Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts

Tuesday 24 January 2017

Alternative Universes in American Politics?

The so-called mainstream media, obsessing about its own concerns with 'what is truth?', seems to have given up on the job of reporting what is actually happening in Washington as the Trump administration gets into gear. One of the best short accounts comes from the personal economics blog of John Maudlin and I refer you to that posting as a starting point. Here I want to look at the 'what is truth?' debate with as little rancour as possible towards a global media system that is part infotainment and half partisan advocate for its own fixed positions.

Looking at events from the United Kingdom, you get a distilled view of the situation in which the BBC offers snippets from American politicians - the classic 'sound bite' - and interviews with people who happen to be in town promoting a book or passing through. It is not a true picture of events. These can only be properly understood by someone in Washington with some access to Administration officials. Nevertheless, if I cannot comment as Maudlin comments, I can see how things are going pear-shaped on the cultural level. I listened to what Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway said about 'inauguration numbers' in their sound bites and then to Thomas Friedman promoting his book on BBC Radio 4 yesterday and came to some conclusions.

First, the Trump camp are surprisingly inarticulate under close questioning, seem appallingly ill-prepared (the incorrect facts that tumble out are gifts to their opponents who give no quarter) but not necessarily entirely wrong. Before he started throwing out ill-researched claims, Spicer was clearly referring to the global internet and broadcast viewing figures of the Inauguration rather than the numbers who actually turned out on the day in Washington. Partisan commentators refused to recognise that claim and decided to concentrate not on all the facts that might apply (that is, that global interest in the Trump Inauguration was probably unprecedented) but one set of fact - the lesser numbers on the ground at the Inauguration - in part because Spicer allowed himself to be moved on to that territory himself. The commentators were not actually interested in the interpretative wider truth which is that, while Trump had less people on the ground than Obama, there were fair reasons for that fact (which was a demonstrable fact) and internet and global media interest was probably higher than in any previous election. Commentators were only interested in weaponised facts where they had the advantage and in demonstrating that truth was to be defined only on their terms.

Something similar is going on in the UK with May's blunder over not revealing a failed missile test to Parliament before a vote on the extension of the nuclear deterrent. It was a fact that was inconvenient that she should have presented factually and then argued her case as to why this fact was not relevant to the decision before the House. Her opponents are now able to avoid a discussion on that decision and simply concentrate on a partisan piece of 'amour propre' because of her blunder and her continuing inability to admit the facts for entirely spurious 'national security reasons'. She dug a hole and keeps on digging as we write but that does not stop her opponents being self-serving partisans. Neither is actually interested in the truth and so it is with the American case.

When you consider that Washington is a City that lives off Government, that it has a large poor black community (possibly disproportionate to all other cities) and that Trump's support was largely based outside the East Coast and in States where significant cost and effort would be required to travel to Washington in the working week - especially for lower middle class and working class supporters - then it is reasonable that the numbers on the ground should be significantly different between the Obama and Trump administrations. Spicer was right that the media and elements in the administration were trying to use the 'fact' to delegitimise the President even if, like Prime Minister May, he blundered badly in his handling of the situation.

Spicer seemed unable to make his points clearly and articulately to the point where one really does have to ask whether he is the right person for the job and that is what is interesting, not so much which facts are true and which are not. Conway's contribution on TV was much the same - when she said 'alternative facts', she should have said (according to the articulacy standards of the mainstream media) 'alternative interpretation of the facts' (see above) or that there were facts (see above related to global reach) that the mainstream media wilfully ignored in order to offer an interpretation that suited its narrative (which would be true).

This is part of the frustration of the Trumpers. They are both wrong and not wrong. Things are more complicated than the attack dogs of the mainstream media allow. The mainstream media's methodology is to select facts but then fail to add further facts that would indicate complexity and suggest alternate interpretations. This creates a partisan and self-serving editorial narrative that is designed to de-legitimise what has now become an enemy, an enemy that they largely created for themselves in the second half of 2016. By systematically concentrating on specific 'facts', ignoring other facts and then expressing a partisan and manufactured outrage when inarticulate responses seem to question the facts they have decided to make significant, the mainstream media is often playing a sly game that is deeply embedded in their way of doing business.

The Trumpers, meanwhile, are contesting the media interpretation and the lack of fair presentation of all facts as well as the obvious purpose behind the selection of facts. This is ground that cannot be conceded by the media in case it raises questions about their right to act as intermediaries between power and the people. This methodology on the part of the media is not specific to the Trump case: it is how the media works normally. Politicians before the populists arrived always understood this. They adapted with their own techniques in return and both parties (politician and journalist), in playing a confrontational game with rules accepted by both, created the widespread distrust that both professions suffer from today. Both sides fought over interpretation according to rules set by the media but where the media did not always inquire too deeply into the facts that underpinned the politicians' position. The partial politicisation of the executive has brought civil servants into the frame of distrust as well - the Rogers case in London earlier this month demonstrated this. In effect, the public was 'informed' with half truths in a contest of competing 'weasels' and its model of the world shaped by what 'weaseldom' decided was the shape of the world. Now that game is over.

A journalist guest commentator on British TV was (unusually) corrected by the BBC presenter last night when he referred to Trump as a 'monster', No one rational who disagreed with Trump has any justification for calling him a monster and yet the Twitter feeds of journalists and academics and the comment columns are filled with similar aggressive claims without real substance other than personal prejudice or arederived from particular ideological judgments that should have nothing to do with straight news gathering. One can disagree with a man without having to call him a monster and agree with him without deludedly expecting him to be a saint.

What we have here is the arrival of inarticulate populists in high office trained on 'heuristic' thinking where everything is connected. This is at its worst when poor connections are made so that conspiracy theory results but it is at its best in giving a more realistic picture of the complexity of the world to a person than he or she can get from theory of book-larnin'. They are facing off 'rational' intellectuals, all operating within a framework of pre-set rules that have the double effect of containing them within a social structure and allowing them privileged status within that structure. The intellectuals are actually highly selective and partisan in their fact collection procedures because they see the world in terms of competition between ideas and persons. They competed in order to get a position within the game and so they see those outside the game offensively as risks to their hegemony. Part of their mythos is that a 'fact is a fact' rather than a fact in relation to other facts. Friedman unintentionally grasped the problem this morning when he said that this was a matter of an 'alternative universe'.

Friedman certainly intended the notion of Trump's people being in an 'alternate universe' as an insult at their expense but the accusation could be turned on its head. We have two alternative universes neither of which is entirely real. One is based on complexity and life actually lived in which two incompatible thoughts are possible before breakfast because that is how the world actually works and where leadership is making judgments that parse dialectical tensions. It also happens to be anxious, occasionally paranoid and certainly defensive. It sees itself as protecting itself from the world.

The other universe is based on absolute and simple notions of fact and non-fact that fail to understand how facts are selected for interpretation, how inconvenient facts are omitted to effect change and how facts can offer us multiple interpretations. Facts are accumulated within unspoken paradigms where inconvenient facts can be sidelined until their insistent knocking at the door of reality forces them back into the game - by which time 'rationalisation' has found a way to incorporate them into the model without affecting the essential structure of reality - or rather what passes for real amongst those with the power to define reality. It is also a universe based on the 'logos', the connectedness of words rather the connectedness of experiences and things. It takes emotion or sentiment and rationalises these into strings of words that may be perfectly coherent but may well be a map that is not accurate to the territory. It sees itself as being co-terminous with the world.

This clash of universes is profound because it is a clash between the ways that minds work as profound as the difference between the ways men and women think. It is not a case of one being right or one being wrong but simply one of of difference. Men and women can get along just fine in the good society through norms that respect difference but, here too, recent political conditions have created conflict through confrontation and identity politics (also associated with 'logos'-type thinking). In the good society the 'heuristic' and intellectual approaches can also get along through the medium of the effective politician but Trump has arisen (as have other national populists) precisely because the intellectual has not only despised the heuristic but has demonstrated publicly that they despised the heuristic.

The national populists have thus not caused 'reaction', they have arisen as a reaction to the long term effects of having society run from a position of aggressive intellectualism. Why is this? The massive increase in the graduate class, in regulatory capitalism and in the scale and reach of government has created a mass base for the intellectual stance which never existed before. Until this period in history, intellectuals were either servitors of power or manipulators of the levers of power. They are now power itself - or thought they were until 2016. The loss of leverage (literally) has de-intellectualised the intellectuals and turned many of them into ravening wolves seeking the blood of those who unexpectedly removed them from hegemonic power whether democratically (UK) or merely constitutionally (US). The loss of control of democracy and of constitutional forms is part of the agony of this class.

Until the post-internet era, the 'logos' political system could command and control through relying on limited information and communications systems in society. The agents of information were of the same broad social origin. The adaptability of politicians in finding the right rhetoric could defuse the bomb of populist resentment. FDR and Reagan are perhaps the models of how the American political system found the right person at the right time to defuse political discontent by conceding just what was required to salvage the system. The arrival of the internet at the same time as the unresolved economic issues arising out of 2008 combined with the inability of the liberal side of the equation to 'get' what Bernie Sanders was perhaps trying to tell them - that the old politics was creating its own opposition, its own nemesis, through hubris. We should note here that Trump has been careful to invite labor union leaders to his first meeting on manufacturing today and that many trades unionists were not happy with the liberal espousal of NAFTA which Trump has vowed to renegotiate. A million marching women may find that the heuristics of increasing job security are as or more important than their cultural politics.

The heuristic approach does not rely on interconnected and carefully calibrated coalitional politics and the dumping of single issues into packages of measures demanding loyalty but tends to see life as a process of constant negotiation and even struggle. It also places much emphasis on promise keeping whereas the logocratic approach is not interested in promises but only in shared values and the law. Judicial activism is the final position of the logocrat just as the 'movement' is the final fall-back position of the heurist. Trump symbolically epitomised that sense of life as a set of deals just as Hillary Clinton symbolically epitomised the other form of thinking which has become culturally dominant - order being imposed through fiat by regulation based on theory. Her slight popular victory reflected that cultural dominance (ironically, the conservative desire for the maintenance of order) but Trump won the formal victory which was based on the carefully balanced prejudice for a form of heuristics implicit in the original but now perhaps partly dysfunctional Constitution.

Where does this lead us? Possibly to disaster? The absolute incompatibility of slave owner values and non-slaveowner values by 1860 did not lead to a civilised separation and a different form of struggle for freedom from slavery in the South but into a vicious war. Its lack of resolution gave us the current race problem that is America's most serious continuing internal crisis of social cohesion on which a lid is kept simply because black Americans are not a majority, are concentrated geographically and America has the rule of law to fall back on. The incompatibility of populist heuristics (shared in fact by many libertarian and advanced thinkers on the East Coast as well) with ideological rationalism built on the 'logos' is now absolute - as incompatible as the differences of opinion between states in 1860.

There is now no effective dialogue between the two universes. One represents vast and well paid special interests embedded in the State and the Academy as well as the Media. It certainly means well and has noble values but it did not deliver what it promised to many people while its own elite members got richer. It is important to note that the black American vote did not surge for Hillary and that this was not because she was not black. As many have pointed out, inequality between whites and blacks certainly did not improve and probably worsened under Obama, a mixed race wealthy (by their standards) lawyer.

The other universe of Trumpers, however, seems unable to develop a language for articulating its own complexity just as the first is blind to the limits of rationalism and the extremely weak philosophical base for its Kantian 'pragmatism'. There are palaeo-conservatives, libertarians, identitarians, Judaeo-Christian communitarians and all sorts of essentialist dreamer floating around the nether regions of the Trump movement but it really is a case of a 'thousand flowers blooming' with no clear core. This may be a good thing for a heuristic way of dealing with reality but it also means that we cannot expect coherence any time soon. The mainstream media (outside Fox and RT and sections of the British right-wing media) is wholly trapped within one universe and the centres of power in Washington, increasingly in London and possibly elsewhere later this year, are now either in or being drawn into the other universe by necessity.

The problem gets more difficult for the intelligent citizen who understands that the heuristic approach to the world is intellectually correct (though it need not come up with the analyses of Trump by any means) but that both universes are spinning towards a clash that will not result in war yet might well result in a collapse in internal cohesion, political violence and attempts to change the Constitution ... perhaps worse. At best, it may mean a cultural war in which one or other has to win or die, leaving the loser in a state of simmering resentment like the Confederacy after 1866.

This is an international problem not confined to the US by any means. Our putative intelligent citizen has a difficult choice whether to assist the heuristic universe to articulate its position more effectively (that is, to adopt the technology of the 'logos' without its ideology or special interest aspects) and so bring it to some sort of compromise with the rational - but will it or cannot listen? Alternatively, he or she could try to introduce a more informed heuristic understanding to the other universe, the one which has become self-serving in its use of the 'logos' to drive ideology. The inhabitants of the latter universe have already weaponised language and the Trump camp are right to see this weaponisation, making use of the mainstream media, as a threat for which they have developed little protection. Perhaps they feel like an insurgent liberation army facing a ramshackle but well armed state military that won't admit defeat after losing control of its capital and is now inclined to warlordism.

The protection that the Trump camp may employ (since human beings are adept at survival) is likely to be asymmetric and culturally subversive. The lack of respect for the new Presidency may become something that the 'educated' but not necessarily always 'intelligent' preceding elite may come to regret since the one thing that the incomers have which they do not command is the internet under the conditions of the First Amendment. The battle for control of the social media platforms comes next. Already, the German logocrats are trying to intervene to manage and control Facebook and other media in anticipation of their own trial of strength in the Autumn. The most probable outcome of all this, much further down the line, is a dialectical one in which both sides exhaust themselves into something new, perhaps a younger generation adopting heuristics as a way of life but directed towards more liberal ends and less intolerant of difference. Perhaps that is just wishful thinking. Perhaps history will look on 2017-2018 as America's bloodless (we hope) Cultural Civil War because that is what it is shaping up to be.

Saturday 6 September 2014

Against Words & Tradition -Ten Propositions for Discussion

1. Each person perceives the world marginally differently at each successive point in time and each generation of persons perceives the world collectively in a way different from other generations. To hold a truth from past experience as self-evident is absurd. New conditions create new truths and all conditions are, in some respect, new conditions.

2. Experience is more than language. All our senses and our sense of being are engaged in knowing the world. The word spoken is only a part of knowing and scarcely the most dominant or reliable part of it. The word written is more distant still from the word spoken in its representation of the true state of affairs in the world.

3. How we use a word and the context of the word is more important than the word itself. The text tells us nothing without the context in which the text is used. The text in itself is a false friend. Our use of the text is what matters.

4. Words can never capture the totality of human experience. Words are a simplification of experience and so of being in the world. To use a word is immediately to begin to tell a lie.

5. When we say that two things are the same, we are not able to say that they are the same, we are merely saying that it is convenient that we treat these two things as the same for our purposes and our purpose only derives from words if we choose to make words our purpose. Knowing our purpose beyond and behind words is a more valuable purpose than inventing a purpose from the words to hand.

6. The space that we exist in is a space in relation to our perception of that space. There are as many worlds as there are persons perceiving a world in which they perceive themselves as existing.

7. To define a thing is to remove it from its existence as experienced by a person in the world -  definition is the begining of the process by which lies are told.

8. Existence is not logical. It merely exists.

9. Metaphysics cannot exist in words. It can only exist in experience, if it exists at all - which is to be doubted.

10. We are what we do in the world in the flow of time. We have no essence beyond our act in a moment of time and personality is an accumulation of such acts under conditions where the next act will not be precisely like any act ever done before.

Monday 5 May 2014

Consciousness Studies, Degenerate Liberalism & 'Libertarian Socialism'

The amount of work on consciousness in academic scientific and philosophical circles has probably never been more intense. Yet every participant in the debate on what it is and how it works agrees that nothing has been resolved. Some (such as Colin McGinn) plausibly claim that we will probably never know what it is.

Mind & Language

Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.

There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.

As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.

Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.

Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.

Convergent Theories

This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.

Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.

The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.

The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.

The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.

Cartesianism Crumbles

The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.

All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.

The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.

The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.

Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.

Monistic Dualism?

The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.

Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.

As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.

Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.

Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.

Implication

Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.

It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.

The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.

Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.

This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.

Bats & Humans

In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.

The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.

But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.

This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.

The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).

The Uniqueness of Persons

However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.

Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.

A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.

Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.

Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.

The Failure of the Enlightenment

This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.

The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.

The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.

The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system

There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).

What Not To Do

One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.

The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.

But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.

Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.

Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.

Why The Elite Cannot Cope

Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.

But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.

The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.

The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.

The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.

The Problem of the Intellectual

The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.

Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!

These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.

Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.

The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.

Being Aware of Being Aware

This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.

Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.

Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.

The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.

Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.

The Dark Side

The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.

Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.

The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.

More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.

I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.

The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'

Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.

Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).

Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.

But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

Phenomenological Perspectives

Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]

This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives. 

Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.

The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.

Conclusion

What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.

Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.

Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.

We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.

Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.