The Uncle of Logic

We all like to consider ourselves to be very logical individuals.
We like to say, "Makes sense to me," as if that puts the ultimate seal of approval on whatever is being discussed at the moment.
Especially us guys, who seem to put Logic up on a pedestal while our female Significant Others shake their heads at our shaky decisions and say things like, "Logic is over-rated; what about Compassion? Empathy? Caring about the other person?"
Makes sense to me.
Even Spock himself is on record (vidoetape) as saying that Logic is the beginning of Wisdom, not the end.
Way back in the day before the day before the day, a guy named Aristotle was kicking around the idea of Logic as if it was something new. And, in a way, it was something new in the sense that it wasn't as well defined before he wrote his Analytica Posteriora.
Which, by the way, apparently translates as: Logic.
So, since it's the earliest well-known thesis on the subject and develops the related ideas much more thoroughly than had ever been done, Aristotle gets to be The Father of Logic.
And, if you can find a comprehensible translation of the work (Ari's English was worse than patchy) you can treat yourself to a well-reasoned presentation of the basics of what has since become the "science" of Logic.
If you can find a comprehensible translation.
I have looked at a half dozen different translations of his work Nicomachean Ethics (Ethics) and none of them are easy to understand. (Yeah, yeah, I can just see the eggheads feigning confusion and saying, "What translations has he been looking at that are so hard to understand?" Save it. I'm not buying it.)
But how logical was Aristotle, really?
Look at this exerpt from Ethics, from near the end of the seventh of ten sections:

Then again, it is allowed that Pain is an evil and a thing to be avoided partly as bad per se, partly as being a hindrance in some particular way. Now the contrary of that which is to be avoided, qua it is to be avoided, i.e. evil, is good. Pleasure then must be a good.

Did he really talk this way? The way a professor would, just to confuse and annoy us?
No, he spoke in Greek, which, at least to my ears, is even more confusing and annoying.
Okay, maybe this is a bad translation. Here it is again from another scholar:

But further it is agreed that pain is bad and to be avoided; for some pain is without qualification bad, and other pain is bad because it in in some respect an impediment to us. Now the contrary of that which is to be avoided, qua something to be avoided and bad, is good. Pleasure, then, is necessarily a good.

Better. Dumped the "per se" and the "i. e." but kept that pesky "qua."
How would I translate it?
Hey, pain is bad, and the opposite of pain is pleasure, and the opposite of bad is good, so pleasure is good.
Is this logical?
Sure, the conclusion seems sound. "Makes sense to me."
But is the reasoning sound? One of the first things you learn in studying Logic is that just because the conclusion is correct, that doesn't mean the logic is correct.
Here is one way to break it down:

Entity A has quality X.
Entity A is the opposite of entity B.
Quality X is the opposite of quality Y.
Therefore, entity B has quality Y.

(A = pain/B = pleasure/X = bad/Y = good)

That's simple enough. So what's the problem?
One way to test whether a logical construct (sometimes called a syllogism, but this is not a fundamental example) is sound is to substitute other entities and qualities for the variables.
Try to find one that is obviously wrong.
Ahem:

A = dog/B = cat/X = carnivore/Y = non-carnivore

A dog is a carnivore.
A cat is the opposite of a dog.
A carnivore is the opposite of a non-carnivore.
Therefore, a cat is a non-carnivore.

We know that opposite entities do not necessarily possess opposite qualities.
But read those Aristotle quotes again with that in mind. That's what he is saying regarding pain and pleasure.
Sure pleasure is good. (Do we say that in connection with the heroine addict who can only find pleasure in self-destruction?)
Sure pain is bad. (Do we say that of someone who can't feel pain and is unknowingly bleeding to death of a foot injury he hasn't noticed?)
But that can't be shown by implying that opposite entities possess opposite qualities.
Sorry Aristotle.
When they put you on that pedestal and called you the Father of Logic it set you up as a target for every little half-baked armchair philosopher like me to take potshots at.
I got you on this one - say "uncle!"

Alternate Universes

There is, in the literary field of science fiction, a strain based on a plot device usually termed Alternate Universe, or Alternate History.
Harry Turtledove is probably the best known proponent, with interesting "what-if" plots based on events such as people coming from the future to supply the Confederate armies with M-16s during the American civil war.
What fun.
I like the term Speculative Fiction, which some sci-fi afficianados advocate to replace the rather restrictive term, Science Fiction. It isn't alway about science, after all.
If we apply the speculative aspect to our own lives, for instance, science is usually the last area we consider.
What if...?
Look at any hugely successful person.
Okay, look at Jack Nicholson, to take a random example.
What if Jack had botched his role in the movie Easy Rider so badly that he could never have landed another acting role again? After all, his acting style is rather idiosyncratic. It could easily have been passed off as too eccentric, or too limiting, or just too plain weird.
Imagine The Shining, starring Harrison Ford in the lead role. Hmmm. Not the same movie at all.
Or what if a well-meaning uncle had said, "Jack, forget about all that talk about becoming a movie star. You know how few people actually make it in that business? Why don't you come into the hardware store business with me. There's good, dependable income in this line of work and I'll make you a 20% partner right off the bat!"
Wouldn't Nicholson have made an awesome hardware store manager?
How many famously successful people would be able (and willing) to tell us of a turning point in their lives - or even more than one turning point - where they made a decision that made all the difference? If they had decided otherwise, they would have remained in obscurity like the rest of us poor shmucks?
They might have lived in an Alternate Universe in which they never amounted to much, driving the daily commute to and from their trivial jobs, coming home for a little beer and a little TV time every evening, puttering around with their garage hobbies, maybe getting out once a week to go bowling, spending way too much time at their computers writing in their blogs...
Ouch.
One tends to think of his current reality as the main trunk, so to speak, of the possible chains-of-events his life could have taken. All the other "paths not taken," (I love the poetry of Robert Frost) could be seen as offshoots.
But is it more accurate - if you are not hugely successful, but might have been - to say that your current reality is one of the offshoots of the fabulous life you could have lived?
Aren't we all living in an alternate universe of the life we fantasize about?
"I could have been a contender."
Hell, I could have been The Man!
It's been said that in our Golden Years, we have regrets not about the things we did, but about the things we didn't do.
Does virtually everybody over the age of forty or fifty look back on missed opportunities?
Is there anybody that says, "Nope, I would pretty much have ended up with the short straw no matter what I would have tried, no matter how hard I worked."?
What if they had been able to shed that attitude? Then what?
What about you? What would your life have been like if you hadn't taken the alternative route, the path of least or lesser resistance, the "blind alley"?
Does it hurt to think about it?
It hurts me.
I am definitely one of those who feels that I could have been, would have been, should have been famous in my area.
Ever heard of Kenny G?
In an alternate universe there is a guy who eclipsed poor Kenny so badly that he didn't become a household name. Kenny might have been playing in the backup band for the Blues Brothers. Instead, in this alternate universe, my identical twin of the same name would have a handful of platinum records by now.
Think this is all just chest-beating? That I'm fooling myself into thinking that "I could have been a contender"?
What I'm saying is that virtually anybody could have achieved The Dream with enough hard work and persistence.
If you don't buy that, read the book, The Magic of Thinking Big, by David Schwartz.
If you're young enough not to regret the missed opportunities of the past, read it twenty times.
After reading that book you'll be less skeptical about what the average joe is capable of.
Also, if you don't buy this philosophy, try this not-so-simple experiment.
Talk to ten people who have made it BIG in their fields. Ask them if they buy this idea.
At least nine of them will say to you, "It's not too late to become the person you were meant to be. Start now."

Nine English Teachers

The Cato Institute is sometimes referred to as a "Think Tank."
There are some brilliant people associated with it which, to my way of thinking, pretty much have it right on every score, especially politically.
I want to emphasize that I didn't just buy into the ideas that Cato espouses. Only when I discovered that their ideas corresponded with mine did I allow myself to be "influenced" by them.
Recently one of their brainiacs was asked to offer three examples of amendments to the Constitution that he felt would actually help things instead of just further messing things up.
You see, the thinkers at Cato believe - as I do - in Hayek's principle of "The Fatal Conceit" (see his brilliant book by that name), which states that there is no way we can know everything we need to know in order to design a perfect economic or political system. The best system is the one in which natural forces (in Economics, "market forces," or Adam Smith's "invisible hand") shape a system with everyone just looking out for his or her best interests.
Correspondingly, our Constitution allows for laws to be repealed if it turns out that they had the dreaded "Unintended Consequences."
We learned from the Prohibition Amendment that telling people they can't get drunk is a bad idea.
Or did we? We apparently have a hidden Prohibition Amendment somewhere that people can't get stoned.
Anyway, the proposed amendments that James Buchanan of Cato came up with go something like this:

1. Let's restrict estimated federal spending to the limits imposed by estimated tax revenues.
2. Let's tell Congress that they are not allowed to take any discriminatory measures of coercion.
3. Let's limit the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to the prevention of interference in voluntary exchanges.

Okay, so don't spend more than you make, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and mind your own damn business.
Sounds fair enough.
Here's my amendment:

"Congress shall make no law that violates the Constitution."

"But isn't that pretty much a given?"
Virtually every law Congress passes these days violates the Constitution in some way. Most of the time you need look no further than the Tenth Amendment to see it.
The Tenth Amendment says that if the federal government hasn't been given explicit permission to do a thing in the rest of the Constitution, then it can't do it. Anything not mentioned in the Constitution is left to the states and the people.
But here's our system:
Congress can pass any law it wants, regardless of constitutionality.
Then, when someone violates that law by doing something he or she should be free to do, the government nails that person.
Then, if the person has enough money and/or enough political clout, the Supreme Court finally decides whether the law is constitutional in the first place.
HUH?!
Whose cock-eyed idea was that?!
Congress shall make no law that violates the Constitution.
Congress represents (to use the word very loosely) the people.
Well, the people can't be expected to be experts on Constitutional Law, now can they? Their reps simply do what they are requested to do, right?
Fine. Then let's give veto power to someone who has sworn on a bible to protect and defend the Constitution.
The President.
Oops.
What happens when you have a president that can't even spell "constitutional"?
Back to the drawing board!
So what are we supposed to do, have the Supreme Court approve every bill before it gets signed into law? Cumbersome, but it might work.
Oops again.
What happens when you have a Supreme Court that misunderstands property rights so badly that it thinks your local politicians can take away the land that has been in your family for a century or more and build a shopping mall on it?
Back to the drawing board again!
Nine highly respected judges can't read the plain English of the Constitution.
They can't "interpret" the very document they exist to uphold.
Clearly what is needed here is a panel of nine English teachers to "interpret" the plain English in our Constitution.
Those nine English teachers could sit near the doors of Congress and check to make sure that no laws get out that the Constitution says are against the rules.
They could teach our representatives what the big words in the Constitution really mean.
Teach them that stealing is bad.
To keep their hands to themselves and off of other people's stuff.
And while they're at it, they could make sure that the congressmen who break the rules don't get recess.
Class dismissed.

A Mouthful of Oatmeal

I'm waiting for the light to turn green.
My windows are up. It's in the 70's but my windows are always up.
But in the car next to me the windows are down and I can hear the other guy's music.
Kind of a cool mid-tempo groove with the drummer popping out some nice snare patterns on the turnarounds.
No, it's not something old; anything old that is so obscure that I wouldn't recognize it won't find it's way to the radio. Or anyone's CD collection for that matter.
At this point you may be thinking, "Oh, are you some kind of expert on music, Mister Song Encyclopedia?"
Actually, yes. More on that in another post.
But my windows are up.
All that is coming through is the drum track and a little bass.
After appreciating that much for another 30 seconds or so, I roll down my window to hear what's on top. The vocals, guitars, background singers or horns, whatever.
And I hear what I should have suspected all along.
Above the cool groove is one single element; what sounds like the schoolyard bully with his mouth packed full of this morning's oatmeal, yammering about something unintelligible, more than likely a topic that would appeal mostly to someone like a schoolyard bully.
It's a Professional Rap Artist.
There, I've done it. I've branded myself as someone who hasn't kept up with the current trends in music. Someone who has been left behind in the cultural scheme of things. Someone who is to be laughed at from behind the hands of any 16-year-old musicologist that can name every musician in every band that appears in this week's top twenty countdown. (Do they still have those?)
Do I feel like my parents? Those poor musically-inept souls who would have rather heard Frank Sinatra than Frank Zappa?
Sorry. No.
I remember thinking when I was a teenager that I would NEVER become like my parents and refuse to understand or accept the music of the next generation. I remember hearing other kids say that. Many of us vowed that whatever twists and turns music might follow in the future, we would keep up and stay on the cutting edge.
But they played us a dirty trick.
It's as if they said, "Oh, so our parents think they can be open-minded enough to accept our music, do they?" and proceeded to search for ways to design music that would sabotage our efforts.
It's as if they asked, "How far do we have to diverge from anything that sounds like music before our parents are hopelessly discouraged in their quest for open-mindedness?"
Any suggestions?
You, in the second row, holding up your pants.
"Well, we could remove any and all Melody. Our parents seem to like humming or whistling melodies."
Applause and whistles.
You, with the pierced eyeball.
"How about putting all Harmony so far in the background as to make it all but meaningless?"
More applause and whistles.
You, the chick with the sexy two inches of belly hanging out.
"Could we, like, put some, like, oatmeal or something in the singer's mouth?"
Applause, whistles and some woo-hoos.
And we have Rap.
I suppose that the guy who suggested taking out the Beat was beaten and the girl who suggested using all nonsense syllables in the Lyrics was compromised with.
They stopped two steps short of taking out ALL the musical elements and leaving us with dead air between commercials.
"But the problem is that you just don't understand Rap music!"
No, the problem is that I do. I understand why you like it and it has nothing to do with Music.
Is there a place for Rap music?
Yes. Music with nothing but a beat and spoken words has been with us for decades. We used to call them "Novelty Songs" and some were great hits. (Ever hear "They're Coming To Take Me Away"?)
We just never felt like making a steady musical diet of them.
That would be like eating nothing but Doritos or Hot Cheetohs for every meal.
Come to think of it...
I'll just be rolling my window back up now.

Mr. Know-it-all

I know that what I write on this blog will be seen as inflammatory by many.
In one sense, that is the purpose of what I write here.
These "editorials" are not meant to be feel-good material. They are my opportunity to "vent." Better here than in public where I might be lynched.
That is why the people who are most likely to read it are the people least likely to be able to hunt me down with a noose; people I meet online who know nothing about me.
There's one named Lois. I hope that's not her real name, that's it's only an alias she uses online.
She and I have traded meaningless pleasantries over the past year or so.
I told her about my blog, knowing she would check it out.
I was curious as to what her reaction might be. I was prepared for any of several possibilities, from "Hey, pretty cool!" on one hand to "What the...??" on the other.
This turned out to be an arbitrary polarity.
Here's what she wrote:

"I checked out thwe site. I'm not quite sure what I think of it. It kinda sounds like you think you have all the answers and all the rest of the world is doomed. that is a little too egotistical for me. Then again who am I that I could question you?"

I looked back over the last few posts to try to get some clue as to where she was coming from. And after giving it a lot of thought, I recalled something I read somewhere that goes something like this: "Some people hear the words - some people hear the tone." That goes for reading as well as hearing, of course.
When someone is offering an opinion, it can and probably should sound as if they think they mean what they say...that they think they have some answers.
All the answers? Do my posts come off as sounding that pompous? Somebody's been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh.
I pointed out to her that I refer to the entries as "editorials" for that very reason; that an editorial (in a magazine or newspaper, for instance) generally will take the tone that the writer thinks he "knows it all."
Her response?:

"that might be right. I think many people could be misled by reading articles like that. Are you out to make recruits to rebel against the political system?"

That's when it hit me.
What we're seeing here is not an example of someone who is uncomfortable with my opinions.
What we're witnessing here is someone who is uncomfortable with having opinions.
Opinions cause strife.
Opinions make people argue.
Opinions pit people against each other and lead to bitterness, competition, winners and losers, unrest at the dinner table.
All those dreadful things that can make our day so unpleasant.
"Why can't we all just get along?" as Clinton said.
He certainly wasn't "out to make recruits to rebel against the political system." The political system was the only thing keeping him out of jail.
In fairness to Lois, it must be said that this is the mentality that the vast majority of U. S. citizens subscribe to.
Best not to have strong convictions.
Best not to rock the boat.
From what I have read (meaning that it's not just my opinion - put down that noose!) most North Americans felt that way at the time of the American Revolution, as well.
Good thing somebody rocked the boat.

"Which one are you?"

Since hurricane Katrina, my wife has been working with the Vietnamese "Refugees" from New Orleans who have temporarily relocated to our city.
Some of these Refugees are second-time-around refugees.
They are the same people who were labeled "boat people" and who fled Viet Nam when things fell apart there a while back.
Some of these people are still trying to make sense of the political atmosphere they find themselves in here in the states.
Things are pretty simple in third world countries politically. Dictators do tend to cut through the red tape.
The Refugees have learned that there is an either/or mentality in American politics, and they have accepted that as the reality here, as have so many government-educated Americans.
It's a convenient way of looking at things. Convenient for the wolves as well as the sheep.
These Vietnamese, says my wife, are constantly asking her, "Which one are you?" referring to the arbitrary polarity of Democrat/Republican thinking.
She keeps telling them that she is neither. She says that she looks at what each candidate says he or she believes in and votes accordingly.
They are having a hard time assimilating this view, partly because it contrasts so glaringly with all the other information (propaganda?) they have gathered regarding American politics.
And partly because they have seen from harsh reality that what a candidate says he or she believes in rarely has any bearing on how that candidate functions once elected.
So they keep asking, perhaps rephrasing it each time within their limited English vocabularies, "Which one are you?"
The problem here is that my wife - an amazingly intelligent person, by the way - keeps telling them what she isn't.
She can't tell them what she is.
She avoids "isms."
She doesn't want to be an "ist."
Defining yourself can be so confining.
She chides me for being a Libertarian. She feels that by defining myself as such, I am now obligated to toe the line for any cause that the Libertarian "leaders" ask me to support, and that if I choose not to support a "Libertarian Cause," I will have proven myself to be a hypocrite.
That's the way it works with the two dinosaur parties, right? That's the way it works in the Left/Right, Democrat/Republican arbitrary polarity.
She doesn't want to be confined to that polarity.
Neither do I.
So she chooses to have an ill-defined philosophical construct.
I choose to be an "ist."
Actually, I am an Objectivist. And, politically, Libertarianism works best within that philosophical framework (despite the opinions of the followers of the originator of Objectivism, Ayn Rand, who felt that there is a disconnect between the two systems of thought - "philisophical protectionism?").
The real question contained within the simplicity of, "Which one are you?" is "Are you a proponent of the Left/Right arbitrary polarity - or are you a proponent of Freedom?"