------------- HAPPY NEW YEAR -------------

 

Happy New Year to all my readers!

Who I am as a philosopher

At the end of December many people reflect on the past year; on what they have done then or on what happened in the world. I am not that kind of person. I prefer to reflect, when I feel a need for it; not because it’s a certain date on the calendar. However, if I have the feeling to look back and this happens to be the time that many people do, let it be so. So, after having been busy in philosophy for many years, the question came up in me: Where do I stand now in philosophy? I started as a sociologist. Then I gradually switched to philosophy, to that extent that it became my passion and that I wrote a PhD thesis on a philosophical theme. Initially, my mind was in the grip of the philosophy of action and I was interested in methodology, too. But I have always had a broad interest and my interest in the philosophy of action became an interest in the philosophy of mind and action. In the meantime, also Montaigne had been added to my field of study. So it was for a long time, till more and more themes were added to my mental library. Then little by little my interest in action theory and in some mind themes faded into the background, and other themes came more and more to the fore, so that nowadays I seldom write yet about my old themes. But need I tell you all this? For certainly, as an avid reader of my blogs you’ll have seen this change.
When old interests fade away and new ones come instead, at a certain moment the question arises: Where do I stand as a philosopher? In fact, it is the question: Who am I as a philosopher? This question is not as simple as it looks at first sight. For it is a qualification of the question: Who am I? And there is not a simple I. The I can be looked at from different sides, and different positions will give different replies. For example, George Herbert Mead famously distinguished between the Self, the I and the Me. The Self comprises the attitudes of the group or community a person belongs to towards this person and towards one another in what they do. The I is the response of the person to the attitudes of others leading to a self-image. The Me consists of the attitudes of others towards the person as seen by him or herself. The essence of this theory is the relationship of the person – the I of my question “Who am I as a philosopher?” – towards the other. Especially, it is the place of the person among his or her relevant others. But if this is true, then I can reformulate my question into the question: What is my place among other philosophers? Or: How do I compare with them? However, these are still difficult questions, for there are many philosophers in the world. How to determine then where I stand? Even to determine my place among the most important philosophers would be quite a job.
In order to simplify my task and to find a quick answer, I searched on the internet and I found a website that answers my question, since it gives a Philosopher Personality Test. The test places you between seven very different philosophers: Nietzsche, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Epicurus and Aristotle. True, this is only a very small selection of the great number of important philosophers in the world. Personally, I would like to know how Wittgensteinian I am or how I compare with Montaigne, but this is what I found. I’ll spare you other details; you can find them on the website just given, but I did the test, which consists of 35 questions, and what did I get? My views are closest to those of Aristotle! See the picture at the top of this blog, which is the result of the test. How happy I am! For Aristotle is one of my favourite philosophers and the Stagirite would have been my first choice from the seven philosophers, would I have been asked whom I most would like to be. I would have been unhappy to be a kind of Nietzsche or Plato and just they were most different from me.
Should I really be happy with the result? People like to develop, but have I developed? Thirty years ago, I wrote my PhD thesis based on the action theory of Georg Henrik von Wright. This theory is fundamentally Aristotelian, as von Wright explains. Does it mean that I haven’t developed since I began to philosophize? You can see it that way, indeed. But to my mind, I have developed, as I explained above. Wasn’t it for that reason that I wanted to do the test? However, there is a hard core within me; it is the philosopher who I fundamentally am. This core is mainly Aristotelian. Yes, it is Epicurean as well, but then not so much philosophically but in my daily life.
And what kind of philosopher are you? Do you want to find out this, too? Maybe the test is a nice play for you to do on New Year’s Eve. For although the makers of the test “have strived to make [it] as reliable and valid as possible by subjecting this test to statistical controls and validation”, as so many internet tests, in the end it is fun (with a serious core).
Happy New Year

----------- MERRY CHRISTMAS ! -----------

Merry Christmas to all my readers !

The blog machine

Sometimes I haven’t much time to write a blog, like today. Then I wish that someone else would write it or maybe that I had a machine that could do the job for me. As for today, I had the idea to write about Christmas. But what to write that is a little bit original? So much has been written already about Christmas and each year I have already written a blog about Christmas. But then I remembered that a blog machine really exists. Recently, I had read about it in a newspaper. It is called OpenAI. Why not give it a try?
The website of OpenAI was not difficult to find. Here it is: https://openai.com/ It pretends that it can write articles and essays and also, of course, blogs. So, I made an account and logged in. However, my problem to write a blog quickly was not yet solved, for it is not enough to order the website to write a blog as such but it needs a theme to write about. When I wrote that I wanted to have a blog about Christmas, I got a vague text that everybody could write. I didn’t need a “blog machine” for this. I had to specify my question. Then I got an idea. Now a is war going on between Russia and Ukraine, two nations in which Christianity is an important religion. But Christmas is a feast of peace, which is in contradiction to war, even to that extent that warring nations often organise a truce during Christmas. Now it is so that in Ukraine and Russia not Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are the major religions, but Orthodox Christianity is, and Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas not on the 25th of December but on 7 January. But I needed a blog about Christmas and actually the date it is celebrated is irrelevant. Therefore, I ordered the blog machine:

Write a text about Christmas at the frontline between Ukraine and Russia in the war between both countries.

This is what I got (unchanged):

“Christmas at the frontline between Ukraine and Russia in the war between both countries is a somber affair. The trenches are silent, with the only sound coming from the wind and the occasional distant thud of a mortar or the crackle of rifle fire. The bitter cold of winter has settled in and there is no respite from the harsh conditions. This Christmas, there is no festive cheer to be found at the frontline. Instead, there is a grim reminder of the human cost of the war as soldiers from both sides huddle in their trenches, hoping that the fighting will not resume in earnest. For many, this will be the only chance to rest and reflect on the past year, and the suffering it has brought. Though there is no room for celebration in the trenches, the soldiers of both sides still maintain a fragile respect for each other. Small acts of kindness, such as trading Christmas gifts, have been observed on both sides. This serves as a reminder that, despite the conflict, there is still a common humanity that binds us all. Though Christmas at the frontline between Ukraine and Russia may be a solemn affair, it is also a reminder of the courage and resilience of people on both sides. It is a reminder that, even in the darkest of times, hope and compassion can still exist.”

Not bad, isn’t it? Especially the end is realistic. There the text talks about peaceful contacts between soldiers on both sides of the frontline and about trading gifts. Didn’t this also happen here and there along the front during Christmas 1914 in the First World War? Then soldiers on the allied side heard German soldiers sing “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (Silent night, holy night), while the Germans heard Christmas carols on the allied side. This made the soldiers realize that their enemies were as human as they themselves were and that they had the same feelings and faith. And so the enemies contacted each other, first hesitatingly, but then they left the trenches and talked with each other, and even exchanged little gifts and played football with each other. It was the beginning of an unofficial truce. The army command tried to stop it, but nevertheless here and there along the front the truce lasted up to two weeks. One year later, strict measures were taken to prevent a new truce and during Christmas 1915 it was war “as usual”.
How nice would it be that now in 2022 there would be such an informal truce in the Ukrainian-Russian War and that now it would lead to a real truce and maybe to the end of the war. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?
But I let my imagination run away and actually I am writing not about a Christmas truce but about a blog machine. As you have seen, now there are machines that can free you from the task to write an article or a blog and maybe even a book. So, in case I have no time to write a blog or want to take a day off, I can simply go to the OpenAI website and let it write my blog. Gradually this blog machine will become better and soon you’ll see no difference any longer between a human-written blog and a machine-written blog. How useful would it be for me! But should I be happy with it? For if this trend will go on, soon the machines will outrun the human beings on this earth. They’ll even need no longer an order that tells them what to do. Machines can live their own lives. Then human beings will be superfluous on this earth. They can die out and nobody will miss them. But aren’t we yet already busy working on our own extinction?
Merry Christmas

Random quote
Misunderstanding is normal, understanding is the exception.

Gerhard Roth (1942-)

Travelling: “I know what I fly from, but not what I seek”

Sometimes, when reading Montaigne, I think that I simply can quote him in order to describe how I myself think about a certain theme. Just change some words, modernize the situation described a little bit and you get my thought. Take travelling. My wife and I often travel without a real plan what to do and where to go. That is, we have determined a region where to go, a date when to leave and one when to return (and even the return date can change during the trip) and then we go. Usually, we have some vague idea what to visit, but what we’ll really do is usually only determined when we have arrived in our region of destination. Often we don’t know in the morning where’ll we’ll sleep in the evening. We can even change the region where to go during the trip. So on our way to Slovakia we ended in Switzerland, for at the end of our first day we discovered that it wasn’t only hot in Slovakia, but that the heatwave would last at least a week, while in Switzerland the weather was fine and cool. I think that Montaigne was also the kind of person who liked this way of travelling very much. Anyway, when I read his travel diary I got the impression that he let the progress of the trip depend on the quality of the landscape and the cities he passed and on the persons he happened to meet. Of course, much was different for a traveller in Montaigne’s days. Then a traveller had to go by foot, horse, coach or cart, while today people travel by car, train or plane and sometimes by bike and only rarely yet by foot. Montaigne preferred to travel by horse and I am like him in the sense that I made my best trips by bike or car, the modern variations of horse and coach.
Nevertheless, before I leave  my mood is always: Why should I go? Why this trouble? Isn’t it good enough here at home? For, as Montaigne tells us in essay III-9 of the Essays, titled “Of Vanity”, “I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.” The future is uncertain; I don’t know what is waiting me. Therefore, so Montaigne, “I am hard to be got out … I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbor, as for the longest voyage.” Even so, Montaigne doesn’t stay at home, for if others “tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is hard to be believed: ‘There are so many forms of crime!’; secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much as our own.” In other words, you think that at home it is best; you think “home sweet home”. But is it really so? There are many ways of life, and maybe we can learn from them. So let’s go. And once my wife and I have closed the door of our house behind us, everything is different. We are on our way and being on the way is a different kind of feeling. “Being once upon the road, I [Montaigne] hold out as well as the best.”
Travelling in the proper sense is not going somewhere but it is pure going. The real travel has no destination. It is moving, even when you stop for a rest, for sightseeing or for the night. “I neither undertake [a travel] to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me.” Sometimes it happens that you pass a place where you would like to stay longer: “I have seen places enough a great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed.” And sometimes Montaigne really did. For instance, he stayed in Rome for months, though not without a break. Also then he couldn’t withstand the inner pressure to travel. He left Rome for some time for a trip through central Italy. Although my wife and I never made such a long stop during our travels as Montaigne did in Rome, once we see a reason to stay somewhere longer, we do. But each travel has an end, alas. During his famous trip through Europe, Montaigne was called back from Rome by the French King, who had appointed him mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne left reluctantly. Nevertheless, also his homeward journey was yet a real travel: not a straightforward horse ride to Bordeaux, but staying here, staying there, until he could no longer postpone his return, since the king was calling him. For my wife and I usually the date of return has been planned, for instance, because we had booked a ferry already before our trip. But in the absence of such an urge, also for us the date of return is not really fixed. This return then is always a bit double: a longing to be home again but also a wish to stay on the move. Once at home there is always a nostalgia for the travel that has ended and a reluctance to return to the stream of daily life. It lasts a few days and then the rat race of “real” life appears to have been taken up again. This lasts till we think again: Where shall we go? Where will our next travel be? But also this is double, for then the mind starts to think: Why this trouble? Isn’t it good enough here at home? I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek. But isn’t that the sense of travelling?

Random quote
We may be very uncomfortable with our monkey past, but it is undeniable.

Gerhard Roth (1942-)

Deleting monuments

Budapest, Hungary: The Memento Park

Recently in the Netherlands, and especially at the Leiden University, a discussion was going on, whether it was allowed to remove a painting because you don’t agree with the representation. Briefly, a painting showing smoking professors of the university board had been removed because some people didn’t agree with its contents: It was not acceptable that a university board existed of only old men who, moreover, were smoking. In other words, the painting was not in agreement with the present values. Note that the painting had been made in 1976 and that it showed the actual board of the Leiden University in that year. Although the painting has been hung back in the meantime, the question remains: Must a piece of art be removed, if you don’t agree anymore with its representation? But actually, the problem is wider than only about art, for also monuments are often under discussion, because people don’t agree any longer with what they express. For instance, in the USA statues of slave holders are under discussion, in the UK the question was raised whether a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a representative of colonialism in Southern Africa, should be removed from the University of Oxford, and in the Netherlands there was a controversy about a statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the founder of Batavia (Jakarta) and former governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, who harshly ruled this colony. And at the moment in the Baltic States monuments are destroyed that had been placed there in Soviet times.
Often there are good reasons to remove a controversial monument – in this blog it includes also a piece of art –or to change its context, but often there is also much against doing so. So let’s see why a monument should be removed:

- The monument is considered to represent a former oppressor or it is not in agreement with the views of the present regime. That’s why Soviet monuments are removed in the Baltic states, but also why in Hong Kong recently monuments have been removed that commemorate the killings on the Tian An Men Square in Beijing in 1989. However, already when the Soviet monuments were placed, many people detested them.
- The view what the monument represents has changed during the years. So, the view on Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Cecil Rhodes and slaveholders have changed through the years and nowadays nobody would make monuments for them anymore. However, also when these monuments were made, they were often already controversial.
- The monument as such is not under discussion but the maker is. I discussed such a case already three years ago in my blog on “degenerate art”: a painting in the room of the former German chancellor Angela Merkel was removed, since the painter appeared to have been a Nazi.

Undoubtedly, there are more reasons that a monument might be removed, but I think that these points make clear that removing a monument, because the idea it represents has changed, is not just a matter of correcting a false point of view. If that were the case, there would be nothing against destroying a “false” monument. However, by destroying a false monument not only a supposedly false point of view is corrected, but also a little bit of a once accepted view on the state of affairs in the world is destroyed, so a part of history. The idea that humans are historically developing beings is denied by cutting off a part of the past. For that’s what actually happens when a monument is removed. One does as if not seeing, is not being; as if it never existed; as if we are not like that. Moreover, a chance to learn from the past is destroyed, with the possibility that mistakes of the past will be repeated again in future. On the other hand, some monuments were already controversial at the moment they were placed, and this makes the question even more complicated, for why should we maintain what was already controversial from the beginning? Another complicating factor is that a monument in my sense can also be a piece of art or have artistic value.
Here I shall not elaborate these points, but I want to propose some possible solutions:

- Monuments can be removed and then destroyed. Sometimes this is the best solution, but in a sense it is destroying history, as I just explained.
- Monuments can be moved to a more appropriate place. This can be a less striking place (so not any longer on a central square but in a park), a museum or other appropriate place. For instance, in Budapest, monuments from Soviet times have been collected somewhere outside the town in an open-air museum where everybody can see them: The Memento Park.
- Monuments can be adapted in some way or a plaquette can be added describing the context of its origin and what’s wrong with it. There are many ways to re-interpret the original representation of a monument.
- A monument can be transformed into a new monument, a “counter-monument”. This is what happened with a monument of the former dictator Alfred Stroessner of Paraguay. The old monument is used as material for a new monument or it is fit in a new monument, while parts of the old monument are still visible.

Removing monuments, including pieces of arts, is re-interpreting and rewriting history. This can be a tricky affair, for what to do with the old monument? Destroy it? But that’s destroying a part of your history with all its dangerous sides. But as I have shown, there are several solutions that do right to both the past and the present. Anyway, monuments are fundamentally political, but society changes and what is “innocent” today may be “unacceptable” tomorrow. However, today re-interpreted monuments may tomorrow again be unacceptable.

Random quote
Anyone who does not know how much he does not know will find himself very wise.

Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678)

Solitary confinement

Alexey Navalny

At the moment that I write this, the Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexey Navalny is in solitary confinement. That is, he has been placed in a small punishment cell, where he has to stay for fourteen days. He is allowed to take two books with him and to use the prison kiosk, albeit on a very limited budget. It is already for the fifth time since mid-August that Navalny has to undergo this kind of punishment. Here it is not the place to write why Navalny has been placed in solitary confinement, but I think that it is a good moment to write a blog about what being kept in isolation means to you.
What actually is solitary confinement? Let’s quote the Wikipedia: “Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which the inmate lives in a single cell with little or no meaningful contact with other people.” A prisoner can be isolated for different reasons, for example, as a result of a court decision; as a disciplinary sanction in the prison; in order to protect the prisoner; and so on. The essence is that the prisoner is deprived of any contact with other prisoners and has a minimal contact with the warders. The punishment can vary from having to spend the whole day in a prison cell, with the exception of doing exercises outdoors once a day, to complete sensory isolation, when the prisoner is placed in a pitch-dark cell in which no sound from the outside can be heard. The latter is the worst.
Especially complete sensory isolation has devastating consequences for the functioning of your brain. Most people will think that the brain works this way: Via the eyes, ears and other senses the brain makes a representation of the world describing how the world outside looks like. Research has shown, however, that it works not this way but about like this: There is already a kind of description of the world in the brain and via the eyes, ears and other senses the brain receives input about the present state of the world. The brain compares the input with the description present and if there is a difference the brain updates the description with the help of the input. However, the updating doesn’t simply stop, if there is no input from the senses. The brain is continuously in flux and is continuously reordering and revising the world description with the help of the information that is already there and with the help of its imagination. That’s what is happening when you are dreaming when you are asleep, but also – which is a more serious effect of sense deprivation – when you are hallucinating. Then you produce your own fantasies in your mind and in the end you can become mad. And just this happens (usually already very soon) when a prisoner is placed in an isolation cell without any light and sound: the prisoner becomes mad. What exactly happens is different from person to person. Some are going to daydream and have strange fantasies; some are also going to bang their heads against the wall. Your brain runs riot. It’s terrible (see David Eagleman The Brain. The Story of You, 53-58).
But also less extreme forms of isolation are not without consequences for your mental health, for there is also another factor that seriously affects your mental health, besides sense deprivation: deprivation of human contacts. Humans are social beings that need other humans to survive. Being provided with all you need to survive physically (food, fresh air, free space to exercise, and the like) is not enough. Also deprivation of human contacts, while otherwise living in the best physical conditions, will make you mentally ill. It can make you physically ill as well. The list of health problems you can get is very long and I’ll not mention them all, but here are some. Mentally, you can suffer from anxiety, stress, depression, paranoia, outbursts of violence, suicide, etc., etc. Physically you can suffer from chronic headaches, eyesight deterioration, dizziness, fatigue, laziness, sleep problems, muscle pain, etc., etc. Moreover, it is not unlikely that these problems will not stop once the isolation has ended. They can stay with the ex-prisoner for the rest of his or her life and maybe lead to a premature death.
Therefore, solitary confinement must be avoided as much as possible and be used only in extreme situations. That’s what, for example, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says: “Solitary confinement should only be imposed in exceptional circumstances, as a last resort and for the shortest possible time.” (source Wikipedia) Then one can think of isolating a prisoner or psychiatric patient for a few hours after an extreme outburst of violence at most. The United Nations considers in the so-called Mandela Rules solitary confinement lasting longer than fifteen consecutive days as torture. (source here) And I think that it is torture, indeed, certainly if it lasts more than a short time, depending on the kind of isolation (complete sense deprivation and forced staying alone in a cell with TV, radio and books available are quite a different, of course). And, that – torture – is what they do to Navalny, certainly in view of the fact that, as said, he is being isolated already for the fifth time since mid-August. But all this throws also a grim light on the forced isolations ordered by the authorities everywhere in the world in order to stop the Covid pandemic. Even though these isolations were or are in most cases by far not as extreme as the forced isolations in prisons by way of punishment, even in these cases already we see the negative health effects that human isolation can bring.

 Sources: see the links in the text, plus this article by Tiana Herring and this one in Medical News Today.

Random quote
The less one knows himself, the more he will be pleased with himself.

Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678)

Botulinum toxin and empathy

An important problem in philosophy is the so-called problem of other minds. In short, it involves the question how we can understand the intentions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, etc. of other persons, if we can only see their behaviour. An important step towards the solution of this problem was the discovery of “mirror neurons”. Mirror neurons are neurons that fire when a person acts, but also when he or she sees another person acting. If the latter happens, your mirror neurons mirror in your mind what the other does. Not only humans have mirror neurons, but also primates and birds have, and maybe other animals as well. In fact, they have been first discovered in macaque monkeys (by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team).
It has become clear that mirror neurons play an important part in reading the minds of others, so in seeing and understanding what other people think, feel, intend and so on, although it is not the only factor that helps interpret other humans. Other important factors are what people say, what they actually do and their gestures, for instance. Autistic people have the problem that they cannot read the mind of others well, which may be caused by a malfunctioning of their mirror neurons.
Our mirror neurons are continuously active, when we see others. “To better understand how we read faces so rapidly and automatically”, David Eagleman and his team invited test persons to his lab, so he tells us in his book The Brain. The Story of You. The test persons got two electrodes on their faces and they were asked to look at photos of faces. “When participants looked at a photo that showed, say, a smile, or a frown, we were able to measure short periods of electrical activity that indicated their own facial muscles were moving, often very subtly. This is because of something called mirroring: they were automatically using their own facial muscles to copy the expressions they were seeing. A smile was reflected by a smile, even if the movement of their muscles was too slight to be visually obvious. Without meaning to, people ape one another.” Note that normally you are not aware of this mirroring process and that it happens automatically. (pp. 154-5)
This mirroring effect when you see others may explain why married couples tend to resemble each other after many years. It’s not only because they get the same habits, tend to wear the same kinds of clothes and the like, but also because, so research suggests, “they’ve been mirroring each other’s faces for so many years that their patterns of wrinkles start to look the same”. (ibid. 155)
All this casts a negative light on the use of Botox and other such products as a beauty treatment. Botox is the brand name for Botulinum toxin, a very poisonous product protein derived from a bacterium. Only a few drops in your brain can kill you, because it paralyses your muscles. Injected in your facial muscles, it paralyses them, too (locally), and thereby reduces wrinkling. Besides the supposed effect that it makes you more beautiful, there may be another effect of using botulinum toxin for reducing wrinkling as well. Eagleman and his team showed the photos used in their research also to Botox users. He tells us: “Their facial muscles showed less mirroring on our electromyogram. No surprise there–their muscles have been purposely weakened. The surprise was something else.” Eagleman asked both Botox users and non-Botox users to look at photos with expressive faces “and to choose which of four words best described the emotion shown.” The result? On average, Botox users were worse at identifying the emotions in the pictures correctly.” Why? “One hypothesis suggests”, so Eagleman, “that the lack of feedback from their facial muscles impaired their ability to read other people.” (ibid. 155-7)
Reading emotions in the face of someone else is mirroring them with your own face and then interpreting with your brain what your own face is doing. But if your own face cannot mirror the face of the other, there is nothing to read there for your brain and as a consequence, nothing to see in the face of the other. The emotions of the other cannot be felt. So, the malfunctioning of your facial muscles makes understanding the other and feeling with the other more difficult. Cosmetic beauty can have its price, if this explanation is right.

Random quote
My greatest business always is to keep free from business.

Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389 or 390)

Dictatorship and language

One of the main characteristics of Orwell’s type of dictatorship is that people are oppressed by manipulating the language they use. It was thesis 2 in Onfray’s summary of Orwell’s theory in my blog last week: Impoverish the language and manipulate the thoughts with the help of words. This is done by introducing new words and banning undesired words, if not by making a completely new language. Sometimes words get a double, possibly contradictory, meaning. The word “peace” is a case in point, not only in Orwell’s Big Brother Society but also in the present world. A “peace keeping” operation is a kind of military operation performed by United Nations troops. Really peace keeping should be sending mediators. But in this case we can say yet that it is an independent international organisation that tries to end a violent conflict, which is a step towards peace, indeed. But how often hasn’t it happened that one country has invaded a neighbouring country on the pretext of bringing there peace, while in fact it was nothing but forcing the neighbouring country to the will of the invader. Or, another case, just say that your neighbouring country is governed by Nazis and you have constructed a pretext to invade it.
There is a basic idea behind the view above: By manipulating the language people speak we can influence their thoughts. Even more – and we see this also in Orwell’s approach of the relation between dictatorship and language – the idea is that by manipulating their language we can determine how others think. It’s a common idea. Not only political writers like Orwell once thought so, but also linguists assumed a relationship between language and thought: the Sapir-Whorf thesis. The strong version of the thesis says that the relationship is deterministic. However, it has become clear that this strong version is not true. The relationship between language and thinking is more complicated. As a consequence, in this sense a strong version of an Orwellian kind of dictatorship cannot exist: A dictatorial language instrument that oppresses people by determining how they think does not exist. And how could it? It would suppose that the Sapir-Whorf thesis was not valid for the leader(s) of the Big Brother Society but only for the common people.
The idea that we can determine people’s thoughts by manipulating the way they speak supposes that thinking and language are two sides of the same coin, but this idea is quite problematic. For instance, don’t animals think because they don’t speak? Cannot we discriminate colours if we haven’t a word for it? In Russian, there are words for light blue and dark blue, while in Dutch there is only one word for both. Does it mean that the Dutch cannot discriminate these shades of blue? Of course not. Such examples illustrate that thought and language are different things. However, although your language doesn’t determine your thinking, it does have an influence on it. So, although the strong Sapir-Whorf thesis is not tenable, there is a weak version that says that their language does have an impact on what people think, and there is clear evidence that supports this weak version. For instance, in many languages some substantives have a female gender and other substantives have a male gender, but in each language it is different whether a substantive is female or male. So in Spanish “bridge” (puente) is male, while in German (Brücke) it is female. Lera Boroditsky discovered that, when asked to describe “bridge”, the Spanish speakers said “big”, “dangerous”, “long”, “strong”, “sturdy” and “towering”, while the German speakers said “beautiful”, “elegant”, “fragile”, “peaceful”, “pretty” and “slender”. Other tests gave equal findings. As Boroditsky concludes: “Apparently, even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.” (see my blog dated 18 November 2013).
For this reason, but also based on what I see happening around me, I think that the effect of language manipulation for political reasons is somewhat different from what Orwell’s theory of dictatorship supposes. Orwell’s theory implicitly endorses the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis, and this view is not tenable, as we just have seen. However, there is clear evidence that a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis is true and that language does have an influence on how we think. This means that language still can be used to oppress people and to affect what they do, but the effect is not deterministic. There is no strong version of Orwell’s dictatorial language theory. Instead, there is a weak version, based on the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis. By manipulating language dictators can try to influence social, and so political behaviour. If it is not allowed to talk about certain themes or if people are forced to use certain words, dictators can try to prevent that people are going to communicate about certain political issues and next that they organise themselves around a certain idea in a way the dictator doesn’t like. “No communication, no organisation”, is the slogan of a dictator. To make communication more difficult is to make it more difficult that people oppose themselves and organise themselves with like-minded people. If you call an invasion a “special military action” instead of a “war”, maybe people feel less the need to oppose it (or so the dictator hopes). Word manipulation can influence people in the same way as an ideology does. However, the effect of language manipulation is not deterministic. It does not exclude alternative ways of thinking. This is what we see in dictatorships happen and this is how dictators use language in order to oppress people: Manipulation with words. Nevertheless, opposition remains possible and also often exists. 

Random quote
The meaning of something to you is all about your web of associations, based on the whole history of your life experiences.

David Eagleman (1971-)

A theory of dictatorship

Photo taken at Fort Breendonk, Belgium

About half a year ago I have written the blog “How to become a dictator”. I propounded there the view of the French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik about this question. Of course, Cyrulnik is not the only one who has dealt with the problem. Not only political theorists and other scholars have developed dictatorship theories, also novelists have done so. The best known novelist who did was George Orwell (1903-1950), who treated the theme in two novels: Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). I think that all my readers will have heard of these important books and maybe they have read them as well. Nevertheless, as it goes, at least often with me, maybe you keep something in your mind of the books you have read, especially if you consider them important, but gradually it fades away. So it happened to me also for Orwell’s books, even though I have read them several times. Therefore, I was happy to come across a book by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, titled Théorie de la dictature, that compiles Orwell’s work on dictatorship and discusses its main theses in a clear way. Since nowadays the power of dictators is growing again, I want to share with you the main lines of Orwell’s theory of dictatorship, as explained by Onfray.
When talking of dictatorships, most readers will think of Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, and indeed, these are the most important dictatorships in the present world (certainly in view of the size of the countries, for the situation in a country like North Korea is even far worse). However, dictatorship is not a black-and-white phenomenon in the sense that a country is a dictatorship or it isn’t. Moreover, often a country doesn’t suddenly become a dictatorship but gradually develops to become one (see Russia since 1991). It’s a phenomenon on a sliding scale. A country can be more dictatorial or less dictatorial. It can also move into one direction or in the opposite direction. Actually, Onfray’s book is not a warning against Russia or China (although it helps understand these countries, too), but a warning against dictatorial tendencies in France and the European Union. So, if you live in a democratic country, then you can use Orwell’s view also to judge your own country and use it as a guide to stopping dictatorial tendencies. However, in democratic countries dictatorial tendencies often don’t come from the top but are the result of developments on all levels of society. It’s an interaction between social developments and governmental interventions. Keeping this in mind, here then are the main lines of Orwell’s theory of dictatorship summarized in seven theses by Onfray with a little bit interpretation by me:

1) Destroy liberty. Watch people continuously; prevent that they have a personal life and that they live on their own; let them participate in common feasts and ceremonies; manipulate and uniformise their thoughts and views.
2) Impoverish the language and manipulate the thoughts with the help of words. Introduce new words and if possible a completely new language or terminology. Ban undesired words. Give words a double, possibly contradictory, meaning. Prefer oral texts to written texts. Try to prevent that people read the classical authors or rewrite them. A present example here is the term “special military operation” instead of “war” for Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
3) Do away with the truth. Develop and teach an ideology. Use the press as your instrument. Spread false news. Only what the authorities say is true.
4) Manipulate history. Erase undesirable past facts. Rewrite history and “make” new facts. Destroy books and write literature according to the official norms.
5) Deny or ignore nature. Deny natural human desires or just use them as a way to distract people from the real problems (sex, sport). Promote an ideal type of living; an ideal model of man. Regulate procreation. Medicalize life. See, for example, how China deals with the Covid pandemic. On the one hand, it tries to stop the spread of the coronavirus with measures which may reduce the spread of the virus but cannot destroy it (nature is ignored), while on the other hand these measures are a manner to keep the people under control.
6) Propagate hate. Make an internal or external enemy. Make war. Say that those who criticize your measures are psychiatric patients or criminals; make them “confess” their sins. Examples here are the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (the internal enemy) and Ukraine and the NATO (the external enemy).
7) Strive for full power and control of all aspects of life. Take full control of the education of children in all its aspects. Make your own opposition. Put the elite to your hand. Make that scientific facts are only known to those who really need them (so to the scientists). Make people believe that they have something to say and that they have an influence, although, of course, the real power is in the hand of the leader(s).

This theory of power is based on Orwell’s imaginary worlds in Animal farm and 1984. Even in the most severe dictatorships, it can happen that its aspects are not fully realized and maybe never will be realized. But Orwell holds us a mirror that reflects a possible world; a world that has already partly been realized in some countries. If we may believe Onfray, France and the EU are on the way to become dictatorships. I think that this is a bit exaggerated. Nevertheless, we can see Onfray’s thesis as an early warning, and in order to see how France, the Netherlands and the EU are developing, we can use Orwell’s theory of dictatorship and Onfray’s interpretation as a checklist. If warned in time, maybe we can keep the situation under control, but for that we need more than a checklist but also people with a democratic mind. 

Random quote
However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her.

François Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

10,000 VIEWS !

My philosophical blog reached a milestone, for for the first time since I started writing philosophical blogs 15 years ago, I had more than 10,000 views in one month! To be exactly, my blog had in October 10,227 views! Yes, 10,227 views of my blog in a month.
More and more people are reading my blogs. Till last February, I had about 3,000 views a months and then gradually more people discovered my blog page, with the result that last month I broke the 10,000 limit. Thank you all !

The value of the banal

Lately, someone asked me whether I like big cities. When I said that I preferred little towns and the countryside, he replied that metropolises and big cities are interesting and multinational and that they attract many tourists, implying that little towns and the countryside are boring; even more, that they are something to look down upon. I don’t agree and I opposed that the countryside is often underestimated and that you can find there beautiful things that would certainly would deserve a place in a museum, if you wished to have it there. Although what I said is certainly true, I think that in some way I missed the point.
Before going on, I want to say that I certainly see the value and the interesting points of big cities. I have been in many big cities and national and regional cultural centres that have that function. I wrote in my last blog that recently yet I have been in Lille, France. I often come in Amsterdam and through the years I have visited the mayor metropolises and capitals of Europe, like London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin or Helsinki to mention a few, and I have been in Tokyo as well. It was nice to be there, although, it’s true, I preferred to stay there not too long. These cities have something that you don’t find in the countryside. And it is just for this, what these cities “have”, that people go there: their museums, their atmosphere, their internationality, their masses of people with many backgrounds; and so on. But does this mean that the countryside is not as valuable, and not as much worth to visit? People do go there, indeed, but even then people often go there for the special. For that special little museum, for that special splendid view from the mountains, or for the folklore, the local yearly festivities. The rest is banal, or so they think. I think, however, that little towns and the countryside are also worth to visit for the non-special; for what they are.
Now it is so that you can value the special only if you can value the banal, even if it is in a negative way. But is the banal really banal? If you think so, in fact, you misunderstand the value of normality; so the stream of life in which much is routine and continuously flowing. But by saying it this way, I make a mistake, for it seems to imply that you find the simple, “normal” life in the countryside and the exciting special life that is actually worth to live in the city. This is a false contrast, a false opposition. For it is not the city versus the countryside but the special against the normal, or the banal, if you want to call it that way, and you find as much normality or banality in the city as in the countryside. In fact, most city life is normal or banal. People wake up, go to work, school or whatever they do, and in the evening they go to bed. If they do something special, it can only be an escape from the normal, a deviation from the routine, for the normal is the base. Even for the celebrated painter, whose work hangs in a famous museum, for the member of the parliament, or for the successful businessman, most of life is routine. He or she brushes his/her teeth, parks his car, goes to a food shop and also most of their work is routine. But it is just these normal things that make life possible. Without eating, so going to a shop, for example, life is not possible. In this sense just the normal is the most special and in this way more valuable than the special.
However, this is not all. Montaigne tells us somewhere in his essay “Of Experience” (Essays Book III-13) “In my infancy, what they had most to correct in me was the refusal of things that children commonly best love, as sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes. My tutor contended with this aversion to delicate things, as a kind of over-nicety”. In other words, Montaigne wants to say, the normal, in this way the ordinary and common food, is not only the base of life, it has also value as such. It is not vulgar, as apparently Montaigne’s tutor thought and as many people tend to think. See how Montaigne continues his text: “Indeed ’tis nothing else but a difficulty of taste, in anything it applies itself to. Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread, bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate. There are some who affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst the partridges; ’tis all very fine; this is the delicacy of the delicate; ’tis the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes [dislikes] ordinary and accustomed things” (my italics).
Indeed, how often doesn’t it happen that people highly value a refined taste and look down upon those who don’t or who even prefer the kitschy. They make a distinction between High Culture and low culture, as if there isn’t simply only culture (or Culture, if you like). Taste is a matter of taste, but even if there is a refined taste, we can only value it if we know the normal taste. The special rests on the normal. And what is actually against appreciating the normal, for not only does it constitute life, it constitutes the special as well.