In praise of minding your own mind

But Gnostics gonna Gnost

Some vaguely orientated discursive rambling connected with moral reasoning and humility. But first ...

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The world is complex and confusing and we are all expected to know lots of stuff and be 'right' about things all the time. This is because we are encouraged to see being right about things as one of the highest virtues. A while ago I had some experiences that left me thinking that feeling like you're right about everything is overrated and that (personally) being curious, often mystified and open to different perspectives is more psychologically nourishing.

This newsletter occasionally does offer genuine professional 'expert' insight (especially on how the media sausage is made) but mostly it's speculation around why we are the way we are, how ambient sociocultural conditions affect us and the ways we navigate them. There isn't really any argument as such. Because I don't care so much about what I think as how I (and others) came to think it; biases, external influences and the stories we tell ourselves about how we think.

Substack and the 'blogosphere' is full of insightful writers, many of whom are obvious savants. Rarely Certain isn't among those. It's about being an ordinary person wondering about things that aren't as simple as they once thought.

So now you know

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This is part of an ongoing preoccupation with authenticity, honesty and the lies we live amidst.

Frank Zappa (probably) said

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”

It illustrates the reasoning error called a 'Category Mistake', committed when something from one epistemic class of things is deployed to help establish a proposition from another class.

Another good one is the time someone gestured to some buildings that made up a college and asked the philosopher Gilbert Ryle "but where's the university"?

The concept of moral reasoning looks like a Category Mistake to me, if you take 'reason' as not just a thinking process but also the ability to nail the validity of the premises from which a valid conclusion is eventually reached.

If the premise cannot be discovered through reason that's the category mistake. You could just as well talk about aromatic reasoning, mellifluous reasoning or tactile reasoning.

Obviously you can take reason in its weaker sense, as a serial process in which each step naturally - or 'reasonably' - follows the previous one.

But we don't really mean that when we talk about reason.

It's meant to be superior to feelings or stories as a basis for explaining things about the world.

Which means it needs to first establish facts, before working out what to do with them.

You can soundly reason your way to a conclusion that seems clear, but from an initial faulty premise - a problem that reason is also supposed to avoid.

This is why so many quite clever people believe what they do about things like Covid vaccine harms or that they were untested or that anthropogenic influence on climate is not increasing mean global temperatures.

We reason our way perfectly to conclusions that range between slightly valid and false if we begin with a faulty premise.

This is what seems to happen with moral reasoning, which seeks to establish 'proofs' of universal moral propositions via a process of reason.

What prompts this reflection on moral reason is a personal weariness with relentless moral calibration.

There seems to be a widespread obsession with moral virtue or vice/corruption.

It makes me think that we are unwittingly so desperate for pre-Enlightenment God to come back with some commandments that we are becoming more obsessed with 'right' and 'wrong' as time goes on without Him.

This is what the now ubiquitous 'thinkpiece' (or 'take') is founded on; moral calibration between pairs or sets of propositions.

Everything comes under scrutiny for its virtue or lack therein, which is why so much energy is expended in arguing about whether or not the Effective Altruists, for example, are good people who are thinking correctly or wrongly because they insist on quantifying targets and results rather than relying on feels.

But each time I read one of these critiques I'm thinking something along the lines of Effective Altruists are improving the lives of people they don't know while you're just wandering around up your own arse in search of wrongness because something just feels a bit off to you.

What is the point? What is this an attempt to achieve?

All the writers of those kinds of thing seem to think that their moral intuitions have been deeply thought through and now they want to imprint their personal instincts onto the world because it's obvious to them that it's the correct way of seeing things. But it isn't. It's just a feeling, unless they can identify the source of their premises' truth values.

But there isn't one and it's almost taboo to suggest this.

Even though almost all of politics is now stupid because it's founded on feels.

I would love to see more honesty in intellectual life. More self-awareness of the real motivations of people who want to impose their ideological frameworks and judge others within those constraints.

What I'd prefer is more 'these are the intuitions behind why I think this' and less 'here is an argument that says you should think this because it is correct'. I would prefer the 'takes' to explicitly include reference to the personal biases we bring to the table when we hash out a thing.

That would mean knowing them, though. A lot of the time we don't. Which is nice, because this ignorance allows us to think we're better at 'reason' than others and who doesn't enjoy feeling a bit superior?

But we seem to need this layer of reassurance that it isn't just us being jerked around by feelings, which is what the idea of 'reason' provides.

It's fine to strongly dispute - or even hate - socialists or conservatives. It's just how you feel. You don't have to justify it, so stop trying to prove that hating them is fine because they're bad people, according to some independently derived yardstick.  This is actually just you being childish and foot-stampy about intuitions that are different from yours.

The dullest thing about a lot of discourse around meta-morality is that people who engage in it never admit their self-interest.

So the right blathers on about 'master' and 'slave' morality, sparked by the graduation of Wokeism into mainstream life and they represent the inevitable Newtonian equal and opposite reaction from people who feel very Right Wing about the world and although it's all quite interesting and entertaining, none of it gets you to any kind of actual truth.

Which is that they feel kind of sexy and potent and don't much like diminishing themselves in service to elevating the blacks and the trannies and the poor and so on. And that's fine. Feel what you feel, but stop pretending that your feelings are more relevant than other feelings.

Why are we like this?

There has to be a reason for this feature of forever trying to promulgate our feelings and the only one I can think of (apart from narcissism) is Nietzsche's idea of the Will to Power.

While everyone seems to think that they're proving things all we're ever really doing is trying to impose our wills on the world.

So here's an unprovable and purely intuitive personal theory and the good news is that it's not going to come with an argument about why you should believe it. It's just something to consider.

Now that there is no God to love and guide each one of us, we have lost two anchor points; confidence in moral rightness or wrongness and an obvious point to existing.

It used to be that God made us, loved us and provided a roadmap to Heaven.

But we got rid of Him and started worshipping reason instead.

So we became our own gods and because gods must influence beyond themselves we all want the moral laws we intuit to be adopted by others.

And, because there is now no God-based religion for most of us, we have become Gnostics, so that we retain the comforts of feeling insightful about universal principles without having to argue about whether there's a big guy from whom it all flows.

The most obvious form of this is Social Justice fundamentalism, which divides existence into two opposing forces of good and evil. Where there is a realm to be reached which is pure and divine and essential to reach because the one we're in is so flawed, corrupt and unjust.

The mythology and cosmology of this is provided by sacred texts, such as those arguing that being white is evil and that no good ever came from imposing our ways on less well organised and technologically disadvantaged peoples.

Gnosis - or salvation - is achieved via knowledge of spiritual truths (being white or materially successful in comparison to others is terrible) and by shrugging off the constraints of the material world (such as biological sex).

Not saying that's all wrong. Just saying it's all quite Gnostic. Almost all politics is, since it stopped being about a rolling programme of making hospitals, schools, roads, trains and business conditions better than ten years before using various different approaches.

The Right is also quite Gnostic too, but since most people at that end of the spectrum concern themselves much less with judging the content of my mind in terms of its moral valence I tend to leave them to it.

The more people concern themselves with how others see the world, the more I wonder about what gives them the confidence to sit in judgement.

Gnosticism and - especially - Will to Power spring increasingly to mind.

There has to be a reason why the cleverest people seem to be the most determined to impose their intuitions on others. Rationally, the cleverer you are the more obvious it should be that there are no universal moral truths and the more sanguine you might be about views you don't share, is how it seems to me.

Believing in universal moral law ought to be outmoded after so much education has been moulding so many more people into supposedly more rational and disciplined thinkers.

One clue stares us in the face, thanks to all the worries about the potential for 'sentient' AI running amuck.

If morality was as simple as we seem to think, this shouldn't be an issue.

But we have this obviously rational fear that a suitably powerful artificial 'mind' tasked with preventing all cancer could see the eradication of all cancer-prone life as a valid solution.

The fact that there's so much discussion about 'alignment' (getting AI to make choices that reflect the average normalton's values about suffering and death) should give us pause.

If we knew what 'right' and 'wrong' were, or what incontrovertibly matters most in this world, we could just tell the AI and be done with it. Or - if it were really a matter of reasoning - just tell the AI to figure it out and act accordingly, starting by reasoning the basic premises to reason up from.

But the the AI might get around being told to end cancer and preserve life by coming up with some other unimaginably horrible strategy and everyone who reads anything about the alignment problem knows that it's hard because it isn't really rational anyway, precisely for this reason. Our values are just feelings about things that we elevate to pretend that they're noble.

This is mostly why few things leave me less satisfied than moral reasoning because it's just trying to 'prove' feelings (a category mistake, if ever there was one).

This all sounds a bit esoteric but it touches us all, in life. It's a big part of why I'm no longer part of the Left, while feeling unable to identify with the Right per se, owing to all the moral calibrations that come with those territories.

Both sides have such obviously bullshit reasons for some of their views that it's almost as if they're unwell. And, in fact, Scott Alexander has a fun piece positing trauma as the driver of strong political opinion.

Not since studying moral philosophy in exchange for some letters after my name decades ago have I believed that things are morally 'right' or 'wrong' in any independent sense, the way I believe that there’s some hydrogen in a water molecule.

It's all just attempting to derive externally relevant 'laws' from internally experienced conditions of the mind. And then judging (ie one-upping - putting oneself above) all the people who don't conform.

Being gods, we have to because that's what gods are for.

And being subject to the Will to Power we can't help it.

Which is why opinions are so intrusive since we became digitally networked. We are subject to the Will to Power at scale, while having our own insignificance in the grand scheme really rubbed in.

Here's how the idea fits the way things look.

It’s metaphysical, I’m afraid

Nietzsche suggests that we have a primal drive to assert our influence, find ways to exert power and impose our wills on the world. This isn't to be mistaken for a personality thing any more than the primacy of Darwin's will to survive is a character trait. It's a baked in feature of life, in a metaphysical sense.

Where it also fits with what we see going on all the time with 'values' is that the Will to Power combines creative and destructive impulses and strives to define new realities.

Traditional Christian-based morality tends to be an attempt to suppress the individual Will to Power by promoting meekness, humility and self-denial.

This is why so many people - mainly on the intellectual Right - are critiquing 'slave' morality and promoting 'Vitalism'. They like the idea of becoming Nietzsche's idea of 'Übermensch' - people who are able to escape the influence and rules of others and be themselves, without externally-imposed constraint. I feel them too. There's something about being relentlessly pressured or encouraged into virtuous cognitive behaviour that makes me swing the other way.

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[Offer runs out at midnight tonight]

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It's almost like Nietzsche was in the midst of social justice v social conservative Twitter mayhem when you consider what he had to say about interpreting reality. Which was that it’s best understood as a manifestation of the Will to Power.

It's not that there are no truths or reality to be discerned independently of our minds, but that we tend to overlook that our understanding of them comes from a dynamic interplay of forces, where every entity is striving to assert its influence and power over others.

Next time you see a word salad critical theory about sex, race or any other of the identities in the intersectional matrix of social justice concerns try not seeing it in this light; as reality being shaped, rather than described. This is a manifestation of the Will to Power.

So if you don't believe in moral 'truths' you must think all things are fine, however much pain or unhappiness they cause

That is the predictable pushback to these views.

I just accept that my personal moral foundations are rooted in nothing more sophisticated than 'try to mostly do as I would be done by in most circumstances' because it tends to cause less of the sort of pain in others that I would not like to experience myself

It's not that I don't care, in some vague sense, about suffering out there in the world. Sometimes I even do something that might help alleviate some of it. Or commit a petty kindness that is only rewarded by some internal approval about being quite a nice person at heart. And I'd still press the button marked 'End Suffering In Many Instances' were I omnipotent. But this only flows from the Will to Power and not a universal moral law.

No, no, no, moral discourse isn’t pointless

Trying to come up with universal moral laws is obviously still worth a shot and I remain all ears. I wouldn't want to disrespect the attempts of cleverer people than me to come up with first principles.

Among the Substackers I enjoy most is

Bentham's Bulldog

who often does lots of moral reasoning and that person would definitely run rings around me in any debate. It's an interesting field but that blog keeps reminding me in the end that no forms of morality can be 'proved', however entertaining it is to try.

Amusingly, perhaps, it was the erudite reasoning of Bentham's Bulldog that ended up affirming my belief that the whole endeavour is futile while also reaffirming an instinct that Utilitarianism is as good as it gets, for all of the repugnant back alleys it leads you down.

Morality doesn't exist as a thing in itself any more than money or human rights. But - just as with money and human rights - we naively think that these are things rooted in a reality that is external to our minds because of the way it is talked about.

It was slightly surprising, as an actual student doing moral philosophy, to realise that I was never going to get any closer to the 'truth' than my childhood instincts had been about good and bad.

The moment I encountered Freddie Ayer saying that moral statements are expressions of emotional attitudes (aka Emotivism or Prescriptivism) that was it.

David Hume's "is-ought" point - that you cannot rationally derive a prescriptive statement from a descriptive one - still seems obviously valid to me (see Category Error above).

Moral reasoning is a kind of sport and sports are for winning.

That's all it is.

Or