Ever the creative polymath, he also turned out at least a couple of sort of bad-ass Porter Wagoner meets Larry Flynt style cowpunk ditties. On blood-splattered clear vinyl, no less!!

Moonshine Mountain-mp3

In the talk and throughout the ensuing exchange, Harris rolls out a number of interesting claims:

• Despite relativistic intuitions that moral belief is a special kind of belief—such that competing moral beliefs can’t be objectively arbitrated—moral beliefs are internally just like other beliefs that represent the world. That is, moral beliefs function in actual cognitive systems (read: brains) as representing facts about the world. So, for example, our epistemic commitment to the proposition that it is wrong to torture children would be the same kind of epistemic commitment as would our commitment to the proposition that humans are mammals. This seems to imply that moral beliefs are at least functionally as truth-apt and defeasible as any other kind of belief.

• Values are kinds of facts—specifically, facts about the wellbeing of conscious beings, because any candidate value of any possible interest to human beings reduces to concerns about wellbeing.

• Wellbeing, like ‘health,’ is a potentially robust empirical concept, if an open-ended and even pluralistic one, with clear objective exemplars and contraries.

• Therefore, we can legitimately and effectively interrogate moral claims—that is, qua claims involving defeasible beliefs about the way the world works—through a scientifically refined theory of their source of value; namely, wellbeing.

All of this has been dressed up, it seems to me, in a kind of standard meta-ethical jargon of facts, values, morality, and so on, which is mainly what has drawn critics brandishing Humean and Moorean considerations. I think these objections tend to miss the most interesting stuff going on here, with Harris to some extent feeding the distraction. Still…

That stuff:

G.E. Moore’s “open question argument” maintained that values can’t be natural facts, because, for any candidate identity between a value and a natural fact, it’s an open question whether the identity in question obtains, which can’t be true of an identity. For instance, suppose the candidate identity of ‘goodness’ and ‘oxytocin-secretion-maximizing.’ It is then an intelligible open question to ask of some action X, (1) but not (2):

(1)  I know X is oxytocin-secretion-maximizing, but is it good?

(2)  I know X is good, but is it good?

Moore reasons that because the meaning of the natural fact term isn’t contained in the meaning of the value term, as it clearly is in (2), they can’t be identical. Realists have parried this argument, e.g., by arguing that the fact/value identity is an a posteriori necessity, like the theoretical identification of water with H2O.

Drawing out the anti-realist intuition in a somewhat different way, Hume famously observed an apparent gap in arguments to moral injunctions between “is-statements,” or descriptions of the world, and “ought-statements,” or prescriptions to action. Philosophers have worked this up into an argument that no conjunction of mere is-statements can possibly legitimate an inference to an ought-statement. Realists have developed various responses to this. Harris offers his own work-around here.

All of this is sort of standard initial maneuvering in meta-ethics, and fine so far as it goes, but, it seems to me, this line trends away from Harris’s most interesting claims. As I said, I think this is to some extent Harris’s own fault for framing his proposal in the terms he does. On the other hand, this might be the best way of drawing attention to the potentially powerful critical machinery he’s trying to put together. At any rate, Harris’s most consequential claims, it seems to me, are the following (empirical) claims:

(1)  Human moral concerns in fact ultimately reduce to concerns about wellbeing; which is to say that moral claims issue from concerns about wellbeing.

(2)  Moral beliefs function in normal human cognitive systems like other beliefs about the world. This is to imply that our moral beliefs represent the world, and bear the same kind of logical and causation-invoking properties and relations as other kinds of belief. That is, moral beliefs are not a distinct kind of belief. If this is right, then, at minimum, non-cognitivism is a false theory of moral language.

These claims, it’s worth emphasizing, are empirical claims. Harris could be substantially wrong about either or both.

In particular, Harris’s claim that moral concerns are always reducible to concerns about wellbeing—immensely attractive and plausible though this proposition may be—is so far basically only supported by a-prioristic intuition-pumping about what we can conceive of human beings caring about, and furthermore relies heavily on a notion of wellbeing potentially so open-ended as to risk vacuity. On this latter point, Harris admits that wellbeing is a concept that, like health, though we have clear definition-targeting exemplars, remains to be scientifically unpacked and delimited. All well and good, and I think most people can kind of get this far with Harris, but there’s a distinct looming tension here between an overrestrictive conception of wellbeing and a vacuously pluralistic one, at least insofar as we want to do more with that concept than condemn Nazis and the Taliban.

At any rate, if Harris is correct in these two claims, then (1) there is a basic common moral currency among otherwise disparate cultures—that is, there is a universal dimension of value—and (2) this value is embedded in causal, logical, empirical, and moral theories of how the world works. Therefore, any claimant to moral truth is in principle subject to criticism for making false (moral) statements. Put another way, if, at bottom, what we all value is maximizing wellbeing, and our moral beliefs are beliefs about how to maximize wellbeing, then our moral beliefs can be wrong. Yet another way: given a universalizable value function; namely, wellbeing-maximizing, and given that moral claims in fact embed theories of optimizing that function, then seemingly incommensurable moral languages are subsumed in one empirically responsive universe of discourse, and therefore subject to criticism and refinement through empirical investigation and argument. This doesn’t negate the possibility of standing outside of that universe of discourse and looking at its structure, but if Harris’s major claims are right, once you make a moral claim, you’ve entered the common moral landscape, and you are constrained by its kinematics. Contrary to what Harris seems to say, this doesn’t refute the Humean objection, but defuses it or makes it toothless.

This much said, I do think the wellbeing theory imposes a heavy burden on Harris. We can surely conceive aliens who hold, say, knowledge, to be a supreme (and supremely “trumping”) value in and of itself. Of course, Harris doesn’t need it to be the case that any conceivable value reduces to concerns about the wellbeing of conscious creatures, he only needs it to be the case that human values do.

On the other hand, through a few listens, Telstar does seem more and more like a Rosetta Stone to various production styles through and parallel to the Beatles and the British invasion—which I guess is kind of the received view on that record… For me, especially, it exposes the sensibility behind the demented compression you hear in early Screaming Lord Sutch singles (like Dracula’s Daughter), which themselves prototype something that echoes through a certain lo-fi punk lineage from the Sonics to the Cramps to the Mummies. And what’s especially interesting about that, is how antithetical to that genre Meek’s vision clearly was. That is, Meek was clearly un-ironically and earnestly futuristic.

It would be interesting to know how Meek thought of the Lord Sutch stuff he recorded. He did have an obsession with the occult, and believed he was in communication with the ghost of Buddy Holly, so maybe he took a less waggish view of those records than did the Screaming Lord himself…

Jungle Fever-mp3

Sweeping cultural alarmism, in any event, invites a kind of skeptical meta-induction over any particular instance of itself. That is, it’s basically gotten things wrong in so many past instances, that it very likely gets things wrong in the given instance. This isn’t (nor should it be) a knockout argument or anything. Rather, it is (and ought to be) part of the background against which Kakutani-style appraisals are read, and so I think defines a secondary burden for the cultural pessimist, which is to distinguish the case at hand from the kind of cohort anxiety over newfangled forms that is constantly rumbling through the culture. At minimum, you have to be able to say why this isn’t just beatnicks, or Elvis’s hips all over again.

Moreover, approvingly quoting a cultural mercenary like Bill Maher on intellectual shallowness and the blurring of news and entertainment strikes me as self-contradictory and really quite bogglingly obtuse.

Semantic saturation, or satiation, is what happens when you repeat a word until it loses meaning. Just as you generate retinal fatigue for a certain color by visually fixating an object of that color for an extended time, you induce semantic satiation by literally overloading the neural assemblies involved in calling up the concept picked out by the repeated word. In the color fatigue exercise, the result you get when you look away is an opposite—a spectrally inverted afterimage of the fixated object—but semantic satiation transforms normally sturdy concepts like “dog,” “seven,” “canoe”—or, in the classic stoner formulation, your own name—from concepts, into flavors of phonetic taffy; totally decoupled from their representational targets. Experientially, it’s a weird, alienating effect, especially if you can sustain concentration (the effect dissipates when you become distracted). If you do it in a concentrated and protracted way, you get a kind of dizzy unmooring from meaning altogether. You live in J.G. Ballard.

J.G. Ballard’s early science fiction ushered in and developed an introspective thread in the new wave of science fiction in the ‘60s—the exploration, in Ballard’s term, of “innerspace.” Ballard’s stories, often depicting a world under duress of large-scale biological and/or socio-organizational change, usually involve an idea of small-scale cognitive intervention, whether caused directly by the changing techno-social or biological environment, or induced to withstand it. Ballard’s interest, at any rate, lies in imagining and depicting the direct character of such small cognitive changes for the lived life of individuals. Dystopic and existential, his stories, at their best, poetically capture the inner feeling of rude mechanisms of the mind in disintegrative mode.

Ballard’s clinical style floats the prospect of a unifying diagnosis of a condition running through all his stories. In which case, it’s almost surely not there. Still, I like the idea of total, referent-annihilating, semantic satiation as a metaphor for the limit case Ballard’s protagonists approach as they undergo various forms of dissociating cognitive rearrangement. In “Manhole 69” the characters go from a sleep-depriving surgery into catatonic withdrawal from the world due to, perhaps, relentless exposure to the contents of their own minds. “Voices of Time” imagines a weirdly irradiated earth of evolutionarily prognostic mutants in which humankind is falling into a massive “nar-coma” and two individuals, an artist surgically anaesthetized against sleep, and a scientist gradually approaching permanent sleep with diminishing lucidity, struggle to retain meanings given in ordinary mental life. In “The Terror Zone” a guy, his psychologist, and various phantom doppelgangers contend for a governing account of a hallucinatory episode. In “The Overloaded Man,” one of Ballard’s most clinically observed, if least literarily fragrant, sketches, Harry Faulkner, a sort of vector sum of George Jetson, Walter Mitty, and various disintegrating Graham Greene heroes, actually begins a practice of disengaging his perceptions from their meanings, functions, and associations, until he finally dissolves in a swell of raw sensory impressions—total semantic satiation!

Here, Popmatters reviews a recently published collection of the complete Ballard short stories. Although…it’s also awesome to read his stories out of the wonderful, evocatively covered old-school paperbacks.