I was thinking earlier tonight, "You know Bob, you have put up that long extract of Orwell reflecting on facts in politics (Orwell On Fact and Reality), but you have not done any exegesis with it." But here early in the AM (6/5/21) I was hit by something that epitomizes perfectly how the dilemma as to facts has reached a very high pitch.
See, for instance, Andrew Stiles' "Libs: Emily Wilder and Nikole Hannah-Jones Were Victims of Conservative ‘Disinformation Campaign’ in the Washington Free Beacon this morning. Here's a snippet from it:
University of North Carolina journalism professors Alice Marwick and Daniel Kreiss are just as convinced that Nikole Hannah-Jones was the target of multiple "conservative disinformation campaigns." Writing in Slate, the professors argue that criticizing Hannah-Jones and her controversial 1619 Project, a revisionist history of the American founding that has been widely criticized by historians, is tantamount to waging disinformation.
It's "possible," they concede, that some critics might be "doing so in good faith," but that doesn't mean their criticism is any less disinformative. "Debate and disagreement are at the heart of academia—but conservative disinformation campaigns are deliberately spread to advance particular political and ideological goals," Marwick and Kreiss write. Of course, by this standard, most of what the mainstream media do on a daily basis might be described as a disinformation campaign.
Our UNC journalism professors are mired in confusion of stunning depth. They seem totally ("perhaps in good faith," as they might put it) oblivious to the blurring of those intellectual boundaries whose precise location is at the heart of the controversy, if that is what it is, regarding facts. My guess is neither professor ever used the word "epistemology" once in, say, an undergraduate term paper. They clearly have not explored the subject at a graduate level.
Where to begin? How about with the profs' obsession with motivation instead of message? They deem it likely that conservative observers can, yes, be acting in "good faith" yet still be dissemnating this thing called -- rather loosely, it must be admitted -- "disinformation." So these observers somehow mean well, are striving to discern truth from error, but must be so deluded that they are unaware of their "political and ideological goals."
That is, of course, nonsense, as Stiles points out in summary fashion:
...by this standard, most of what the mainstream media do on a daily basis might be described as a disinformation campaign.
This simply won't do. The complete absence in the public square of any focus on, say, to what criteria ought appeal be made to sift out truth from error is daunting, and bodes ill for our future. This is not a problem only recently thrust on us. It's not as if we have not had a steady dialogue in Western Civilization for oh say a coupla thousand years on the question. But thanks to the combined efforts of French and German philosophy faculties in the last century, and their sycophantic followers in the English departments of practically every college and university in the Anglophone world, no discussion of claims to truth versus error is deemed to have any more weight than, say, conversations as to whether anchovies should ever be served as a pizza topping. (The answer to that is of course YES.)
Orwell saw this coming in the Forties. It is precisely this development that he said scared him "more than bombs." I refer of course to this from him in the extract cited above: "...the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world." Rationality and objectivity are relics of the Bad Old Past and thanks to recent elucidations are now known to be devious attempts by evil white heterosexual men to (EEK!) maintain their CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE.
That "public square" I mentioned? It no longer rings with considered efforts to persuade. The sweaty, red-faced orators standing (literally!) on soap boxes at various points across the Boston Common may be gone, but much more has been lost than their picturesque presence. They had no problem with others of their number, at other locations, plying their assembled crowds with their efforts to persuade. They wouldn't understand the current, apparent, need to eliminate opposing views, as if such things are toxic to the public weal.
How much have we lost? How much trouble are we really in?
Did Nietzsche really say, "Facts are precisely what we don't have."? I think he did, and that was all the pinheads teaching "English" at our higher ed facilities had to see. Under some of the meanings of the word "fact" Nietzsche was right. But Orwell's gift for clarity comes to the fore in his "Looking Back On The Spanish War" article. I will perforce quote an entire paragraph, which will serve to benchmark how much we have lost:
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'the facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'science'. There is only 'German science, 'Jewish science' etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five -- well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs -- and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
Here's the money quote: "It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys." For our journalism profs we are not all of "one species of animal." We are either in the ranks of what the wonderful John Derbyshire terms the "good white people," or we are dangerous insurrectionists plotting our next destructive foray into the gated communities of the Beautiful People. We are in Bizarro-World, which unsurprisingly Orwell described perfectly in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946):
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Finis
Mark Steyn has an entry, "Caving In," on his site, and the first word to leap off my monitor was "Orwellian." I am, with my focus on Orwell -- see, for instance, Orwell On Fact and Reality -- in excellent company. Steyn lays out the striking parallels between Orwell's Ministry of Truth (1984) and our own CNN, Facebook, Google and Twitter. They are the direct descendants of the Ministry.
Last month Steyn contributed to Hillsdale College's Imprimis series, and closes the piece with a meditation on language and its uses and abuses. A couple of paragraphs if you don't mind:
I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to “counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the truth. Even on FOX News, I have noticed, news anchors now talk about “gender assigned at birth,” as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex. There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.
Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.
Orwell would like to meet Steyn is my guess.
I submit that in his contribution yesterday (6/6/2021) to The Catholic Thing, "Those Dead Dogmas," Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap. did exactly that for the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The article is a model of clear, positive exegesis. Check it out, especially if, like me, you are not a Catholic.
I'm just learning here early Tuesday morning that the slug Biden managed to pass the weekend without a mention of D Day.
Sitting in for Mark Levin, Ben Ferguson repaired this gap in my awareness by playing the prayer audio. Here is a direct link to that audio courtesy history.com:
https://www.history.com/embed/21167912
I more and more lay hold of Archbishop Vigano's characterization of our present moment in history: The Children of Light versus The Children of Darkness. Even FDR knew enough on the eve of the landings in Normandy to offer a prayer, not a speech.
Stuff I can't remember!
I cannot seem to keep this man's name in my head: Paul Weiss. (Nor Bob Zany!)
Also: "Neurath's boat" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat
Also:
"...a society must incorporate the rationalizing power symbolized by scientific knowledge, for otherwise it will be a fatally split society- split between a powerful elite and the disenfranchised mass. To this we add now: an irrational elite is the most dangerous of all."
Holton "On-The-Integrity-Of-Science-The-Issues-Since-Bronowski" (date?)
Also: Marcia Sankowsky (Do I have that right? Is this Marcia Germaine Hutchinson?)
Also: most important date in the history of modern Western civilization: 1687. First publication of Newton's Principia.
AND THE TERM I CAN NEVER RECALL: CONTINGENT (OPPOSITE TO NECESSARY).
New favorite conductor: Paavo Järvi
Elusive mental status exam term: labile
Ortho surgeon who did my fusion: Lucas
Alvin Francis Poussaint, M. D.
Emphasis added to Bridgman quote below Aug. 25, 2021.
From: Bob Bernstein <bob@fanatick.org>
To: Gary Parker <gary.parker@gmail.com>
Subject: Percy Bridgman: Absurdly Brilliant
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2021 20:34:15
User-Agent: Alpine 2.23.2 (DEB 509 2020-10-04)
"It may perhaps be hopeless ever to expect a mathematical formulation of the observer; the fact that the theory is itself a creature of the brain of the observer who is trying to formulate a theory which shall include his own brain would lead one to expect mathematical difficulties."
The Nature of Physical Theory p.121.
I believe Bridgman's bottom-line insight is:
"...what we mean by physical reality is to a large extent a matter of convention and convenience." ibid. p.120.
A tad underwhelming one might say, but in saying that I am only showing my own hand of cards in this game. In this next paragraph from the same work Bridgman NAILS ME:
nb. "Jeans" -- cited below -- was an English physicist and astronomer working during the period of these earth-shaking developments in physics e.g. relativity and quantum mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jeans
"The feeling that all the steps in a mathematical theory must have their counterpart in the physical system is the outgrowth, I think, of a certain mystical feeling about the mathematical construction of the physical world. Some sort of an idea like this has been flitting about in the back-ground of the paraphernalia of the thinking of civilization at least since the days of Pythagoras, and every now and then, perhaps after some particularly striking mathematical success, it bursts forth again like a crop of mushrooms after a rain, as in the recent fervid exclamation of Jeans that "God is a mathematician." This mystical feeling involves, I think,a feeling for the "real existence" of principles according to which this universe is run. We have seen how meaningless is the contention that principles exist independent of the mind in which they are formulated. What Jeans might have said is that Man is a mathematician, and reflected that it is no accident that he forms nature in his own image." p.67.
I very much regret that Bob Castiglione of the RIC philosophy department is not alive to (continue to) join me in these explorations.
--
What can be asserted without evidence can be
dismissed without evidence.
Hitchens' Razor
The following text is for the present submitted without comment.
"If all you have is a hammer...everything starts to look like a fact -- um, I mean..."
The remarkable Cambridge (UK) philosopher, the late John Wisdom, began his landmark essay "Gods" (1944) with this: "The existence of God is not an experimental issue in the way it was."
Belief in God is not now usually put to the test by looking for the results, say, of a particular prayer or ritual. If the desired outcome fails to materialize, suspicion first falls on the prayer; there must have been something faulty in the intention. The initial desire behind the prayer deserves blame, not God. Whether a divine all-powerful benevolent Creator exists is not seen anymore as a question susceptible of being "settled" by a sufficiently diligent collection and collation of facts.
In Western modernity, this has become the accepted wisdom regarding most questions involving "ultimate concerns" (Tillich's phrase). So-called "natural theology," which purports to extract evidence and consequent compelling reasoning from the physical, natural world in support of God's existence and estimable character, has for the most part been confined to a corner of Roman Catholic teaching, being, as it was, a component of the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas to the question. The modern point of view, holding sway since, roughly, the end of the eighteenth century, holds that the really difficult, and most important questions that confront us are not such as can be answered by any imaginable collection of facts, but are instead tangles that demand increased clarity of thought. Conceptual muddles are what bedevil us, not lack of information. Historically, this has been the conclusion since Hume and Kant tackled the foundations of modern science, and left them, still, for the most part not on solid footings.
As an aside it ought to be noted here that the dubiously named enterprise known as "creation science," rather than seeking to make inferences from facts observed in nature to God's existence starts with the latter claim and then attempts to explain in supposed theoretical fashion the facts of evolution. But this is really a dog in another fight, namely the one about the true character of scientific method. What's central to the present discussion is the importance attached to facts in all kinds of diverse settings; their presumed Divine Authorship is yet another fight, one we will bypass for now.
If our ultimate concerns all bear question marks, do we labor more under a dearth of facts, or in a fog of confused thought? Well you may ask, "What are these vital questions that give you so much pause?" Fair question. Let's take a shot:
Is the human mind fitted to understand the universe?
What is reality?
When does life begin?
Does anything exist independently of our idea of it?
In the context of this discussion, here's the real kicker:
What is a fact?
That last one is useful, as it brings out in stark outline the folly of relying on the relentless, and ever-widening search for facts to answer our most basic concerns. This search has gained momentum as more and more aspects of human experience appear to fall under the aegis of something called "science." The medical field especially, awash in new genetic findings almost daily, adds its powerful imprimatur to the notion that very few significant questions ultimately will be left standing when all the data "is in."
We are told that the availability of cheap computing machinery has spawned a new branch of mathematics: experimental mathematics. Are we now to believe that fundamental problems in mathematics have resolved themselves into "factual" questions? Alas, we are going to be bogged down for some time, since the following question is hardly one that can ever be answered by any imaginable collection of facts:
What is scientifc method, and what makes it preferable to, say, divination?
No doubt many will rush in at this point with vague talk about how science can predict events, but actually very, very few sciences have developed to the point where their predictions are much more than educated bets on future outcomes. Physics, chemistry, and some parts of biology can exercise precise predictive capability based on theoretical laws. For the rest of them, they are at best "correlational" pursuits. This, of course, is the wide open barn door through which creation science yokels can drive their buggies into downtown Boards of Education. But to listen to the proud peacocks of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the line between science and beguiling fiction is clear for all to see! Science deals with natural causes of events! Everyone knows that!
By now, you should be ahead of me. You should have already framed in your mind the next addition to our list of important questions which no imaginable collection of facts can ever answer. No? Ok, don't blink: What is nature? How should we discern the natural from what is not natural?
The blame for the creationism debacle in Kansas lies squarely with our scientific community, which has comfortably ignored (for the most part) most all of the philosophical discussion of science that has transpired, as noted, since Hume and Kant pursued their investigations more than some two hundred years ago. That's a long time for perhaps our most powerful intellectual community to ignore the crumbling of its own foundations. And now the piper wants to be paid.
Physicists may enjoy contributing to ventures such as the film What The Bleep Do We Know!?, but if we are all only involved in crafting edifying guiding fictions, then let no one take umbrage when the folks from the other side of the tracks notice that no guiding fiction is any better than any other guiding fiction. Isn't that a fact?
But, when all is said is done, when I look at a pencil sitting in a glass of water, I know the pencil is still straight. I know what is fiction, and what is not. Isn't that a fact?