Greece State-Church Troubles

Go to 9:18 to see the part about Greece. Damon moved to Scotland from Greece and is calling the Atheist Experience in Austin during this clip.

">

The call continues here, but no interesting callers come afterwards, in my opinion.

">

Cohen, The Man Exposed

Eric Stockhausen

Précis

In "Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat", G. A. Cohen analyses capitalism and various political positions in regards towards capitalism. He correctly claims that freedom and unfreedom are compatible and that in a capitalist society one is free to sell one’s labour but not free to not participate in the game of capital gain. He contends with the libertarians and Nagel-like liberals because he disagrees for the rights reasons that economic and individual freedom is not the only kind freedom and that there is inherent unfreedom in the capitalist system. Cohen disagrees with Marxists who ignore the fact that there is such a freedom as being able to sell one’s labour. As Cohen exposes these Marxists' underlying contradiction by asking: “If the worker is not free to sell his labour power, of what freedom is the foreigner whose work permit is removed deprived?” (Cohen 165). He then criticizes Anthony Flew’s definition of Libertarianism by explaining that libertarians are not “‘opposed to any social or legal constraints on individual freedom’” but are defenders of capitalism (Cohen 167).

To explain why libertarians, like Flew, and liberals, like Nagel, overlook the interference inherent in a system that protects private property, Cohen offers a two-part explanation. For the first part, Cohen reminds that private property is being seen as a necessary part of human existence, separate from social and legal constraints. Because of this “tendency to failure of perception”, liberals and libertarians do not see the “particular way of distributing freedom and unfreedom” inherent in protecting private property rights (Cohen 170).

Relation to Researching Gender Equality:

Within the masculinist tradition of economic and freedom theory, Cohen makes a convincing case, but from Nancy Hirschmann's feminist theory of freedom, Cohen fundamentally misses out what capitalism is and can be. For example, after World War Two in the United States, men replaced women in the workplace; anti-feminists claimed that women who had jobs were taking them from men who deserved them; and some women had to work because they had no male counterpart to support them, like after many wars. Using Cohen’s language, married women had the freedom not to sell their labour but not the freedom to sell their labour, some unmarried or widowed women had the freedom to sell their labour but not to marry, some unmarried women could get married or attempt to be in the workforce, competing with male privilege and reduced pay. Post-war United States was a capitalist society, but Cohen claims capitalism is a system in which ‘one’ has the freedom to sell their labour and private property is protected. Most libertarians would claim that housewifery is not something a libertarian society would ban, so how did Cohen miss this aspect of freedom-unfreedom in capitalism?

This tendency to failure of perception, to use Cohen’s words, stems from a masculinist theory of freedom, which ignores the plights of women and families and speaks only for the male privilege. This process of male theorist creating male concepts of freedom for men is an age-old tradition masculinist thought that still affects theorist to this day. Sexist capitalism is still capitalism. Marriage, housewifery, and childrearing are part of everyday life in capitalism too.

This gross failure to include the freedom-unfreedom that women still face today in capitalism means theorists should start progressing towards a feminist criticism of freedom in capitalism. Anti-feminists to this day make the call that women who work weaken the family by not spending their time raising their kids and take jobs from men who need them. The sexist social constructions that can and do exist in a capitalist society does affect the distribution of freedom and unfreedom, and by including the social constructions in Cohen's theory, a feminist version of Cohen's theory of freedom and unfreedom in capitalism is more penetrating.

Cohen, G. A. "Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat." The Liberty Reader. edt. by David Miller. Paradigm    Publishers; Boulder, Colorado: 2006.

Mousetrap

 This was originally written a year ago.

The painted face, how real, how fake
Always tempting to say real, how much justice
In calling it more false than words.
It is but a painting

Aided by painted tongue
And painted praises
And painted company
And painted needs, belongings, emotions….

Palpable falseness….
To free reality from the hyperreal map
To tear it asunder and liberate the face
From its imaginings, its comfortable, pretentious smile

I remove the painting from upon the wall
From its high place and call it false
Then I point to the window it covered and say "Ah-ha"
The window be falsely colored, show me the color of the real world

I will not be made the fool.
Not by my fellow men, not be play upon like a pipe
Not contorted into a soulless machine made only to work endlessly
And produce more work for tireless tired generations to come sadly into being.

I do not open said window;
I tear it from its foundations
Climb the wall to oh glassy window which had been placed so highly.
The walls have ears but no mouth unlike the false face.

They hear without listening. The painted face spoke without speaking.
I must liberate myself, not be claimed by the wall.
I must remove the painted face, but not let its sticky surface capture me
And turn me into another false idol.

I will liberate myself through the hole I created.
No longer will false exercises hold me so tightly.
If I am to participate with the wall or the painting forever from my leap outside,
It shall be on my terms.

So I say unto the hearing wall, "Adieu!"

Values and Science

Many would have us believe values either come from religion or are baseless. In this post, I have several quotes about the negative response of that view. In Motivation and Personality, A. H. Maslow, a humanist psychologist, wrote:

This chapter [Higher and Lower Needs] will demonstrate that there are real psychological and operational differences between those needs called "higher" and those called "lower." This is done in order to establish that the organism itself dictates hierarchies of values, which the scientific observer reports rather than creates. It is necessary to prove the obvious because to many still consider that values can never be more than the arbitrary imposition upon data of the writer's own tastes, prejudices, intuitions, or other unproved or unprovable assumptions. (146)

Malsow is still relevant today. David Foster Wallace mentioned Maslow's value theory in April 2001 edition of Harpers, saying:

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. (41-42)

Democratic Spirit aside, Wallace mentions religious faith among qualities to which people dedicate their lives. Wallace is only half right in his description of Maslow's pyramid. On one hand, Maslow said:

The higher the need the less imperative is for sheer survival, the longer gratification can be postponed, and the easier it is for the need to disappear permanently. (147)

Religious faith does postpone gratification, supposedly until after death. It is not necessary for survival unless the culture threatens violence or death for heresy or apostasy. Under this light, Wallace may have correctly referenced Maslow with religious faith, but Maslow also said:

The casting out of values from psychology not only weakens it, and prevents it from reaching its full growth, but also abandons mankind either to supernaturalism or to ethical relativism. (146) 

Religious faith would be an appeal to supernatural ethics as a guide, while Maslow, a humanist, rejects that as abandoning mankind. 


Albert Camus in his Myth of Sisyphus claimed that the leap of faith is philosophical suicide. Not only suicide was a problem, but the leap of faith justifies human suffering and injustice through theodicy. Camus was on the side of humans against the human condition. The difference between Maslow and Camus is that Camus has self-realized ethics (e.g. "I choose to live; therefore, I place a value on living.") while Maslow finds them with science. In The Rebel, Camus wrote of his down-to-earth ethic:

“They [the early nihilists of Russian socialism] called themselves materialists; their bedside book was Buchner’s Force and Matter. But one of them confessed: ‘Every one of us was ready to go to the scaffold and to give his head for Moleschott and Darwin,’ thus putting doctrine well ahead of matter...Doctrine, taken seriously to this degree, has the air of religion and fanaticism” (155).

“Therefore they [the early nihilists of Russian socialism] do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas. To be precise, they live on the plane of ideas. To justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death...We are again confronted with a concept of rebellion which, if not religious, is at least metaphysical. Other men too, consumed with the same devouring faith as these, will find their methods sentimental and refuse to admit that any one life is equivalent of any other. They will then put an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will decide, quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else. The problem of rebellion will no longer be solved by arithmetic, but by estimating probabilities. Confronted with the possibility that the idea may be realized in the future, human life can be everything or nothing. The greater the faith that the estimator places in this final realization, the less the value of human life. At the ultimate limit, it is no longer worth anything at all” (170). 

A debate that happen October 5th between Sam Harris and Mark Oppenheimer, they discussed whether religion was a force of good in society. Mark Oppenheimer took the positive and said in his opening statement:

Religion responds to a deep, satisfying human need for ritual. And it often organises the human quests for ethics and meaning. To think about the common good, the purpose of life and how to live, it has proven useful to use religious stories or theology.

 Later Oppenheimer ends his argument with:

Finally, religion is fun. As a philosopher might say, it generates utility. Not everyone will enjoy reading religious books, or singing hymns, or puzzling over theological puzzles, or hunting for Easter eggs, or hearing a great sermon. And in a free society—the best kind—nobody has to. But for people who do enjoy these things, religion is certainly a force for good.

Sam Harris took the negative and said in his opening statement:

The important question is whether religion is ever the best force for good at our disposal. And I think the answer to this question is clearly “no”—because religion gives people bad reasons for being good where good reasons are available.

Harris ended his speech with:

What a person believes about the nature of reality matters—even when he or she is engaged in so simple a task as feeding the hungry. And wherever one finds unjustified beliefs appearing to bring benefit to humanity, it is generally easy to think of a set of justified beliefs that would bring greater benefit still. This is not an accident. Staying in touch with reality is rather useful. Which of the world's faiths can honestly claim to be doing that in the year 2010? 

I have provided different opinions, and I am convinced that secular morality is the way to go. There is still debate what kind of secular morality should exist. Of course morality should be reality-based, but can science determine it? I like the existentialist self-realization model but I am open to the arguments of Maslow and Harris. What do you guys think?

I want to be, but I am

I am young.
Evil harms me; tears blind.
I want to be mature,
So I do not cry.
I am strong.

I am old.
Evil harms them; eyes see.
I want to be human,
But I cannot cry.
I am weak.

(Just a reflection piece)