John C. Wright's Journal

A reader with the royal yet Hibernian name of King McDee asked whether the unemployment caused by automation should be counteracted by welfare payments from the public till to the poor. I replied that a greater help to the poor would be to lower income tax.

He asked four questions:

“1. I don’t understand how removing income tax will benefit people with no sources of income.”

The prices of all goods and services in the economy will fall, including those bought by jobseekers living off savings or charity.

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This is a reprint of the first column ever published here in my journal. Oddly, it seems to be part of an ongoing conversation, of whose earlier segment, if any, I have no record.

sophistibation asks:

I’m curious what your suggestion, if any, is for a long-run solution to the problem of overpopulation, given your seeming distaste for contraception, one-child policy, etc. I’m not suggesting that there is a current global overpopulation crisis, but only that eventually the population must be limited either by “self-regulation” (abortion, contraception in the case of the West today) or by war, famine, etc. Interested to hear your thoughts.

I am a Cornucopian, which is the opposite of a Malthusian. The term was coined to define the position of economist Julian Simon whose famous wager with doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in a sane world would would have put paid to the Malthusian predictions of the latter. (You can see more about the Simon-Ehrlich wager here.) A Malthusian says that population growth (especially of Irish, Hindoos and Negroes) leads to disastrous scarcity of resources, resulting in mass famine, war, and apocalyptic megadeath. A Cornucopian says that population growth, while it creates dislocations and even disasters (such as the enclosure laws of England) does not necessarily lead to the scarcity of  any particular resource, nor all of them.

More people does not mean less stuff.

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A reader with the royal yet Caledonian name of Kingmcdee writes:

Just today I witnessed an atheist in Youtube comments … Responding to someone talking about fine-tuning, he asserted that no God was necessary to explain the unlikely course of events on Earth, because there existed Natural Laws which guaranteed that evolution would produce the results that it did.

Apparently he was not aware that Natural Laws are immaterial, eternal, unchangeable, and everywhere applicable – something that no physical thing could ever be.

So, he either believed that the Universe was ordered by immaterial and universal principles (a strange form of atheism indeed), or that the order of the Universe simply needed no explanation (hardly very rational).

My comment:

Allow me respectfully to disagree in part, and agree in part.

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I attempted to compress a theological argument into four posts on Twitter, within the character limit.  Tell me whether the argument holds:

The observation that reality is real, that only symbols reflecting realty can be true or false is accurate. However, this does not address the central argument: why any thought reflects reality?

The human faculty of reason either a tool with an aim (to truthfully reflect reality) or not. If not, reason is aimless, hence untrustworthy. If aimless, reason does not “fail” when irrational, nor “succeed” when rational. Failure and success only apply to tools working or not.

If human reason is aimless, it is untrustworthy for any and all reasoning, including this.

But if human reason is a tool with an innate aim, then the including the faculty of reason in human nature is deliberate. A tool implies a toolmaker. An aim implies an aimer. If our nature is of deliberate design, man was created by an intelligent creator: ergo God.

QED.

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Postscript: Our own Stephen J takes up the challenge of actually penning a haiku of seventeen syllables to carry our syllogism.

If Reason knows Truth,
then Truth is Reason’s Purpose–
If Purpose, then God.

We have all heard the argument of One God Less.

It takes a form something like this:

You Christians do not believe in Zeus or Odin or Osiris, neither do you believe in the gods of the Hindus, nor the Aztecs, nor the gods of Shinto. Indeed, there are a thousand gods in which you do not believe.

Whatever your reason is for you not to believe in those thousand gods, that reason is sufficient for me not to believe in your one.

You are just as much an atheist as I am when it comes to Zeus or Odin or Osiris. I am merely an atheist toward one God more than you.

It is an argument that is too clever for its own good. It sounds tricky as elfin glamor, but falls to pieces at the slightest touch of the cold iron of logic.

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I am the last person on earth to contribute a wise comment to the discussion of freewill vs determinism (or predestination, or any variant thereof) for the simple reason that I do not think the two incompatible.

I do not think the paradox everyone else sees in the question actually exists. I am what is called a “Compatibilist.”

Free will is a legal category: namely, whether or not a man is liable for his own actions. Dogs and children do not have free will, nor to madmen, as they are not fit to stand trial.

Determinism is a ontological category, or, rather, a categorical error: namely, Determinism mistakes the ontological category of might-have-been (i.e. an event which could have come about, but did not) with the category of is-not (an event which never could have come about).

The legal category and the ontological category have nothing to do with each other.

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Allow me to propose that there is something more fundamental than psychology, more fundamental than philosophy, which underpins one’s thought. Something more fundamental than psychology or philosophy influences or determines which worldview, one adopts, and to which one adapts oneself.

This most fundamental of foundations is one’s selfhood and one’s sense of self. It defines the basic anthropology and cosmogony of one’s sense of what man is and what is man’s place in the cosmos.

It is the study of “himselfhood.”

I propose the term eautology (from the Greek εαυτός ) to refer to the study of man’s sense of self, sense of life, sense of the world.

Other terms, such as “meta-psychophilosophy”, would be awkward, and the term “anthropology,” outside of theological discussions, has taken on another meaning.

Why is such a term needed?

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Here is a topic which is always timely.

We are all weary hearing the claim that opposition to the widespread normalization of sodomy, pederasty, transvestitism, castration, is bigotry akin to fascism; and we are likewise weary of the claim that tolerance toward perversion will usher in the paradise of endless worldwide orgies, like some mad vision of hordes of houri from an Arabic afterlife.

Let me set out the basic conservative argument, so that we need hear no more extraneous comments about utopia or Nazi Germany or how liberating to women divorce and sexual perversion are, or how happy it makes virgins to fornicate.

All of that, true or false, is irrelevant to the basic argument.

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Sometime circa A.D. 2007, an unsolicited question was sent to me with the mildly ungrammatical title of WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY? I did not recognize the man’s name, nor did he say for what publication, if any, he wished my response.

His somewhat leading question read:

As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.

What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!

Since this view of science, much less the scientific community, could not be further from the truth, I was at somewhat of a loss.

I wonder if the ever-better questions, ever-better put, now being asked by the ever more powerful tools and techniques of science now include “How Ungoodthink a Shirt was the First Scientist Who Landed a Probe on a Comet-head Wearing?”

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In his 1962 book  PROFILES OF THE FUTURE Arthur C. Clarke posits the dictum that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I answer is that Clarke’s Dictum is true only if the man who fails to make the distinction steadfastly ignores what distinguishes technology from magic in the first place, as Clarke, a crass materialist, blatantly does.

Because magic and science are as different as soul and body, as different as as word and meaning, as different as mechanism and aim, Clarke’s Dictum must be rejected as fallacious, if not risible.

As if saying any sufficiently advanced mannikin is indistinguishable from a man. The thing can be said only by someone who refuses to see what makes a man a man and not a mannikin.

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