What happened to the slave of reason

Turkey

   If we think about Hume as a happy go lucky person who loved port and cheese, we can pull two strands of his thinking that nicely reflect his world view. The first strand, was his understanding that commerce was a humanizing force. His point was that the desire to improve one's material condition gives a person something useful to do, stops them being "indolent" and it drives the interactions that result in "industry, art and knowledge."

  Hume's second strand was his understanding of 'habit' which he read as a scaffolding of both 'custom and habit' which allowed for the individual who gets useful things done. Hume's list of good things for such an individual, included stable laws and property rights, not because they were divine rights, but because they provided a predictable framework in which human beings could cooperate, and flourish without butchering each other.

  "What happened?"

  The likes of Descartes and that man from Somerset John Locke were of the opinion that we people had a rigid soul. Our core essence was rational and fixed, they argued, we were isolated, autonomous moral actors, we were "absolute" which means our self, the thing that is you or I, doesn't change.

  Hume, on the other hand, with his ever changing bundle of emotions and passions, his constantly fleeting thoughts did not believe that reason alone could even begin to prove the existence of an unchanging self, the existence of God or morality or half the things reason was credited with.

  It was like this : reason and passion are not enemies. But as Hume put it himself : "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."

  For Hume, commercial activity was something individuals could do that was only valuable because it refined human sociability and made life pleasant without us butchering each other. The moment commercial individualism starts laying down endless no's, destroys social harmony, conversation, and sympathy, Hume would have agreed, commercial individualism begins to defeat its own purpose. 

The Hyper-Individualists

 

Ironweed

  Baxter and I have an issue with what's loosely referred to as Individualism. What's happened over the past 250 years is that Market Logic has replaced Social Ethics, then the political class determined that stupidity did indeed trickle down and more recently Neo-Christians rearranged the Beatitudes to allow jumbo jets, corporations, the billionaire and aircraft carriers to pass through the eye of the needle because of King Cyrus the Great of Persia, formerly Iran.

 A basic genesis of modern Individualism would start with the Protestant Reformation. An assertion by the Godly that no longer were we people joined by a collective church, that whole collective stuff which allowed the greedy to thrive and pay priests to grant them amnesty, that soup of vice and avarice had warped the understanding of why Jesus died on a cross. The truth was, when you died you stood alone before God, who'd bring out the big book, you'd be asked to explain your actions and your attitudes, and sometimes, depending on your legal team, especially if you were a suspicious looking character, God himself, apparently, would ask to see your papers rather than just assuming you'd been baptized.

 You can wonder, if you like, why people got excited by the prospect of this face to face with the ultimate headmaster. There are a number of theories the simplest is that a worthy percentage, it's usually 20%, relish the prospect of purification by large numbers of the poorly adjusted going to an eternity in hell without prospect of forgiveness, this was certainly Dante's position.

 More recently the poorly adjusted are seen as an opportunity for gathering redemption points within a community, they have been lumped in with the heathen, the Jews and the Catholics and are regularly subjected to degrees of evangelical fervor from our 20%. 

 When the Enlightenment gathered steam, one of the areas it chose to apply reason to was this rather icky personal relationship with God, his enthusiastic Son and a somewhat sinister, poorly understood Ghost. Not everyone was convinced that Calvin and Luther had logically solved the problem. One of the founders of Individualism as a modern practical philosophy David Hume, and you can blame the English for a lot but Hume was a Scotsman. His Book was Treatise of Human Nature, it was published in 1740. Hume, along with a bunch of others, argued that people were a bundle of sensations subject to the give and take of cause and effect, we had free will, he didn't think miracles were real and we probably hadn't been perfectly designed.

 Some might say "What about what's his name, the chap from Somerset England, who died in 1704, he pretty much wrote the bill of rights."

 The thing about John Locke, he was all very Enlightenment, and gung-ho on property rights, personal rights, slave ownership, supply and demand, money as a means of exchange and it's a very long list of often sensible, old fashioned capitalistic claims about stoic behaviors being profitable and so on, but he was a Puritan who was 10 years old during the English Civil War. This made Locke a Calvinist, Lutheran true blue Protestant with an aggressively healthy attitude toward Judgement Day, he wasn't a liberal in the same "for god's sake don't take yourself so bloody seriously" sense that Hume was a liberal. Nor was Hume anything much more that an agnostic, and by the 1740's you could begin to use the 'A' word without being automatically branded a dangerous blasphemer who should be shipped off somewhere.  

  So how did a tool meant to establish moral agency turn into a "dying fish on the beach"?

 In the late 20th century, championed by figures like Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women."  Ayn Rand's individualism was stripped of its relational context. Reagan became a Right Wing Saint. And on it went into deeper and deeper pits of tripe.

  Hyper-individualists now continue to guiltlessly reduce human freedom to frictionless consumer choice and white faced autonomy from obligation. Public health measures are "tyranny." Taxes are  "theft." Collective sacrifice is viewed as "sucker behavior." Just visit the White House if you want to listen to the new sermons

 The issue for Baxter and I is this : Homo sapiens is an obligate social species, which means we cannot survive, grow or reproduce alone. We survived the two million plus years of the Pleistocene precisely because our ancestors did not act as hyper-individualists. Our neurobiology, our oxytocin pathways, and our default somatic states are hardwired for cooperation, shared responsibility, and belonging.

 This current iteration of hyper-individualism, dominated by an unlettered, small class of psychotically un-woke, newly hyper-wealthy, demand that because an increasingly tinier few want to fly around in rocket ships and government is an evil, the rest of us human organisms must learn to live in direct contradiction to our evolutionary biology and to do that we've got between eighteen months and three years to learn to share our existence with cake. 

 

We Fear Death Because we Fear Freedom

Old Fashioned Buddleia

   I think we can go for the meanings in freedom that share the sense that something is free if it can change without constraint so long as we include the sense of aloneness in free found in the meanings chemists have given to Free Radicals.

  A free radical is an unpaired electron which is short lived, highly reactive and unstable as it bobs around looking for stability by stealing or sharing an electron from other molecules. When two Free Radicals meet they clash into each other and combine to form a stable pair. When the union happens a Free Radical is no longer a free radical.

  Of course, in chemistry, free radical is not quite that straightforward, there's a further complexity that requires a basic grasp of the word valence. Electrons prefer pairs, they bond as positive and negatives, An unattached electron is within the orbit of an atom, an ion or a molecule. Within this context of a disgruntled, lonely unbonded electron that's already a part of something, a free radical presents the entire atom, ion or molecule with the destabilizing insecurity which when free radicals find each other results in new chemical bonds between atoms and molecules.

  I don't know about ions, possibly they just doff the hat as they pass in the night but for the atoms and molecules in something like a barrel of crude oil the insecurities of free radicals when correctly encourage by devious chemists can be persuaded to become a billion plastic shopping bags.

 The uncertainties of the Free Radical hint at an idea amongst psychiatrists, sociologists and sometimes philosophers that we people, without our chains, would probably define freedom in terms of disappearing into nowhere as a blinding light. Instead we fear death because we fear freedom and have a penchant for inventing a rule based paradise. 

Woke, Freedom, Habitus and Simone de Beauvoir

Mason Bee

  An acceptance of Pierre Bourdieu's structural scaffolding, the Habitus in which we confront the unwritten of our absorbed existence is rightfully useful. There within Bourdieu's scaffolding you'll find the 'situation' through which de Beauvoir's 'nothingness' becomes. In these shadows, you can if you're desperate enough, mandate or inspire new structural rules, but you can't force a human organism to thrive, and note the symbol thrive, under a scaffolding a human organism no longer regards as legitimate.

 De Beauvoir herself, despite her antipathy toward elements of the Habitus - she had some very cruel and self centered things to say about La Belle France into which she was born - was able to thrive because the scaffolding of her Habitus and her capacity to navigate her situation allowed her to thrive.

 Sartre's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am free regardless of the world I am born into. My consciousness is always radically unbound.

 De Beauvoir's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am born into a structured situation, a 'habitus.' To will myself free in the situation I have found myself born into is to will others free because my freedom needs a world of free others "to act upon and disclose" which is a way of saying I need something like a permission structure in a Habitus that allows me to decide what I want to become. Hence "You aren't born a woman, you become one."

 In her Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir put it this way: "Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men." She went on to write: "To will oneself free is also to will others free...."

 And of course it had occurred to her that since the Bronze Age, female humans had been turned into objects by male humans.

 "Where are we? I'm lost!"

 De Beauvoir: Freedom needs an open future of choices, just having free will inside your head, like Sartre, is useless if your 'situation' offers no real possibilities. If a person is trapped in poverty, tyranny, or rigid social roles, their future is closed off. We need free others to give our actions meaning.

 "Really?"

 If everyone around you is reduced to a passive, subjugated instrument, your own freedom operates in a vacuum and it becomes meaningless.

 "Really."

  Oppression, de Beauvoir argued, is a mutual mutilation. To turn a free, conscious "subject" into an "object," the oppressor destroys the very thing that makes human society dynamic. By closing off the future of others, you shrink the richness of the world you yourself inhabit.

 "You sound very woke! Or are you ant-woke?"

 If the scaffolding isn't legitimated by the free choices of the people living inside it, it becomes an enforced cage - one that degrades the freedom of those running the cage, too.