, the individual. I like the small world. My favorite bumper sticker: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you mourn the dearth of compassion in our society, be compassionate and inspire by example. If you hate injustice, be just in all your ways.

I admit: this is a sentimental and perhaps incoherent argument. Nevertheless, the one truth to which I subscribe is that pronounced by Errol Morris: “Error is the central feature of human existence.” The accumulation of power for the enactment of “correct” political ideas terrifies and upsets me because I don’t believe humans are capable of more than error, and the best I can say about one political party or another is that fewer will die by their mistakes.

I believe this to be true of Obama, which is why I favor his election; but it is hardly enthusing for me, and I would much rather see scores of articles every day about personal acts of decency than about how stupid and awful Republicans are.

Moreover, I believe that only though ethically decent behavior on the individual level does society improve; in the end, I think, politics is -from a moral perspective- a distraction, more often about identity-association than about actual compassion.

I apologize if this offends anyone, sincerely; after all, we’re all just doing what we think best.

Tags: film love morality politics dr zhivago friedrich nietzsche soren kierkegaard
When I think of the irreducibility of stupidity -my own especially- I feel oppressed by the monumentality of it, its scale and scope and persistence. I’ve often quoted Errol Morris saying that “error is the central feature of human existence.” Or as Albert Einstein put it, “Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” I’ve been reading Avital Ronell’s Stupidity, a book which is far beyond my comprehension (for reasons having either to do with her, me, or both of us). I failed completely to understand another work of hers called The Telephone Book, the prose of which is so impenetrable for me that I feel genuinely moronic when I attempt to understand even a paragraph; again, this may be her fault or mine, but she’s a well-regarded writer and I think I likely lack the lexicon and analytical skills needed. But parts of Stupidity are striking, and I thought I’d quote at length from its opening: “Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in the clutch of denial—and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history. From Schiller’s exasperated concession that even the gods cannot combat stupidity to Hannah Arendt’s frustrated effort, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, to determine the exact status and level of Adolf Eichmann’s Dummheit…stupidity has evinced a mute resistance to political urgency, an instance of unaccountable ethical hiatus. In fact, stupidity, purveyor of self-assured assertiveness, mutes just about everything that would seek to disturb its impervious hierarchies. “Neither a pathology nor an index of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor.”

When I think of the irreducibility of stupidity -my own especially- I feel oppressed by the monumentality of it, its scale and scope and persistence. I’ve often quoted Errol Morris saying that “error is the central feature of human existence.” Or as Albert Einstein put it, “Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

I’ve been reading Avital Ronell’s Stupidity, a book which is far beyond my comprehension (for reasons having either to do with her, me, or both of us). I failed completely to understand another work of hers called The Telephone Book, the prose of which is so impenetrable for me that I feel genuinely moronic when I attempt to understand even a paragraph; again, this may be her fault or mine, but she’s a well-regarded writer and I think I likely lack the lexicon and analytical skills needed.

But parts of Stupidity are striking, and I thought I’d quote at length from its opening:

“Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in the clutch of denial—and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history. From Schiller’s exasperated concession that even the gods cannot combat stupidity to Hannah Arendt’s frustrated effort, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, to determine the exact status and level of Adolf Eichmann’s Dummheit…stupidity has evinced a mute resistance to political urgency, an instance of unaccountable ethical hiatus. In fact, stupidity, purveyor of self-assured assertiveness, mutes just about everything that would seek to disturb its impervious hierarchies.

“Neither a pathology nor an index of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor.”

Tags: stupidity philosophy psychology
lfarm: This weekend I re-watched a documentary called Capturing the Friedmans. I first saw it towards the end of college and was almost overwhelmed by it. It’s the story of a Jewish family from Great Neck, NY in the 1980’s. The father, Arnold Friedman, a retired school teacher and his 19 year old son Jesse ran a computer class out of their basement. In 1988, both Arnold and Jesse were arrested for sexual misconduct with minors, and additional charges for possession of child pornography. Arnold’s oldest son David, a natural born filmmaker, decided to videotape what followed. What you see is the demise of a family, caught on camera. It’s utterly compelling, and the director presents such an unbiased account you find yourself struggling with what you believe actually happened. The home videos are incredible. I watched all of the DVD extras. Highly recommend it if you can handle the subject matter. Here is the film’s main site. One of the most unsettling problems of intellectual life is the near-impossibility of disentangling the threads of human conflict. It is as though reality resists our efforts at analysis; the more focus and scrutiny we bring to bear on a situation, the more diffuse facts become, the more truths scatter and leave only shaky testimonials and inconclusive evidence. This is why conspiracy theories are so common: examine anything closely enough and problems with prevailing explanations abound. It is as if the world was a lazily-written novel, full of holes, and as readers we’re left asking, “But what really happened?” Errol Morris has made a career out of exploring this problem, in The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, and The Fog of War, in particular. His movies don’t preach, but one conclusion it seems hard to avoid is, as he put it, that “error is the central feature of human existence.” I love that quote. Capturing the Friedmans reminded me of Morris’ works, but with primary source material. As part of “error,” we should include forms of human delusion like hysteria, fear, passion, and hatred, all of which conspire to render truth inaccessible in this film. It’s astonishing and devastating. 

lfarm:

This weekend I re-watched a documentary called Capturing the Friedmans. I first saw it towards the end of college and was almost overwhelmed by it. It’s the story of a Jewish family from Great Neck, NY in the 1980’s. The father, Arnold Friedman, a retired school teacher and his 19 year old son Jesse ran a computer class out of their basement. In 1988, both Arnold and Jesse were arrested for sexual misconduct with minors, and additional charges for possession of child pornography. Arnold’s oldest son David, a natural born filmmaker, decided to videotape what followed. What you see is the demise of a family, caught on camera.

It’s utterly compelling, and the director presents such an unbiased account you find yourself struggling with what you believe actually happened. The home videos are incredible. I watched all of the DVD extras. Highly recommend it if you can handle the subject matter.

Here is the film’s main site.

One of the most unsettling problems of intellectual life is the near-impossibility of disentangling the threads of human conflict. It is as though reality resists our efforts at analysis; the more focus and scrutiny we bring to bear on a situation, the more diffuse facts become, the more truths scatter and leave only shaky testimonials and inconclusive evidence.

This is why conspiracy theories are so common: examine anything closely enough and problems with prevailing explanations abound. It is as if the world was a lazily-written novel, full of holes, and as readers we’re left asking, “But what really happened?”

Errol Morris has made a career out of exploring this problem, in The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, and The Fog of War, in particular. His movies don’t preach, but one conclusion it seems hard to avoid is, as he put it, that “error is the central feature of human existence.” I love that quote.

Capturing the Friedmans reminded me of Morris’ works, but with primary source material. As part of “error,” we should include forms of human delusion like hysteria, fear, passion, and hatred, all of which conspire to render truth inaccessible in this film. It’s astonishing and devastating. 

The Cost of Error: "Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy."

I agree with Robert McNamara: because we are not omniscient, we ought not violate our deepest ethical principles based on expedient predictions. I agree with Errol Morris: “Error is the central feature of human existence.” And here we are, the USA, doing to the innocent what we claim to invade nations for doing to the innocent.

Yes, this was one man. I don’t care, and neither should any of the purportedly moral leaders of the nation. What makes me sick is knowing that Christian conservatives would never bother to read a story like this, and their media would never pitch it to them (like leftist outlets and good news from Iraq); they live in a world where our errors cost nothing.

But this man disappeared and was tortured senselessly; his father died without knowing where his son had gone; his life was permanently disfigured based on nothing; and none of the hawks give a damn.

Killing

…Milan Kundera once wrote that humanity “proceeds through life as if in a fog.”  This fog is thicker in times of tremendous stress, I’d add; and nothing is more stressful, more disruptive to reason and sobriety, than violence and war.  Decent human actors make horrible mistakes; Morris once asserted that “error is the central feature of human life.” …

Tags: milan kundera literature