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Kaj_Sotala comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong
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-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
This is better than the other Screwtape quote, but - given the example of Ayn Rand - I think Lewis still gets causality backwards where smart Marxists were concerned. I think they started by being right about God and "materialism" when most people were insistently wrong (or didn't care about object-level truth.) This gave them an inflated view of their own intelligence and the explanatory power of Marxism.
I admit, I get horribly mind-killed whenever I realize I'm reading something by CS Lewis, especially anything from The Screwtape Letters. That's because years ago, the arguments in this book were used against me by a girl I was dating as a means to end our relationship (me being non-religious), who herself was convinced by her friends and family that we should break up.
That said, I was able to read this and appreciate it more clearly if I substituted the quote like so:
If we are attempting to spread good rationality around, would it be efficient to not try to convince people that rationality was "true", but instead attempt to promote good rationality by saying that rationality is "strong, stark, or courageous -- that it is the philosophy of the future"?
So you propose to spread rationality by encouraging irrationality?
Even assuming that this will work — that is, not just get people to buy into rationality (that part is simple) but actually become more rational, after this initial dose of irrational motivation — what do you suggest we do when our new recruits turn around and go "Hey, wait a tick; you guys got me into this through blatantly irrational arguments! You cynically and self-servingly pandered to my previously-held biases to get me on your side! You tricked me, you bastards!"? Grin and say "worked, didn't it"?
That seems to be what the quote is arguing.
The quote is spoken by a devil, who's deliberately seeking to destroy and devour a person...
The speaker does not himself believe that materialism is true; he is giving advice on how to make another believe a falsehood.
And do you think it's a good idea?
We aren't trying to promote the idea that rationality is true. We are trying to promote that it is useful.
More accurately, we have defined "rational" to mean "useful", and when we argue that something is rational, we are arguing that it's useful.
If you are, you are being irresponsible because you are not checking what people are going to do with this useful thing.
I can't know for sure that it won't come back to bite me, but I suspect helping people generally tends to be helpful. There are things that are easier to use to cause harm than to help, like nuclear weaponry, but in general helpful things seem to have improved humanity's standard of living, and made them care more about morality.
I don't actually think that teaching rationality is dangerous. I think that LW expects it to have an edifying effect, to change values for the better. So it is the claim of purely instrumental rationality that is the problem.
We are trying to promote the idea that it is useful because it is true.
The only senses in which you wouldn't say it's true are those in which that would be a type error.
While it is true that you shouldn't be a materialist just because it's fashionable, there's a fine line between saying "you shouldn't be a materialist just because it's fashionable" and "my opponents are just materialists because it's fashionable". The second is a straw man argument, and given that this is CS Lewis putting words in the mouth of Satan, I read this as the straw man argument. Needless to say, a straw man argument is not a good rationalist quote.
That sounds to me like you're assuming that Lewis wrote the book so that he could put the devil to say strawmannish things, in order to mock the devil. Which is not the case at all - the demon writing the letters is much more similar to MoR!Quirrel, displaying a degree of rationality-mixed-with-cynicism which it uses to point out ways by which the lives of humans can be made miserable, or by which humans make their own lives miserable. Much of it can be read as a treatise on various biases and cognitive mistakes to avoid, made more compelling by them being explained by someone who wants those mistakes to be exploited for actively harming people.
I read that quote as saying that the Devil (or a demon) deceives people by making them believe those things, not that the Devil believes these things himself. That's how demons behave, they lie to people. This one lies to people about why one should be a materialist and the people fall for it. The point is not to mock the demon, who in the quote is acting as a liar rather than a materialist, but to mock materialists themselves by implying that they are materialists for spurious reasons.
Of course, Lewis has plausible deniability. One can always claim he's not attributing anything to materialists in general--you're supposed to infer that; it's not actually stated.
Edit: Also, remember when Lewis wrote that. 1942 wasn't like today, when it's possible to say you don't believe in the supernatural and (if you live in the right area) not suffer too many consequences except not ever being able to run for political office. Any materialist at the time who claimed he was courageous could easily be just responding to persecution, not claiming that that was his reason for being a materialist. Mocking materialists for that would be like mocking gay pride parades today on the grounds that pride is a sin and a form of arrogance--pride in a vacuum is, but pride in response to someone telling you you're shameful isn't.
The demon is not just lying at random - the demon is lying with the purpose of getting a certain reaction (in this case, getting the human to subscribe to the philosophy of materialism). The original quote is advice on how to use the human's cognitive biases against him, in order to better achieve that goal.
The point of the quote isn't materialism. That could be replaced with any other philosophy, quite easily. The point of the quote is that, for many people, subscribing to a philosophy isn't about whether that philosophy is true at all; it's more about whether that philosophy is popular, or cool, or daring.
The point isn't to mock the demon, or the materialist. The point is to highlight a common human cognitive mistake.
I don't think he was mocking, but I do think he was correct. I claim that it's perfectly true that most materialists today are materialists for spurious, non-object-level reasons. The same goes for all other widespread philosophies. People in general are biased and also don't care about philosophical truth much.
I think the non-object-level reasons that the devil names are interesting.
I think few new atheists care about whether atheism is strong or courageous. They rather care about the fact that it's what the intelligent people believe and they also want to be intelligent.
I suspect that most members of the Democratic Party are Democrats for spurious reasons too. But a Republican who lists a bunch of human foibles and writes a scenario that specifically names Democrats as being subject to them is probably attacking Democrats, at least in passing, not just attacking human beings.
Don't let yourself be mindkilled. Arguments aren't soldiers.
Focus on the true things you can say about the the world.
I am tempted to reply to this with "May the Force be with you", but instead I'll ask "just what are you trying to say?" You just gave me a reply which consists entirely of slogans, with no hint as to how you think they apply.
I think the argument I made was fairly obvious, but let me break it down.
You care about who's attacking whom. If you are in that mindset arguments are soldiers. You treat the argument that there are atheists who are atheists because it's cool to be an atheist as a foreign soldier that has to be fought. A foreign soldier that doesn't play according to the rules.
Those considerations don't matter if you want to decide whether there are atheists who are motivated by the coolness of being an atheist. If you care about truth, you want to have true beliefs about how much atheists are motivated by the coolness factor of atheism. It doesn't matter for this discussion whether that argument is fair. What matters is whether it's true.
See filtered evidence. It is completely possible to mislead people by giving them only true information... but only those pieces of information which support the conclusion you want them to make.
If you had a perfect superhuman intelligence, perhaps you could give them dozen information about why X is wrong, a zero information about why Y is wrong, and yet the superintelligence might conclude: "Both X and Y are human political sides, so I will just take this generally as an evidence that humans are often wrong, especially when discussing politics. Because humans are so often wrong, it is very likely that the human who is giving this information to me is blind to the flaws of one side (which in this specific case happens to be Y), so all this information is only a very weak evidence for X being worse than Y."
But humans don't reason like this. Give them dozen information about why X is wrong, and zero information about why Y is wrong; in the next chapter give them dozen information about why Y is good and zero information about why X is good... and they will consider this a strong evidence that X is worse than Y. -- And Lewis most likely understands this.
I doubt that any LW member would take all of his information about the value of atheism from Lewis. If you let yourself convince that atheism is wrong by reading Lewis than your belief in atheism was very weak in the first place.
I have a hard time imagine pushing anyone in LW into a crisis of faith about atheism in which we wouldn't come out with better belief system than he started. If someone discovers that he actually follows in atheism because it's cool and works through his issues, he might end up in following atheism for better reasons.
Your understanding of 1942 is amazingly flawed. No-one in the developed world was persecuted for being a materialist at that time, but plenty were for their religion. Moreover, the fashionable belief at the time was dialectical materialism, and part of the claim made for it, by dialectical materialists themselves, was that it was the philosophy of the future.
Well, my first thought was Bertrand Russell being fired from CUNY, which was around 1940, although that was mostly because of his beliefs about sex (which are still directly related to his disbelief in religion). Religion classes in public schools were legal until 1948, and compulsory school prayer was legal until 1963. "In God We Trust" was declared the national motto of the US in 1956.
So given that none of these are examples of people being persecuted for their materialism, can I take it that you agree?
Like Salemicus said, no one of those things are persecutions. The closest of your examples is Bertrand Russell's firing, but even you admit that wasn't over his materialism.
By way of contrast there were in fact places in the developed world during the 1930's-1940's where one could be prosecuted for not being a materialist. And by prosecuted, I mean religious people were being semi-systematically arrested and/or executed (not necessarily in that order).
Saying "people in this time period are persecuted for their religion" implicitly limits it to Western democracies unless you specifically are talking about something else. It's like claiming that "in the 1980's, women weren't allowed to vote". That's literally true, because there are countries where in the 1980's (or even today) women could not vote, but it's not what most people would mean by saying such a thing.
Furthermore, the existence of laws implies persecution. If school prayer is compulsory, that means that people in schools are punished for not praying or have to pray against their will for fear of punishment. That's what "compulsory" means.
(Besides, if you're going to interpret it that way. I could point out that in countries like Saudi Arabia, people could be killed for not believing in God, and that this wasn't any better in the 1930's in most of those countries.)
Spain was certainly a democracy at the time this prosecutions were happening, granted it was engaged in a civil war, but it was the democratic side whose partisans were doing the prosecution. Furthermore, "Western democracies" wasn't a stable category during the period in question, so it was perfectly reasonable for a religious person living in a western democracy to worry that his country would stop being democratic shortly.
So can you cite an example of someone being imprisoned or executed for refusing to engage in school prayer?
I didn't say people were imprisoned or executed; I used it as an example of persecution. It certainly was that. You may think that persecution only means being imprisoned or executed, but I don't agree with that.
Lewis' point of reference is the UK, not the US. I don't know how much that changes the picture.
I think the US counts as part of "the developed world", however.
Bertrand Russell wasn't a materialist; he believed in Universals. I think you are confusing "materialist" with "people I agree with".
If accepting universals made one not a materialist, that would rule out some of the great Australian materialists, such as David Armstrong. Thus, that would clearly be a non-standard use of the label "materialist." Perhaps there are details of Russell's account of universals which are not shared by Armstrong's which make it anti-materialist, but you don't specify any. I know that Russell's views changed over the years, which of course complicates things, but he certainly didn't believe in spooky souls, and most of the doctrines of his I can think of which seem to be in possible tension with materialism are either susceptible to varying interpretations or matters he changed his mind on at different points or both.
Being proud of something that is actually shameful strikes me as particularly sinful.
How about being ashamed of something that is actually prideworthy?
If someone is a materialist just because it's fashionable, that's trouble. Lewis may be wrong on whether or not the Church is 'true,' but I don't think Lewis is wrong on calling out compartmentalization and inconsistency rather than thinking about whether or not doctrines are true or false.