Eikonoklastes by Michael Hartl: Category Philosophy

Palpatine the Merciful, Sauron the Just, and Ripken the Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac

Michael Hartl — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:50:00 -0700

I have contrarian tendencies. When I watch movies, for example, I often find myself secretly rooting for the bad guy; operating under the theory that the winners write the history books, I try to imagine how the story might be different had the bad guy won. Might the Emperor have been more sympathetic if he’d had a chance to tell us his side of the story, instead of being thrown down a reactor shaft by his trusted protégé and having his Death Star blown up, not once, but twice, by a handful of self-righteous rebels? Had not a bunch of lily-white men and elves defeated his dark-skinned, multiracial, multi-species armies, might Sauron be seen as a wise and compassionate champion of the downtrodden of Middle Earth? There’s little doubt that’s how he would tell it, if he hadn’t been so rudely dispatched by some meddling riverfolk.

My contrarian habits extend to nonfiction characters as well. (I can tear down pretty much any historical figure, no matter how revered; I’d be happy to take requests.) Recently, I found myself ripping a new one on a contemporary hero—that paragon of the American work ethic, the great Cal Ripken Jr., recently inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

Despite an outstanding career in the field and in the batter’s box, Ripken is known in popular culture almost exclusively for The Streak, the incredible 2,632 games in a row he played between 1982 and 1998. It’s an article of faith that Cal Ripken Jr. represents the hard-working ideal, a self-sacrificing team-player who just wanted to win baseball games—so much so that he’d play through injuries, the flu, hemorrhoids, anything. But let’s look at Ripken through a contrarian lens. Setting aside the tremendous luck required for such a streak—both his genetic luck-of-the-draw durability and freakish avoidance of serious illness and injury—should we join the crowd and laud Ripken’s achievement?

Perhaps not. Consider that a baseball season consists of 162 games—that’s a lot of games even for a relatively undemanding sport. Consider also that even durable players can benefit from the occasional game off. If you want to maximize the probability of winning, it makes sense to have your best players take some time to recuperate, resting against weak opponents so that they can be fresh against stronger ones. What this means is that there were almost certainly times when it would have been in the best interest of the team for Cal Ripken Jr. to rest—but this would have meant breaking The Streak. In other words, Ripken may very well have sacrificed his team’s success for his own personal glorification. (That this was done with the complicity of his managers and probably teammates as well indicates that he wasn’t the only one willing to sacrifice the team’s performance for personal goals—in this case, the reflected glory of being a manager or teammate of the great Cal Ripken Jr.)

One can plausibly argue that winning isn’t the only goal of baseball, and defend The Streak on the grounds that it increased the value of Ripken’s team more than the extra wins would have. This is quite possibly true, but that’s not the argument people make; The Streak is always couched in terms of hard work, dedication, and doing whatever it takes to help your team win.

Despite being mainly ironic fun, there is a serious undercurrent to these sorts of thought experiments. Trying to imagine how the Emperor or Sauron might have been wronged by the official accounts—or how Cal Ripken Jr. might not be the humble, selfless team-player of media legend—is like push-ups for your critical thinking muscles. It’s only too easy to believe what everyone else believes, simply following conventional wisdom wherever it leads. I find that habitually going the other way is a useful mental exercise, even—or perhaps especially—when it leads to Palpatine the Merciful, Sauron the Just, and Ripken the Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac.

And don’t even get me started on Scrooge the Misunderstood.

Linguistic narcissism?

Michael Hartl — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 13:30:00 -0700

I have a hypothesis that some brilliant writers are afflicted by a kind of linguistic narcissism: their writing is so beautiful that they manage to convince themselves of bad ideas. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, wrote persuasively in favor of the Marxist view of human biology. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, crackling with wit and anecdote, advances the thesis that people are surprisingly good at making snap decisions on precious little information—except when they’re not.

Today I read the obituary of John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist known for his “witty and acid-penned” writing and critiques of consumerism and corporations. The brilliance of his writings may have blinded, not only his readers, but also Galbraith himself, to the flaws in his thinking.

To take one example, Galbraith once said that “I am struck by our superb capacity to manufacture consumer gadgetry, including electronic games, versus our capacity to produce schools.” His apparent astonishment is an indictment of “our” society’s priorities, but a simple rephrasing might ameliorate his confusion: “I am not struck by the superb capacity of private companies to manufacture consumer gadgetry, versus the capacity of governments to produce schools.”

My hypothesis could be wrong, of course; bad ideas might have nothing to do with verbal fluency. There are, after all, plenty of excellent writers whose principal ideas are not obviously wrong. But I suspect that some people’s capacity for self-deception is enhanced by their falling in love with their own (literary) voice.

Morality and God

Michael Hartl — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:32:00 -0700

What is the objective basis for morality? The answer isn’t “God”.

Since I view the existence of God as highly unlikely, God as moral arbiter seems similarly unlikely. Many people are perturbed by this; indeed, many reject atheism partially because they perceive nihilism to be the inevitable result—which, even if true, is simply an appeal to consequences.

But suppose we stipulate to the existence of God. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make moral questions much easier. For how are we to know the Divine Will? God rarely speaks on such matters. Prayer isn’t much good, since even prayerful people disagree. And the holy books of the world both disagree and have spotty coverage at best.

Let’s consider the most popular holy book, the Bible. Even the many Biblical laws don’t cover all the possibilities, and it’s ambiguous to boot. Thou shalt not kill—really? Even in self-defense? There’s plenty of killing in the Bible, of course; the sixth commandment is better rendered as Thou shalt not murder, but that simply begs the question: What, exactly, is murder? In other words, when is killing justified?

It’s justified when people work on the Sabbath, it turns out, and, as a result, nobody really believes in the entirety of Biblical law anyway. (How many Jews or Christians actually support the prescription in Exodus 31:15?) So, on what basis can we accept some laws (proscribing murder and theft, say), but reject others (death to adulterers and Sabbath-workers)?

No, morality isn’t easy, even if God exists.

Political philosophy

Michael Hartl — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 11:14:00 -0800

I’d like to lay a foundation for future posts by stating the animating principle of my political philosophy. I don’t offer it as a normative principle; it is simply an opinion, a general predisposition:

I believe in the full flourishing of humanity.

What exactly I mean by full flourishing will become clearer as this blog fills up with posts.

I agree with self-described (American) liberals that civil liberties, a healthy environment, and economic opportunity contribute to the flourishing of humanity. And while I sympathize with their preferred method for achieving these goals—namely, “Good Government”—for the most part I simply don’t trust government to produce the outcomes liberals hope for. I also don’t support the liberal obsession with “equality”, an ill-defined concept about which many liberals nevertheless care very deeply. Culturally, I am cut from liberal cloth—a Harvard-educated intellectual with an ignorance of guns, an aversion to church, and a penchant for classical music and Cabernet. Unfortunately, I find that there is much truth to the caricature of liberals as generally well-meaning but hopelessly naive at best, and smugly self-righteous at worst.

I tend to agree with principled conservatives who support small government, free markets, and individual responsibility, though I don’t think they go far enough. I do object to the fetishization of traditional moral and religious values, but this disagreement is more philosophical and religious than political—or it would be but for the power of the religious wing of the conservative movement. This influence of religious conservatives—combined with the lamentable demise of Western-style, Goldwater conservatism at the hands of Big-Government conservatism—keep me squarely out of the conservative fold.

Finally, libertarians are unique among the major political philosophies in recognizing that politics is ultimately about force; most libertarians adhere to the Non-Aggression Principle: no person has the right to initiate force against another person. While this principle is a good rule of thumb, and certainly contributes to the flourishing of humanity, it’s often too vague to be useful; there are just too many edge cases it can’t handle. Moreover, it ultimately misses the point; in my view the relevant question is not “When is force justified?”, but rather “What is the best mechanism for determining when force gets used?” Though I am uncomfortable with the dogmatic tone and consistent oversimplification that plague many libertarian arguments, libertarian is the label closest to my beliefs, so I sometimes call myself a libertarian if brevity requires it.

As a coda, let me note my sympathy for those who are apathetic about politics. In many ways we are helpless to change anything; you can make a strong case for rational ignorance of politics. Unfortunately, while you may not care about politics, politics cares about you.

Welcome

Michael Hartl — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:48:00 -0800

Welcome to Eikonoklastes, a blog by Michael Hartl. As you may have guessed from the warning in the banner, eikonoklastes is the Greek root of the word iconoclast; you won’t therefore be surprised to learn that a principal theme of this blog is to question conventional wisdom. Strangely, this simple act of questioning seems inevitably to produce a profusion of controversial ideas—things you can’t say, as essayist Paul Graham puts it—for it seems, upon close inspection, that conventional wisdom is often wrong. And people don’t like hearing it.

In his essay, Graham (wisely) doesn’t say many things you can’t say (one exception being the notion that physicists are smarter than professors of French literature—an example close to my own heart). On this blog I plan to say some of the things you can’t say—tactfully, with circumspect language and all due discretion—but I will say them nonetheless.

Not everything will be controversial; I have significant interests in computer programming and technology, for example, which should prove intriguing but not inflammatory. But I’ve got a lot of ideas rattling around inside my head which are unfettered by what “everyone” thinks or knows, and I want to get them out. This blog is the place I’m putting them.

Notes:

I’d like to thank Bill Lazar for giving me the kick in the butt I needed to start this blog. I registered eikonoklastes.org years ago for this very purpose, but it was Bill’s prodding that finally put me over the edge. If you disagree violently with anything I post, blame Bill.
Eikonoklastes is R-rated. If you might be offended by the occasional “fuck”, you’d best be leaving now. Newsweek writes “f---”; The Economist writes “fuck”. I read The Economist.
My punctilious nature has, among other things, led to a predilection for beautiful typesetting. Though still lacking the visual appeal of the written page, the web can look pretty—my favorite aesthetic touch is the em dash, exhibited for your amusement in this very sentence. I’ll also use proper en dashes, as I have from 1996–present, and curly (but not Microsoft “smart”) quotes. This means that a simple “cut and paste” operation won’t work on posts from this blog—which will only be a problem if anybody ever reads it.