Tag: Philosophy

The Kind of Confidence That is Attractive in Men

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Women commonly say that confidence is very attractive in a man and young men frequently misunderstand this because they think by “confidence” the women mean “believing that there is a high probability of success at what one is currently attempting.” Starting from this mistaken premise, they go on to notice that the people who most believe that their current endeavors are certain to succeed are swaggering fools. From this they they either conclude that women are self-destructive idiots, or are just completely confused. The problem, of course, is that this is not at all what the women mean. (There’s also a secondary problem that damaged women who were raised very badly tend to be attracted to men who were raised badly, and these cases supply evidence that this mistaken interpretation is correct. I’m not going to address that further, though.)

What women actually mean when they say that confidence is attractive in a man is that it is attractive when a man is rationally pursuing good goals, and both halves of that are intelligible to the woman. That requires some explanation, though, because the word “rationally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That’s for a good reason—wisdom and virtue are not easy in this fallen world. But it is, none the less, in need of elaboration.

The first and easiest thing to distinguish the rational pursuit of good goals from something that is obviously not confidence—desperation. Or, as Adam Lane Smith likes to put it, trying to get adopted like a puppy at the pound. There are different ways at arriving at this error, but they broadly fall into not having a good goal—usually, merely wanting someone to like you—or having a good goal but not rationally pursuing it: wanting a wife with whom to raise a family but snatching at any opportunity without regard to whether the woman would be a good wife, and not giving her any opportunity to find out if one would be a good father. I don’t think it needs much explanation why desperation does not come off as confident, but it will be helpful to look at the reverse: why does rationally pursuing the goal of finding a wife come off as confident?

Consider what the rational pursuit of that goal entails: the man needs to get to know the woman and to assess things like her wisdom, prudence, temperance, fortitude, patience, etc. At the same time, she will need to evaluate the same of him, and so he should be helping her to do that accurately. This will necessarily entail holding off from prematurely forming emotional bonds—it would be imprudent to become attached to a woman he may want to separate himself from, and it would be uncharitable to encourage her to become attached to him when he may wish to separate himself. Actually doing this requires willpower, but even more importantly, it requires conviction that the world is organized in such a way that the rational pursuit of these goals can actually lead to success. If the man is a Nihilist and believes that the world is merely chaotic randomness, it would not make sense to follow such a plan. But neither would it make sense to follow any other plan; if the world is unintelligible to human beings, if we are merely the playthings of evil gods, then following through on such a plan of action, with the restraint it entails, makes no sense. But here’s the thing: whether we are merely the playthings of evil gods in an unintelligible world or whether God is in his heaven and though his mills grind slowly yet they grind exceeding small, the only people who ever have long-term success are the people who follow rational plans. The people who treat the world like an unintelligible chaos always flame out after a while and usually flame out immediately. So if you want a life-partner and co-ancestor for your descendants to raise them with you, you really want someone who acts according to the conviction that rational plans are worth following. This is confidence.

Of course, confidence is evaluated according to many more pursuits of many more goals than just the pursuit of the woman herself, but especially in the beginning, that is probably the most obvious one to the woman. However, she will pretty quickly discover what other goals the man she’s evaluating as a potential husband is pursuing, and in what manner he’s pursuing them.

For example, how does he earn his living? While it is possible to approach that question in a mercenary way, it is a highly relevant question even to an ascetic who owns only two saris, as the nuns in Mother Theresa’s order do (two so that she can be clothed while she washes the other). Feeding and clothing oneself is not the highest good, but it is an important good and a noble and dignified pursuit, and one very much worth doing well. Even if a man is just a subsistence farmer, does he care for his fields or does he let them go to ruin? The answer to that question tells you quite a bit about the man and his convictions.

Does the man find anything in the world interesting in a manner worthy of an adult? To find something interesting takes work. This is related to an aphorism by G.K. Chesterton:

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

If a man finds nothing interesting besides games—which were made to interest him without effort on his part—it means that he has not taken the trouble to find interesting anything which was made for a reason other than to please him. Such a man will be a very dull conversationalist, and even more important, what kind of father can he be? If he has taken no trouble to learn about anything which exists for its own sake, how can he possibly know anything worth teaching to his children? How much will he even take the trouble to learn about his children?

I would not have the space to explain all of the possible things to learn about a man even if I were writing a book and not a blog post, but I hope that this has at least sketched out what is meant when (healthy) women say that confidence is appealing in a man.

The Communist Manifesto is Unbelievably Bad

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read The Communist Manifesto (in English translation, of course) since from time to time I read primary sources and I literally have great difficulty actually believing how bad it is. It does not really contain either a political philosophy or an economic philosophy; it has a few scant elements of these, and is about as much a considered work of political philosophy as is Star Trek: The Next Generation.

For those not familiar, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a TV show set in the twenty fourth century where it is a post-scarcity world in which everyone has an unlimited amount of whatever they want without effort. In TNG (as it is commonly called for brevity) this is accomplished through free energy by unspecified means coupled with “replicators” that can make anything, instantly, with no cost. (I believe various unauthoritative technical manuals suggest there is some hidden feed-stock of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but there is never any kind of limit to what replicators can replicate, and there are episodes where feed stock is clearly not required.) I bring this up not as a tangent, but as oddly similar: it is fairly clear, from TCM (as I will call The Communist Manifest, for brevity) as well as several FAQs (which Marx called a “catechism”) that Marx believed that the industrial revolution was bringing about a post-scarcity world.

TCM was published when Marx was 30 years old, and I’ve been told it’s not why he was influential—that was Capital, or Das Kapital, as it is often known, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which is it’s full title. That book is around 1,000 pages long, and I don’t find it even slightly plausible that communists read the whole thing, so I’m still quite unsure of what to make of it. I’m willing to believe that Capital did flesh Marx’s ideas out somewhat, since they were basically only a few partial bones in TCM. Capital was published when Marx was 48, and presumably the intervening 18 years and the extra 970 pages lent themselves to a little more thought. I have trouble believing much, since the author of TCM was clearly not a thoughtful man.

It’s difficult to even critique TCM because there’s so little to it. It begins with the idea that the key to understanding history is class conflict, which is just wrong. That’s not the key. It mostly doesn’t even apply. It’s like saying that the key to understanding history is belts. I mean, yeah, you can identify belts at times and places in history, but if you think that they’re the key to understanding history you’re just a moron (assuming you’re older than fifteen; if you are fifteen you just need to think about this more). There is no single key to understanding history, because human history is as complex as human beings. And if there was a single key, interdependence would unlock quite a lot more of history than class conflict would.

Marx’s arguments are often beyond asinine, too. When he tries to address objections to abolishing the family, he starts by saying that families don’t really exist anyway so nothing will be lost. He defends all women being held in common, rather than marrying, by saying that the bourgeoisie has extramarital affairs so often that they effectively hold all women in common anyway. This is just rhetoric, not an argument, and it’s not even good rhetoric. Moreover, it’s rhetoric where actual ideas would be most natural, highlighting that there are no ideas.

To give another example of idiocy: among the general points that a communist system would have (there are only 10), Marx says that factories will be interspersed with agriculture such that there will no longer be a town/country distinction. This is only starting to become sort-of possible in certain types of manufacturing with modern high-end 3D printers in low-volume markets. In Marx’s time, when factories were enormous and required the labor of a huge number of people, this was pure insanity. Ignoring how factories would get in the way of farmers, this would require either factories so small as to be unproductive or absolutely enormous commutes to work at a time when horse was the dominant form of transportation. To say nothing of the great difficult of transporting raw materials to random locations and finished goods from them. (Factories were often on rivers because river transport is so much cheaper than overland transport; they were often near each other because one factory’s output might be used as an input by another, and not needing to transport these goods hundreds of miles was far more efficient.) If you even begin to try to work through what randomly locating factories throughout the countryside would entail in terms of transport and coordination, of the running of rail lines through farm fields and so on, it becomes immediately clear that Marx never gave a moment’s thought to what this goal would entail.

And that’s a theme of TCM. There is zero thought given to how to accomplish… anything. For example, he states that all property will be owned by the state, but he never so much as raises the question of how the state will say what will be done with its property, let alone provide even a hint of an outline of an answer to the question.

Incidentally, this is a point which a lot of people sympathetic to socialist rhetoric seem to miss: any form of socialism where the means of production are owned by The People is necessarily totalitarian, for the simple reason that if The People own the means of production, they clearly will have to say what gets done with their means of production. That computer in the apartment in which you live—that can be used to write things, so the people should get to say what their computer gets used to write. The oven in the common area of the apartment building in which you live produces cooked food, so The People should say what food their oven is used to cook.

Socialist-sympathizers will balk at this and say that all manner of things are excluded from ownership by The People, but all they’re doing is saying that what they actually want is only a little bit of socialism—often, in practice, only socialism of the things that they don’t want to own, but then most human beings are hypocrites.

Anyway, Marx says nothing in TCM about how The People (or The State) will say what happens with all of its property. He gives not a word to how this will, in his way of looking at things, only set up a new class conflict between the bureaucrats and the civilians, or between the politicians and the civilians, since clearly you can’t say what happens to everything by direct democracy. Especially since nations will fade away and there will only be one worldwide government.

A world government is, of course, a recipe for minimum accountability, but that requires some minimum of knowledge of how human beings work, which was clearly beyond Marx, or perhaps against his beliefs; but I would have expected him to at least give some vague hints about how the world government is supposed to work, even if it was beyond him to say how it wouldn’t work and what to do to correct against its failings.

Why Modern Art is Bad

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

My title is a little over-broad, as there is Modern art which isn’t bad. But a large enough fraction of it is to justify the title, and I’d like to talk about why that is. Because it’s not an accident.

The first reason is that Modern art arose from Modern Philosophy, which jettisoned the idea of truth. (If you only know a little bit about Modern Philosophy this might sound odd; a few hundreds more hours of reading it will clear things up.) Since beauty, like truth and goodness, is a kind of apprehension of being, the rejection of truth was also a rejection of beauty. Art without beauty quickly becomes very strange, and also bad. That is, it becomes deconstructive. There is a thing which can be called deconstruction whose purpose is to give insight into the inner workings of something good, in order to better be able to appreciate it or to make goodness oneself; this is not what happens, though sometimes in the early stages it is what people pretend is going on. A complete rejection of truth and beauty means that deconstruction can only be for the purpose of destruction; the only enjoyment the feeling of power which comes from ending something which is good. Of course, not all Modern art embodies this perfectly. God is the only one who accomplishes all things according to His will, so human artists with bad intentions sometimes fail and make good art by accident. And, of course, not all Modern artists even fully buy into the idea.

The other major reason why Modern art is bad is because it is a status symbol of the upper classes. Well, not just that it’s a status symbol, because they don’t have to bad. Ideally, status symbols are good, and can be when the highest quality is limited in availability. Ermine furs and imperial purple dyes were both high-status and beautiful in the days when they were incredibly hard to get. The problem is when beauty becomes cheap, as modern chemistry has largely rendered it. Exclusive items with quality can still go together, as in the case of fancy wrist watches or luxury cars. But cheap reproduction and efficient markets have made beautiful art (relatively) easy to come by, so the only way for art to become exclusive is to artificially limit it to only certain producers. Modern art, being ugly, helps in this, because people won’t pick the selected artists by accident, that is, merely because they happen to like the art. Because no one naturally likes the art. High status people train themselves to enjoy the art because enjoying it confers status.

You can learn to enjoy Modern art, but the same skill would allow you to enjoy any random patch of dirt on the ground. Dirt is actually interesting stuff, if you take the time and trouble to look closely at it. But dirt is common; dirt is cheap. It’s dirt cheap, in fact. In consequence, few people have the humility to learn to appreciate dirt. If you learn to appreciate dirt, you will probably be happier, but no one but you and God will know it.

Unsustainable Things Give the Biggest Short-Term Benefits

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Change in dynamic systems always brings with it opportunities, and, in particular, unsustainable opportunities. These opportunities come from the mismatch between the parts of the system adapted to the new system and the parts which have not yet adapted. And unsustainable things usually give the biggest short-term benefits, which creates an incentive for people to instigate change in order to take advantage of the huge short-term benefits available before the system has adapted.

A simple example can be seen in the inflation or deflation of a currency. Let’s take deflation since it’s less common and less likely to have negative associations. In deflation, money is removed from an economy. The same amount of economic activity can go on as long as the price of everything lowers, and indeed this is what will eventually happen as the people who still have money offer less of it to others for goods and services and out of desperation they take it. The money then flows from the people who have it to the people who don’t, prices tend to lower, and we’re eventually back to where we started but with different numbers. Instead of the average wage being one Florentine per hour, it’s now half a Florentine per hour, and instead of a loaf of bread costing one Florentine it now costs half a Florentine. (Florentine is, I hope, a made-up currency purely for the purpose of illustration. It can be paper or gold or platinum, it doesn’t matter.) So the same amount of labor buys the same amount of bread, but the numbers have changed. We’re back to a stable situation, because a human economy needs (roughly) a certain relationship between the price of labor and the price of bread in order to function. It will go back to that. But what happened along the way? A lot of things, including a lot of suffering, but the relevant part here is a lot of opportunity.

If a person foresees the coming deflation, he will do what he can to save money, knowing that it will go up in value. He will forgo luxury goods and save, while he works extra hours to amass even more money. Then when the deflation hits he finally pays himself back, with all the money he saved buying twice what it would have back when he earned it. His new riches will only last with his savings; eventually he will have to go back to work and there will be the same relationship between his labor and the things he can buy with it as before the inflation. But while it lasts, he’s living high. And people who realize this will have a motivation to try to influence government policy to create deflationary periods. If his country is on a gold standard, he will have a temptation to help revolutionaries who want to sink ships carrying other people’s gold.

(We don’t see deflation nearly as often because far more people appreciate the potential for personal short-term benefit in inflation, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

You see similar opportunities for short-term gain in social changes as you do in economic ones, though because society is more complex and also more subtle than economics, these are often better disguised. Let’s take a simple case, though. Suppose a man in the 1950s desires to insert his penis to the vaginas of many women who, unlike him, are not interested in being promiscuous. The number of promiscuous women is irrelevant to this man since promiscuous women are, by hypothesis, not the object of his desire. If you need a story to make this more plausible, suppose that he is attracted to the feeling of conquest in bedding a woman who is saving herself for marriage, or if that is too old fashioned for you, who only feels sexual attraction within the context of what she beliefs to be a long-term relationship. In stable times, this will not work. His dreams of many such penis-insertions will result in very few actual insertions, and most of those will end up being with women who deceived him while he was trying to deceive them. He may, however, have the opportunity to realize his dream during times of social change.

If the social norms protecting women who are only interested in coitus within the confines of marriage or at least a long-term relationship are shifting, some of these women will rely on the old social protections while they are no longer being afforded and will, because of that, be easily deceived. To give a concrete example, suppose that women no longer tend to stay near family members but instead are exposed to unrelated young men whose reputation they do not know. Let us suppose, for example, that public schooling as been instituted and that automotive transport has brought a large number of people together, and moreover it has become normal for teenagers to use cars to go to places where none of their family are. While people are still getting used to this new normal, some young women may rely on reputation and their family not allowing males of ill intent near them to filter out the males of ill intent, and so a pretty face coupled with charming words may well convince her that she is consummating a marriage with him that they effected (the sacrament of marriage is confected by the couple, not by any priest or officiant) while he has simply lied to her because he is a bad man.

This state of affairs will not last; young women will, fairly quickly, learn to rely on different things to vet males than applied in their old environment. But during this transition, they will have none of these things, and some will be easy prey.

It is interesting to note, though few will care because people are naturally less sympathetic to males and even less so to bad males, that the changing social norms will also result in young women who are eager to be promiscuous having a better shot at this hypothetical male who only desires to insert his genitalia into women who wouldn’t want him if they knew what he was doing. During these hypothetical changes in social norms, he will be far more easily misled into thinking that all women are shrinking violets who object to using sexual intercourse like heroin because that might as well have been the case under the previous social norm and the exceptions were easy to spot.

When everyone gets used to the new circumstances, things will return to their previous difficulty, albeit with small modifications for differences in exact circumstance. People will develop new ways of getting to know a person’s reputation, people will treat strangers as unfiltered by people they trust, etc. etc. etc. There will be no lasting benefit, but there can be huge short-term benefits.

(Bear in mind that this example was a change in social circumstances that didn’t alter people’s fundamental preferences. It’s not an example of temporary sterilization. That will still cause changes that can be taken advantage of, but it also alters people’s fundamental preferences and the changes that will be adapted to are in things affected by it but not its direct consequences.)

The example I gave above was of a social change induced by a shift in (transportation) technology, which our hypothetical cad had no real control over. Yet even there, you can imagine, if he was sufficiently far-sighted, how he could champion government funding for roads as well as mandatory public schooling.

In practice, of course, the sorts of advocacy that people can have on social changes tend to be far more limited in effect and tend to look far more like simple bad advice. Loosen up, don’t be such a prude, you only want to treat sex like it’s not a safer form of heroin because the mean Christians are trying to control you, etc. etc. etc. These people are not, in the main, Machiavellian masterminds who are trying to create chaos to take advantage of it before they settle down. Mostly they are fools who think that the good times will last forever. In ten or fifteen years they’ll probably be writing op-eds about how great jumping off the cliff was but you don’t want to take things to their logical conclusion, you just want to keep falling forever because it’s a lot more fun. What they’re trying to do is to get the advantages of the change.

A big part of why they don’t realize that this is what they’re doing is because a lot of people never consider that human beings have two phases: childhood and adulthood. Childhood is a time of change, when human beings are easily molded. People can still change in adulthood, but nowhere nearly as easily. Accordingly, if you institute a social change in all of society, it will take far more hold in the young than in older people. The young will take it to its logical conclusions because they’re not held back by being stuck on adaptations to a previous order.

To give an example (painted with an absurdly broad brush), social norms were changed in the 1970s to where family, friends, and aquaintances no longer protected young women from the sexual advances of bad men. So for a decade or so, bad men could sexually harass women to their heart’s content and it was a cad’s paradise. But then young women who were raised without the expectation of social connections helping them adapted to the circumstance and sought the protection of law, and we had the crime of sexual harassment, as well as all sorts of corporate policies against it. And things went back to more-or-less normal.

As a brief aside, it is amusing to see people who grew up at just the right time think that the 1970s were representative of how society worked throughout all of human history up until some people agitated for legal protections. These people have clearly never watched movies from before the 1970s! Back then, important customers could get thrown out of an office for making advances on a secretary in terms sufficiently veiled that they’d never get past the initial stages of filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Heaven help an employee who was sexually aggressive with fellow employees! This weird historical myopia is a subject for another day, but it is funny how people have managed to continuously think of their grandparents as downtrodden slaves and themselves as the first generation to be free for several generations in a row.

Anyway, the amnesiac attitude towards the developmental stages of human beings is often behind quite a bit of agitation for social change; the people doing the agitating only ever think about what things will be like when people set in the old ways partially change over, and are always shocked at what people who grow up with the changes do in order to lead human lives within the new order.

Admittedly, part of that is that people rarely adapt to change well within a single generation. They go to excess on some things and utterly miss out on others. It takes time to refine complex systems. The people having to do the adapting often suffer for it, too. Adults have fewer needs because their lives are already largely set; children have a ton of work to do in setting up their lives and will often do less of it due to the uncertainty of tumultuous times. The adults who advocate for social change thus reap more of the rewards and pay fewer of the costs, then blame the new generation for not doing as well as them. It’s a bit cheeky to burn the furniture then complain that people don’t sit down, but then most people are not philosophers.

One final note I should add is that none of the above means that social change is always and everywhere bad. Much of it is inevitable with a changing environment (such as is caused by developments in technology). Some of it is needed merely in order to fix the mistakes of the past. Indeed, as the paradox of Chesterton’s post states, you need constant change merely to be conservative. As he so rightly said, if you leave a white post alone, it will, in short order, become a dirty grey post. Only by continually repainting it white will you and future generations have a white post.

Change there must be, but it’s often best to limit it to fixing mistakes. And have a thought for the people who have to grow up in the new system because they won’t have the advantages of having grown up in the old one. Only their descendants will have that advantage, and only if the people who have to grow up in the new system don’t change it again.

The Universe Can’t Have Always Existed

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized4 Comments

One of the stranger things that one comes upon from atheists is the idea that the universe always existed. This is obviously impossible because it’s a simple contradiction in terms because simple observation shows that things happen because of causal linkage. Though it is more common for people to describe this model as “a causal chain that never started”, it would be more accurate to describe this model as “an infinite series that terminated.” I’m referring to the mathematical concept of an infinite series, so I think it might make sense to pause for a moment to explain what little you need to know about the mathematics of infinite series because most people don’t study higher mathematics.

Speaking a little loosely, an infinite series consists of two things:

  1. A starting value (optional)
  2. A way to generate the next value from its index in the list, the previous values, or both

One example of an infinite series, N, is: N1=1, Ni+1=Ni+1. That is, the first element in the series is 1 and each successive element is the element before it, plus one.

That’s it. That’s all infinite series are. They can be defined any way you want; you can reference more than one element, such as in the famous Fibonacci sequence where (starting with the third element) each element is the sum of the previous two. You can define them without reference to the previous element, such as a series of numbers where each is the index squared (1, 4, 9, 25, 36…). But in each case, what you have is a rule for how to generate all of the elements. What you don’t have is the elements. Yet.

This gets us to the famous mathematical fact that “infinity is not a number.” Infinity isn’t a thing, it’s rather the concept of, “you never stop.” If you ever stop, it’s not infinity. And as you can see in how we defined the infinite series above, it never stops. That’s what makes it an infinite series.

Now, the moments of time clearly form a series; they are ordered not merely by the passage of time but also by causal connections. If I push a glass off of the table, it falls after I pushed it and not before.

Now, the thing is, the set of all moments leading up to the present moment forms a sequence with a final element. A sequence with a final element, by definition, is a finite sequence. However, by the hypothesis of the world always having existed, this would be a finite sequence with infinitely many elements. That’s a contradiction, and since it is indisputable that the sequence of moments leading up to the present moment has a final element, the number of elements in that set cannot be infinite. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Uncowed by mere logic and obvious truth, the atheists who hold this kind of thing will then say that there’s no reason you have to stop when counting backwards. It could be infinite in that direction! Whether or not that’s true, it’s irrelevant, because time doesn’t go that way. Time moves forwards, not backwards. God, or the laws of physics, or brute facts, or a drunken elf named Fred, or something clearly already picked a direction for time to flow, and we’re all stuck with it. All manner of things might be true if we lived in a completely different universe than the one we live in, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club if tautology club has rules and they’re well ordered. (Mathematically, a well-ordered set is an ordered set which has a first element. Not all ordered sets do. The rational numbers greater than zero under the standard ordering are not well-ordered, for example, because for any hypothetical first element, simply divide it in half an you have a rational number which comes before it.)

Interestingly, it has been a common theme in arguments for God to simply side-step the problem and give arguments which do not rely on the universe having started. The argument from motion (change) and the the argument from contingency and necessity are the two most obvious examples. Plenty of others don’t require it, either. (The Kalam cosmological argument is the obvious exception, of course.) I can see the appeal of simply side-stepping the problem since it’s irrelevant, but I do somewhat wonder at the wisdom of it. It may be falling on the wrong side of answering a fool according to his folly; by allowing people to persist in holding as true something that’s obviously wrong, it has allowed the fools to be wise in their own eyes.

Then again, they’d do that anyway. Most of them are clearly not seriously thinking through their own ideas. But for the few of them who are, I think it’s worth at least pointing out that the universe can’t have existed forever before explaining why it doesn’t matter anyway.