Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Everything We Do is Wrong

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Oct. 25, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:08

Everything We Do is Wrong

Science is becoming an active impediment to virtue.

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	I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that, in fact, the entire way Westerners approach almost every aspect of human existence is basically just wrong.
	And I don't mean wrong in only the thin sense of being factually incorrect either.
	I mean we're both factually, morally, practically, spiritually wrong.
	And moreover, our perennial wrongness on these issues is causing a great deal of confusion for the people who don't think the same way as us, that we have invited and permitted to live here in their millions.
	I suspect that the source of this wrongness is the deification of science and the fetishization of reason, which is deeply characteristic of 20th century thinking and hugely damaging to non-scientific, non-rational enterprises,
	such as family, country, human happiness, our cosmic sense of self, even to our ontological status as moral agents from whom ethical judgments are derived and to whom moral characteristics are applied.
	There is nothing scientific about the deepest regard with which we hold ourselves, the dignity that we thaimotically expect from others to respect and the intuitive nature of our response when these boundaries are transgressed, even though when we do respond in a more animalistic, instinctive way to being disrespected, it's perfectly reasonable and everyone understands why we did it.
	And yet, here we are, pretending that such inversions of morality are not only acceptable but they are normal, good, positive, indeed, they are what progress is all about.
	And I think this is because science has some natural advantages over philosophy.
	Its positive results are much quicker, and its negative results take time to manifest.
	Science often provides a swift solution, even if we don't know what the long-term result will be, and whatever it is, we can safely assume that science will take care of it when it comes up.
	Science is thereby always galloping at a clip, hurriedly attempting to keep up with its own errors, never able to stop and take stock of all that it has achieved, for good or for ill.
	And moreover, the compounding errors which are being mitigated by new techniques, which themselves add new and unexpected problems to the stack of human achievements, surely must at some point, in what I'm assuming is not the far too distant future, end up creating something that doesn't really resemble an authentic human life, at least not one that our ancestors would have recognised.
	Eventually we may find ourselves trapped in a labyrinth of scientific accomplishments, of which we simply don't know the way out.
	Worse, it may be that the last men we have burdened with the weight of our technological advancements are simply unable physically to overthrow what has been done to them.
	Their agency over future generations, as C.S. Lewis points out, might be reduced to practically nothing, and we will have arrived in some kind of existential terminus from which there is no escape.
	I know it sounds ridiculous now, because such a future sounds very far off, but we are quite happily walking down that road, and I think it might be worth at least paying attention to that which we're accomplishing in the name of progress.
	Let's take a concrete example of this to explore.
	I am fascinated by the weight loss drug semaglutide, which is colloquially known through the brands that sell it, such as Ozempic and others.
	Wikipedia lists its medical uses as, quote, the higher dose formulation of semaglutide is indicated as an adjunct to diet and exercise for long-term weight management in adults with obesity.
	Having spoken to people who have used Ozempic, they tell me that it simply just makes you feel less hungry and more full, so you lose weight without having to do the hard work of willing yourself not to eat to excess.
	One didn't have to change their mind to change their body.
	This has been done for them through the magic of science.
	No self-control was required, no self-discipline was required.
	They as people did not improve, instead they skipped the journey to arrive at the destination.
	Ozempic and other weight loss drugs have side effects, of course, and from what we know so far, they don't seem that bad.
	Most are some form of digestive problem as the drug interferes with the complex system that, like all complex systems in nature, we don't fully understand and therefore can't fully predict the outcomes.
	But these short-term negative effects aren't so terrible, and so it seems like a worthwhile sacrifice to make.
	There is of course the worry that a more long-term issue could come up for users of semaglutide that simply doesn't manifest until about a decade later.
	It could be that there is a price for cheating on one's diet that will be paid in full at some point in the future, and I suppose all we can do is hope that if that does come up, science can solve that problem too.
	Philosophy though is the other way.
	In the short term, very little changes when one engages with philosophy, and it can be many hundreds of years before the effects of a new philosophy can really be seen.
	But when this does happen, the roots run very deep, and the changes are lasting.
	This makes philosophy a tough sell.
	It's far easier to promise immediate scientific revelation than long-lasting improvement.
	And moreover, where science says, keep doing what you're doing and I'll mitigate the negative effects, philosophy demands that you instead change what you're doing and begin to love the difference.
	This again is a tough sell, because usually we were doing something unwholesome because it gave us immediate gratification or was just easy, such as in the Ozempic example.
	It often feels good to overindulge, even though we know it will be bad for us in the long term.
	And if we can shortcut our way around it, what's the harm?
	Well, it's hard to put this in a way that is comprehensible to modern sensibilities, but the harm is in the fact that you are still the inadequate person that you were yesterday.
	The problems that you have accrued from living in modern society are usually because we are insufficiently virtuous.
	Virtue as Aristotle defined it, being the middle point between excess and defect, is a self-evident but often elusive state to be in.
	One mustn't do something too much or too little.
	To stay within the golden mean is the path to virtue, and science is giving us means of circumventing that, but not to our benefit.
	Aristotle drew up a hierarchy of moral virtue and we can see where we fit in it.
	At the bottom were the vicious men, men who indulged their vices and enjoyed them, even while knowing that they were vices.
	These people are selfish, greedy, insatiable, and shameless.
	Above them are the incontinent men, who know right from wrong but could not stop themselves from indulging their vices.
	These are the weak people, who know they should stop doing what they're doing, but can't find the fortitude to gain control of themselves and change their lives.
	These people are usually quite pathetic, shameful, disdainful, almost pitiable.
	Above the incontinent men are the continent men, men who know what is virtuous and what is vicious, and choose the virtuous path, even though in their heart of hearts, they wish they were indulging their vices.
	These people are generally quite respectable because they've mastered their worst impulses and probably consist of the majority of mankind.
	And finally, above the continent men are the virtuous men, those men who do the right thing for the right reason, to the right amount, and enjoy doing it.
	To be a properly virtuous man, in Aristotle's estimation, is to love virtue for its own sake and to find no burden in it.
	If we apply this to our eating habits, we can see that there is definitely a golden mean here, because of course we need to eat, but not too little and not too much.
	So through the lens of virtue ethics, we find that the vicious people are those who eat far too much or far too little, so that their bodies suffer from it.
	They take an unwholesome pleasure in the excess or deficiency, which is not only bad for themselves, but it's a bad example to others.
	The incontinent people are those who eat too little or too much, usually too much, and know that they shouldn't, but lack the self-control to become at least continent men, who don't indulge in excess, but still want to.
	And finally, from a dietary perspective, the virtuous people are those who enjoy eating a healthy, seed oil-free diet, and are not tempted by the modern, sugar-filled, fast-food diet at all, and in fact, find such food repugnant.
	It takes a lot of effort to improve yourself as a person.
	Many people can have vicious habits regarding their diet, and only after a strong desire to improve become incontinent men, knowing that they ought to change but not finding the willpower.
	And after enough time passes and enough effort is applied, you may become a continent man who, like me, is desperately trying to become virtuous in my eating habits.
	The reason that I'm laying out what appears to be a very mundane thing is that it shows us how science is interfering with the philosophy of virtue.
	Azempic intercepts these stages between being incontinent and being continent by taking the place of the change of mind required to accomplish the transition from one to another.
	The incontinent person can be made continent through scientific intervention, making them want to eat less.
	And if it's successful, science has provided a method by which we can avoid the negative excesses of vice without having to become virtuous at all.
	Science in this case becomes an active barrier to achieving virtue.
	Even if we get the outcome that we want, we are still the same overindulgent moderns with our lack of self-control.
	We haven't become better people.
	We've just hidden the consequences of our vices.
	Our characters have not improved.
	We are still the same inadequate people that we were before.
	Only now we get to be mediocre without suffering the ills of our sins.
	Instead, we've replaced those with medically induced side effects, which themselves we will take further medication for in order to ameliorate them, and so on and so on, to whatever unpleasant destination that path takes us.
	When what we ought to have done is changed ourselves, so we would have changed our outcomes and become better people in the process.
	Our ontological status as moral agents is still low, because we are not respectable people.
	We aren't giving ourselves reasons to think highly of one another.
	In fact, we are essentially using science to cheat our way through questions of virtue and vice.
	And as with everything, we are looking at ourselves as the fungible, interchangeable, scientific units that are the appropriate ground for experimentation to overcome something that wasn't a question of physicality, it was a question of character.
	We have subverted this, we have gone around it, we have failed to learn the lessons that we ought to have learned, and so we haven't improved at all.
	The essence of what we are remains the same.
	We are not virtuous, we are frauds, this is a fiction.
	Even if we appear to be thin and beautiful and young and happy, we got there through fraudulent means.
	We cheated.

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