Harper continues his flip-flops

How fast can a Prime Minister completely abandon his positions? Well, if you listen to our dear Stephen Harper, a position can be abandoned faster than you can say Afghanistan. Not only is Harper now a great believer in deficit spending, his big issue of the war in Afghanistan is now that little war that we can't win. Not that long ago if anyone even wanted to ask questions about Canada's involvement in Afghanistan, Harper essentially suggested they were a Taliban supporter. Now the Taliban has largely disappeared from his discourse and he is just talking about an 'insurgency' that cannot really be defeated. This grand flip-flop wouldn't be quite so painful if Harper had not questioned the 'patriotism' of anyone who didn't agree with him only a few months ago. 

Is this really the guy who had the gall to establish a web site called 'Notaleader.com' attacking Dion?"

A Thomas Hood Poem

Little Cairo was Cuddling up to me last night as I put her to sleep and this morning I read this poem by Thomas Hood entitled Lines On Seeing my Wife and two Children Sleeping in the Same Chamber. 

And has the earth lost its so spacious round, 

The sky its blue circumference above, 

That in this little chamber, there is found

Both earth and Heaven - my universe of love ! 

All that my God can give me or remove,

Here sleeping, save myself, in mimic death.

Sweet that in this small compass I behove

To live their living and to breath their breath!

Almost I wish that with one common sigh 

We might resign all mundane care and strife,

And seek together that transcendent sky,

Where father, mother, children, Husband, Wife, 

Together pant in everlasting life. 

Peace to all. 

We cannot give in!

Those in the left who have let their egos rule over the compassion and love that is at the heart of our social conscience, they will pay the highest price in karma. They can control and attack those whom they find under their power and their evil deeds will slowly rot them from the inside and, even if they live a long life, they will be nothing but empty shells of inhumanity.  Like Dorian Gray, their flesh is only the illusion. Behind this they are the monsters that we know them to be. The price they pay is not that their souls go to hell, but it is the loss of their soul itself, it withers and dies and they can no longer live in the realm of humanity. Despite the actions of those who parade around as left wing activists yet are sad, soulless creatures, we cannot lose our the faith because we cannot be dragged down with them. 

Canada Reads

I find it amazing that his charade of ‘Canada Reads’ continues the way it does. A group of pseudo-intellectuals pontificating as though they are authorities on literature. And what makes it truly intolerable is that they do this as though they are ‘contemporary’ and ‘hip’, all the while mired in a 19^th century paradigm of literature that exhausted itself more than 50 years ago but is kept on life support by bourgeois, college mis-educated, self-aggrandizers who read glorified soap-operas  in book form that they imagine raise them to a level above  the viewers of Days of our Lives. And so they ramble off psycho-babble about novels that could have been written a hundred years ago, nauseatingly speaking as though the characters are real people, all the while boosting their egos and placing themselves in the role of ‘cultural commentators.’ The German critical theorist Theodore Adorno once wrote that “philosophy continues to exist because the moment to realize it was missed.” Similarly, your Canada Reads segment shows that “the Novel lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.” 

Harper and History

The unusual  events of history brought Stephen Harper to power, and soon I believe history will take that power away from him. First Harper was lucky enough to come across the rather ineffectual Peter Mackay who was willing, despite written promises to the contrary, to give the entire Tory party away. Then the Sponsorship scandal landed right in his lap coupled with an unusually honest Prime Minister in the guise of Paul Martin who, instead of brushing it under the rug, was willing to start a genuine independent investigation. (Unlike Harper who would never have investigated  such a scandal) And with the Sponsorship issue in the air, Harper had no need to run a genuine election campaign but just kept telling us that the Liberals were ‘corrupt’ and we should get rid of the bums. Yet even with one of the worst scandals in Canadian politics Harper still couldn’t come close to a majority. They managed to play this out for nearly two years, and any time they were caught in their own scandals they simply pointed at the opposition and told us that the Liberals did worse things. Then they broke their own electoral laws and in a vain attempt to get their much sought after majority. But despite their relentless attacks on Dion which worked remarkably well on a gullible electorate, the Conservatives were still unable to win a majority. Then came Harper’s two biggest mistakes; a denial that there was a looming economic crisis, and his disastrous fall economic statement which finally exposed the depth of his partisanship. But the real spanner in the works for Harper is the economic slowdown which he reacted to by abandoning his entire economic oeuvre.  In his master’s thesis Harper condemned all deficit spending as an attempt by governments to get reelected. Now suddenly when his political power was threatened, he is a great convert to government intervention. This conversion seems hollow to just about everyone. But despite the abandonment of his so-called principles, the economy will wrench Harper from power as it has done to so many politicians before him. Oh, the Conservatives will fall back on their old tactics; they will begin relentless attacks on Ignatieff, but one can only cry wolf so many times and these attacks in the midst of a depression will appear to most people as particularly unseemly. Bullying will only take you so far even in politics. Indeed, the conditions of history will oust Harper from power just as it brought him to power. 

The Is-Ought problem continued

It seems to me to found any objective notion of philosophy in general or ethics in particular, you would have to solve the is-ought problem. I see no indication that this has been done or, indeed, could be done. This seems clear for two reasons: one, agreement cannot be reached on the is; two, the ought always implies a value claim. If the equation is; if  x then y, then surely the x must be agreed upon if y is to meaningful, objective, or in any way proscriptive. I have to tell you, I just don’t see that happening.

If one makes a claim such as, humans have a primary biological imperative  toward survival, therefore we should act in this manner. Here we have an is and an ought. Furthermore, this is a widely held view. But many people simply would not agree upon the is to begin with, and even if they did there could still be wide disagreement concerning how people should act in response to this supposed imperative. I  don’t believe that there is any overriding motivation for human behavior.  Given how self-destructive humans can be, I certainly don’t believe that there is an overriding imperative toward self, or species, survival. I think people are motivated by countless different things, to the point where I would say it is ‘over –determined.’ Being over-determined, I don’t believe that we can establish an is concerning human needs or motivations. If this is true, then we cannot establish any kind of objective ethics or even objective philosophy. I believe it is hopelessly simplistic to reduce human needs or motivations given how complex society and history appears to be.

The problem is made even more complex when we come to the ought part of the equation. Now, even if you get people to agree to the is, they may disagree with the ought. For example, if people agreed on the idea of an overriding motivation of survival, I think a pretty strong case could then be made that excessive cooperation would be the ought that would follow from this. And given certain evolutionary processes like say, the evolution of canine societies, (which many experts claim is similar to human evolution), then this could be a very strong argument to cooperatives. I am not claiming that it is an open and shut case myself, I am just raising the spectre of reasonable doubt, which is all that needs to be done against any kind of objectivist claim. But even more significant than the simple spectre of doubt is the fact that the ought that people endorse will flow naturally out of their values. This can be seen very clearly when one realizes that people are free to reject any ‘natural’ imperative. Someone may claim that individual survival, for example, is an overriding and necessary instinct to human life, and I might say that I choose to reject and attempt to overcome that instinct. This is just a very simple example that could be applied to any supposed imperative. Ultimately, you can accept or reject a course of action according to you values (and arguably everyone does) which renders, quite simply, any notion of objective action absurd.  

Instead what I believe happens is that narrowly define the is and then infuse their ought with a reflection of their own values. In other words, I don’t think that we can define a human nature in anyway that is proscriptively meaningful, therefore we are compelled to imbue our oughts with our own values. It sound very convenient, for example, to say that Humans have a nature, and that they ought to act in accordance with it. But I don’t think we have a definable nature (in any strict  or proscriptively useful sense), and even if I did, people could simply say “I don’t think we should act in accordance with it.” And the argument quickly fall apart.

At a slightly more complex level, one might make a proscriptive plan like: All people are compelled to survive, survival demands this kind of action, you ought, therefore, act in this way. Well even if we agreed to the first and second claim (an agreement that I don’t think will obtain) then you might find that some people simply might reject their own survival. 

So-called objectivist philosophy, but more generally any philosophy that claims to constitute an objective ontology, rests in part on a claim to have settled the is-ought problem. Hume's guillotine as it is sometime called, puts forward the premise that one cannot move from an observation of what one believes exists, or is, to what one ought to do. What this premise basically says is that experience of the world cannot proscribe actions to us. In other words, even if we know what is, we don't necessarily therefore know what ought to be. Since Hume, this has been one of the central problems of all Western philosophy and I believe in some sense that the failure to find a way through this is the reason that one of the very strong currents of philosophy fell into a fairly relativistic strain that we associate with writers like Lyotard and Derrida. 

And I must admit that when talking philosophy I find it difficult to imagine any serious way that an objective philosophy can be constituted. Despite simplistic claims to common sense philosophy or the so-called objectivism of people like Ayn Rand and her followers, I see no way to settle the is-ought problem. Some form of 'value-pluralism' as explained by Isaiah Berlin certainly makes a lot more sense to me. 

More on this tomorrow.