Political Realism of John Mearsheimer

I have followed the activities of John Measheimer for several years. And although I criticized his views on liberal education, I think his views on international politics are on the mark. [But see my caveats: My criticism of John Mearsheimer and Timothy Snyder for focusing on ideologies rather than the interests of individual leaders]

He is the author of the following six books:

  • Conventional Deterrence, 1983
  • Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, 1988
  • The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001
  • The Israel Lobby, 2007
  • Why Leaders Lie, 2011
  • The Great Delusion, 2018

    Because I am interested in escaping from bullshit, I found his discussion with Vishnu Som on why leaders lie enlightening:

    Also, the following discussion of his book, The Great Delusion, pretty much summarizes Mearsheimer’s views on international affairs:

    • The Odd Conservativism of Karl Popper

    Although Karl Popper was very critical of the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, he was also a very strong defender of the imperialistic liberal democracies. Sometimes one’s views are revealed by one’s silence; rather than by one’s explicit statements. In Popper’s case, there are a few pointers as to where he stood.

    Although Popper is in agreement with Marx over the 19th century conditions suffered by workers under capitalism. But he is totally silent on the conditions suffered by people by the European colonization of the world. And he expressed the belief that it was British humanitarian attitudes that led to Britain granting independence to India. To show that I am not exaggerating, here is a quote from his article “The History of Our Time: An Optimist’s View” (1956) [reprinted in his Conjectures and Refutations (1963)]:

    “When Mr Krushchev on his Indian tour indicated British colonialism, he was no doubt convinced of the truth of all he said. I do not know whether he was aware that his accusation were derived, via Lenin, largely from British sources. Had he known it, he would probably have taken it as an additional reason for believing in what he was saying . But he would have been mistaken; for this kind of self-accusation is a peculiarly British virtue as well as a peculiarly British vice. The truth is that the idea of India’s freedom was born in great Britain; as was the general idea of political freedom in modern times. And those Britishers who provided Lenin and Mr Krushchev with their moral ammunition were closely connected, or even identical, with those Britishers who gave India the idea of freedom.”

    Since Popper wrote this in 1956, surely he must have known of the Jallianwals Bagh massacre in Amritsar, India in 1919. It was this and not abstract defense of freedom which caused Indians to rebel and Britain to concede.

    Popper was against nationalism and the Wilsonian declaration for the right of self-determination.

    “But the nationalist faith is equally absurd. I am not alluding here to Hitler’s racial myth. What I have in mind is, rather, an alleged natural right of man — the alleged right of a nation to self-determination. That even a great humanitarian and liberal like Masaryk could uphold this absurdity as one of the natural rights is a sobering thought. It suffices to shake one’s faith in the wisdom of philosopher kings, and it should be contemplated by all who think that we are clever but wicked rather than good but stupid. For the utter absurdity of the principle of national self-determination must be plain to anybody who devotes a moment’s effort to criticizing it. The principle amount to the demand that each state should be a nation-state: that it should be confined within a natural border, and that this border should coincide with the location of an ethnic group; so that it should be the ethnic group, the ‘nations’, which should determine and protect the natural limits of the state.” [same source]

    When someone resorts to calling something “absurd” without an argument, critical rationalism has gone by the wayside.

    See also: Centralization of power is not beneficial to ordinary people; it is bullshit.

    Recently I came across a Ph.D. dissertation which squarely faces this issue: Craig Willkie, Open Nationalism: Reconciling Popper’s Open Society and the Nation State, University of Edinburgh, 2009.

    See also: Andrew Vincent, “Popper and Nationalism,” in Karl Popper —A Centenary Assessment, Jarvie, Milford & Miller (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

    In Search of Salvation

    Yesterday I watched most of the five-part mini series on HBO, The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, 2021. It is the story of Gwen Shamblin Lara (1955-2021), who promoted a diet program within a Christian “Remnant Fellowship.” Here is the trailer:

    What do I think about this?

    Well, two things. The first is that there were and there still are a slew of preachers who exploit the gullibility of so many people. I can’t tell the mind sets of these evangelists. All I know is that many of them make great fortunes, so that they can afford such jets as a Cessna Citation 501 (in which Gwen Shamblin was killed).

    And my take on such preachers is pretty much as portrayed by the character played by Burt Lancaster in the film Elmer Gantry, 1960 (based on Sinclair Lewis’s novel of 1927). Here is a clip from the movie:

    My second point is that these gullible people form the great mass of the 84% of the world’s population: The Unenlightened.

    Nitpicking on Karl Popper

    Although I am in agreement with Popper on his description of the scientific method and with his striving for an open society, I do have a few disagreements with some of his claims and proposals.

    The first one is his general claim that he does not wish to argue over meanings of words. On the other hand, he also does not want to argue at cross purposes. Well, how in the world are you to avoid arguing at cross purposes, unless you clarify what each of you mean by your words. This does not mean arguing which meaning or definition is to be preferred, but it does requires making a clarification of how words are being used.

    The second disagreement I have with Popper is over the search for essences. Historically, Popper may be right about the misguided search for “essences” of natural things. A possible explanation for this is a conflation of artifacts with natural things. An artifact — at least in typical cases, such as in the case of tools — is made for a purpose. And the essences of tools are the purposes they serve. Now, thinking by a misconceived analogy, one can ask what purpose does a stone or a bird serve. And by further analogical thinking, since artifacts serve the purposes of man; it can be mythically reasoned that natural things serve the purposes of gods or a God, or that things themselves are animate beings with purposes. So, I agree with Popper that natural things have no essences, but he forgets that artifacts do.

    This distinction between natural kinds and artifacts is relevant to the “infamous” Eddington’s two tables problem. Eddington had written “There are duplicates of every object about me — two tables, two chairs, two pens …” (A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1958, p. xi). This is a mistake. The word “table” refers to an artifact, and physics does not study artifacts; it studies the materials out of which tables, and artifacts, are made of. A table as a piece of furniture is defined by the purposes it serves. And physics does not study human purposes.

    The third disagreement I have with Popper is with his use of the word “rational.” He seems to use the word “rational” as contrasted with the word “irrational.” But there is a broad sense of rational such as when humans are characterized as “rational animals.” This means that humans are capable of acting in rational ways. Being rational, in this sense, includes acting irrationally. To make this clear, consider a cat. A cat cannot act rationally or irrationally, because it can act only a-rationally (or non-rationally). It is Popper’s failure to make a distinction between irrational and a-rational (non-rational) behavior, which causes him to call someone who acts by intuitions as acting irrationally; whereas I would say the person in such situations is acting a-rationally (non-rationally)– like a cat. For example, people who want to experience mystic states or to experience drug highs or who want to “escape from reality,” are not — in my sense — necessarily acting irrationally, but — given their circumstances — may actually –by seeking non-rational states — be acting quite rationally.

    The fourth area of disagreement I have with Popper is over his treatment of democracy. His criterion of democracy seems to be concerned with whether there exists in the institution of government a mechanism for removing a leader from office by a popular vote. This to me is a necessary but not a sufficient demand. The result is that he seems to be indifferent to types of democracies.

    In contrast, I want to make three points.

    1. Swiss style democracy is superior to all other existing state democracies.

    2. There is a distinction between Macro and Micro democracy. Micro democracy is favored by anarchists, and exists currently in Rojava, in the Mexican area controlled by Zapatistas, and in the Mexican town, Cheran.

    3. As a social democrat, Popper is for piecemeal engineering rather than for revolution. My position is that if a piecemeal law is passed granting everyone a free access to subsistence land — that will constitute a revolution!

    The Paradox of Choice

    A paradox is a seeming contradiction. But a contradiction is necessarily false. So, the task is to explain the appearance of a contradiction. In a previous blog, I made references to an article by Quine which dealt with paradoxes: “Paradox” — a type of bullshit

    While glancing at the index of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol.2, under the heading “paradoxes,” there are a few that have become famous. There are the paradox of freedom, the paradox of tolerance, the paradox of democracy, and others.

    In this blog, I want to alert you to a paradox which I previously have not heard of. When listening to its description, it resonated with me as absolutely true. This is the paradox of choice, presented by Barry Schwartz. Here is the video which enlightened me.

    Lectures on Philosophy

    If you want to listen to lectures on philosophy, there is a set of lectures given by Hank Green which are as good — if not better — than those given in a college. One reason for their quality is that these lectures have been edited, so they come off as polished presentations. [This can be appreciated by looking at some of the outtakes.]

    Here is the Crash Course Philosophy List. There seem to be 46 lectures.

    However, just because these lectures are good or even better of their kind — I mean as lectures; classroom lectures are better in one respect. They allow the audience to ask for clarification and allow for criticism.

    And, indeed, these internet lectures need clarifications and are subject to criticism.

    I will offer one such criticism of the lecture on compatibilism.

    Compatibilism is the thesis that determinism and free will are compatible claims. However, before even offering to clarify what is meant by “free will,” the lecturer moves rather quickly to the question of responsibility. These, as I see it, are distinct issues. By not offering a clarification of “free will,” the lecturer muddles the issue.

    Doing something freely (or of one’s free will) is to be contrasted with being forced to do something by another person. This is the kind of freedom which is sought by all human beings, and is dramatically illustrated by Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, screaming for freedom:

    My primary concern is to stay alive, and I can do this if I am free (from someone) forbidding me from taking up subsistence land.

    Imagine a person, Friday, on an island foraging for food. He is free from the commands, whims, and brute force of another person.

    Then comes Robinson Crusoe who subdues Friday and shackles him to a tree. Friday is no longer free. He is shackled so his limbs are not free, and he is no longer free from the dictates of Crusoe.

    What does this predicament of Friday have to do with whether all of this or any of this situation is determined by natural forces? Whether you are a determinist or an indeterminist in science, is irrelevant to Friday’s plight. In this sense, free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism because whether Friday is free from the whims of Crusoe is a different question.

    Incidentally, this question of the freedom of some people from the dictates of others (which is at the bottom of the capitalist, socialist, and anarchist debates) is for some reason excluded from these internet lectures.

    Responsibility

    As to the question of responsibility, one could start with actual legal law. Take a case of one person being accussed of killing another person. In law this is called manslaughter, but whether this manslaughter warrants to be called murder is a complex matter. Even with murder the law makes a distinction of degrees.

    There are two very enlightening articles on this topic written by John Austin: “A Plea for Excuses” and “Three Ways of Spilling Ink.”

    Objection to my position

    Someone may justifiably object to my criticism by claiming that it is an evasion from the problem as stated. Well, what is the problem as stated? In terms of the Friday/Crusoe situation, the question is whether Friday — before the entry of Crusoe on the scene — acts freely, in some other sense.

    OK, I did not address myself to making sense of this question, and if the term “compatibilism” is used as an answer to this question, then when I used the term “compatibilism,” it was to answer a different question. Let us, then distinguish, “compatibilism (1)” for the former, and “compatibilism (2)” for the latter.

    Dangers of Human Overpopulation

    Ever since Thomas Malthus, we know that population growth is exponential, while the source of food from using the land is arithmetic. At the site worldmeter, it is reported that the world population in 1800 was 1 billion, in 1930 it became 2 billion, in 1974 it became 4 billion. Currently in 2021, it is nearly 7.9 billion.

    The main and imminent danger from overpopulation and its effects is the destruction of the ecosystem. This means a disruption of climate, sea rises, pollution, species extinction.

    Another effect is a depletion of resources — primarily food and water. And, as Jared Diamond noticed, the killings in Rwanda were not just due to ethnic hatred, but also due to a scarcity of subsistence land. [See, Jared Diamond, “Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide,” Collapse, 2005]

    Adding overpopulation and scarcity of resources to war and violence, the result is massive migrations of people into Europe and into the United States.

    Today, on facebook, I was reminded of experiments done with mice and rats in overpopulated conditions (with adequate food and water) on behavior patterns which lead to extinction. I remember reading in the Scientific American in 1962, John Calhoun’s article “Population Density and Social Pathology.”

    The one that today caught my attention is the experiment of John B. Calhoun; variously called “mouse utopia,” “behavioral sink,” and “universe 25.” Here is the account of the experiment:

    See also: What Humans Can Learn from Calhoun’s Rodent Utopia

    Who to read in philosophy concerning knowledge and what exists?

    I would read a dialectical philosopher. By this I mean a philosopher who has examined the claims and arguments of previous philosophers and has come to his own conclusions. If you had lived at any time up to the 16th century, you should and would have read Aristotle and his commentators, such as Aquinas, Maimonides, and Averroes. But after the discoveries of Galileo in the 17th century there occurred a scientific revolution in physics and astronomy culminating in the work of Newton. And the philosopher to read then was Locke in England, and Descartes in France. The former was an empiricist; the latter a rationalist, whose position was developed by Leibniz. And Hume had presented a major challenge to empiricism. Well, these two strands of empiricism and rationalism were critically examined and readjusted by Immanuel Kant. So, contemporary philosophy (i.e., epistemology and ontology) must now take into account Kant and any advances in science.

    So, the question is: which author has competently taken into account this stream of philosophy? My first stab would be to read Bertrand Russell, especially his The History of Western Philosophy (1945). But a second, and an improved reading would be to read everything written by C. D. Broad. Why? Because Russell remained an empiricist, while Broad had absorbed Kant, while still critically having surveyed the history of philosophy. [See my: Philosophical Alternatives from C.D. Broad]

    There is an outstanding philosopher — Wilfrid Sellars. [See my: Problems from Wilfrid Sellars] But I would not recommend reading Sellars to a novice because he is too technical. He assumes a knowledge of current technical philosophical literature. He can be appreciated only by professional philosophers. However, several books have now been published with the intention of making him more accessible to a wider audience. Wilfrid Sellars was trying to come to grips with Kantian themes, as have many other Kantian scholars.

    One such outstanding Kantian scholar is Robert Paul Wolff, who published his findings in the book Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (1963). His lectures on Kant, given in 2016, are available on youtube, and I recommend them. Here they are:

    Lecture 1

    Lecture 2

    Lecture 3

    Lecture 4

    Lecture 5

    Lecture 6

    Lecture 7

    Lecture 8

    Lecture 9

    As a caveat, I just want to point out that neither Sellars nor Wolff had available to them C. D. Broad’s book: Kant. The reason is that Broad had written out his Kant lectures in 1950-52, and this manuscript was only published by C. Lewy in 1978.

    Also see: Kant and Building a Robot

    Controversial subjects should be learned through dialogues and debates

    Reflecting on my own learning experience, I do not remember learning much of anything (with exceptions) about controversial matters such as politics, religion, or ethics from listening to lectures. But I have learned more from participating in and listening to dialogues and debates.

    Listening to a lecture — given either to a small audience such as in a typical classroom, or to a large audience such as in a public lecture — at best, one learns the opinions of the lecturer; but one does not learn the merits of such opinions unless they are subject to criticism by a person of at least equal competence. I, therefore, recommend that all controversial matters taught in schools be conducted by two competent persons with incompatible positions.

    Historically, such an approach was dramatically illustrated by Plato’s dialogues, as well as by Aristotle in some of his writings, and more so by Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. But these are imaginary or opinionated dialogues. What is needed is to witness real disputes.

    As illustrations, let me offer the following debates available on the internet as examples.

    The first one is a BBC radio debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston in 1948:

    Here is a transcript of the debate: A Debate on the Argument from Contingency

    The second debate is between Norman Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz at Democracy Now in 2003 on the Palestine-Israel conflict:

    Here is my take on this debate and its aftermath: Andrew Chrucky, Norman Finkelstein, DePaul, and U.S. Academia: Reductio Ad Absurdum of Centralized Universities, 2007.

    The third debate is between Richard Wolff and Gene Epstein on Socialism vs Capitalism in 2019.

    Here is my partial commentary: Richard Wolff’s failed definition of capitalism

    The fourth debate is between Tucker Carlson and Cenk Uygur on immigration in 2018.

    Here are my Comments on the Cenk Uygur and Tucker Carlson “debate”

    The fifth: Sir Roger Penrose and William Lane Craig: How to combine the physical realm, the mental realm, and the abstract realm?

    My last illustration is the debate between Stefan Molyneux and Peter Joseph on the merits of capitalism: Andrew Chrucky’s annotated commentary on the debate between Stefan Molyneux and Peter Joseph of the Zeitgeist Movement about the free market system, which took place on September 23, 2013.