Loose Reflections on Representative (or Indirect) Democracy

    Direct democracy is not a good idea, except for very specific questions. But it is always a risk to entrust questions of fundamental importance to the people – in a referendum, say, Brexit being one glaring example. Representative democracy, or indirect democracy, however, is worthless if the representatives do nothing but vote according to public opinion polls – or much worse, special interest lobbying, a form of legalized corruption – or even worse, representatives who just do whatever Trump wants them to, no matter how toxic for the country.

  The criteria to vote for a representative should be emphasized in education. Above all competence – a person of independent judgment, experience, and virtuous character (wisdom, self-restraint, justice, courage). This means that a representative must be willing to lose the next election if necessary. There is little a political process can do to guarantee only competent, virtuous representatives will govern. You can take away all the corruption – legal and illegal – by getting the money and lobbying out of the system: elections should be publicly financed; instead of TV ads designed to pull emotional strings, only rational debates with competent moderation and editorial pieces in newspapers and magazines. Books of course. And speeches. This presupposes an enlightened public, which is not given in any current liberal democracy, though some are closer to it than others. This also presupposes a sense of community, which alone can give people a deeper sense of who they choose to represent their interests. There must be a healthy political culture if there is to be good representation, and this is sadly missing. The growing of a healthy political culture is paramount. Actually, if there were a healthy political culture and an enlightened public, the arguments against direct democracy would be correspondingly weakened.

   In Germany, the problem of competent representation is dealt with by the party system. The parties select their list of candidates based on internal criteria – political promise, character, intelligence, etc. (ideally). If elected to the Bundestag (Parliament), they are assigned to committees – foreign policy or military policy, for example – where they acquire expertise and experience. It’s like starting to work for a company. You get promoted if you show ability (or have good connections). By the time you reach the top policy-making positions, you will have usually already proven yourself over time. For example, the current minister of the health system, Dr. Karl Lauterbach,

 

Curriculum vitae

Born in Düren on 21 February 1963, career: university professor.

1982-1989: Medical studies at the RWTH Aachen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, University of Texas San Antonio (USA), (PhD in Medicine).

1987: Research residency at the University of Arizona, Tucson (mentor: Prof. Dennis Patton).

1985 to 1990 PhD in Medicine at the Institute for Nuclear Medicine of the nuclear research facility in Jülich (mentor: Professor Ludwig Feinendegen).

1989-1990: Master of Public Health (MPH) at the Harvard School of Public Health focusing on Epidemiology, and Health Policy and Management.

1990-1992: Master of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

1992-1995: Doctor of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (mentors: Professor Marc Roberts and Professor Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences).

1992: Fellowship in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University (Director: Professor Applbaum)

1993: Fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Ethics (Director: Professor Lynn Peterson).

Since 1996: Guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Since 1998: Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne.

C4 professorship offers from the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

Since 2008: Adjunct Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Main research focus: Primary and secondary prevention of chronic disease, in particular disease management of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, COPD, and hypercholesterinaemia. Health economics and health policy.

1999 until 2005: Member of the Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System.

2003: Member of the Commission on Sustainable Financing of the Social Security Systems (Rürup Commission). Member of the SPD Cologne Programme Committee.

2004: Member of the SPD Party Executive’s working group on citizens’ insurance.

Since 2005: Member of the Bundestag, on leave from his post as the Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne. (In his absence, Professor Stephanie Stock is Acting Director).

2013-2019: Deputy parliamentary party leader of the SPD.

Since December 2021: Federal Minister of Health.

  

  Note that he only became a minister after years of experience making law in the Bundestag and within his party. Of course, other parties disagree with many of his policies. He is not popular among the doctors. But no one can doubt his qualifications. His personality and policies are well known. Disagreements with him are like two accomplished pianists disagreeing over how to perform the end of a Bach piece than between an accomplished pianist and an amateur like myself over the same subject. We have very few such qualified people in Congress, and why should we? Congress is not responsible for making policy, though they do have the power to wreck policy and leave the country without a policy – as is the case currently with Ukraine support, immigration policy, and many other issues.

  And of course, in the German system, the Bundestag produces the government. Should the SPD (Lauterbach’s party) not be part of the next election, Lauterbach would still be in the Bundestag and take part in debates about policy as a critic. These debates – ideally – would contribute to the political education of the citizens. Unfortunately, few citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany follow the discussions in the Bundestag. They – like everywhere – increasingly tend to get their news from Instagram or whatever. The public media does regularly cover Bundestag debates, however.

   Since our Congress does not make policy but only approves or disapproves the policies of the executive – or make deals with the executive to secure their approval – discussions, such as they are, have a very different quality. The fact that Congress has only this negative role reduces the need for expertise. At present, our Congress is so dysfunctional – a ground for shame.  But that is connected with the structure of our government: a debating society with the power to reject policy or make acceptance conditional on all kinds of things (concessions to big Pharmacy to the oil industry to the political needs of a certain congressman to the will of Trump) – that is so unworkable; only representatives of amazing character could overcome it, but how our representatives get chosen has nothing to do with the way Karl Lauterbach was. Money is usually all important, and of course public persona, which is a function of media access.

    The German system tends to produce better representatives because of the discipline imposed by the party system. To advance a representative is beholden to the party – not special financial interests or media access. Anything human is imperfect however: we have some fine representatives (too few) and there are some idiots in the Bundestag. But overall the Parliamentary system with the parties governing produces better representatives. I suppose the disadvantage is that party discipline means that policy decisions are made at the top; for a lower-level legislator to reject the policy decisions of their party leadership means an end to their political career. This is not necessarily bad: policy is made by the most experienced, the most proven. But every system needs the occasional maverick to buck it.

 

Parties in the Federal Republic of German and the United States

    I would like to have a system without parties, in which a representative was elected for their competence and character. But that requires a level of enlightenment and investment of time on the part of the voters that is utopian in the current society. In Germany, people vote for parties first, personalities second if at all – under normal circumstances. The general orientation of the parties is well-known enough for people to cast their vote without the kind of investment of time my party-less idea would require.

   Germany uses a mixed-member proportional representation system, which allows for a greater diversity of political parties to be represented in the national parliament (Bundestag). This system encourages the formation of coalition governments, as no single party typically wins an outright majority of seats. In contrast, the United States primarily employs a first-past-the-post electoral system for congressional elections, which tends to favor a two-party system. 

   German political culture places a strong emphasis on consensus-building and compromise, particularly due to the proportional representation system and the prevalence of coalition governments. German parties are often more ideologically disciplined, and there is generally a higher level of trust in political institutions compared to the United States. American political culture, on the other hand, tends to be more adversarial and polarized, with a focus on winner-takes-all elections and ideological purity within parties.

    Since the American system is a winner-take-all, we have only two parties. Within the two parties – before Trump – different groupings would have their own parties in Germany. For example, within the Democratic Party, there are so-called progressives, that are close to the Social Democratic Party or the Green Party in Germany. And you have liberals who are more friendly toward the corporate economy – like Clinton and Obama. Our system forces them into the same bed, which can become quite uncomfortable for the one or the other.  Sometimes compromises are made to ensure harmony going into an election – Biden was certainly moved to the left by the progressives, pissing off many “moderate” (hilarious ideology) Democrats like Joe Manchin. This is like the Social Democrats having to work out compromises with the Greens to form a government. In the German case, the compromises are worked out after the election, and the agreements are like a governing contract that is public. But Green voters don’t have to stomach voting for the SPD and vice-versa.

    Again, in my ideal of party-less candidates, the working out of compromises would be so complex as to be unworkable. Parties seem to be a necessary evil. German political parties tend to have a more centralized and hierarchical structure compared to American parties. Decision-making within German parties often involves party leaders and officials at the national level, with a strong influence from party headquarters. In contrast, American parties often have a more decentralized structure, with considerable autonomy given to state and local party organizations – i.e. less control over who is elected, who advances, etc. – and more beholden to private sources of money. When representatives represent corporate or billionaire class interests, we can no longer speak of indirect democracy. Indirect Plutocracy would be a better term, and that is where we increasingly were going in my home country. There has been under Biden hopeful movement in Democratic Party to correct this. 

 

    In the end, while the structure of a political process is important, it all comes down to how healthy is the pollical (democratic) culture; how enlightened are the voters; how competent and virtuous are the candidates. Political systems that encourage or make difficult these things, but not guarantee them. A democracy is only as good as its voters and representatives. 

 Reflections on Democracy as a Form of Government and the American Political System

 Plato identified the weakness of democracy. Political action requires either competence or virtue: competence, for example, when making security or economic policy; virtue when allowing policy to be infused with justice and the common good. The basis for democracy – literally “rule by the people” – is that sovereignty lies not in a monarch, not in an elite, but in the people. The people govern themselves in the sense that they are not governed by a king whose subjects they are or the traditional authority of an elite.

   The sovereign, more precisely, are the citizens. In Athens, the cradle of democracy, citizenship was restricted to Athenian men of a certain age. Women were not thought competent and in any case, had another role to play in the city-state. Foreigners were not citizens – their loyalty could not be counted on for one thing. And of course, slaves had no rights at all. Since the Enlightenment, women have had citizenship, implying they are competent, rational beings. That is the key point: rationality, competence, virtue. To govern well – to be able to make competent and just policy – requires a certain kind of education and certain natural abilities. It is one craft among others.

     Regimes – I mean by that term nothing more than the form of government or state – based on monarchy or oligarchy justify themselves by denying the competence of the common people (competence = reasoning powers and capacity for virtue), either by nature or because their role as laborers or craftsmen absorbs their energies, whereby a political class – mostly the richest – has the leisure and the sole purpose to govern. So if democracy is not denied because the nature of the common people is not up to the task of self-government, its denial is justified by the distribution of roles in society. Each person, to be good at their job, must devote their lives to it. Governing requires the development of reason and virtue, and that takes all one’s energy; education must be tailored to the development of reason and virtue. Craftsmen also need education but of a different kind. To be a good craftsman also requires all of one’s energies, thus leaving no time for political education and the duties of citizenship.

   The people, therefore, either by nature or occupation or both, are not capable of governing themselves. A particular man may be a good carpenter, but that doesn’t mean he can pilot a ship or knows what needs to be done in terms of foreign policy. To give the carpenter a voice in the conduct of foreign policy is analogous to giving a ship’s mechanic a voice in navigating the ship. The mechanic couldn’t even intelligently participate in a conversation about navigation choices – the same with foreign policy, for example. They lack the background knowledge and experience. The pilot or foreign minister doesn’t understand much about the ship’s engines either. People need to restrict their judgments to areas they know about. And of course, more natural gifts of intelligence and character are required for some occupations: a theoretical physicist or a stateman requires gifts that are more rare than those of a carpenter or a mechanic.

   So if the people have an equal voice in governing, how will they be able to judge sound from unsound, serious from unserious rhetoric? A mechanic could tell me any bullshit, and I would not be able to judge it as bullshit since I don’t know much about engines. The problem of a democratic people falling to propaganda was perhaps the worst feature of democracy for Plato. Competent pianists can disagree about how to perform a certain fugue of Bach; my opinion would be irrelevant to such a disagreement; indeed, I am not entitled to an opinion due to my ignorance. With today’s technology and a whole science industry behind it, propaganda is so powerful that it constructs reality itself, makes truth irrelevant. That was Plato’s definition of Sophism: language becomes an instrument not to reveal reality but to mask it for power. Language (including visual images) is one tool among others to get power. The only purpose is to create the desired effect, to make people think and feel like you, the power-seeker, need or want them to think and feel to serve your interests. Proof for Plato that the people cannot and should not govern themselves.

    Of course, the situation is far worse for us than it was for the Athenian democracy Plato criticized. To be a craftsman is to have mastered a discipline, which means that knowledge and virtue had to be acquired. And craftsmen, free men, had a kind of honor in most societies. Good government was obligated to do them justice. They were part of the community and their interests mattered. These interests, at least, they presumably were competent to speak about. But capitalist work has largely deskilled production. I suppose the mass of Trump supporters – not all – are unskilled and poorly educated, having never had to master a discipline because the economy does not need too many such qualified people. Factories make tables today, not skilled carpenters. And the quality of education possible for large masses of people is so poor that few understand even the most basic features of government or history. But the most ignorant QAnon nut’s vote counts the same as the government professor’s. The minds of most citizens – the Trump people are only the most extreme example – never come into contact with reality. Fantasies are constructed, and based on these fantasies they exercise their voice.

    Moreover, there is a world between most people and the financial elites in this country. And the purpose of politics, to the extent that it has any substance, is for the financial elites to keep and grow their wealth, and for the working masses to keep and grow their modest wealth by defending what they have again imagined enemies – poor immigrants mostly, and other non-white groups that are worse off than they are. This narrative is entirely the product of the financial elites and swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the masses of Trump supporters. When politics is reduced to a war of all against all, mediated by fantasy, to determine who gets what and how, the door is opened to what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. Only with our constitution – topic for another day – the tyranny can also be of a minority.

    To sum up Plato’s critique, a quote from Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

     The presupposition of democracy, the anthropology behind it, was the belief that the average voter is competent, rational, virtuous. Thus the average voter can, it is assumed, judge authentic arguments from propaganda, as Jefferson wrote:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

 

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, & which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press. it is therefore the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

 How melancholy to read these words after the experience of the 20^th century and the age of Trump. If anything has been proven by the history of the last 100 years it is this: people, especially people on the lower end of society but not only, are manipulable. They can be made to dance on the strings – nay, they often want to dance on the strings of a Hitler, Trump, or whoever. If any fact seems to make nonsense of the fundamental premise of democracy – that the common person is competent – it is this history and indeed present in the US.

    Jefferson was well aware that there is a sociological component to competence. He feared urban masses: “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” Since America was so big, he assumed (rightly) that there was enough land and wealth to go around, so that the democracy would be based on a large property-owning class and a fairly equal distribution of wealth. (The natives would either have to get “civilized” or face their ruin.) He thought a good public educational system and a free press would ensure the enlightenment of the sovereign. The contrast with modern America couldn’t be more stark, as this graph shows:

  

   The level of education corresponds to this, and even the best education for the elites is not the kind of education needed to produce wise and virtuous citizens devoted to the common good. Trump has supporters in every class, though their motives differ. This is just my feeling, but the best metaphor to picture the relation of the top to the rest is that of predator and prey, only the predator manages the prey to keep them docile and ignorant. Again, this makes nonsense of the idea of democracy.

. . .

   The problem is that it is almost utopian to imagine a selfless, devoted, virtuous class of servants who manage the ship of state in the best interests of all. The tendency of any such elite is to develop their own class interests and pursue them at the expense of the common good. As Churchill said,

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

I feel the same way. Even among modern liberal democracies, American democracy ranks near the bottom, but it is much preferable to an autocrat like Erdogan, Orban, or Putin, or an autocratic party like the Law and Order Party in Poland (even if that party represents the majority) controlling economic life and monopolizing the public realm (controlling nearly all communication). Why is a malfunctioning democracy preferable to what I would call pop-fascism? Here my short answer:

• I don’t want to have to watch what I say – for example, as a university instructor. Putting people in prison for their thoughts, words actions – insofar as these respect human dignity – is horrible.
• I – like Jefferson – think that freedom of the mind is one of the most important goods, and it can only be protected in some form of open society.
• A political life that does not center around open public debate but passive TV viewers consuming propaganda also demeans the human being.
• An autocrat and his oligarchs are like parasites, sucking the blood out of working people. (Thus many big capitalists will throw their support behind Trump, as German capitalists did behind Hitler, rather than face a democratically elected government that will challenge their privileges.)
• Education – especially the university – cannot be free when its prime function is to produce conformity to the regime.
• It belongs to human dignity to be free, and that at a minimum means giving one’s consent to being governed and respecting the rights of those who disagree (again, within the limits of respecting human dignity).

• I was born and raised in a society that was at least in theory devoted to the principle that all people are created equal. That is not as good as Germany's 'the dignity of man is inviolable' but it is pretty good. I can't change my loyalties at 64. People have sacrificed their lives for this principle.

Given that I feel compelled to support democratic government, how do I conceive it? The people are the sovereign – like a monarch, a collective monarch, a schizophrenic monarch who has different personalities, different conceptions of his interests. As the King had a cabinet of wise men to advise and conduct the day-to-day business of government (the King can’t be an expert at everything), so the democratic sovereign has a government to advise it on policy, to force it if need be to face the requirements of reality and justice. The job of the government is to enlighten the sovereign. It does this by means of reasonable dialog and criticism, always oriented to truth and justice. This should ideally be done by representatives in a legislature – like Parliament or the Bundestag. A free and above all responsible press should be limited to reporting and giving commentary in the form of rational debate between authorities representing different positions. The media must be public to do this task, and should be strictly supervised not for content so much as for respecting the ethic of truthful, rational speech. [Corporate media is the death of democracy; the only thing worse is the state control of media as in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, or China.]

    I think – I learned of this argument from my friend, Dr. Georg Bluhm, and I have never been able to refute it myself and know of no other refutation – the separation of powers system in my country makes this function of government difficult. The problem is that Congress has the power to reject any executive policy – e.g. in the Cold War, undermining Détente, as they did with the Jackson Amendment (many examples I could give) – without the responsibility of putting an alternative policy in its place. A debating club without responsibility lacks the discipline that only reality provides, for it is reality that policies must deal with. Thus debates in Congress tend to degenerate to Sophistry (with noble exceptions). In Parliament, it the government’s policy is not supported, the Parliament must replace the government with a new one that will put into place the alternative, which has been vigorously debated. The fact that any policies debated in Parliament might have to be enacted and that the government that enacts them will be judged by voters provides some measure of discipline to the rhetoric.

   The education of the citizens is obviously critical as well. Classes not only in government and history – classes that feature a clash of interpretations – should be combined with classes in so-called “critical thinking” (formal and informal logic, the art of making good arguments). The quality must be high in all classes of society. Don’t ask me how we get there.

   And the socio-economic status of the citizens must be addressed. You can’t only have a very sick democracy in a country with classes as far apart as in America, with so few at the top and so many at the bottom. Wealth and opportunity – a matter of justice in any case – must become more evenly distributed if a country is to have a meaningful democracy.

   I don’t know how to reconcile capitalism in its current form with democracy. To me, that has been the fundamental problem of American democracy, in addition to the consequences of racial hatred. (They are connected.) Capitalism dumbs the citizens down in drastic ways: through mindless work, through mindless consumerism, through the structure of media. This is too complex to discuss here, but Marx was right about one thing: the economic and class structure of society conditions the consciousness of the people in it; and some economic and class structures are compatible with democracy – and some are not. In America we have a Lockean liberal (nothing to do with the current meaning of ‘liberal’) ideology that has no roots in social-economic structure. Indeed, a pop-fascist regime is the "superstructure" that probably most reflects the economic-social "base" at the current time. That is a deep and probably intractable problem.

 Political Philosophy and Current Events

I want to start another thread of discussion – with no one but myself, sadly – about politics, as my home country is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

 

Background

  My home country is de facto in a state of civil war – divided somewhat by region but more by class, religion, level of education, rural vs. urban, race, and other factors. Most importantly by class. There has been some violence, but the potential for violence remains mostly under the surface at this point. By civil war I mean that supporters of Trump have rejected the basic constitutional system (elections, rule of law, independent judiciary, free and objective media) in favor of a pop-fascist cult of personality and a regime change to something like Erdogan's regime in Turkey, the Orban regime in Hungary, or (most clearly) the Putin regime in Russia. Whatever the differences in Trump’s base, they agree on this. The so-called MAGA movement is in open rebellion against the government and constitution of the United States, though in their own minds they are "patriots." (One thinks of Orwell: love means hate, truth means lies, patriot means traitor.)

  This civil war cannot be resolved on the battlefield, like the last one. That means: it cannot be resolved. A permanent cold civil war, until something collapses, until some disaster mixes things up again and hopefully we can start anew. Perhaps it is a just punishment for our hubris over the collapse of the USSR. Certainly, it is very satisfying to people like Putin who were part of the Soviet regime and lived through its collapse.

   More concretely, that means they want to control the media – to make pro-Trump media like Fox the only source of information; they want to control the justice system: Trump-friendly judges (e.g. the Supreme Court is almost there) who will rule based on Trump’s will rather than any objective application of the law); legislators blindly loyal to the leader; and a military and intelligence service that subordinates itself not to a constitution but to the leader’s will. (Of course, the leaders of such regimes are the richest people in world, and Trump’s base somehow needs him to be super rich.)

They have formed a cult around an amazingly base character, a pathological narcissist who knows no other value than elevating his ego. Everything is transactional. Security policy: he was rightly impeached for making digging up dirt on his political opponents a condition to release security aid to Ukraine; he actively colluded with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election; he lies so compulsively that it doesn’t even make the news anymore; he ignores facts to create alternative facts, alternative realities for his base – who expects that from him; he is a convicted rapist (ok, he ‘grabbed her pussy’ as he expressed himself in the Hollywood interview) and fraud; he and his family together received billions from foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and China during his Presidency; the pathetic forms his narcissism takes: the golden shoes, the superhero cards, the commercial about God choosing Trump (vomit emoji); the unchristian demonization of other kinds of people, especially the poorest and the non-white; the use of threat against opponents, from verbal abuse to unleashing his attack dog supporters on them; above all, the attempt to overthrow the government – continuing – of which the attack on the Congress by a violent mob was just one act. He is either a creature or a partner of Putin, sharing the goal of sowing chaos in the country. He is a traitor. That is who 77 million Americans voted for in 2020. That is the choice of millions more today. As he said – one of the few true things he has ever said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?”

  A large portion of Americans live in an absurdly small epistemological bubble tightly policed by an echo chamber, controlled mostly by Trump (and Putin) through Fox and even worse media outlets and of course the social media algorithm. They already have the totalitarian power to construct reality for their base, and thus to control the thoughts and feelings of their base – or probably confirm them, since if Fox, for example, started disseminating truths that punctured the bubble, its audience would find another echo chamber. Over 40% of Americans live in a fantasy world – not counting those of the so-called “WOKE” side who also live in a fantasy world. His control over them is probably at least as great as Hitler’s over Germans at the height of his powers. Of course, the rest, whatever their differences, see this from the outside with amazement, frustration, and disgust, but nothing anyone can say or do will penetrate the bubble. These people are as isolated and insulated – by their own choosing – as any member of the Koresh cult (Trump began his campaign symbolically in Waco). They are the basis of Trump’s power.

 

The consequences have been severe.

·        The undermining of the judicial system. A jury doesn’t count for the Trump world unless it consists of Trump cult members. A jury of people who are not in the cult is not a ‘jury of peers’. Judges outside the cult are enemies by definition. For them, Trump’s indictment and pending trials are show trials, equivalent to an American being tried in a court set up by Lenin’s Soviet Union. They don’t recognize the legitimacy of the American judicial system – unless they get a judge or jury who will rule in their favor. The rule of law has been compromised. The Supreme Court has just today exposed themselves as Trump hacks and have lost - also because of their corruption (clients of right-wing billionaires) - lost all legitimacy. 

 ·        Elections can no longer serve as the only legitimate way to form the government. For the Trump cult, elections are only valid if they win. Thus we don’t have a true election. For Trump supporters elections are one tool among others to reach the goal of a regime change.

·        Our bedrock alliances have been undermined. Biden and any Democratic Party leader will honor them. As long as a Democrat is in the White House and the Democrats control Congress, our deterrent power prevents Russia (and thus China) from isolating my country by annexing Europe to its sphere of influence (unless, of course, countries like Germany and France merged and acquired enough military power to be deterrents in their own right – improbable). No NATO country, no ally can place its security on who controls Congress or who is in the White House. Thus even though the Democrats control the White House and Congress, a small minority of Trump’s people can cause us to betray Ukraine, exposing an alliance with us as unreliable. After the War, both parties, for all their differences, supported the alliance. European countries could rely on that. Now, with the Trump civil war, no country can rely on us. That has created a fundamentally different international system, one fraught with insecurity, on in which we are increasingly isolated – much to the delight of dictators like Putin (Trump’s boss or partner, I am not sure which).

·        Politics is negated. Every elected representative is absorbed by the civil war, and can no longer afford to use judgment about politics. Everything must be weighed on one scale:  does it help or hinder Trump in his bid to replace the traditional government system with a kind of pop-fascism.

Against this background, I want to reflect in future entries on politics in general, and US politics (and history) in particular.

   One of the most frustrating aspects of politics parallels one of the most interesting aspects of philosophy: the difficulty of communication between people inhabiting incommensurable philosophies – since people in the Thomist world version, say, and people in the Marxist world version, for example, would also have a difficult time communicating, even if not so difficult as would someone in a cult with an outsider. In philosophy, no bubble can be self-contained and the echo chamber doesn’t function: that is, there are no bubbles in philosophy, and the only echo chamber is defined by the outer limit of reason. There are only horizons in philosophy. As a Thomist, say, as someone who has embraced a definite philosophy of life, a man may have a different conception of reality, human nature, reason, knowledge, politics, culture, and art from a Marxist, as someone who loves wisdom (and thus truth) I must be willing to think I could be mistaken on some point, and thus willing to take seriously some other philosophy of life can offer me insights. But again, since the Thomists and the Marxists do not even conceive of reason and responsible conversation in the same way, there are challenges.

  But with a cult – like the Trump bubble – the first commandment is to maintain the bubble at all costs. Philosophy, conversation is not possible – another devasting consequence of the civil war, since politics in its pure form is authentic communication (authentic: oriented to truth). They are protected, insulated against reality. You don’t puncture the bubble of a cult by using reason, which is by definition that capacity in us that reaches out of our fantasy lives to reality.

   I have always been critical of the US system and my criticisms remain. But it is now a choice between the system I criticize and a qualitatively worse system. Liberal-capitalism I am no big fan of; fascist style dictatorship is something to fight. 

    Therefore, though I like to converse with people who see the world differently than with people who see the world like I do, the people I would most like to have a conversation with will not be available. Indeed, I doubt from my side it would be any more possible to have a conversation with a Trumpist than for a geologist or a physicist to converse with a flat earther. Marxism and Thomism are both serious philosophies. Classical liberalism is a serious political philosophy. MAGA is not a serious political philosophy – it is flat earthism compared to classical liberalism, socialism, or Burkean conservativism, say. Still, I would try it.

   What I want to do is political philosophy, practical philosophy and more general philosophy. And relative to a cult, that puts me in a bubble. That says something important about human finitude.

Meditation on Petitionary Prayer, Goodness, God’s Essence, and Loss of Faith

   Many years ago, when my daughter was going through a bad time, and I had been a newly converted Catholic full of glorious faith, feeling the presence of grace, I prayed for God to be with her and protect her. I was doing all I could but had reached the limits of what I could do. I guess it could have gone worse for her but it’s not like my prayers were answered. This is a mild case.

   A more serious case I read about in C. S. Lewis’ autobiographical book Surprised by Joy. His mother died of cancer when he was a boy. His prayers were not answered either.

  In his case and mine, the failure of God to answer such pure and innocent prayers – prayers for the protection of the most innocent and vulnerable, children – led to a crisis of faith. I had as a child ceased to believe in God when my youthful prayers were not answered. After all, I knew the verse:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

My childish prayers were certainly ridiculous, and so they had ceased to count. But my prayers for my daughter were not ridiculous. They did count. And certainly, as I said, many more serious prayers have gone unanswered, not that my daughter’s situation wasn’t serious enough.

On reflection, my prayers seemed absurd. God does not protect our children. That has been entrusted to us, a decision on the part of God, the wisdom of which I completely fail to see. Think about all the cruelty and injustice towards children. The neglect and abuse from parents themselves victims of neglect and abuse. Look at the children of Gaza or Ukraine today as a write. At the children in the cities during the bombings of WWII. At the Holocaust. At all the many attempts at genocide. At the children during the plague. Look at the children sexually victimized in child pornography. At the ones sexually abused and strangled.

God does not protect children. God did not even protect himself. He died on the cross. The prayer of Christ was not answered. Christ was abandoned as we are. God shared most deeply in our humanity when he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

      Along with the unspeakable human cruelty to animals, and indeed the cruelty of animal nature – eat or be eaten (the young being the first to be devoured – (as well as the absurd: e.g. the need to shit), all this just makes it hard to believe in divine goodness. A line from a Led Zeppelin song has always struck me:

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move

Ivan Karamazov (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov) rejection at least of one possible Christian understanding of God seems to me irrefutable. I will quote at length.

These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say."

"Brother, what are you driving at?" asked Alyosha.

"I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."

. . .

"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. it's just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden -- the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.

 

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like."

"Never mind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.

 

And then Ivan draws his theological conclusion:

 

I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?

 

As I said, my daughter was a mild case – if God won’t or can’t do anything for the extreme cases (of which our history is full), was it not absurd that I expected divine protection for my daughter? God does not protect children. And if God does not protect even children, why should we wretched sinners be protected? Why should my beloved aunt, Alice Ann, a devout believer, suffering the agonies of a death from cancer be protected?

      Of course, there have been many attempts to apologize for that picture of God. Only He knows the big picture. Perhaps the tortured child would have grown up into an evil person, etc. Or: All the suffering that happens here on earth will be made good in the afterlife. Etc.

  Yet that picture of God – the powerful, all-conscious, all-knowing, all-Good being who knows when every leaf falls and parts the Red Sea – is a human fiction, an idolatrous image, something I (like Ivan) have had to let go.

I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

        "That's rebellion," murmered Alyosha, looking down.

"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that," said Ivan earnestly. "One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

      "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

"And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy forever?"

       "No, I can't admit it….”

 

The wall of unanswered prayer forces a radical rethinking of some religious pictures.

    As I have children, I cannot reject the world, as Ivan did (and Schopenhauer). I have found my way back to affirming life, somehow, and thus to God – a God that does not form any clear picture in my mind at all. I came again to God over the reality of goodness in the world. God seems to me like light. It leaks through only from somewhere when one person tries to help another, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, without any thought of their own ego. God shines through people who don’t lose their humanity even in the darkest of places (e.g. Auschwitz). God shines through the lives of the saints. God is a light that shines through some few souls. Yes, God is the light that shone through Christ. Or God shines through the world in the beauty that remains in it. Like a leak from another world that something in us – the capacity for love, compassion, self-sacrifice, beauty – reflects. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is on us to make this world a safe and good place for children, by adjusting our spiritual mirrors to that light.

    So what about the Biblical passage? What about prayer? First the whole passage:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? (from Luke, 11)

Apparently the one petition God does grant is for the gift of the Holy Spirit. And for me the Holy Spirit is what turns our inner mirror to the light that leaks from somewhere into the darkness of the world we humans have constructed for ourselves, into a nature that at least seems constructed by a devil in some of its aspects. Any power God has to affect the course of events, it seems to me, is given through this light, light of love.

 

 

Afterthought

The basic teaching about the efficacy of petitionary prayer opens up the Christian faith to the kind of mocking humor used by Woody Allen’s mouthpiece Boris in the movie Whatever Works (for example):

Marietta: Oh, Melody. I have a sad tale to tell you.

Melody: What happened, Mama?

Marietta: Your father left me. Aren't you shocked?

Melody: No.

Marietta: And with who, of all people?

Melody: Your best friend, Mandy.

Marietta: How did you know?

Melody: Oh, Mama. It was as plain as the nose on your face.

Cliché, sorry.

Marietta: At first I thought he was acting peculiar because things was going so bad for us, darling.

Boris: How often did you have intercourse?

Marietta: Are you going to close that insulting mouth? By bad, I mean he lost a lot of money in the stock market after you left and we were forced to sell the house. 

Melody: You sold the house?

Marietta: I'm sorry, yes. We took a beating because we were so desperate. And then he lost his job, the company went out of business. And then we spent all our savings on medical bills, 'cause I came down with a case of the shingles!

Melody: Oh, my God.

Boris: Christ, this is like Job. No locusts?

Marietta: Darling, I turned to Jesus in a deeper way than I had ever done in my life. I prayed and I prayed, every day and every night, asking God to help me.

Boris: Let me guess what happened, your shingles got worse. 

Marietta: I said, "Lord, just give me one sign that all my suffering is for a purpose." I said, "Please, God, just say something." "Break your silence.

I can't take any more misery!" 

Boris: Nothing, right? And all that money you put in the tin box every Sunday.

 

Now I laughed my head off over this scene. To laugh at something – in this case, an image of God and a theology of prayer – is a sure sign that it is dead for you.

Another afterthought.

My model prayer is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor, opponent of the Hitler regime, written from his cell in a Gestapo prison. No prayer to protect him, to get him out, to spare his life, to protect his family. Instead this:

God, I cry to you in the early morning, help me to pray and to gather my thoughts: I cannot do it alone. It is dark inside me, but you do not leave me. I am timid, but with you is my help. I am anxious, but with you is peace. There is bitterness inside me, but with you is patience. I do not understand your ways, but you know the right way for me. Lord Jesus Christ, you were poor and miserable, caught and abandoned like me. You know all the sorrow of humanity. You stay with me, when nobody stays with me. You never forget me, and you search for me. You want me to recognise you and turn to you. Lord, I hear your call and follow. Help me.

I pray for strength, for gratitude, for forgiveness - ways of trying to turn my soul-mirror in the direction of the light. I also - absurdly, perhaps pathetically - still pray that God at least be with my children. 

 Meditation on the Real World and the World as it Appears 

 

       What we know directly are contents of our consciousness, not reality as it is in itself: that is the main idea of Kant, which Schopenhauer thought was self-evident. The contents of our consciousness, the possible contents of any consciousness like our own, that we can investigate, understand to a certain degree, acquire knowledge about, interpret, etc. – that is, our ideas or re-presentations of the world as we experience it is everything we can even think out, the horizon of our thought which we cannot go beyond. We cannot get outside of our experience as structured by our brains, by our language (and in particular by our concepts of things), no more than a character in a video game can do something that goes against its programming.

 

I am looking at the two birch trees in the back of my apartment house.

   These two birch trees are not really there as far as I know. Light hits my eyes; the photons are translated into electrical energy; the electrical energy reaches my brain; my brain interprets the energy according to its program into ‘two birch trees. I cannot get out of my brain to compare the images it produced with some unperceived, unconceptualized thing-in-itself. For all I know, I might just be a brain in a vat, a brain being fed the right electrical information by some Mega-computer (Hilary Putnam). All I know is what my brain generates as “reality”; I cannot know anything else.

    For Kant, our brain’s programming generates a Newtonian “reality.” The phenomenal world in space and time is governed by the deterministic laws of physics – not because the laws of physics describe reality as it is in itself but because the laws are the way we have been programmed to experience the world. When we do physics, we are really describing or mapping the way our brains have been programmed to experience. And since Kant mistakenly believed Newton was the final word on nature, he thought this programming belonged to our hardware.

   And the programming, what we think of as physics, is completely deterministic. Nature – so the programming – is a closed system. Imagine all of what we can experience, the entire set of the content of what we can be aware of, subject to a program with this logic.

   Here is an example of a simple, closed, deterministic system using just two symbols: "+" and "-". We can represent this system as a sequence of these symbols. One such system is a binary alternating sequence, where each symbol alternates between "+" and "-": for example, the sequence: "+-+-+-+-".

  In this system, the pattern is deterministic and closed. Given any starting point in the sequence, you can predict the next symbol and all subsequent symbols with certainty. The system follows a deterministic rule where the symbol alternates between "+" and "-". Starting from any position in the sequence, you can predict the symbol at any future point or past point in the sequence. For instance, if you start at the first symbol "+", you know that the next symbol will be "-", then "+", and so on, following the alternating pattern. Similarly, if you start at any other position, you can predict the subsequent symbols based on the deterministic rule of alternation.

   All of nature – so our programming – follows the laws of physics (the rule of alternating between + and – in my simple illustration would be a physical law, like the law of gravity. We, nature, everything that we can experience, is part of the chain of cause-and-effect. My typing these words, in this system, would be entirely predictable if we had all the laws operating – i.e. the full programming were transparent to us. This system is closed because there are no external influences or interactions affecting the sequence. It's a simple example, but it effectively demonstrates the concept of a closed, deterministic system where all possible outcomes are completely predictable.

    So every thinker who imagined reality as a radical split between the world as we experience and represent it to ourselves (the phenomenal world, the world of appearances) and reality as it is in itself, unperceived, unconceptualized, unrepresented always leaves a backdoor. There is always a way out of the phenomenal world, the world that our brains have pulled down over our eyes. For Kant, it is the experience of freedom, namely, the freedom to follow (or not) the moral law, to do one’s duty. In the world as we experience and as can be described with physics, there is no freedom and thus no responsibility, no morality. Everything is caused. A person being murdered and a person being killed by a tornado – no difference within the phenomenal world, the world of objects obeying causal laws in space and time. We experience it as different – which, if the world is our representation and nothing more, must either be an illusory experience or an experience from another realm, the true reality behind the veil of appearances.

   Kant chose the latter alternative. When I see a beggar, and all my natural inclinations urge me to check my phone and walk by, but something else in my – my sense of duty, call it – calls on me to stop and give, and I stop and give, I have actually experienced a leak from another world, from the true world. The chain of cause and effect that runs the program with which we must experience anything we can experience is broken every time we do our duty (for Kant). Now you can’t prove it. Everything about giving to the beggar happens in the world of appearances and is thus subject to the same programming laws, the laws of physics. And of course I might have given to the beggar for numerous other reasons than out of a sense of duty. But if I acted from a sense of pure duty, I experienced something beyond space and time, beyond cause and effect, but plurality and all other conditions of our experience. I can’t say anything about it. I can’t give a reason for it. I experience it as an absolute command, something sui generis, something that can’t be compared to anything else we experience because it is not part of our program. It is like Super Mario (from the video game) stopping the program and doing something on his own because a voice from somewhere outside the virtual world he was a part of communicated a duty to him; as though rather than jumping on an enemy goombah felt compelled to show mercy even though mercy is not part of the program.

    Kant worked out an interpretation of the sublime to account for this getting out of the programmed reality.  I read a book by Thomas Weiskel that worked out Kant’s notion of the sublime in a way that made sense for me.

      The world of appearances is not a cage. Our understandings change all the time – at the margins (though the margins seem deep to us surface dwellers). And sometimes something amazingly new breaks into it. First, a contrast to everyday experience is presupposed – the experience of the virtual world generated by our brains' interpretations of sensory input.  

        A father, say, has a conventional relationship with his children: he is preoccupied with work, does his duty to the children – reads to them in the evening, etc. – but experiences all this as something normal, everyday, something typical for his culture. We might say this relationship is somewhat shallow without intending a moral judgment. And this shallow relationship is interwoven with the routines of family – carrying out the father program. And then, in the second phase, something happens to radically disrupt this conventional relationship: he loses a child in an auto accident or, less dramatically, is moved by some loving gesture of the child: “The habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise or astonishment is the effective correlative, and there is an immediate of a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess – and then both are, since their relation has become radically indeterminate (Thomas Weiskel, 22-23).” The habitual attitude breaks down. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he begins to see his previous life with his children in a new, critical light as being shallow, conventional – a view that was not available before. 

        In the third and final stage – assuming it comes at all – a fresh, new relationship is established. This new relationship, incorporating the excess Weiskel identified, has a different character: “…the mind recovers a fresh balance between outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and object such that the very indeterminacy that erupted in phase two is taking as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. This new relation has a “meta” character that distinguishes it from the homologous relation of habitual perception (23; emphasis mine).” The father – again, like Ivan Ilyich – has come to see his children in a radically different light; has come to change the attitude he has towards them. It is like the linguistic change between conventional uses of words like son, daughter, father, including the ways a sociologist might perhaps use the words in his work, to the super-charged uses of these words in religious poetry – language “used at full stretch” reflecting a deeper love for the children. And the conversion is not restricted to how the father experiences his children; in a sense, he now lives in a different world. (This is the only sense Nelson Goodman’s world-pluralism makes for me.)

       And then the sublime experience gets passed on in the grammar of our language, becomes part of an expanded common sense. Newborn babies are gifts, a person can haunt us in remorse, the world is filled with the grandeur of God. . .. Not everyone will be able to make these metaphors come alive in sublime experience; but it will be generally intelligible to everyone that some people can, and it should be intelligible to most that I might judge my life to be impoverished to the extent I cannot. Conceptual space for the seeing of newborn babies as gifts will have been created. Of course, this cultural space is a gift of culture, and cultures differ from one another to the extent they do not share such space. 

         Now through the sublime experience, reality leaks into and changes us and our world. But because nothing in our experience of the world allows us to understand it – we can only understand what we are programmed to experience – it’s not like we can prove it. If someone denies it, calls it an illusion on the grounds that nothing escapes the laws of physics, then Kant could not prove it to it. He could say that unless we acknowledge it, morality would be an illusion. But that is no argument that morality is not an illusion. He could say our form of life would be turned upside down. Again, that is not argument that our experience of morality is upside down. When we act from duty, according to Kant, we cannot really believe that the sublime experience corresponds to nothing or is just part of the brain’s program. But our subjective certainty again proves nothing. We are left with the sublime and the sense of subjective certainty. Believe it or not!

    To draw a limit to what can be thought – to remove metaphysical thinking as a human possibility – Kant and his followers distinguished between the world as we experience it and thus can think about, and the real world beyond our experience that we can never experience and thus never think about. Any way of conceiving the world that divides it up into a world of appearances that is equivalent to the world that we experience and talk about, and the real world that is conceptually beyond experience and all of our concepts has two and only two mutually exclusive alternatives: either skepticism: we can understand our programming better but can never know reality as it is in itself (unperceived, unconceptualized); or there is an escape from the virtual world through the sublime, but it cannot be conceptualized, spoken about except metaphorically (or analogically?), and thus cannot be known or proven – it is based on subjective certainty. Wittgenstein calls this “the mystical.”

   Both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein offer different variants of this, and I will discuss them in a future entry. But if one denies the axiom that all experience is by definition or by nature cut off from reality, virtualizes reality as it were, then things look different. I will conclude with a quote from Wittgenstein on this topic:

…to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought. . . .

I agree that we have no reason to suppose that reality completely conforms to our ways of experiencing it; that there is no reason to believe in realities that transcend our experience and thought. I disagree – and find it makes no sense – to suppose that our experience is not of something real. Perhaps it's only the surface, but it is the surface of something real.  When I look at the birch trees, I am seeing something real, birch trees, though I don't know them, don't see them as God does.         

Afterthought

Kant did not exclude the possibility that time, space, causality, subjects and objects, existed in the real world; but he maintained we could not know it. He did think it necessary to imagine a real material world apart from our perception of it. Schopenhauer found this illogical. If all we can know is appearances, then nothing gives us the right to suppose there is any world in itself apart from the world we experience. We don't know the sun, only the eye that sees the sun, he wrote. Thus the whole world of experience is a "phantasmagoria" - an illusion.