Knowing...

I'll tell you what I don't like. I don't like it when people try to make the other party feel dumb to bolster their arguments. I'm with Hume on this. I don't think reason can account for very much. An answer you arrive at through reason may or may not be better than one you get at through faith but whatever the case, it often has nothing to do with the Truth. Reason and Faith are for things you do not know. If you know, you would not require either of those tools. It is always a mistake to apply abstract reasoning to reality as a whole. And when it comes right down to it, it still requires a bit of faith to believe that reason will provide you with the best solution. It's not necessarily so and never can be given its very nature.

I had this conversation with someone who was a recent graduate of Berkeley's philosophy department. Either she slept through most of her classes or the program itself was seriously suspect. I couldn't believe her lack of understanding in some pretty basic modern philosophic principles. We talked about the thought exercise involving the rising of the sun the following day. Like it or not, you cannot be sure that the sun will come up the next day. Perhaps you say that the Earth revolves around the sun and that it will continue to do so. Why do you believe that? How do you know? Is it because the sun has come up every other day? Well, that's poor thinking because the fact that it has come up every other day has nothing to do with it coming up tomorrow. Believing it will is a matter of habit. Knowing is a matter of past experience. Reason and faith are for future events. It is likely that the sun will and it makes sense to live your day assuming as much but that's not the point. You are still taking it on faith, like it or not, that it's going to happen. In fact, the very act of using reason-- especially the principle of sufficient reason-- requires a first leap of faith.

I'm not particularly interested in either of these things. I'm interested in knowing-- the kind of knowing that comes from experience. When I teach my students, I expect them to take nothing on faith except the faith that they have to have in me as their instructor to do some potentially dangerous and definitely uncomfortable things. After they do what I ask, they will know. Before that, it was just a guess. They could reason all they want about how they would deal with a particular situation and what would be effective. Or they could just do it and see what actually happens.

In our society, we have taken the position of the rationalists. We think that reason is the answer for everything. It is not. A well constructed argument can never prove anything beyond the fact that it is well constructed. It has nothing to do with the Truth. Reason is inherently destructive. It's good at poking holes and discovering foolery but it's hardly creative. As I like to say, logic will give you all kinds of reasons not to do something. It takes faith to create. I know many people like this. In fact, San Francisco, with its high percentage of intelligent, well-educated people is filled with many many folks who are unhappy and contributing nothing-- certainly nothing compared to what they have been given. I have a friend who is like this. He's incredibly intelligent but in a vicious way. You can't convince him to do anything or to every push himself because he has explained away everything into nothing. His arguments are always coherent and well-thought out but his intelligence offers nothing to his community around him.

If I were to call him on this, he would give me all kinds of reasons of why this isn't the case and I would not be able to defend my position against his barrage. But even a casual observer would have to agree with me. Arguments are just words and words are ether. People make the mistake of confusing words with Ideas which do, in fact, have weight and substance.

As always, I bring this back to the martial arts. I have, throughout my life, run into many notebook warriors who could argue me to the ground about the intricacies of technique. The conversation would go like this.
"What would you do if I did this?" To my answer they would say, "What if I did..." ad infinitum.

My favorite answer to this line of questioning came from one of my instructors who answered such queries with, "You can do whatever you want. The question is, 'Can you do it?'"

And that's it, isn't it. You can't answer those kinds of questions verbally. A person can always concoct some situation I haven't had to deal with. You have to put it on the mat and that's why I love the arts. It's one of the few places where you can call somebody on their bullshit in a definitive way. You can't talk your way out of getting punched in the face. You either dealt with it effectively or you didn't. Once, when I was working with a military unit, a local instructor came out to our training and tried to challenge what I was doing. He said that my knife techniques were ineffective and that he could take my knife away without suffering any injury 10 out of 10 times. I, of course, offered to have him demonstrate and he agreed. We met in the sand pit and lined up across from each other. I asked if he was ready and when I replied that he was, I immediately drew my live blade.

He backed up immediately and started stammering. He said he wasn't going to demonstrate against a live blade. He might get hurt. I replied that I thought that he had 100% confidence in his technique. He quickly started backpedaling and left the pit saying that I had misinterpreted his words-- the final defense of any academic. What did he think we wre doing? Having a epistemological debate? I wonder if academics would be so forceful in pushing their positions if there was such a cost for being wrong?

Finally, this brings me to Senator Obama. I'm sure he know a lot more than me in quite a few areas. But it's becoming increasingly clear that he knows nothing about foreign policy. What he uses instead of a strong argument is a condescending tone which seems odd to me since he has no foreign policy experience at all. To use Kennedy and Khrushchev as an example to depend his stated position of treating with Iran and Ahmahdinejead shows that he really doesn't understand the importance of that meeting. First of all, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a direct result of that meeting and Khrushchev's reading of Kennedy as a weak man. Secondly, the Soviet Union was a country with rational leaders who had a lot to lose. The leadership of Iran has shown itself to be highly irrational and we know they are actively working towards what they believe will be Armageddon. Comparing those two situations and regarding them as similar is something a senior in high school would do. Such an opinion would get laughed out of any decent first year political science program.

Bottom line-- you either know or you don't. Reason and Faith will never replace knowing no matter how strong they are. And arrogance based on something as flawed as human reasoning? Well, that's hubris and don't we always seem to pay a cost for that?

The Existence of Evil

I had a great conversation with my friend, Lee Smith last night. Lee's a writer and a great one. He's currently writing a book. I don't know what it's about but I'm guessing it has to do with the Middle East. He's spent a lot of time there, most recently living in Beirut during the unpleasantness a few years ago. Lee's not only a great writer but a serious thinker and I'm tremendously lucky to have him as a friend. To me, he is the best example of journalistic ethics. He seeks to understand, not just tell a story and I always have an interesting conversation when we get the chance to talk.

Last night, I was on Facebook. Lee is my only friend on Facebook. I only signed up so I could have a single source to read his material. Anyway, while I was logged on, I got a instant message from Lee. This caught me by surprise mostly because instant messaging isn't something that I normally. Plus, it was around 0500 where Lee lives in DC. Anyway, I gave him a call and we had an interesting chat at that late hour. We talked about a lot of things but the topic that really stuck in my mind was our conversation of Evil.

He asked me if I thought that a person could believe in the existence of Evil and be secular at the same time. What an interesting question. I never really looked at it that way. I guess I would consider myself secular but I don't deny the existence of God. My God is the Spinozan God who is relatively unconcerned with the day to day matters of my life. He has created this wonderful world and if I can't negotiate it, well, that's my problem, not His. (I like the Spinozan idea of loving God without ever expecting him to love you in return) This has never really collided with my secular beliefs, though there are times that it does. I'm again referring the Straussian notion that our internal conflict (in the West) is a struggle to reconcile out Hellenic cognition with our Hebraic morality. I used to wrestle with this idea mightily. Finally, I was beaten by this Angel and I found (through Spinoza) a way I could honestly believe in both without sacrificing my sense of wonder and gratefulness and my good sense and rationality.

So my answer to Lee would be quite simple. Believing in the existence of the "DEVIL" doesn't mean that I don't believe in science. Like someone once of said of Mussolini or Hitler (I'm not sure which), the regimes of those men made evil banal. When we use our secularism to tamp down our repulsion of evil, we discard the God-given gift of higher reason and deny the best of our humanity. In the movie, The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey's character said that the greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convince the world he didn't exist.

The thing is this. I can't prove to you through logical theorems that the Evil exists. If you haven't experienced it, there is simply no way for me to convince you that it does. It's like trying to explain "sweet" to someone who has never tasted anything "sweet." You can't do it. It's a matter of first principles. Now, not every anti-social act is evil. Evil isn't the absence of good or the absence of virtue. Evil is the presence of Evil. Is is positive (not in the moral sense but in the existential sense). It is not the lack of something but the presence of something more. You know it when you see it and it is undeniable.

It is like the notion of "swing" in jazz. You can't define it verbally but you know when something "swings" and when it doesn't.

Americans have a really poor understanding of this-- especially our academics. I think that is the residue of Marxism that makes us believe that everything boils down to materialism. That's simply not true. I think this is because America is a safe society in ways that we cannot measure. Our youth take risks that youths in other countries would never dream of because we have network that will care for them in ways that they take for granted. Conservatism is not a longing for the old ways. It is a philosophy based on the hard-won experience that being wrong is very costly. The levers that academics and social scientists are so eager to pull are attached to human lives. A cogent and cohesive system of beliefs is nothing if it ends in human misery.

We take virtue for granted because we take safety for granted. The basic lawfulness of your average American is the end result of man's combined learning in ruling since the beginning of civilization. Your average American obeys the law not because he is scared of punishment but because he believes it's the right thing to do while at the same time forgetting that this belief is the true benefit of being an American. We have some basic notion that being good works out in the end. But what about all those countries where people do not feel that way? Take practically any city in Asia and you will find people unconcerned for the body politic. I wonder if we could act so virtuously if our safety nets were not in place?

Our "virtue" as a people, such as it is, is a convenient one, based on the conditions of safety provided to us by better men. Yet even in a society such as ours, Evil does exist. Secularists want to write it off as mental defect or psychological abnormality because doing so, gives us the idea that we can eventually defeat such behavior at its roots-- that we can event a pill that gets rid of Evil. That will never happen and I'll tell you why. God's big joke is the the very thing that makes up our human dignity is what debases us as well. Our ability to take a stand a say "No! I will die before I allow this!" is the same impulse that would rather fight than give up it's old ways. Remove this instinct and you have sheep, not men.

Good and Evil are this impulse in action in two diametrically opposing viewpoints. The very same thing that makes a hero makes a villain. At the same time, i don't believe that it is relativist which is which. Some systems are simply different while some systems are in reality better than others. You cannot tell me a system of beliefs that condones the stoning of women for the crime of being raped is on the same moral level as ours. Principles apply to everybody or they mean nothing. If we are to believe that everything falls victim to relativism, then nothing has meaning at all. That may be true but my experience of the world would seem to counter that argument.

So I have attempted to give you reasons for an understanding that I originally stated cannot be achieved through language. You simply have to see it and in American society, you are unlikely ever to so the vast majority of our citizens have no rational idea of how to combat it while our intelligentsia refuses to believe it exists. That we haven't already lost the battle is a testament to the enduring power of virtue. I'm torn with hoping that everybody gets to experience Evil so they would value what we have as a people and the protective instinct to shield people from it's existence.

Lastly, I want to say something about the language of virtue. I'm a victim of the East Coast Intelligentsia (which provided the bulk of my higher education) and because of that, I am uncomfortable using words that evoke morality or virtue. But I am more and more convinced that we have to use those words because what they represent matters and if we fail to talk about them, we will lose them and in doing so, lose our chance for real human dignity.

Not your Average Observer

I've been working with my group class on awareness. I don't frame that word in new age mumbo-jumbo. I don't particularly care for academic definitions of concepts. Definitions (especially for something like "awareness") should give you opportunities for action. This is particularly true of "awareness."

I've been pretty successful a as a negotiator in my life. I do especially well in high risk environments where most people are taken off their game. Somebody once asked me what I thought was the secret of my success and I finally decided, after much reflection, that it was because of my experience in fighting. When you fight, the first ting you must do is size up your opponent. And the great thing about fighting is that you get immediate feedback to whether nor not your assessments were correct. Plus, the cost of being wrong is high. Years spent doing this allowed me to observe even the smallest things that would be missed by most people, particularly when they're under stress. My observer gets better and sharper when I'm under stress. Something I credit my training with. Now, even when I meet people socially, I go through that same sizing up. I may even them push them on something to see how they react. I then file that information away in case I need it later. Often, I'm more aware of a person's actions than he is.

I explained to my group class like this. Every person has two broad sets of sensors: internal and external. Internal sensors are the ones with which we determine how we're feeling and such. External sensors give us information about the outside world. These two set of sensors are inter-related. You have no measure to empirically judge the accuracy of your internal sensors so you try to make your external sensors as accurate as possible and hope that some if it bleeds over. Interestingly enough, this has no meaning to those people who only see external events through their internal sensors. Those people, to me, are the most unhappy because the world treats them very differently from how they think they should be treated.

But broadly, let's say that you have 100 point of mental and emotional energy you can allocate to your sensors. When it's peaceful and you have time for reflection, you should put 80% of the energy into your internal sensors. However, if you are subjected to stress, it should be the opposite. You should put 80% into the external sensors. The thing is, it is human instinct to do exactly the wrong thing. When you apply stress to the average person, they put all their energy into their internal sensors which takes away their ability to alleviate that stress.

In our class, we train to retrain this instinct. When we apply stress (through sparring) I want my students to gather information about the outside world. The better the gathering, the better decisions they can make. The point is to make it instinctive. Blood pressure goes up and you're instantly putting energy into your external sensors without having to make the conscious decision to do so.

Only be being armed with accurate information can you formulate a good plan. My negotiations generally were successful because I was able to assess the situation more clearly than anybody else. I was able to cut through the emotional fog and address the real issues. It wasn't because I was smarter or had a better plan. It was just because I saw more clearly.