Planet Marx [II]: Dialectic Hard
Thu Aug 02, 2007 at 05:37:24 AM PDT
A friend – let’s call him I - was called up a few years ago for Grand Jury, Drugs. It was a thoroughly depressing experience. Cop followed cop, Assistant DA Assistant DA, and every single defendant was indicted. I thought the cops were lying, and the ADAs were pushing for indictments with very little evidence. The worst came a day before a holiday, when everybody was in a hurry to get home and two black men were indicted on the strength of witnesses who had seen "two black men" in the vicinity of the deal. In Manhattan.
The depressing part is how the jurors fell for it; a majority were black and Hispanic, by the way. It seemed as if none of them – white, black or in-between – had sufficiently developed a process to structure evidence in a cogent way. Time and again, bewildered, they’d reach a dead end: statements could only be true or false, and that had little to do with the circumstance or nature of the evidence itself. At this stage they had no choice but to fall back on the authority of those presenting evidence. Where logic ended (and it ended very soon), Authority took over and told them to indict. It was small consolation (not even much of a surprise) when I found out, a few months later, that most of the cops who testified had subsequently been indicted for perjury and many of the cases thrown out.
There are a couple of names for the thought process that permeates American society in our century; it's usually called Positivism or Empiricism, though when I’m in a bad mood I call it Empirical Materialism: statement x is slapped against statement y and the causal relationship left dangling, without any system to evaluate the potential nature of the logical dynamics created by the interaction of the two, let alone the logical dynamics within the system itself. When a president tells us there’s a black woman in Chicago who drives up in her caddy to cash her welfare check for a bottle of vodka we cheer or we panic as if the truth or falsehood of the statement had to be taken at a single gulp, slapped against a real black woman in a real Chicago. Like the American jurors, the American public has no system that enables it to break this statement down into its component parts and reconstitute it back to its wider meaning – to ask, for instance, "why vodka?" In this regard the discussions you'll find on a blog like DailyKos are no different than the information presented in the New York Times: either consists in throwing out statements (or pictures of cats) without ever stopping to examine the successive statements themselves, let alone stooping to criticize their internal workings. In the absence of an internalized system for distinguishing the true from the false (or rather, to distinguish what is true within what is false), bloggers are thrown back on an "authority system" of points and ratings: he who gets the most points when he lies, wins.
Alfred North Whitehead used to say that every philosophical system fails by what it leaves out, but the empirical system of thought is, at the present time, desperate to maintain and extend its political dominance in spite of its transparent failures. In this struggle Economic Theory plays today the role that Theology played in seventeenth-century Europe: it strives to extend its empire over forms of thought and behavior it is manifestly incapable of embracing: psychology, sociology, statistical analysis, politics, and even journalism, since, as Nickie Kristof explains on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times for July 30, the reason our politicians are crapheads isn't the New York Times, it's that kids aren't taught economics in school, economics being the science that teaches people how to vote in the best interests of the New York Times.
Item: the book Freakonomics has been on the best-seller list for a long while, its authors are supposedly preeminent economists; yet in their introduction they baldly claim: "But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other." This is beyond nonsense, because in statistical thinking correlation is never a "cause" of anything at all: just because Professor Dumdum gets a kick in the pants every time he walks past me doesn’t mean the kick is "caused" by his walking past, but if you want to emit the hypothesis that Professor Dumdum gets a kick in the pants because he’s a flaming asshole, then I’ll be glad to show how this correlates with the mark of my Doc Martens on his butt; this being "Science," we might have to send Professor Dumdum past me a couple hundred times to establish a high degree of probability – but that’s okay.
What Freakonomics calls a "cause" is, properly speaking, the hypothesis of the book itself, implied in its subtitle, A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. Hypothesis: "Everything can be explained by Economics, a science founded on the hypothesis that everything is explained by the profit motive." This is science? In the seventeenth century the Jesuits got a bad rap for flimflamming their flocks with a similarly manipulative logic known as casuistry. Casuistry, like Economics, was prescription pretending to be description, hypothesis masking as correlation. If you want to understand American mass media read Pascal’s dissection of Jesuitspeak in Les Lettres Provinciales. Yes: that Pascal.
Next diary: Dialectic Harder
reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language
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