Bouvard on Probability, Circularity, and Theoretical Grounding

When i think of probability, I'm generally thinking of Peirce, without claiming expertise in his philosophy. But here, though, I don't think that's so important. What's important is, first, turning binaries into probabilities: so, instead of god/bad, progressive/ reactionary, true/false, etc., we have a distribution: something which one might have called "true" has references on one set of possible scenes, while we can imagine other possible scenes upon which it would have no referents--while we may not have a very good sense of how likely those other scenes are, we may want to keep their possibility in mind. We're interested, then, in the spread of these possible or hypothetical scenes, rather than coming down on one side or the other: true or false. Second, making these aggregated probabilities (all the things we imagine likely, to some extent, as we clarify our hypotheses regarding possible scenes) capable of expression in language. It's not so easy to speak outside of the binaries: people want to know, on some level we all want to know: is this true? Good? Important? Instead, we'd have to learn to say that someone positioned in this way, within this history, this relation to some center, would say X is "good" under these conditions, and here is our own interest in hypothesizing that. But we'd want to be able to say things like this fluently, not in a stilted way, and in a way others could pick up on.

It may be that "human nature" is one of those concepts that are intrinsically circular and grounded in literacy and therefore not worth arguing about. All these arguments seem to have the form of the one dealing with the relation between "God" and "the Good" in one of Plato's dialogues: is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it's good? We can go in a similar circle here: there are human constants--mimetic desire, the linguistic means of deferring it, etc.--but unlimited forms these constants can take. So, does human nature involve constant transformations in human nature? The point of identifying "human nature" seems to me to provide a device for arguing against something that would violate it--like surrogate birth, or other reproductive technologies. As soon as the new practice is established, opposing that would be a violation of human nature, etc. So, we could use "human nature" in the ways you suggest, but would it help us in determining the moral meaning of a particular practice at a particular point in history? I don't think so, because it can't tell us what practice or figure will be violently centralized (i.e., scapegoated) under those conditions, and resisting such violent centralization is how we establish moral practices.

Right, this is the kind of situation--fighting back against the latest crazy SJW initiative--where people want to fall back on "human nature" as a guarantee, and are regularly disappointed. "People used to think the subordination of one race to another was 'human nature'," etc. But, of course, what "licenses" me to say it's "crazy"? Once we get our theoretical ducks in a row, how do we talk about this stuff? Ultimately, I think we will have to break up the disciplines mandating these practices from within. The legal discipline along with the medical, therapeutic and probably other disciplines are all implicated here. It would be necessary to show that what is going on in these disciplines is not inquiry, that they close off positions and questions, themselves legitimate in terms of the discipline, that would interfere with the conclusions we could show they clearly want to arrive at. Of course this doesn't help this father and the many others who will no doubt undergo the same ritual. If appeals to "human nature" were to help him, fine, but, while one of these parents might get lucky here or there, I don't think appeals to human nature and common sense could be anything more than a desperate stopgap measure. But the problem gets bigger--the very discourses and disciplines that transgenderism "distorts" were already disfigured by previous liberal initiatives--we're at the point where appeals to "common sense," "human nature," "freedom," etc., are merely appeals to previous liberal depredations that are now defunct. We're at the point where even small cases have the potential of putting liberalism as a whole on trial. But think about the kind of institutions of the Right that would be needed to sustain such an effort. In a sense, what the Federalist Society in the US did is a kind of model here--they genuinely transformed the legal profession, and are the reason there are justices like Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, etc., for Republican presidents to put on the Supreme Court. But this is a very specialized arena where big businesses have very precise interests that can be defended by traditional "constitutionalism." Doing something analogous in medicine, psychology, education, etc., would be a massively larger project.

I think we can speak about a "real human order," because "order" is very different from "nature," being directly social and historical. There may never have been a perfect human order, but there have been orders and understandings of order in greater conformity to "proper" or "functional," or "healthy" reciprocal center-periphery relations. And so we can speak about "deviations" from that, or failed attempts to resolve anomalies intrinsic to a given order that provide our discourse with a normative base. Asking what the "right" order is involves both assessing previous orders against the present one, while using that assessment to identify elements of a better order out of the one we have.