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THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Tag Archives: John Dewey

Identity sans Community

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Authoritarians, Identity Politics, John Dewey, Media, Personhood, Social Media

≈ 3 Comments

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John Dewey, Personhood, Self-Identity

I’ve pointed out on several occasions that identity – as in “self-identity” or “personal identity” – is a construct that emerges from social interactions; it is something that is actively made, not something we simply have or is “given” to us. The evidence for this claim is much too dense for me to spend any more time rehearsing it (some representative discussion and citations can be found HERE.) So I will treat the fact of the constructed nature of personal identity here as a, you know, fact. And while the intention to construct an identity might, in some sense, be “built in” to us, the actual construction itself is something we must learn from our interactions with others. Were the construction primarily or exclusively instinctual, then the identity formed would be no more “constructed” than a bird’s nest is “designed;” the bird just gathers sticks and puts them together in the pattern that is instinctive to the bird.Tinker Toys

No, our personhoods, our selves, our identities, come to be assembled through our various forms of community based interactions. Obviously our genetic background provides a significant input beyond just our outward appearances. Things as diverse as shyness and psychopathic tendencies, intelligence and aesthetic tastes, all have a significant genetic components. But these things can be cultivated or suppressed, discovered or ignored, rewarded or punished, in unboundedly varied ways. Sociopaths might be born, but not every sociopath becomes Ted Bundy (some become Bernie Madoff or Martin Shkreli.) So how these biological bits and pieces come to be assembled into the persons we are is an open ended, and highly creative process. So what happens when that process is artificially truncated in some form or other? Continue reading →

Gun Ownership as Identity Politics

04 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Authoritarians, Gun Control, Identity Politics, John Dewey

≈ 12 Comments

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Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Gun Legislation, Identity Politics, John Dewey

(This is a “hot button” topic. If you’ve not commented here in the past, then I encourage you to read my policy on comments and spam before commenting now.)KnottedGun

So, another day, another mass-shooting; ho-hum. The NRA and other gun lobbies will noisily declare – in absolute defiance of all logic and evidence – that if only there were MORE guns, such tragedies would not occur. The staggering costs of gun violence will be dismissed out of hand, even and especially on those vanishingly rare occasions when they are mentioned at all. Meanwhile, gun advocates will brazenly insist – again, in absolute defiance of all logic and evidence – that gun control is incapable of effecting gun violence.

This last piece of nonsense deserves special attention, given that the absence of basic reasoning is so manifestly stark. The claim essentially amounts to insisting that since gun control laws cannot be 100% effective (which is to say, completely eliminate all forms of gun violence), then they can only be completely ineffective and useless. In other words, even if gun control laws only reduced gun violence by 1%, those 330 lives saved each year (since we slaughter over 33,000 annually), simply don’t matter. And let us apply the above “reasoning” to other laws: making murder illegal has not ended crimes of murder; so by the same argument, we should make murder legal. The same approach applies equally to every other law and regulation out there. Continue reading →

The Prayer Of A Freeman

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Altruism, Ayn Rand, Ethics, John Dewey

≈ 3 Comments

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Altruism, Ayn Rand, Ethics, John Dewey

The Guardian had an article recently about an emerging movement that some are calling “extreme altruism.” Believers in extreme altruism hew to the conclusion that one is morally obligated to give away a very large part of one’s own resources (“earnings” is a term used in the article, but that is a concept particular to a very specific type of economic structure) in an effort to seriously improve the welfare of others. The author gives the example of “Julia”: “Julia believed that because each person was equally valuable, she was not entitled to care more for herself than for anyone else; she believed that she was therefore obliged to spend much of her life working for the benefit of others.” Julia did not just throw her money at random charities; rather she researched groups that appeared to do the most good, spent their funds most efficiently, and used local people rather than their own, foreign aid workers. (It was because of this last that Julia chose not to become such a worker herself for an NGO – locals would know their own needs of their own peoples, as well as understand the cultural settings of those needs, much better than foreign aid workers.)fishing-03

A personal aside is necessary here. An aside that requires a brief visit to that toilet of non-intellectual sociopathic spew that is known as “Ayn Rand.” Continue reading →

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