I've said much of this already, in slightly different ways, but I feel that I'm coming closer and closer to a proper synthesis of my whole notion for why God is a nonsense category.
Theism is predicated upon the concept of an immaterial mind that initiated the existence of matter through an act of volition, and that certain movements of matter, namely those actuated through the human limbic system and its associated manipulations of tools and crafting of artifacts, are also ultimately the results of immaterial minds ('souls', which haunt human bodies and somehow control and guide them). Mind, in order to have the truly sovereign existence that is supposed by theism, cannot itself be a manifestation of material processes -- otherwise it ceases to be self-actuating and becomes fused with, and constrained by, physics, which is the domain of the material. If matter is needed for mind to function, then this is to concede the materialist conception of mind, at least in its broad outline, and mind as independent Thing then loses its efficacy. When even a smidgen of matter is absorbed into mind's being, its status as the theist's Sovereign Agent, the 'source' of material existence as well as its ongoing driver (at least within the realm of human beings and their effects), is severely undermined. Indeed, the resident matter would itself need to be 'explained' through recourse to a purpose in the theistic narrative -- and purpose is of course something that in the theist's conception of the world emanates from mind; to allow matter into the equation would require an account for the processes and interactions that mind was partaking in to help mind achieve what it couldn't otherwise achieve by its unhindered self. This would hardly be the stuff of 'Pure Will', as God is often described. Brute purpose, in this scheme, is therefore the precedent and prerequisite component, and matter is the result. In this scheme, then, mind must divorce itself of all matter; mind is the original Origin, the source and the creative spark that breathed the universe into existence.
The scientific narrative is precisely reversed: here matter is the precedent and prerequisite and mind is the consequence. Mind is gradually built up over countless eons by increasingly sophisticated increments of biology; indeed, it is ultimately nothing more than a functional aspect of biology. This makes mind as the preceding ultimate cause for the universe both untenable and superfluous. Once primordial mind is shown to be superfluous, so too must primordial purpose (in the theistic sense, not in the Darwinian biological sense). Purpose, as we now understand, is itself an artifact of the universe, built up, refined, and ultimately represented in systems that are able to generate self-reflection (that is, in biological computers we call 'brains').
The primacy and sovereignty of mind is required by the narrative of theism if it is to count as a theism distinguishable from the mushy allusions often bandied about by half-believers who want to claim that God is 'oneness' or 'the universe'. But such pleadings carry nothing of import that would delineate such conceptions from a relabelling of the universe as ‘God’. This is emphatically not the type of entity that could act as a rational agent with a purpose-driven orientation capable of satisfying the emotional earnings that quite obviously lay just behind all this.
It is clear that raw matter cannot be 'inherently' intelligent; indeed, to designate it as such is to latch attributes of mind onto something that emphatically must lack those attributes by virtue of what we know about minds (and if the designation of mind is to mean anything at all in other contexts). Matter, in the materialist conception, can be smart, goal-oriented, even conscious, but only because it has achieved some form of organisation that endows it with the functionalities not seen at its basest levels. Again: to say that matter could ever be 'intrinsically' intelligent is to bestow it with attributes of a higher organisation of itself. The behaviour of matter at its rawest constituent level can only ever be 'dumb', and, in the theistic universe, in need of direction by a dynamic and freewheeling interloper if purpose is to enter the proceedings.
Some people, when they try to imagine what God is, suppose that that he might conceivably be composed of some 'God-stuff' - not the same as Pure Will, perhaps, but a sort of swirly, dynamic, morphing, wishy-washy something-or-other, ‘like air’ but endowed with extraordinary attributes (though lacking in definitive structure) that obey no constraints, operating by a physics beyond physics, as it were. But what, exactly, is this God-stuff imagined to be doing? Is it part of a sensory apparatus? Is it part of God's body (if he's imagined to have or need one)? But from whence does this God-stuff itself come? Would it not itself need to be part of the purpose-centric hierarchy of the theistic framework, and hence a consequence of Pure Will? And if Pure Will is so powerful that it could conjure the universe into existence, why does the primordial mind go through the trouble of kneeling and moulding some God-stuff in the first place? As alluded to earlier, what is the God-stuff doing that mind is not already capable of doing by itself (and which would then, notice, undermine the primacy of mind, now replaced with an acknowledgement of the centrality of systems? Indeed, it is mind that determines that there is a need for kneeling and moulding, but for what return?). Here you might notice also that we're zeroing in on a basic feature of mind: it cannot possibly be a unitary 'thing' but is something that must necessarily exist as an aspect of a changing, heterogeneous system. 'God-stuff', 'spiritual matter' or other such categories are mere face-saving placeholders for postponing an acknowledgement of the sorts of problems that a mind-first narrative instantiates. Since purpose is the driver in the mechanics of the theistic narrative, its pure, free-floating self must reign supreme, bestowed with its own motility and its own separate and inviolable existence. Matter is a dead-weight, an extra baggage that is at best superfluous to mind’s existence, but nevertheless necessary as a means to actuate its plans (i.e. the physical universe within which the arena of human life and all its trials and challenges take place).
Or perhaps God-stuff and Pure Will are fused in an evolutionary marriage, in which one reinforces and improves the other. Of course this undermines the theistic assumption of God as an unchanging, 'perfect', and all-powerful being (especially since it implies that God might at some point have been a bumbling idiot with nary the intellect of a mosquito), but more importantly it also suggests that the scenario of a universe arising from extremely simple beginnings, all by itself, is not nearly so formidably prohibitive as the theist would suppose. After all, if we're asked to imagine that an intelligent supreme being could evolve in this way, why not go the easier route and suppose that the universe evolved? Why go through the trouble of believing that a being evolved first and that the universe came afterwards when this scheme basically concedes that mind isn't the supreme driver anyway? Well, you can see how these types of formulations are rather vapid, designed to placate believers in things that they have no justification believing in the first place. But that's precisely the point, for these are the most reasonable formulations of what a supreme being could be, and even here they fail.
The materialist and idealist formulations both acknowledge that matter, once properly arranged, can exhibit behaviours reminiscent of intelligence. For example, a machine can be programmed to respond to a wide range of stimuli with a great deal of sophistication, showing dynamism and adaptability. But, crucially, it is only when we get to these sorts of higher levels of organisation that matter can become dynamic in its behaviour, to more and more closely approximate intelligence. Where the idealist and materialist formulations part company, however, is in saying where 'true' intelligence and dynamism come into play. The materialist, unlike the idealist, would say that true intelligence can be achieved by appropriately organised matter, albeit of staggering complexity. The idealist would say that true intelligence is only the preserve of some 'immaterial' domain, which reaches into and effects the material world. But we have seen that this can not possibly work.
When a theist talks about free will, they are again taking a philosophical idealist stand on things, positing that there is something that exists independently of matter and that is not constrained by it. If they were to posit a system composed of various parts interacting with each other as well as the inputs and effects of some environment, and which together result in an actuator for moral decisions and all that that entails, then they are no longer talking about free will and moral decision-making in the manner that they currently conceive of it; they are in fact reversing the proceedings in an important philosophical sense, for they want (and, to sustain their viewpoint, need) a notion of human action, minds and God that does away with any talk of component parts and leaves the 'purposeful' as an independently existing thing in itself, as a self-actuating, irreducible driver. That's the essential difference between an idealist viewpoint and an authentically materialist one. When they talk about God, theists are talking about a being that is not reducible in any way whatsoever; they mean to say a being that embodies, or IS, the 'Reason' for the universe's existence; 'Reason' or 'Purpose' or 'Goal' is taken to be a basis for, not a result of, the physical world. The manner in which the universe was supposed to have been brought about by God is through 'Pure will' (the Bible talks about 'the Word'); they mean to say a being which IS, in the ultimate sense, 'Purpose', and that this purpose is itself the locomotive force that drove the universe into existence. For this being, in its basic constitution, to be part of a physical framework is inadequate, because that framework violates the precedence of the pure agency that God is supposed to be. What theists hanker for (and think they get with their religion) is an entity that embodies unadulterated, stand-alone, free-wheeling intellect/morality/will, existing in its own realm. In other words, Mind, Idea, Will and Purpose are here independent, fundamental, eternal categories. Theism is thus a thoroughly, died-in-the-wool, irredeemably idealist viewpoint, and necessarily fatally flawed because of it.
Pure Will, and therefore God, are mere linguistic tricks. This understanding comes from a simple consideration of what a thought is: a representation of a thing. The thought isn't the thing being represented. If physical reality is imagined to have come about through volition, that volition must itself have been composed of thoughts ('I am going to do this' and 'I am going to actualise this thing I'm imagining') - that is, of representations. But no matter how 'pure' it is, volition cannot not act as a standalone feature of existence. Unless it is a functional aspect of a physical system, it can have no interaction with the physical world. We humans cannot will something into existence; for example, a car will never materialise at the other end of a wish, no matter how powerfully we may hope for it, unless we also exert some mechanical effect on the world that involves the rearrangement of various configurations of matter. And the representation of the car can only exist because we have the requisite sensory apparatus to receive the photons that bounce off the car, or of a description of it printed on paper or displayed on computer screen. God has no such sensory apparatus, for he is imagined to be a disembodied, immaterial mind. If humans cannot will something like a car to exist, how then does a 'being' that lacks even the attribute of physicality fare any better? How does the the attribute of 'purity' - in this case meaning the absence of a material constitution - make 'will' more powerful? What exactly is Godly 'power' but a misappropriation of the nature of mind?
It's supremely ironic that theism posits something that has an inverse relationship to the attributes required for it to exist. For a being to be able to will at all, it needs to be superbly complex - that is, to exhibit more physical interactions than an entity of lesser ability to will. The less complex, the less can it represent anything and exhibit intentionality. But theists simply want to yank out the effect (will, intentionality, and consciousness) and place it at the beginning. This is an absolutely clear category violation. The notion that it is possible to cross the gap from the realm of abstract representation to the realm of actual stuff makes intuitive sense upon a naive consideration, but closer scrutiny will reveal that such notions are folk-psychology, not thought-out premises.
When one gets the hang of thinking of the world in terms of concepts, rather than immaterial ideas, of processes rather than Platonic essences, of cumulative change rather than intelligent design -- that is, when one adopts the Darwinian, computational and materialist insights and takes on board their philosophical import -- the religious view is exposed as linguistic nonsense and duly evaporates. Theism explains nothing, because its basic precepts are blatant misappropriations.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Quotes
Quotes from nobeliefs.com
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
--James Randi
The day that you stop looking -- because you're content God did it -- I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
--Neil Degrasse Tyson
We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
--Sam Harris
The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd except to be made by a species that's about a half chromosome away from being a chimpanzee.
--Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens debates Barry Brummett)
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
--Thomas Szasz (professor of psychiatry)
Atheism is the arrogant belief that the entire universe was not created for our benefit.
--Michael Nugent (responding to the question of why atheists are so arrogant.)
The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.
--William Harwood: Dictionary of Contemporary Mythology, London, 1st Books, 2002
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They re far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
--Isaac Asimov
If all atheists left the USA, it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population.
--via TweetDeck
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.
--Neil DeGrasse Tyson
For God’s sake, even the scientists are trying to find ways and means to improve the human conditions on this earth. Such as curing diseases, even conquering death. Now we are told that scientists are playing God. Well, if God would only stop wasting his powers fooling around and begin to play the role of God himself, we would have no need of scientists trying hard to make this world a better place than what the religious morons have made of it during these past centuries!
--Poch Suzara
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today.
--Lawrence Krauss (A Universe From Nothing)
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
As I once put it to theologians at a meeting at the Vatican: theologians have to listen to scientists, because if they want to try to create a consistent theology (and while I have opinions about whether this is possible, but my opinions about this are neither particularly important nor informed) they at least need to know how the world works. But scientists don't have to listen to theologians, because it has no effect whatsoever on the scientific process.
--Lawrence Krauss (Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith?)
An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers.
--Amanda Bloom
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
--Saul Bellow
If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being.
--Gene Roddenberry
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
--James Randi
The day that you stop looking -- because you're content God did it -- I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
--Neil Degrasse Tyson
We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
--Sam Harris
The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd except to be made by a species that's about a half chromosome away from being a chimpanzee.
--Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens debates Barry Brummett)
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
--Thomas Szasz (professor of psychiatry)
Atheism is the arrogant belief that the entire universe was not created for our benefit.
--Michael Nugent (responding to the question of why atheists are so arrogant.)
The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.
--William Harwood: Dictionary of Contemporary Mythology, London, 1st Books, 2002
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They re far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
--Isaac Asimov
If all atheists left the USA, it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population.
--via TweetDeck
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.
--Neil DeGrasse Tyson
For God’s sake, even the scientists are trying to find ways and means to improve the human conditions on this earth. Such as curing diseases, even conquering death. Now we are told that scientists are playing God. Well, if God would only stop wasting his powers fooling around and begin to play the role of God himself, we would have no need of scientists trying hard to make this world a better place than what the religious morons have made of it during these past centuries!
--Poch Suzara
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today.
--Lawrence Krauss (A Universe From Nothing)
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
As I once put it to theologians at a meeting at the Vatican: theologians have to listen to scientists, because if they want to try to create a consistent theology (and while I have opinions about whether this is possible, but my opinions about this are neither particularly important nor informed) they at least need to know how the world works. But scientists don't have to listen to theologians, because it has no effect whatsoever on the scientific process.
--Lawrence Krauss (Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith?)
An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers.
--Amanda Bloom
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
--Saul Bellow
If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being.
--Gene Roddenberry
Monday, September 05, 2011
God as a material construct
God exists.
Okay, not that God; not an actual invisible being/cosmic overlord/forgiver of sin that many people believe exists. But in a very real sense, there is a God. That God is the totality of the collective neural states of millions of believers, the literature and poetry paying homage to him, the infrastructure of the many denominational churches, the customs and taboos that play out every day all over the world, and the financial resources and political power of the clergy. Clearly, God is a material force in the world, even if the entity depicted in the concept of God isn’t any more real than Harry Potter or Zeus.
But this leads onto the question: why is there such a thing as the God concept, and how is it that it holds so much sway? How is belief in a blatantly transparent and corrupt falsehood maintained? There are several hypotheses to explain this, none of them mutually exclusive. All of them probably capture an important element of the truth about why God – the aforementioned collective of brain-states, infrastructure, customs, and regimentations - is a power to be reckoned with. They all take place within a historical material context, feeding off of it, reinforcing it, and being shaped by it (and shaping the broader social conditions in turn). God cannot be separated from the social organism he clings to, and to understand one is to understand something about the other.
God as the personification of human anxiety
Humans fear death. Not just in the sense that an animal might, but in an ''existential'' sense: we can conceive of the fact that we will no longer be. We try to picture this abyss of nothingness where the human mind and all consciousness is annihilated. This self-negation is taken as the termination of our narrative in this world; our pursuits, our problems and our happiness are snuffed out by death. The point of existence ceases to be; we no longer matter, because there is nothing left to do the mattering. When the human mind dwells on this nothingness, it panics and recoils at the implication that our existence is not the raison d’etre of its context. Thus the mind recreates the universe in its own image, conferring to God the attributes that give human life its sustenance and purpose-driven story. The universe (but more obviously the world inhabited by people) is moulded into a gigantic theatre playing to the tune of a supreme Purpose, to be deciphered upon death, which is now converted from oblivion to salvation.
The evolution of human intelligence almost certainly had a lot to do with the demands of group living. But among the motivating drivers for God, existential anxiety must definitely rank high among them. As Erich Fromm said: ''Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.'' Humanity thus had a powerful motivation to craft fictions about its place in the cosmos. The metaphysical scheme derived to resolve this anxiety was religion. But while man created God in his own image, he has now become alienated even from that creation. Again with Fromm, humanity bestows upon God all of its finest attributes, and then begs God to give them back to it. God is humankind’s premier schizophrenic child. Contact with the child itself turns one into a schizophrenic, and a child.
Not only is humanity alienated from God, but God is also an alienating mechanism: he helps to maintain the political and economic hegemony of the ruling class, legitimates the down-grading of women, stifles inquiry, and sets in motion habits of subordination that alienate the masses of one nation state from those in another. God both helps and is helped along by the class structure of society, which leads onto the next point:
God as a misdiagnosis of man’s material condition
Humans live in class societies. Classes are defined by their relation to the means of production; that is, the technologies and procedures by which human life can be reproduced. Classes are antagonistic because their interests do not fully converge but are often irreconcilable, with one class trying to co-opt the labour of the other, and the latter trying to extract ever more concessions and freedoms from the former. Religion represents false consciousness: it posits that the human condition is determined by ''cosmic'' forces that contain within themselves the very embodiments of ''good'' and ''evil'' (concepts that are themselves only meaningful in relation to the material conditions of human beings in any given epoch, yet which are taken as ''eternal'' truths by believers in that epoch. These concepts actually evolve as the material basis for production and class antagonism changes). While humanity is set as a crucial part of this cosmic narrative, these forces are taken as being ''beyond'' humanity; that is, humanity is not taken to be their author. It is no accident that religions have almost always been on the side of the oppressing classes. They are used to legitimate the hegemony of the ruling class by invoking some version of the ''divine right of kings''. In feudal society, the gentry and the royal family (which was basically the most powerful and well-connected gentry that was able to consolidate its control over the other gentry to establish the first nation-states) sold, through the clergy, the idea that their lot in life and that of the peasantry represented the natural order of things. Hence it was blasphemy to suggest that these conditions should be changed, because to do so was to question the very word of God.
One still sees religion being invoked by the leaders of nation-states, especially when their policies are so obviously contra to the interests of the majority of people that these leaders must appeal to their crudest prejudices, namely blind faith. This faith, aside from helping to maintain the power and privilege of the rulers through its message of ''God and country'', also has less direct and more subtle consequences: it helps to maintain habits of subordination that states and other power structures find eminently useful. When people are prevented from thinking in a clear, scientific way that would allow them to make concrete connections between various phenomena and processes (and therefore leaving them unable to grasp and formalise the political-economic content of the forces that shape their lives), they are also much more likely to go along with platitudes, slogans and propaganda spouted by the various cultural managers in the state, the corporation and the media. They are more likely to identify with a group that sees itself as inherently superior to other groups, and to support its policies no matter how destructive they are. One variation of this is called nationalism. It is the belief that to be American or French or Egyptian is somehow ''an honour''. Nationalism is really just another term for nation-state cohesion and backing for the prerogative of a local ruling class, masking itself in a mythical canon. Nationalism undermines not only broader humanity, but also perpetuates the ridiculous notion of a homogenous society in which ''the people'' of said nation have the same basic interests. In this scheme, class distinctions do not feature; there is no structural imperative for one group to control and subdue another. There is no inherent conflict between antagonistic classes, because the nation has become the focal reference point, whether you are a street sweeper or the chairman of Goldman-Sachs. Nationalism is a quasi-religious doctrine that shares features with theism proper: it is largely faith based, it is divisive, it stultifies and regiments, and it can turn people into blood-thirsty animals.
God as salvation in a horrible world
The world is, largely, a horrible place. Alongside the beauty and joy, there is an ocean of squalor, drudgery, boredom, alienation, fear, guilt, betrayal, desperation and slavish obedience to stupidity. This is not a law of nature; it is simply part of the historical context in which we live. There is a constant undercurrent of injustice that most human beings conceive of but feel powerless to stop. This injustice can overwhelm someone if it's focused upon for too long and may even threaten to throw them into the jaws of insanity. With injustice, there is a desire to end it. The human being who conceives of injustice is the one who, at some level, realizes that there is a fundamental mismatch between human potential and human practice. The world is filled with ideologies and doctrines that distort, pollute, misguide and undermine the creative and nurturing impulses of humanity. However, in conjunction with the alienation inherent in class society, people are not able to scientifically and rationally identify those forces that are really behind it and the injustice that arises organically from it, because their own thinking has been to a very substantial degree shaped by those same relations of society. Thus the locus of injustice will be misplaced, imagined to reside in some ''outside'' domain. The emotional need to see justice served remains while the inability to target its ever shifting form produces an internal crisis that culminates in conceiving of a divine justice dispenser (God). The alternative - that cruelty, despotism and injustice may win, or that its practitioners may never be brought to heel - is too horrible and frustrating to contemplate. It is, in a sense, to admit one's one futility.
God as an explanation
For tens of thousands of years, humanity did not engage in a systematic inquiry into its own origins. It instead invented tales, sometimes featuring itself at the centre of concerns and sometimes not, to explain this existence. Humans think in terms of mind/body dualism: for good evolutionary reasons, we find it convenient to think of minds as qualitatively separate from bodies. Humans are also avid pattern seekers, again for good evolutionary reasons. These two characteristics – the folk psychology that we deploy with relation to one another, and the discernment of patterns – perhaps predisposes us to inventing fictions in which the world was designed by a Mind who organized the forests and animals and oceans. Many people continue to believe that God provides an explanation for nature and its workings. This is most graphically illustrated in literalist dogmatism. God might be extinguished in some ways in modern societies, but the slack is often taken up by New Age spiritualism and the like, which regurgitates much the same comforting delusions: that the universe is fundamentally embodied with purpose and that we can ''connect'' with the universe. These new religions, which often lack an explicit God, are also outgrowths of alienation in class society. They are expressions of a need for purpose, while dispensing with the more obtuse logic of a divine patriarch. It might even be supposed that this New Age mysticism is tailored more to women, who have largely been liberated from the feudal obligations of traditional marriage, but who still must contend with and navigate the alienation of capitalist society.
To sum up: the existence of the God concept, its continued appeal, and its usefulness to those in power involves several conditions which embody internal oppositions, and which interact among each other. So how will religion be ended? We often hear, even among hardcore atheists, that ''there will always be religion''. And this may be so. But the assumption inherent in this prediction is that religion is an expression of some aspect of human nature that will remain fixed. I see it differently: the proclivity to religion manifests itself as actual religious belief when the socio-economic context is conducive to it. The standard formulation ignores the historical materialist basis of religion. Religion may persist for a long time, but it will only be vanquished when the material forces of production are aligned with the full creative output of humanity, that is, when work has been emancipated and is no longer alienated work. This will require that people consciously understand both the technical and the social components of their work: how their work relates to the society, how it benefits it and how it enriches it. And, incidentally, when classes have been abolished.
Why can religion not be abolished in class society? In a word: contradiction. For people to have a rational, authentically scientific appraisal of the political-economic forces shaping their lives, they would seek ''answers'' in religion only by willfully ignoring the analysis they had achieved in the first place; to have come to such a level of consciousness, one would already have graduated beyond the false consciousness of religion, which appeals to tales conceived in ignorance. To make connections between material forces is to deny the waffle and obscurantism offered by religion. Bourgeois society is itself a bubble that prevents many from seeing this, because it constantly feeds and reinforces fictions that even its most clever and conscientious adherents are oblivious to. These fictions must produce reactions, as people try to fit irreconcilable conditions of life with one another. This we call, among other things, religion.
Okay, not that God; not an actual invisible being/cosmic overlord/forgiver of sin that many people believe exists. But in a very real sense, there is a God. That God is the totality of the collective neural states of millions of believers, the literature and poetry paying homage to him, the infrastructure of the many denominational churches, the customs and taboos that play out every day all over the world, and the financial resources and political power of the clergy. Clearly, God is a material force in the world, even if the entity depicted in the concept of God isn’t any more real than Harry Potter or Zeus.
But this leads onto the question: why is there such a thing as the God concept, and how is it that it holds so much sway? How is belief in a blatantly transparent and corrupt falsehood maintained? There are several hypotheses to explain this, none of them mutually exclusive. All of them probably capture an important element of the truth about why God – the aforementioned collective of brain-states, infrastructure, customs, and regimentations - is a power to be reckoned with. They all take place within a historical material context, feeding off of it, reinforcing it, and being shaped by it (and shaping the broader social conditions in turn). God cannot be separated from the social organism he clings to, and to understand one is to understand something about the other.
God as the personification of human anxiety
Humans fear death. Not just in the sense that an animal might, but in an ''existential'' sense: we can conceive of the fact that we will no longer be. We try to picture this abyss of nothingness where the human mind and all consciousness is annihilated. This self-negation is taken as the termination of our narrative in this world; our pursuits, our problems and our happiness are snuffed out by death. The point of existence ceases to be; we no longer matter, because there is nothing left to do the mattering. When the human mind dwells on this nothingness, it panics and recoils at the implication that our existence is not the raison d’etre of its context. Thus the mind recreates the universe in its own image, conferring to God the attributes that give human life its sustenance and purpose-driven story. The universe (but more obviously the world inhabited by people) is moulded into a gigantic theatre playing to the tune of a supreme Purpose, to be deciphered upon death, which is now converted from oblivion to salvation.
The evolution of human intelligence almost certainly had a lot to do with the demands of group living. But among the motivating drivers for God, existential anxiety must definitely rank high among them. As Erich Fromm said: ''Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.'' Humanity thus had a powerful motivation to craft fictions about its place in the cosmos. The metaphysical scheme derived to resolve this anxiety was religion. But while man created God in his own image, he has now become alienated even from that creation. Again with Fromm, humanity bestows upon God all of its finest attributes, and then begs God to give them back to it. God is humankind’s premier schizophrenic child. Contact with the child itself turns one into a schizophrenic, and a child.
Not only is humanity alienated from God, but God is also an alienating mechanism: he helps to maintain the political and economic hegemony of the ruling class, legitimates the down-grading of women, stifles inquiry, and sets in motion habits of subordination that alienate the masses of one nation state from those in another. God both helps and is helped along by the class structure of society, which leads onto the next point:
God as a misdiagnosis of man’s material condition
Humans live in class societies. Classes are defined by their relation to the means of production; that is, the technologies and procedures by which human life can be reproduced. Classes are antagonistic because their interests do not fully converge but are often irreconcilable, with one class trying to co-opt the labour of the other, and the latter trying to extract ever more concessions and freedoms from the former. Religion represents false consciousness: it posits that the human condition is determined by ''cosmic'' forces that contain within themselves the very embodiments of ''good'' and ''evil'' (concepts that are themselves only meaningful in relation to the material conditions of human beings in any given epoch, yet which are taken as ''eternal'' truths by believers in that epoch. These concepts actually evolve as the material basis for production and class antagonism changes). While humanity is set as a crucial part of this cosmic narrative, these forces are taken as being ''beyond'' humanity; that is, humanity is not taken to be their author. It is no accident that religions have almost always been on the side of the oppressing classes. They are used to legitimate the hegemony of the ruling class by invoking some version of the ''divine right of kings''. In feudal society, the gentry and the royal family (which was basically the most powerful and well-connected gentry that was able to consolidate its control over the other gentry to establish the first nation-states) sold, through the clergy, the idea that their lot in life and that of the peasantry represented the natural order of things. Hence it was blasphemy to suggest that these conditions should be changed, because to do so was to question the very word of God.
One still sees religion being invoked by the leaders of nation-states, especially when their policies are so obviously contra to the interests of the majority of people that these leaders must appeal to their crudest prejudices, namely blind faith. This faith, aside from helping to maintain the power and privilege of the rulers through its message of ''God and country'', also has less direct and more subtle consequences: it helps to maintain habits of subordination that states and other power structures find eminently useful. When people are prevented from thinking in a clear, scientific way that would allow them to make concrete connections between various phenomena and processes (and therefore leaving them unable to grasp and formalise the political-economic content of the forces that shape their lives), they are also much more likely to go along with platitudes, slogans and propaganda spouted by the various cultural managers in the state, the corporation and the media. They are more likely to identify with a group that sees itself as inherently superior to other groups, and to support its policies no matter how destructive they are. One variation of this is called nationalism. It is the belief that to be American or French or Egyptian is somehow ''an honour''. Nationalism is really just another term for nation-state cohesion and backing for the prerogative of a local ruling class, masking itself in a mythical canon. Nationalism undermines not only broader humanity, but also perpetuates the ridiculous notion of a homogenous society in which ''the people'' of said nation have the same basic interests. In this scheme, class distinctions do not feature; there is no structural imperative for one group to control and subdue another. There is no inherent conflict between antagonistic classes, because the nation has become the focal reference point, whether you are a street sweeper or the chairman of Goldman-Sachs. Nationalism is a quasi-religious doctrine that shares features with theism proper: it is largely faith based, it is divisive, it stultifies and regiments, and it can turn people into blood-thirsty animals.
God as salvation in a horrible world
The world is, largely, a horrible place. Alongside the beauty and joy, there is an ocean of squalor, drudgery, boredom, alienation, fear, guilt, betrayal, desperation and slavish obedience to stupidity. This is not a law of nature; it is simply part of the historical context in which we live. There is a constant undercurrent of injustice that most human beings conceive of but feel powerless to stop. This injustice can overwhelm someone if it's focused upon for too long and may even threaten to throw them into the jaws of insanity. With injustice, there is a desire to end it. The human being who conceives of injustice is the one who, at some level, realizes that there is a fundamental mismatch between human potential and human practice. The world is filled with ideologies and doctrines that distort, pollute, misguide and undermine the creative and nurturing impulses of humanity. However, in conjunction with the alienation inherent in class society, people are not able to scientifically and rationally identify those forces that are really behind it and the injustice that arises organically from it, because their own thinking has been to a very substantial degree shaped by those same relations of society. Thus the locus of injustice will be misplaced, imagined to reside in some ''outside'' domain. The emotional need to see justice served remains while the inability to target its ever shifting form produces an internal crisis that culminates in conceiving of a divine justice dispenser (God). The alternative - that cruelty, despotism and injustice may win, or that its practitioners may never be brought to heel - is too horrible and frustrating to contemplate. It is, in a sense, to admit one's one futility.
God as an explanation
For tens of thousands of years, humanity did not engage in a systematic inquiry into its own origins. It instead invented tales, sometimes featuring itself at the centre of concerns and sometimes not, to explain this existence. Humans think in terms of mind/body dualism: for good evolutionary reasons, we find it convenient to think of minds as qualitatively separate from bodies. Humans are also avid pattern seekers, again for good evolutionary reasons. These two characteristics – the folk psychology that we deploy with relation to one another, and the discernment of patterns – perhaps predisposes us to inventing fictions in which the world was designed by a Mind who organized the forests and animals and oceans. Many people continue to believe that God provides an explanation for nature and its workings. This is most graphically illustrated in literalist dogmatism. God might be extinguished in some ways in modern societies, but the slack is often taken up by New Age spiritualism and the like, which regurgitates much the same comforting delusions: that the universe is fundamentally embodied with purpose and that we can ''connect'' with the universe. These new religions, which often lack an explicit God, are also outgrowths of alienation in class society. They are expressions of a need for purpose, while dispensing with the more obtuse logic of a divine patriarch. It might even be supposed that this New Age mysticism is tailored more to women, who have largely been liberated from the feudal obligations of traditional marriage, but who still must contend with and navigate the alienation of capitalist society.
To sum up: the existence of the God concept, its continued appeal, and its usefulness to those in power involves several conditions which embody internal oppositions, and which interact among each other. So how will religion be ended? We often hear, even among hardcore atheists, that ''there will always be religion''. And this may be so. But the assumption inherent in this prediction is that religion is an expression of some aspect of human nature that will remain fixed. I see it differently: the proclivity to religion manifests itself as actual religious belief when the socio-economic context is conducive to it. The standard formulation ignores the historical materialist basis of religion. Religion may persist for a long time, but it will only be vanquished when the material forces of production are aligned with the full creative output of humanity, that is, when work has been emancipated and is no longer alienated work. This will require that people consciously understand both the technical and the social components of their work: how their work relates to the society, how it benefits it and how it enriches it. And, incidentally, when classes have been abolished.
Why can religion not be abolished in class society? In a word: contradiction. For people to have a rational, authentically scientific appraisal of the political-economic forces shaping their lives, they would seek ''answers'' in religion only by willfully ignoring the analysis they had achieved in the first place; to have come to such a level of consciousness, one would already have graduated beyond the false consciousness of religion, which appeals to tales conceived in ignorance. To make connections between material forces is to deny the waffle and obscurantism offered by religion. Bourgeois society is itself a bubble that prevents many from seeing this, because it constantly feeds and reinforces fictions that even its most clever and conscientious adherents are oblivious to. These fictions must produce reactions, as people try to fit irreconcilable conditions of life with one another. This we call, among other things, religion.
Friday, July 15, 2011
The primacy of the physical
As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.
--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)
You don't need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.
--Robert Anton Wilson
In philosophy, the central conflict is between the concept of the primacy of matter and the concept of the primacy of mind, or at least ideas (''idealism''). Philosophical materialism says that all that exists is matter and the interactions of matter. In this worldview, even minds, ideas, emotions, and meaning are manifestations of interactions of appropriately organised matter. Philosophical idealism, on the other hand, posits that there are ''non-physical'' entities that precede and are more ''fundamental'' than matter; minds and ideas can have their own independent existence. One often hears about mathematicians who regard numbers as ''real things'', or of New Age authors who dress their claims in the language of quantum mechanics to claim that ''we change the world just by thinking about it'', or that ''the moon doesn't exist until we think about it''.
I've written a bit about minds, levels of abstraction, and evolving physical systems. Now let me try to synthesise all this and say why the physical must necessarily precede ideas.
Like I've said before, minds are themselves high-level, abstract ways of viewing physical systems (with the system in this case being the brain and its associated sensory apparatus). There is no such thing as a disembodied mind (and hence no such thing as a personal, ''immaterial'' God. Nor can there be).
Still, some people would persist and claim that there is a case to be made for regarding a non-physical ''system'' or some other entity (or ''pure being'') as a means by which ideas can exist in some realm devoid of any physical processes. This is taken to be a more reasonable, watered down position than positing that an ''immaterial mind'' can exist. In reality, it is just about as untenable as the notion of a disembodied mind, and in a sense is even more so.
Firstly, we are left wondering how such ''non-physical'' ''things'' could ever interact with the world of matter and energy. Even if they could exist, the existence of these ''things'' would be completely superfluous. Secondly, to speak of ''non-physical systems'' is to invoke something while denying a necessary condition for its very existence. There is, in the idealist formulation, nothing to do the idea-ing. Once you conjure that ideas can exist outside of physical systems in some ''realm'', by themselves, then you are denying the very thing that gives them any coherence (indeed, existence) in the first place. How does something even qualify as an idea if it's not the product of a mind? And how is the physical thing that the idea represents actuated if not through volition? Once you go down this more ''reasonable'' route of trying to show that the physical can be preceded by ideas, you might as well go the whole hog and advocate for mind as well, because what about mind could you then not suppose is allowed to exist in this non-physical space if ideas can? Certainly ideas require systematic organisation in the form of an interrelation among their constituent components (sub-ideas, and so on and on) and between each other (ideas are meaningless unless they exist against the backdrop of other ideas). Ideas require structure to qualify as ideas. It's utterly nonsensical to talk about non-physical structure, if by that one means structure in the complete and utter absence of matter and energy. Concepts exist as abstractions, as I have alluded to, but to speak of a concept that does not ultimately reside on some substrate is the sheerest of lunacy. Substrate-neutral concepts, on the other hand, make sense, because these only require the presence of appropriately organised matter and the attendant processes that make it meaningful (indeed, which give rise to meaning in the first place).
But one might still ask, isn't it true that artefacts can still embody ideas, hence giving efficacy to the notion of ideas as something like Platonic essences that exist outside of matter? No, absolutely not. The first part is correct: artefacts can indeed embody ideas. This is so whether the people who built the artefacts are alive or not, or whether the artefacts exist in a world completely devoid of people (say, after a nuclear holocaust). They embody the ideas of people who necessarily once existed. There is nothing at all mysterious or mystical about that (and hence no need to invent mysticisms that try to ''show'' that there is something qualitatively different at play here in the form of ''separately existing ideas''). But that they embody ideas is only because they are lumps of matter that exhibit patterns representing abstractions (''ideas'') that someone took to be meaningful and worth preserving (and meaning is itself, ultimately, an abstraction, for the same reason that ideas are: there must be some entity for which interacting with the world at the level of these ontological categories has efficacy, and for these entities to effect upon the world some means of reproducing the conditions that gave those categories significance. In other words, highly complex physical systems that go by the name of human beings. On a related side note, if an artefact embodies a wrong idea, does that mean that the idealist universe is therefore filled with endless permutations of wrong ideas? But then one needs to invoke a generating mechanism that produces the ideas and a sorting and selecting mechanism that chooses those ideas that are to be approximated in the physical universe. Is there really any need to pay these notions the slightest bit of heed?). Artefacts only exist because they are the end product of a long and arduous process of cumulative evolution.
So are ideas, then, real? Yes, they exist (and are therefore real), but not in the Platonic sense that many people seem to think flows nonchalantly from something like the aforementioned considerations (by the way, there is a nauseating cliche that ''all philosophy is a footnote to Plato''. The more we come to see how the universe and the mind work, the greater should we appreciate that Plato's philosophy is most useful in the sense of showing us how not to think about these things). Ideas are indeed ''non-physical'' in one important sense - they are expressions of patterns that ''emerge'' in the universe as a result of interactions at different levels of physical organisation - but this gives not one iota of credence to the other (extremely different) sense of ''non-physical' - that they can exist ''by themselves'' devoid of some ultimate material basis.
It should also be noted that the existence of emergent properties and entities in the world does nothing to bolster the case for Platonic essences. The latter are supposed to be ''basic'' things; that is, they already exist, and provide a blueprint, as it were, for physical instantiations of themselves. Their physical equivalents are imperfect approximations of the ''ideal''. Emergent properties are the result of lower-level interactions that give rise to something that can be treated as though it has a life of its own at the ontological category we are considering. It would make no sense, for example, to try to understand how a spider differs from a tortoise by going down to the level of the quarks composing the nuclei of the atoms in their cells. One needs to adopt a view that takes into account history and process to answer such questions (incorporating a sort of ''design stance'', as Daniel Dennett says, where we are concerned about phenomena at higher ontological categories than at the most basic level of existence. Incidentally, this is also why exhortations to find a ''theory of everything'' are arrogant nonsense. We can immediately appreciate the absurdity of, for example, understanding a political system via recourse to quantum mechanics or string theory, or to understand how a fascist differs from a communist or how Kennedy differs from Bush by understanding the Big Bang). Specifically, the very process that gave rise to the types of things that people have wanted to lump into idealist categories - biological evolution - is deeply anathema to essences, namely for the following reasons: continuity, flux, and qualitative change. Essentialism in biology is actually another way of saying creationism. Creationists believe that the world is inhabited by representatives of God's idealist forms. Even those religious folks who accept evolution have, as Richard Dawkins has said, failed to have their consciousness raised; they will suppose that ''this is God's way of making us'', completely missing out on the central philosophical import of evolution through cumulative selection: that mindless entities interacting in mindless ways (note: not ''totally random'' ways) can bridge the gap between different ontological categories, and, ultimately, the world of dumb, unthinking, primeval matter with the world of purpose and meaning.
To use Daniel Dennett's terminology: Sky Hooks explain nothing. You need Cranes to do the actual work, and work is what you want to track when building a model of anything. Idealists are trying to lift something from the physical universe and then make it do work outside of its proper domain; they are assuming that this ''thing'' can have efficacy outside of the conditions that give it any coherence in the first place. But when they do this, they are forced to appeal to increasingly nebulous terms of discourse like ''pure being''. These terms eventually become so diluted of any coherent structure or relation to observed phenomena that they end up explaining less and less the more and more they try to. Idealism is thoroughly unscientific, in spite of the fact that many clever theologians have invested a great deal of time and intellect trying to give their beliefs a ''rational'' basis.
Idealism might make nice poetry; it can act as a good approximation in day to day life. But its central tenets are complete bunk.
Next: God as a material force.
--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)
You don't need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.
--Robert Anton Wilson
In philosophy, the central conflict is between the concept of the primacy of matter and the concept of the primacy of mind, or at least ideas (''idealism''). Philosophical materialism says that all that exists is matter and the interactions of matter. In this worldview, even minds, ideas, emotions, and meaning are manifestations of interactions of appropriately organised matter. Philosophical idealism, on the other hand, posits that there are ''non-physical'' entities that precede and are more ''fundamental'' than matter; minds and ideas can have their own independent existence. One often hears about mathematicians who regard numbers as ''real things'', or of New Age authors who dress their claims in the language of quantum mechanics to claim that ''we change the world just by thinking about it'', or that ''the moon doesn't exist until we think about it''.
I've written a bit about minds, levels of abstraction, and evolving physical systems. Now let me try to synthesise all this and say why the physical must necessarily precede ideas.
Like I've said before, minds are themselves high-level, abstract ways of viewing physical systems (with the system in this case being the brain and its associated sensory apparatus). There is no such thing as a disembodied mind (and hence no such thing as a personal, ''immaterial'' God. Nor can there be).
Still, some people would persist and claim that there is a case to be made for regarding a non-physical ''system'' or some other entity (or ''pure being'') as a means by which ideas can exist in some realm devoid of any physical processes. This is taken to be a more reasonable, watered down position than positing that an ''immaterial mind'' can exist. In reality, it is just about as untenable as the notion of a disembodied mind, and in a sense is even more so.
Firstly, we are left wondering how such ''non-physical'' ''things'' could ever interact with the world of matter and energy. Even if they could exist, the existence of these ''things'' would be completely superfluous. Secondly, to speak of ''non-physical systems'' is to invoke something while denying a necessary condition for its very existence. There is, in the idealist formulation, nothing to do the idea-ing. Once you conjure that ideas can exist outside of physical systems in some ''realm'', by themselves, then you are denying the very thing that gives them any coherence (indeed, existence) in the first place. How does something even qualify as an idea if it's not the product of a mind? And how is the physical thing that the idea represents actuated if not through volition? Once you go down this more ''reasonable'' route of trying to show that the physical can be preceded by ideas, you might as well go the whole hog and advocate for mind as well, because what about mind could you then not suppose is allowed to exist in this non-physical space if ideas can? Certainly ideas require systematic organisation in the form of an interrelation among their constituent components (sub-ideas, and so on and on) and between each other (ideas are meaningless unless they exist against the backdrop of other ideas). Ideas require structure to qualify as ideas. It's utterly nonsensical to talk about non-physical structure, if by that one means structure in the complete and utter absence of matter and energy. Concepts exist as abstractions, as I have alluded to, but to speak of a concept that does not ultimately reside on some substrate is the sheerest of lunacy. Substrate-neutral concepts, on the other hand, make sense, because these only require the presence of appropriately organised matter and the attendant processes that make it meaningful (indeed, which give rise to meaning in the first place).
But one might still ask, isn't it true that artefacts can still embody ideas, hence giving efficacy to the notion of ideas as something like Platonic essences that exist outside of matter? No, absolutely not. The first part is correct: artefacts can indeed embody ideas. This is so whether the people who built the artefacts are alive or not, or whether the artefacts exist in a world completely devoid of people (say, after a nuclear holocaust). They embody the ideas of people who necessarily once existed. There is nothing at all mysterious or mystical about that (and hence no need to invent mysticisms that try to ''show'' that there is something qualitatively different at play here in the form of ''separately existing ideas''). But that they embody ideas is only because they are lumps of matter that exhibit patterns representing abstractions (''ideas'') that someone took to be meaningful and worth preserving (and meaning is itself, ultimately, an abstraction, for the same reason that ideas are: there must be some entity for which interacting with the world at the level of these ontological categories has efficacy, and for these entities to effect upon the world some means of reproducing the conditions that gave those categories significance. In other words, highly complex physical systems that go by the name of human beings. On a related side note, if an artefact embodies a wrong idea, does that mean that the idealist universe is therefore filled with endless permutations of wrong ideas? But then one needs to invoke a generating mechanism that produces the ideas and a sorting and selecting mechanism that chooses those ideas that are to be approximated in the physical universe. Is there really any need to pay these notions the slightest bit of heed?). Artefacts only exist because they are the end product of a long and arduous process of cumulative evolution.
So are ideas, then, real? Yes, they exist (and are therefore real), but not in the Platonic sense that many people seem to think flows nonchalantly from something like the aforementioned considerations (by the way, there is a nauseating cliche that ''all philosophy is a footnote to Plato''. The more we come to see how the universe and the mind work, the greater should we appreciate that Plato's philosophy is most useful in the sense of showing us how not to think about these things). Ideas are indeed ''non-physical'' in one important sense - they are expressions of patterns that ''emerge'' in the universe as a result of interactions at different levels of physical organisation - but this gives not one iota of credence to the other (extremely different) sense of ''non-physical' - that they can exist ''by themselves'' devoid of some ultimate material basis.
It should also be noted that the existence of emergent properties and entities in the world does nothing to bolster the case for Platonic essences. The latter are supposed to be ''basic'' things; that is, they already exist, and provide a blueprint, as it were, for physical instantiations of themselves. Their physical equivalents are imperfect approximations of the ''ideal''. Emergent properties are the result of lower-level interactions that give rise to something that can be treated as though it has a life of its own at the ontological category we are considering. It would make no sense, for example, to try to understand how a spider differs from a tortoise by going down to the level of the quarks composing the nuclei of the atoms in their cells. One needs to adopt a view that takes into account history and process to answer such questions (incorporating a sort of ''design stance'', as Daniel Dennett says, where we are concerned about phenomena at higher ontological categories than at the most basic level of existence. Incidentally, this is also why exhortations to find a ''theory of everything'' are arrogant nonsense. We can immediately appreciate the absurdity of, for example, understanding a political system via recourse to quantum mechanics or string theory, or to understand how a fascist differs from a communist or how Kennedy differs from Bush by understanding the Big Bang). Specifically, the very process that gave rise to the types of things that people have wanted to lump into idealist categories - biological evolution - is deeply anathema to essences, namely for the following reasons: continuity, flux, and qualitative change. Essentialism in biology is actually another way of saying creationism. Creationists believe that the world is inhabited by representatives of God's idealist forms. Even those religious folks who accept evolution have, as Richard Dawkins has said, failed to have their consciousness raised; they will suppose that ''this is God's way of making us'', completely missing out on the central philosophical import of evolution through cumulative selection: that mindless entities interacting in mindless ways (note: not ''totally random'' ways) can bridge the gap between different ontological categories, and, ultimately, the world of dumb, unthinking, primeval matter with the world of purpose and meaning.
To use Daniel Dennett's terminology: Sky Hooks explain nothing. You need Cranes to do the actual work, and work is what you want to track when building a model of anything. Idealists are trying to lift something from the physical universe and then make it do work outside of its proper domain; they are assuming that this ''thing'' can have efficacy outside of the conditions that give it any coherence in the first place. But when they do this, they are forced to appeal to increasingly nebulous terms of discourse like ''pure being''. These terms eventually become so diluted of any coherent structure or relation to observed phenomena that they end up explaining less and less the more and more they try to. Idealism is thoroughly unscientific, in spite of the fact that many clever theologians have invested a great deal of time and intellect trying to give their beliefs a ''rational'' basis.
Idealism might make nice poetry; it can act as a good approximation in day to day life. But its central tenets are complete bunk.
Next: God as a material force.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Wasps, behaviour, and levels of abstraction
The following is a question (rephrased somewhat) by a friend that reflects a bias many people have when thinking about organismal behaviour.
''How can behaviour be hard-wired into an organism? For example, how can a parasitiod wasp exhibit the sophisticated behaviours that it does when finding the ant nest that harbours a blue butterfly caterpillar? A human baby needs constant care by its parents, but a wasp already knows what to do when it emerges from a caterpillar. How is it able to do this?''
The basic answer is that all organisms have behavioural sub-routines that are appropriate to the demands of their environments (that is, the criteria that determine whether individual organisms will survive and reproduce or fail to reproduce), because these environments have selected for these sub-routines (alternative sub-routines were "purged" from the population, because they didn't have what it took, given the aforementioned criteria, to get into the next generation). Humans are utterly dependent at birth on their parents/guardians, but they can afford to be; these wasps, on the other hand, can hit the ground running, and this has to do with the particular life style they have evolved to excel at. The question, "How do they know where to go and what to do?" can be answered in different ways, depending upon what aspect of the behaviour you're interested in - or, more precisely, what level of abstraction you're interested in. If you're interested in the actual physical biochemical processes going on in the brain of the wasp, then you need to ask a question about what enzymes and neural patterns are being used, and so forth. This "low level" approach, while interesting, is often not what evolutionary biologists are centrally concerned about. The question they ask (or at least, what behavioural biologists ask) is: "why" do these wasps behave in this way? "Why" is this behavioural routine, as opposed to some other, the one being maintained in the population? This is a more high-level, abstract question that separates the actual nuts-and-bolts happenings from what can be classified as a "functional" perspective (what is this behaviour "for"?). However, the two questions are of course not entirely separate, but in order to link them, it's important to understand something from the outset: natural selection, in its most general formulation, is simply this: certain configurations of matter are more effective at perpetuating themselves than other configurations, by virtue of the consequences they have in particular environments. Once you've understood this, the conceptual hurdle of thinking about how wasps "know what to do" becomes much less formidable.
As a thought experiment, imagine the following: a mutation arises, which happens to change the amount of some enzyme that was being manufactured in the wasp's cells, which has an effect on the expression of some compound that is used in the synapse connections in the brain, which...and so on, which has the consequence that the search pattern of the wasp is changed in some way. It's not important to know exactly what the particular pathway is if we're focusing our attention at the high-level functional mode of analysis, only that there are such pathways. By virtue of the eventual behavioural consequence of the mutation, the latter will automatically become more prevalent in the population (because it does better than "rival" - alternative - mutations at helping the wasp carry out some task). All we need to assume is that there are genetic changes that result in the brain being altered in some way, and that these changes have consequences for survival and reproduction. This is how natural selection "programs" the behaviour of organisms: by indirectly selecting among genetic changes via the proxy of some high-level effect (in this case, organismal behaviour) that is "visible" to it. Thus in this sense does the genome "code for" these behaviours. The genes themselves of course have no idea about anything; they're just strings of nucleotides. But due to the effects they have on the physical patterns of the brain during the development of the wasp, we can treat them as though they knew what they were doing. And so, by extension, the wasp "knows what it's doing" - because it has neural structures that result from this coded program, and these structures process information (or rather, environmental stimuli that are represented to the wasp in an appropriate pattern) in a very particular, highly effective way.
That's really all there is to it. Again, we must always be able to translate back and forth between our low level, nuts-and-bolts explanation ("protein A induces protein B to...etc") with our high-level, functional, more abstract explanation ("Wasps do this because, in this environment, this behavour allows the wasp to find food more easily...etc"). In practise, biologists always implicitly know what they mean when they talk about a behaviour (or a gene) "for" something. This more abstract way of talking is simply less cumbersome than having to always revert back to "gene language".
The mistake people often make is to be mystified by behaviour, because they think that the animal has to "know" what it's doing. And, of course, at some level this is true. The animal has to be able to process information and act on that information in a highly sophisticated way (sometimes, anyway). But it's not necessary to imagine that the animal consciously has any conception of what it's doing, any more than the genes that code "for" that behaviour know. The animal might, as a matter of fact, know what it's doing, or it might not, but this isn't a prerequisite for it actually doing something. A similar question could be asked of cells: how do they "know" how to manufacture proteins (and the myriad other things they do)? And again, the answer is that selection has favoured certain configurations of matter that have the effect that the entity in question behaves in some way appropriate to the demands of the environment, and that some of these ways are more appropriate to the needs of coping with the overall environment than others. It's simply following a set of instructions and rules-of-thumb which have been programmed by natural selection over many generations, given the average set of constraints and challenges encountered in that environment by an individual's predecessors. In the case of cells, we're interested in how proteins are made and delivered to other parts of the cell. In the case of behavour, we're interested in how complex, multicellular systems (that is, organisms - and people!) interact with their environments. Of course, there are more "steps" along the way when considering complex organisms than there are when considering single cells - but this just means that the causal chain is more tortuous. There is still an effect that reaches out from the original, biochemical goings-on in the cell to the outward manifestations that are expressed by the organism as a whole. If we take the abstract, high-level view, we can "cut out" the biochemical middlemen and focus on the functional significance of some behaviour over another (that is, its relevance to the organism's prospects of survival and reproduction), and simply ask "Why does a wasp do this?".
This template can be used for thinking about any complex biological feature, whether morphological or behavioral. A favourite of mine is the examples of mimicry that many insects exhibit. Some insects look just like dried leaves, right down to the veins and ragged edges. Others look like other insects, as a means of infiltrating their dwellings. As a kid, I marvelled at such things. I always had a sense that some historical process had built these structures, but I was mystified as to how the insect could ''know'' to build such a structure, just as I was mystified as to how Triceratops could ''know'' to have horns to defend from Tyrannosaurs. I knew that the animals in question didn't actually need to know in the conscious sense, that they weren't actually thinking about their needs in that particular environment, but nevertheless there had to be some design process, as it were, present (and no, I didn't gravitate towards God. I don't know why that was; perhaps the atheism of my parents unduly influenced me. Religion always seemed to me too dopey to take seriously, perhaps because of the pious injunction to believe or face the torment of Hell, which perhaps led my young mind to suspect that control, rather than explanation, was at the core of religious doctrine). The scientific and fully satisfying answer is that the design work has been distributed over many generations, with modest increments that aided survival and reproduction being preserved here and there, accumulating through time and resulting in something that looks uncannily like the result of a conscious design process. This is how the universe manufactured us.
Once you've made this conceptual inversion of the world - that historical, impersonal material forces can produce things that exhibit, in some important sense, function - then you've come to a profound philosophical insight: conscious purpose need not precede form.
Evolution is the process that changes systems that are themselves endowed with a series of internal processes to navigate an environment space. As the systems change, so does the broader configuration that it is a part of. These systems filter information about the environment, come to a determination of what to do, and then, based upon the fit of the response with the severity of the environmental demand, differentially propagate themselves - and change the environment while doing so, partly because they are themselves simply part of the environment, and partly because they craft the chemistry that permeates the biosphere. In this context can systems enter into cooperative relationships with other systems, merge with them, purge them, and parasitise them. No organism can be understood in isolation, and the biosphere, the totality of all the organisms and their interrelations, must be understood as a gigantic web that is itself changing through time.
''How can behaviour be hard-wired into an organism? For example, how can a parasitiod wasp exhibit the sophisticated behaviours that it does when finding the ant nest that harbours a blue butterfly caterpillar? A human baby needs constant care by its parents, but a wasp already knows what to do when it emerges from a caterpillar. How is it able to do this?''
The basic answer is that all organisms have behavioural sub-routines that are appropriate to the demands of their environments (that is, the criteria that determine whether individual organisms will survive and reproduce or fail to reproduce), because these environments have selected for these sub-routines (alternative sub-routines were "purged" from the population, because they didn't have what it took, given the aforementioned criteria, to get into the next generation). Humans are utterly dependent at birth on their parents/guardians, but they can afford to be; these wasps, on the other hand, can hit the ground running, and this has to do with the particular life style they have evolved to excel at. The question, "How do they know where to go and what to do?" can be answered in different ways, depending upon what aspect of the behaviour you're interested in - or, more precisely, what level of abstraction you're interested in. If you're interested in the actual physical biochemical processes going on in the brain of the wasp, then you need to ask a question about what enzymes and neural patterns are being used, and so forth. This "low level" approach, while interesting, is often not what evolutionary biologists are centrally concerned about. The question they ask (or at least, what behavioural biologists ask) is: "why" do these wasps behave in this way? "Why" is this behavioural routine, as opposed to some other, the one being maintained in the population? This is a more high-level, abstract question that separates the actual nuts-and-bolts happenings from what can be classified as a "functional" perspective (what is this behaviour "for"?). However, the two questions are of course not entirely separate, but in order to link them, it's important to understand something from the outset: natural selection, in its most general formulation, is simply this: certain configurations of matter are more effective at perpetuating themselves than other configurations, by virtue of the consequences they have in particular environments. Once you've understood this, the conceptual hurdle of thinking about how wasps "know what to do" becomes much less formidable.
As a thought experiment, imagine the following: a mutation arises, which happens to change the amount of some enzyme that was being manufactured in the wasp's cells, which has an effect on the expression of some compound that is used in the synapse connections in the brain, which...and so on, which has the consequence that the search pattern of the wasp is changed in some way. It's not important to know exactly what the particular pathway is if we're focusing our attention at the high-level functional mode of analysis, only that there are such pathways. By virtue of the eventual behavioural consequence of the mutation, the latter will automatically become more prevalent in the population (because it does better than "rival" - alternative - mutations at helping the wasp carry out some task). All we need to assume is that there are genetic changes that result in the brain being altered in some way, and that these changes have consequences for survival and reproduction. This is how natural selection "programs" the behaviour of organisms: by indirectly selecting among genetic changes via the proxy of some high-level effect (in this case, organismal behaviour) that is "visible" to it. Thus in this sense does the genome "code for" these behaviours. The genes themselves of course have no idea about anything; they're just strings of nucleotides. But due to the effects they have on the physical patterns of the brain during the development of the wasp, we can treat them as though they knew what they were doing. And so, by extension, the wasp "knows what it's doing" - because it has neural structures that result from this coded program, and these structures process information (or rather, environmental stimuli that are represented to the wasp in an appropriate pattern) in a very particular, highly effective way.
That's really all there is to it. Again, we must always be able to translate back and forth between our low level, nuts-and-bolts explanation ("protein A induces protein B to...etc") with our high-level, functional, more abstract explanation ("Wasps do this because, in this environment, this behavour allows the wasp to find food more easily...etc"). In practise, biologists always implicitly know what they mean when they talk about a behaviour (or a gene) "for" something. This more abstract way of talking is simply less cumbersome than having to always revert back to "gene language".
The mistake people often make is to be mystified by behaviour, because they think that the animal has to "know" what it's doing. And, of course, at some level this is true. The animal has to be able to process information and act on that information in a highly sophisticated way (sometimes, anyway). But it's not necessary to imagine that the animal consciously has any conception of what it's doing, any more than the genes that code "for" that behaviour know. The animal might, as a matter of fact, know what it's doing, or it might not, but this isn't a prerequisite for it actually doing something. A similar question could be asked of cells: how do they "know" how to manufacture proteins (and the myriad other things they do)? And again, the answer is that selection has favoured certain configurations of matter that have the effect that the entity in question behaves in some way appropriate to the demands of the environment, and that some of these ways are more appropriate to the needs of coping with the overall environment than others. It's simply following a set of instructions and rules-of-thumb which have been programmed by natural selection over many generations, given the average set of constraints and challenges encountered in that environment by an individual's predecessors. In the case of cells, we're interested in how proteins are made and delivered to other parts of the cell. In the case of behavour, we're interested in how complex, multicellular systems (that is, organisms - and people!) interact with their environments. Of course, there are more "steps" along the way when considering complex organisms than there are when considering single cells - but this just means that the causal chain is more tortuous. There is still an effect that reaches out from the original, biochemical goings-on in the cell to the outward manifestations that are expressed by the organism as a whole. If we take the abstract, high-level view, we can "cut out" the biochemical middlemen and focus on the functional significance of some behaviour over another (that is, its relevance to the organism's prospects of survival and reproduction), and simply ask "Why does a wasp do this?".
This template can be used for thinking about any complex biological feature, whether morphological or behavioral. A favourite of mine is the examples of mimicry that many insects exhibit. Some insects look just like dried leaves, right down to the veins and ragged edges. Others look like other insects, as a means of infiltrating their dwellings. As a kid, I marvelled at such things. I always had a sense that some historical process had built these structures, but I was mystified as to how the insect could ''know'' to build such a structure, just as I was mystified as to how Triceratops could ''know'' to have horns to defend from Tyrannosaurs. I knew that the animals in question didn't actually need to know in the conscious sense, that they weren't actually thinking about their needs in that particular environment, but nevertheless there had to be some design process, as it were, present (and no, I didn't gravitate towards God. I don't know why that was; perhaps the atheism of my parents unduly influenced me. Religion always seemed to me too dopey to take seriously, perhaps because of the pious injunction to believe or face the torment of Hell, which perhaps led my young mind to suspect that control, rather than explanation, was at the core of religious doctrine). The scientific and fully satisfying answer is that the design work has been distributed over many generations, with modest increments that aided survival and reproduction being preserved here and there, accumulating through time and resulting in something that looks uncannily like the result of a conscious design process. This is how the universe manufactured us.
Once you've made this conceptual inversion of the world - that historical, impersonal material forces can produce things that exhibit, in some important sense, function - then you've come to a profound philosophical insight: conscious purpose need not precede form.
Evolution is the process that changes systems that are themselves endowed with a series of internal processes to navigate an environment space. As the systems change, so does the broader configuration that it is a part of. These systems filter information about the environment, come to a determination of what to do, and then, based upon the fit of the response with the severity of the environmental demand, differentially propagate themselves - and change the environment while doing so, partly because they are themselves simply part of the environment, and partly because they craft the chemistry that permeates the biosphere. In this context can systems enter into cooperative relationships with other systems, merge with them, purge them, and parasitise them. No organism can be understood in isolation, and the biosphere, the totality of all the organisms and their interrelations, must be understood as a gigantic web that is itself changing through time.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Gorgeous things happening in the Middle East
The Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has been sent packing with his tail between his legs, thrown out of the country by an upsurge of mass anger at years of corruption, police state brutality, and a lack of prospects for the youth. The uprising, sparked by the self-immolation of a young man, Mohamed Bou'azizi, has now inspired similar actions in other states in the region, namely Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt. What we are seeing is quite possibly the beginning of a pan-Arab uprising against dictatorship, imperialism, poverty and brutal class exploitation. While the flame of revolution might well be stamped out before it spreads, and the contagion inoculated and confined to Tunisia, the mere prospect of the long-oppressed masses taking matters into their own hands is, for the dictators and ruling classes in the region, a terrifying prospect. It is also a grave matter for concern to the United States, the imperial hegemon and one of the main beneficiaries of the status quo (and which sees these regimes as strategic assets to be backed with billions of dollars in military aid, under the guise of the ''War on Terror''), and to Israel, America's mercenary state and an important collaborator. The basic interests of the Arab masses are fundamentally counterposed to those of imperialism and its lackeys. The Tunisian upsurge is a manifestation of this contradiction.
To have the greatest chance of success in not only overthrowing the gangster regimes but also to flush out the systems of subjugation that have stifled the region for decades, workers, youth and intellectuals must lead a mass-based movement that seek to do away with class-based antagonisms at their root, with special focus upon helping the most oppressed, marginalised sections of society. In other words, an authentic, mass-based, democratic socialist movement. The class-based nature of the revolt must be made clear and brought to the fore. Nationalism and fundamentalist religion, by contrast, are deadly poisons to the working class. The revolt must spread and inspire further acts of disobedience throughout the region, until both imperialism and capitalism have been thoroughly overthrown.
To the Tunisian people, I just want to say Thank You. You have inspired new hope and vitality in the struggle for dignity and decency. May your example serve to ignite the world and crush all oppressors.
From Socialist Alternative Australia:
The Arab world is being turned upside down
Corey Oakley 28 January 2011
A stunning revolt by workers and the poor is shaking the Arab world. The revolution in Tunisia has inspired or accelerated protest movements in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. And now Egypt – the most strategically important of all the Arab countries – is in the midst of a mass rebellion the likes of which has not been seen in a generation, and which threatens to topple the hated pro-US dictator, Hosni Mubarak.
To have the greatest chance of success in not only overthrowing the gangster regimes but also to flush out the systems of subjugation that have stifled the region for decades, workers, youth and intellectuals must lead a mass-based movement that seek to do away with class-based antagonisms at their root, with special focus upon helping the most oppressed, marginalised sections of society. In other words, an authentic, mass-based, democratic socialist movement. The class-based nature of the revolt must be made clear and brought to the fore. Nationalism and fundamentalist religion, by contrast, are deadly poisons to the working class. The revolt must spread and inspire further acts of disobedience throughout the region, until both imperialism and capitalism have been thoroughly overthrown.
To the Tunisian people, I just want to say Thank You. You have inspired new hope and vitality in the struggle for dignity and decency. May your example serve to ignite the world and crush all oppressors.
From Socialist Alternative Australia:
The Arab world is being turned upside down
Corey Oakley 28 January 2011
A stunning revolt by workers and the poor is shaking the Arab world. The revolution in Tunisia has inspired or accelerated protest movements in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. And now Egypt – the most strategically important of all the Arab countries – is in the midst of a mass rebellion the likes of which has not been seen in a generation, and which threatens to topple the hated pro-US dictator, Hosni Mubarak.
In amazing scenes not witnessed in Egypt since the bread riots of 1977, thousands of people marched through the streets of Cairo, battling riot police, storming government buildings, and occupying the symbolic Tahrir Square. The protests started in the early afternoon, but many hours later – at 2am the next morning – thousands of people were still demonstrating outside the parliament building.
The protesters showed incredible courage and defiance in the face of police repression. Riot police – who usually suppress protests in the capital with ease – lost their ability to instil fear.
One account from Tahrir Square, early in the day, tells how:
On the south end of the square, a military tank rolled into the crowd. At the top of the tank an officer manned a fire hose that hammered down onto the protesters. But no one moved.
The fire tank had not advanced more than 30 yards before a young Egyptian sprinted up the front of the vehicle and scaled up the side. He proceeded to climb up to the top of the tank, inciting ovations from the crowd. When he reached the top of the tank, the officer manning the hose dropped the nozzle and jumped on the back of the protester. The two men toppled off the vehicle and onto the ground, where the man was taken away by other officers.
The moment they fell to the ground, the front 200 protesters dropped to their knees in unison and began to pray while the rest of the crowd looked into the faces of Egyptians staring at the scene from high above in their apartment windows. “Who will be the next hero?” they chanted as they looked up. Then they burst into a new chant: "Come join us, come join us!"
In many places the police found themselves on the losing end of battles with protesters, who broke their lines and chased them off the streets.
While the protests in Cairo – where the ability of the state to repress dissent is strongest – were immensely significant, so to were the protests outside of the capital. As Egyptian-American activist Mostafa Omar told socialistworker.org
The size and scale of the protests outside Cairo is the government's biggest problem. In Suez, people refused to be dispersed and fought a kind of guerrilla battle with police. In Alexandria, there was a mass demonstration of tens of thousands, followed by meetings at central squares. There were fascinating scenes – people brought huge posters with Mubarak's face, and were burning them in the street. Elsewhere, in a number of cities in the Nile Delta – a very industrialized era – the demonstrations were most militant as well. It was almost like a national uprising.
In Mahalla, the heart of working-class militancy in recent years, as many as 45,000 demonstrated, and engaged in fierce battles with police.
But it was not just the militancy of demonstrators – the protests were infused with an insurgent, revolutionary mood. Outside the offices of the ruling National Democratic Party in Cairo, a crowd of a thousand chanted: “Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you” (Zine Ben-Ali fled by plane from Tunis to Saudi Arabia). “This is the first day of our revolution” said a group of young men talking to Al Jazeera.
Hatred of dictatorial rule, corruption, police violence, and craven subservience to the US and Israel, are all important factors motivating the protests. But at the centre of the revolt – in Egypt and across the region – are class issues: endemic poverty, debilitating price rises, and the vicious neo-liberal policies imposed on Egyptians by the ruling elite. So while there is support for the protests across social classes, it is being driven by the anger of workers, youth and the poor.
The grievances that led to this week’s explosion have been building for many years. And the latest revolt follows on from what has been a growing rebellion by workers over the past three years.
But it is the events in Tunisia that have turned hatred and anger into open rebellion. Marx once said that ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of the masses. The idea that is gripping the imagination of the Arab world today is that it is possible to resist, that dictators can be overthrown, that people can rise up and make their own history.
The histories of all of the mass revolutionary movements of the past are filled with accounts of how ordinary people, usually too ground down by the drudgery of everyday life to be involved in politics, can be transformed by the fact that suddenly it is they who have the power to determine their own destiny and that of their country, rather than the usual politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”.
Watching the footage of Egyptians, young and old, defiantly speaking their minds to the cameras; organising each other to defend the protests from the police; making heroic, unforgettable gestures of defiance and dignity – the reclamations of humanity that define mass rebellion – you could not help but think that something has fundamentally changed. And the regime, for all its power, will find it very difficult to change things back.
It was the sense of the power of mass defiance that turned the hesitations and nervousness with which the protests began into a revolt that lasted long into the night. Guardian journalist Jack Shenker sent this report late Tuesday evening:
As midnight approaches in Cairo thousands of protesters are still occupying the Tahrir Square, vowing to remain in place until the government falls…
"We will stay here all night, all week if necessary," said Youssef Hisham, a 25 year old filmmaker. "There are too many people on the streets for the police to charge – if they did, it would be a massacre. I came here today not as the representative of any political party, but simply in the name of Egypt. We have liberated the heart of the country, and Mubarak now knows that his people want him gone."
As fresh waves of protesters broke through police cordons to join the throng in Tahrir, a festival atmosphere took hold – groups were cheered as they arrived carrying blankets and food, and demonstrators pooled money together to buy water and other supplies. "The atmosphere is simply amazing – everyone is so friendly, there's no anger, no harassment, just solidarity and remarkable energy," added Hisham.
Just before 3am, after prolonged fighting, the police finally cleared the square. The next morning, Thursday, the government announced that all further protests were banned, and anyone who attempted to demonstrate would be arrested and charged. Literally tens of thousands of police manned street corners, arresting anyone who walked near. According to Egyptian officials, over 860 people have been arrested, the overwhelming majority in Cairo.
The Guardian reported on Thursday night (Egyptian time) that
Riot police and plainclothes officers armed with staves and bars broke up a demonstration outside one of the capital's biggest tourist hotels, the Ramses Hilton, on the banks of the river Nile. Tonight demonstrators and police are still playing a violent game of cat and mouse through the city centre with protesters quickly regrouping after being broken up. The sound of police sirens and detonating teargas canisters could be heard across the city.
But for all the repression, the security forces failed in their attempt to squash the movement through means of state terror. Thousands still managed to demonstrate in Cairo and across the country. In Suez the main police station was set on fire. Further mass demonstrations – hopefully the biggest yet – are planned after Friday prayers this week.
The US and the Egyptian ruling class
It is often said on the left – with some truth – that the Israeli state is the key means by which the US ensures its domination of the Middle East and its resources. But just as important is the network of Arab dictatorships that maintain an iron grip on their populations, collaborate closely with Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians, and allow the vast resources of the region to be expropriated by the various imperial powers while the mass of the Arab population lives in abject poverty. In exchange for this base treachery they are allowed to amass their own obscene fortunes, which to their minds is more than fair payment for their souls.
Because of this, the latest rebellion puts the US government in a bind.
On the one hand, it feels obliged – for purely public relations reasons – to not seem hostile to what is self-evidently a heroic movement for democratic rights.
On the other hand, the upsurge of democratic revolt is fundamentally at odds with US imperialistic domination of the Middle East. Any genuinely democratic regime that represented the views of the people in the Arab world would be fiercely opposed to US/Israeli domination of the region, and also to the brutal class system that sees a tiny minority live in luxury while most people struggle to survive.
So the US is attempting to hedge its bets. Obama claims to support the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people – though he did not feel moved to do so until Zine Ben-Ali was safely in a plane circling Europe looking for a country to land (thank god for the US’s favourite client, Saudi Arabia!). No mention, of course, of the billions of dollars the US gave Ben Ali for services rendered, particularly since the beginning of the War on Terror.
But it was one thing to abandon the Tunisian dictator, it is entirely another to abandon Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, which has played a key role in enforcing US interests in the region and the murderous Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Obama pointedly refused to mention the Egyptian protests in his state of the union address. White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said when questioned about the upheavals that "We have a close and important ally in Egypt and they will continue to be". Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said the United States believed the government of Egyptian President Mubarak was “stable and was looking for ways to meet the Egyptian people's needs.”
There are figures in the US ruling class who think the US needs to distance itself from Mubarak. A Washington Post editorial warned that “Tuesday's events suggested that the Cairo government is not at all stable” and argued that “blind U.S. backing for Mr. Mubarak makes a political disaster in Egypt more rather than less likely.”
But these are mere strategic differences. The US ruling class is united in its determination to see a pro-US regime in Egypt. And on a fundamental level, that means an anti-democratic government, for the reason that the interests of the US and Israel are totally counterposed to those of the mass of Egyptian citizens. There should be no doubt that the US will stop at nothing to try and prevent any genuinely democratic government coming to power in Egypt.
The strategic importance of Egypt to the US is one of the reasons that the Egyptian uprising will face much more serious obstacles to success than did the revolution in Tunisia. On top of that, the Egyptian ruling class is much more stable and broadly based than was Ben Ali’s nepotistic dictatorship. The army will not abandon Mubarak with the same speed as its Tunisian counterpart.
A fight for socialism is the only solution
The revolt in Egypt poses point blank the need for a struggle for socialism.
The demands that are driving the revolt – for an end to imperialist domination of the region, for democracy, for a decent life for the millions of Arab workers who cannot afford the basics of life in spite of living in a part of the world that has created more riches than almost any other in history - cannot be met without a fundamental reorganisation of power in the Middle East.
US imperialism has to be driven out. So too do the ruling class elites who are both craven servants of the US, and exploitative ruling classes in their own right. The only way to do this is to turn the current uprisings into a genuinely social revolution, one that expropriates the riches of the powerful and creates new organs of power based on the democratic organisation of workers, students and the poor.
In Tunisia we are starting to see the beginnings of such organisation, as people organise in their workplaces and communities to try and defend the radical spirit of the revolution against attempts to impose a government that is simply the Ben Ali regime without Ben Ali.
In Egypt the immediate task is still the overthrow of the dictatorship. Because of the strength of the regime, and the intransigent backing that the Egyptian ruling class receives from the US state, working class organisation and struggle is crucial not just to determining the nature of a future regime, but to getting rid of the current one.
This means that in the coming days and weeks in Egypt, the extent to which the working class imposes itself on the movement and gives it direction and organisation will be crucial to determining whether the regime can be overthrown.
The huge strike movement of the last few years opens up the possibility that the working class movement can play a decisive role. But until now the political opposition to Mubarak has been occupied by forces – like the Muslim Brotherhood – who have no fundamental opposition to the prevailing social order in Egypt.
The difficulties that those rebelling in Egypt face are not minor concerns. For decades oppositional politics have been dominated by, variously, bourgeois Arab nationalism, Stalinism, and Islamism. It will not be easy for a genuinely revolutionary working class socialist current to build now, even given the extraordinary events taking place. But insofar as mass upheavals inspire hope on an undreamt of scale, they also open up possibilities that yesterday seemed mere fantasy.
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