It’s my favorite holiday again, and even though I’m hunkered down trying to produce the most complex, intricate, creative season of the podcast yet, there’s no way I’m going to skip a chance to celebrate. This time our guest is Bryon White, CEO of Yaupon Brothers, an organic producer of Yaupon Holly, a climate-change resistant plant once revered as a drink by all indigenous people of the Southeastern United States, beloved for its salubrious properties for body and soul. He and his colleagues are trying to return Yaupon to the place of dignity and value that, from a long-term perspective, it’s always had in North America.

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Today we begin part two—or, as we're calling it, the B Side—of season two, "Race: Is That a Thing?" To kick things off we're re-releasing the last episode of part one, Episode 8: "The Holy Family in a Pane of Frosted Glass" together with Episode 9: "Ballpark Figures Part I."

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To set the stage for part two of our series, “Race: Is That a Thing?", we take a deep look at a recurring metaphor that has permeated our entire series.

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Once again, this is a set of material that we couldn’t fit into Episode Seven: “Categorical Declarative” proper. Consider the contents of the appendix the audio footnote podcasts—or “footcasts”—to that episode. We will be releasing Episode Eight: “The Holy Family in a Pane of Frosted Glass” on Monday, March 18.

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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he “is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields.”

But did Immanuel Kant create the spurious concept of scientific race? We ask Boston College Professor of Philosophy Susan Shell, author of Kant and the Limits of Autonomy and The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation and Community.

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When people talk about things as social constructs, should we understand that as derision or dismissal? Do socially constructed human kinds, like races, get realer over time, the more those who supposedly fit a construct begin to behave as if they naturally fit it?

We ask Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Ron Mallon of Washington University in St. Louis these questions and more.

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Can there be a plurality of concepts of race floating in the social air? If so, are we okay with that? Are there pragmatic uses for one or more of those concepts in the areas of medicine or public policy? In this episode we speak with Robin O. Andreasen, philosopher and Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware.

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If race has no essence, then is it an irrational social contrivance? Or is it somewhere in-between? We speak with Michael Hardimon, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism, who argues we must come to terms with the limited ways in which race really does exist.

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As our guest this episode, philosopher Stewart Umphrey, writes, “Our everyday understanding of natural things presupposes that their reality does not depend on how we regard them, and that the way we ordinarily regard them is heuristically if not cognitively valuable.” Join us as we explore natural kinds in our continued attempt to determine whether “race” is really a thing, and what makes things things in the first place.

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Our season is called "Race: Is That a Thing?" What does it mean for a thing to be a thing? What is a thing? We consult Oxford English Dictionary editor and authorized OED historian Peter Gilliver, who updated the entry on "Thing."

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How deep do the categories we use to navigate the world go? Are they more transient than we normally think? In episode one of the new season, Ben and Aaron lay the groundwork for the series "Race: Is That a Thing?"

In this episode we meet Armand Marie Leroi, Prof. of Evolutionary Developmental Genetics at Imperial College, London, who caused a stir regarding "race" 13 years ago with a controversial op-ed piece in the New York Times.

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Steve Metcalf seems to shed urbanity and passion like I shed dandruff. His off-the-cuff manner of speech is as trenchant as his writing, and he is able to say wise things about any subject.

Here he discusses with me the topic that launched an episode of this podcast and my three-part essay “Best Behavior” (part three coming soon): the weird fact that we all changed our entire outlook on Woody Allen’s film Manhattan to fit our changing moral priorities—how we cannot just bracket out the lechery on display and heap praise on an indisputably brilliant and entertaining movie, even though that’s exactly what we did for decades! Steve and I chew over this terribly troubled—and terribly interesting—question before digging deeper into where our moral judgements hail from.

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Are there types of languages that are unique from other types of languages? Are there newer languages that are formed from other languages, but have less vocabulary, less grammar, less stuff? Is that what we mean by “creoles”? John McWhorter thinks so; Salikoko Mufwene doesn’t. Welcome to the smackdown.

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Now produced at the University of Hamburg, A Million Little Gods is relaunching with the second season, a series called "Race: Is That a Thing?"

The new season launches November 5. But watch out for a sneak peak of the new season tomorrow with a preview episode featuring John McWhorter called "Linguistic Typological Smackdown."

Subscribe now!

 

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In this final part of a three-part series on what it means to be a self—and the final episode of the first season—Aaron discusses with the analytic philosopher Galen Strawson whether you can know your own character, thinking of yourself as the same person over time, and telling a narrative about your life.

And with Fr. James Martin, Aaron discusses knowing yourself in communion with other people and with God.

Related Links:

America Magazine: The National Catholic Review (Fr. James Martin, SJ, Editor-at-Large)

The Abbey: A Story of Discovery by Fr James Martin, SJ

"Against Narrativity" by Galen Strawson

The London Review of Books: "Is R2-D2 A Person?" by Galen Strawson

The Atlantic: "Stop Being So Self-Conscious" by Paul Bloom

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In this second episode of a three-part series on what it means to be a self, we tour a cognitive neuroscience research laboratory, examine "qualia"—instances of subjective perception or experience—and discuss with Prof. Galen Strawson the counterintuitive view of "panpsychism"—the idea that consciousness is a primordial feature of all things.

Related Links:

Professor Andreas Keil

Kevin Gray in Paste Magazine

Qualia (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Daniel Dennett: "Why and How Does Consciousness Seem the Ways It Seems?"

Dan Dennett: The illusion of consciousness | TED Talk | TED ...

17 Quining Qualia Daniel C. Dennett

Galen Strawson: Consciousness myth | TLS - The Times Literary Supplement

Galen Strawson: Qualia Set Aside, What Other Problems Are There for Physicalism? - YouTube

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Aristotle on primary premises

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On the supervenience of the mind on the brain

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On believing in natural selection and being a believer

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What does it mean to be a self? Do you emerge from your brain? Is a self just a human being? Is it something more? Something less? Something altogether different?

We'll try to wrap our minds--so to speak--around these intractable questions in this, the first in a series of three episodes featuring philosopher Galen Strawson and Fr. James Martin, SJ.

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On the “phantasmagorical wall”

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What is science? Is everything, in the end, explainable by science? What makes a practice scientific? What makes one nonscientific? Do rhetoric and debate have a place in science? Do values?

In our second episode, “Party and Science and Bullsh*t,” we try our hands at answering these questions, along with philosopher of science John Dupré, astrophysicist and author Marcelo Gleiser, New York Times science columnist Carl Zimmer, and Katherine Carpenter of the Cultural Cognition project at Yale.

This episode is dense with opinion from the guests, and from Aaron. So in the interest of transparency , we're publishing the fully unedited conversations between Aaron and the guests along with the produced show. Please forgive the fact that it takes Aaron almost as long to ask questions as it does for the guests to answer them.

Here are some links to people referenced, featured, or heard in this episode:

Thomas Dolby: “She Blinded Me With Science”

Bill Nye the Science Guy (Television Show)

Star Talk Radio with Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Seth Andrews Interviews Richard Dawkins

Carl Sagan's “Pale Blue Dot” speech

J. Robert Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report (Introduction to the Best American Essays 2007) by David Foster Wallace

Ben Goldacre: Battling bad science | TED Talk

Don't Dumb Me Down (Science | The Guardian) by Ben Goldacre

Monopolizing Knowledge, by Ian Hutchinson

Richard Dawkins

Sam Harris

Steven Pinker

Daniel Dennett

The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science by John Dupré

Carl Zimmer

New York Times “Matter” Column

Marcelo Gleiser

13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

Why Evolution is True Blog by Jerry Coyne

“Evolutionary Theory’s Welcome Crisis” syndicated article by John Dupré

“Another philosopher proclaims a nonexistent 'crisis' in evolutionary biology” blog response to Dupré by Jerry Coyne

“Jerry Coyne vs John Dupré on the status of evolutionary theory” blog entry by Massimo Pigliucci

“Epigenetic inheritance uncoupled from sequence-specific recruitment” in Science by Kaushik Ragunathan, Gloria Jih, Danesh Moazed

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale

Katie Carpenter

Dan Kahan

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In order to entice more people to become subscribers, here is our full interview (complimenting my three-part essay “The Razor Blade in the Apple,” which I released last month and you can read here) with two scholars who have much to say about the formation of the scientific consensus on race:

* Nathaniel Comfort, historian of genetics and the relationship between modern genomics and 19th-century eugenics

* Ayah Nuriddin, historian of the lived experience of black Americans over the past 100 years and how they’ve navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism

Part II of the essay “Best Behavior” will appear in inboxes next Thursday! Meanwhile, enjoy the interview.

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On the connection between “allusion” and “play”

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On the podcast’s title

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In the premiere episode of A Million Little Gods, we explore the supposedly “literary theoretical” method conceived by Harold Bloom for critiquing the work of poets and other artists over and against their predecessors. As a literary theory, Bloom’s idea was pretty insipid, but as a (somewhat jaundiced) way of looking at the human condition, it was actually profound. We speak to esteemed professor and critic Christopher Ricks, Poetry Magazine Editor in Chief Don Share, and Stephen Metcalf of the Slate Culture Gabfest about the history and legacy of—and perhaps more salubrious alternatives to—the “anxiety of influence.”

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We've reached the heart of the part of our series "Race: Is That a Thing?" devoted to statistics and data. Having laid the groundwork for understanding Bayesian techniques and machine learning—as well as the limits and discontents of those tools—in episodes nine and ten, we turn to how they've been used to understand the history and diversity of the human population.

Carl Zimmer, New York Times science journalist and author, and Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Professor of the Philosophy of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, help us unpack just how difficult it is to justify using our cultural inheritance of "race" to talk about our genetic inheritance.

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Ben and Aaron, their families, and their colleagues and students at the University of Hamburg wish everyone in America a Happy Thanksgiving. Here's a little tone poem, so to speak, for the holiday. Stay safe everyone.

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Is the margin of error the same thing as the percentage of certainty you can have in that margin of error? Can a prediction ever happen in a vacuum without affecting the thing it's making a prediction about? Can we even distinguish between a deterministic universe and one in which we have free will? Does that have anything to do with time? Can two dudes drinking beer under bed comforters at home answer these questions? Let's find out!

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Continuing the theme from Episode 9, we closely examine:

1. how machine learning works,
2. how our subconsciouses—both individual and collective—learn from the past, making ad hoc categories based on contingencies,
3. how those categories are the origin of basically all of the things that populate the world,
4. how technologies that use augmented versions of our own rational capacities are quickly altering baseball, and rendering it nearly unrecognizable in the process!

Our guests are:

• Ben Lindbergh, staff writer at The Ringer, co-host of both Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast and the Ringer MLB Podcast
• Prof. Dr. Heiko Becher, director of the Institute of Medical Biometry and Epidemiology, Medical Faculty, University of Hamburg
• Adam Darowski, creator of the Hall of Stats, a website dedicated to repopulating the Hall of Fame using a statistical formula

Here is a link to Ben Shaver's intuitive medium.com article on MCMC methods which we reference in the episode. 

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We flip to the B-Side of Season 2, as we enter a section of the season devoted to statistics and mathematical modeling. In this episode we examine the life and career of baseball great Ted Williams and consider how adding new variables to a model can change what the model shows, for better or worse.

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Cafe La Morenita. “The little dark-haired girl.” Ehn. Should’ve made Yerba Mate or something. All right, let’s get back to it.

Once people around the world had finally caught on to the fact that they’d been the marks in a shell game they’d foolishly been betting on since the industrial revolution—that their personal labor had been structured within a set of legal and economic institutions and had been measured in standardized units (hours of work) that could be traded and sold on a market for a set value—they had reacted with . . . predictable indignation.

You might think that I am alluding to another feature of the reality Perón found himself lodged in before the junta: “dialectical materialism”—what some call Marxism. And you certainly cannot explain Perón’s rise devoid of that half-baked theory of everything. But there is another way you can strike out on once you face up to the abuses suffered by the subservient.

By the early 1940s, Communism, the purest distillation of Marxist thought, had long-since made its expansiveness apparent: Its most basic dictate—that the lowest level of human experience (the struggle for power and “material” possession) subsumes every other facet of human behavior—was voracious. Everything else—family bonds, career ambitions, fealty to nation, altruism, charity, . . . and (famoulsy) religion—was consumed in the monomaniacal maw of this basic principle, according to which human coexistence is necessarily impelled to one inevitable conclusion: a classless, stateless society where all property is collectively owned and wealth is distributed based on need.

The adherents of this principle believed that some further evolutionary state hidden beyond the veil of those ends might be possible; but that we are culturally blind to that possible state because we cannot look past the aforementioned institutions: the state, the family, religion. In order to achieve those ends, the seductive phantasms of institutions holding them back had to be exposed and brought into synthesis with them.

As you can imagine, the Catholic Church was not amused. It didn’t like being called an institution. It didn’t consider itself the work of humans at all. But much worse: to be rendered a mere diversion—to be labeled as priestly magicians, pressing made-up concerns to distract the people, all the while fleecing the people of their needs, and of the means to attain those needs, either for the gain of the Church itself or, worse yet, in the service of secular powers—that was more than flesh and blood could stand.

Now, you can explain away this reaction as angry deflection or denial. “Of course the Church would resist such a conclusion,” you might say. And, well, maybe. Alternatively, I can call you a self-important cynic. What you might call deflation or reduction, I might call nihilism. Your psychologizing of the Church, or of the Clergy, presupposes the very things you are claiming are “merely” instruments of class domination: values, principles. Marx himself had wavered before leaning into “revolutionary materialism.” He was enthralled not merely by Hegel’s dialectic, but by his idealism.

I’m just gonna help this guy out. So, you should note that when he says “idealism,” he doesn’t mean it in the common way people use it to mean having high ideals or aspirations. He’s using the philosophical term of art: The notion that our minds, our consciousness, our ideas—our values and principles—are real; and alternatively that reality is, at least somewhat, shaped by our minds and ideas.

In Phänomenologie des Geistes, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel argued that we do indeed encounter the “things” of the world. They are outside of us. But we also “make” them, in every facet. Outside of our ideation they are never fully real. Their reality is tied to the process of our conceiving and understanding them. When we begin to understand the things we have conceived in thought as separate from us—and especially when we perceive ourselves as objects, separate from us—this is estrangement.⁠

However, Hegel contends that this process is, nevertheless, an essential part of our becoming complete selves—for the things of the world are separate from us; yet we are objects in the world. When we reconcile ourselves to this paradox, we are alienated, but we are free.

Marx turned this idea on its head. In Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, what in English we abbreviate as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx borrowed the notion of “estrangement.” But where Hegel saw “alienation” as the positive version of estrangement—a stage in the development of self-consciousness—Marx saw only the worker's estrangement⁠ from labor, production, and ultimately, their human essence. And as he “matured,” Marx jettisoned ideas and self-consciousness altogether.He criticized Hegel for viewing ideas as the primary drivers of history, arguing instead that material conditions and economic structures determine consciousness. In the set of manuscripts by Marx and Engels (and probably a few others) that we call The German Ideology, they famously declare: “Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sander umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt.” (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”)

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Unto the breach rode Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci. Alternatively known as Pope Leo XIII. From one perspective, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Pope Leo wanted to provide the Church with a philosophical and theological bulwark against the encroaching influence of modern ideologies. You could of course think of him as a CEO whose one job is to secure the bottom line—butts in pews, knees on prie-dieux, pesos in collection baskets—for the red-cassocked board of directors. But that begs the question that was at hand: What was wrong with those ideologies?

Hegel’s philosophy of reality as a dynamic unfolding of contradictions through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—and especially his views on God and his nigh-on deification of historical progress—those didn’t sit well with Leo. But he understood where they were coming from. The diversity of beliefs, and the difficulty of living together in peace given that diversity, make Hegel’s model of reality appealing. If God is an end toward which things evolve, a self-directing principle that governs or animates reality; and if the truth itself evolves over time; then you can fudge your way through moral quandaries in God’s good graces. It was an enticing notion, but by Leo’s lights discernibly wrong.

Meanwhile, Marx. Marxism denied the spiritual dimension of human existence altogether and placed the onus of virtuous “progress” on the struggle between the classes. If the good is simply all the means necessary to effect the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist structures, then there are no moral obligations for the lower classes—as long as they break the chains of oppression, whatever the lower classes do is, by definition, good.

Leo believed this purely economic and materialist view of history dismantled any moral and metaphysical order. So in one of his first acts as Pope, he released the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which reintroduced the world to a figure once dismissed by the likes of Voltaire and Diderot, d’Holbach and Hume: St. Thomas Aquinas.

It’s not enough to say Leo’s revival of Thomism was simply an academic preference; nor that it was a strategic intellectual or theological response to the challenges posed by Hegelianism, or Marxism, or logical positivism, or whatever other philosophical movement was ascendent in his day. Yes––unlike Hegel, who subordinated theology to philosophy; or Marx, who eliminated theology altogether––St. Thomas provided a balance, where reason supported faith rather than undermining it. And he reinforced the immutability of truth, particularly in metaphysics and ethics, which countered Hegel’s relativistic historicism and Marx’s radical materialism. But he did more than that. Leo believed Thomism offered a better response to that question of how to live together as diverse individuals in a system seemingly bent on stripping us of our individual spirits.

The Enlightenment thinkers had disparaged Aquinas, Leo argued, because he represented medieval Scholasticism, natural law theology, and Aristotelian metaphysics, all of which they sought to replace with rationalism, empiricism, and secular political thought. But Leo argued that their own latter-day evolution into historicism, phenomenology, and dialectical materialism had proved that the Enlightenment’s priorities were a shallow soil that, no matter how long you left it to fallow, could bear no fruit. Leo believed St. Thomas had already foreseen Hegel’s insights, but had given a more elegant, more beautiful account. God is indeed an end.But the truth itself does not evolve.

Aquinas built his metaphysical framework on participation (participatio), which means that all created beings derive their existence from God, who is Being Itself (Ipsum Esse Subsistens). Everything in creation possesses being by participation, meaning not that the world is God but shares in His existence. Thomas writes in the Summa Theologiae that Christ, as the Word (the Logos), is the principle of creation. Everything exists through Him, as confirmed in John 1:3: "Through Him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made."

Christ is not only the Creator but also the ultimate end (telos) of creation. His incarnation fulfills the divine purpose of history. The human soul is created with an intellectual and volitional capacity to receive God. Through grace, Christ becomes present within us. When a person receives grace, they receive a real but participatory share in Christ’s divine life. This means Christ emerges in us through sanctification. To turn away from Christ and rely on ourselves is not freedom. It is emptiness and death.We become our free and sovereign selves only by giving ourselves over to participating in Christ’s life—even if we have never heard Christ’s name or heard His words; even if we have heard them and question them.

I mean . . . . first of all, this guy has lost the frickin’ plot. Second: He’s kinda making the Enlightenment philosophers’ case for them. This stuff just sounds like fantasy and fiat.

Thomism rejects the idea that nature and grace are opposed; rather, grace builds upon nature (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit). This means Christ’s emergence is not destructive but elevating, fulfilling creation’s original purpose. Thus, creation itself is oriented towards Christ, and His emergence in us and the cosmos follows from our participation in divine being.

Now, as I said before, the Enlightenment thinkers shifted to empiricism as a reaction to Aquinas and other medieval Scholastics’ model of cosmic order. Their reasoning was not just intellectual, but political and cultural. They saw Scholasticism as propping up an outdated hierarchy. It was “authoritarian.”

Huh. It’s like . . . it’s like he’s listening to me. Is this– . . .?

I’m playing with words. Words are so very fun to play with. By “authoritarian,” I mean that as of the eighteenth century, the received wisdom about medieval Scholasticism had hardened into hardness. In philosophical and scientific discourse, power had supposedly improperly lain with authority over inquiry; and in politics, a sovereign king had unjustly had more authority than a sovereign people.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as Ruiz de Montoya was smuggling the pot of imperfect embers that would ignite our reality, a mischievous pombero among the island monkeys named Francis Bacon stole the honey that had been used to hold that reality together, and left a new reality in its place. Bacon wrote, and I quote, “As the present sciences are useless for the discovery of effects, so the present system of logic is useless for the discovery of the sciences. The present system of logic rather assists in confirming and rendering inveterate the errors founded on vulgar notions than in searching after truth, and is therefore more hurtful than useful. The syllogism is not applied to the principles of the sciences, and is of no avail in intermediate axioms, as being very unequal to the subtilty of nature. It forces assent, therefore, and not things.”⁠

Woah, woah, woah, whoah, woah. Slow the crap down, Tex! The Forger⁠ here has the luxury of pasting together a book, which means that you can disembark from his fantasy cruise at the next port of entry, and avoid all the locals, and get all the information you need, like, What does “syllogism” mean? And discover that, oh! by the way, the word “vulgar” actually doesn’t mean what you think it means—at least not yet in 1620. Bacon meant of the vulgare—of the common people. It’s a folk category and therefore susceptible to being kind of made up. You know, like I said before: “ fiat.” As for a “syllogism,” it’s classic three-part logical argument that deduces a conclusion from two stated premises. So, you know, “All bacon is salty. This author is Francis Bacon. Therefore this author is salty.” I have no idea what a “pombero” is. And “island monkeys”? Come on!

Within 120 years the inchoate reality that Bacon left behind had cracked through its chrysalis and emerged fully formed in the likes of David Hume

. . ., and his ridiculous red-velvet shower cap, . . .

who wrote, and I quote, “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”⁠

At least some of the germ of Bacon’s new reality took to the wind and would eventually transplant itself in our own forebears, lodged in the cassock threads and the minds of Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina. Yet, while some of its traits took hold, we were resistant to utter transformation; inoculated by Aquinas, who had long-since countered such arguments in the very first question of his Summa, on the nature and extent of sacred doctrine. Some truths, he insists, exceed human reason—we need revelation to reach them. Revelation helps reason—it does not replace it—especially for truths that are otherwise hard to reach or regarding which we are prone to error. In that vein, even truths that reason can reach are better known through divine teaching, because it provides clarity and accessibility to minds that otherwise struggle.

Okay. Look buddy, clearly, you and I are both Catholic. And I get it. I see the appeal of all this reverting back to Thomas Aquinas. I stand up, and kneel, and sit, and stand up again and say the creed at mass, too. But I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I know there are people out there for whom none of that makes any sense. I can’t shake off Hume’s words. They’re very sticky: Facts are the things on which people agree. People don’t roll their eyes when you appeal to facts. Yeah, okay, some people do. But still, not people acting in good . . . faith.

Perhaps you are so used to your surroundings that you do not notice their utility. Do you believe that Aquinas did not know that people grow skeptical of things they do not observe for themselves. he entire architecture of his Summa is built around the pillars of skeptical questions to address. Francis Bacon didn’t create skepticism. He stole it to make his reality. Realities are not eternal. They are the spandrel spaces that emerge when we draw lines through the eternal with our rulers and compasses.

But Aquinas was a thief himself. The honey he stole was Aristotelean logic. And as Francis Bacon’s own editor and commentator at the turn of the last century points out,⁠ Bacon erringly forsook that logic to form his reality: “The demonstrative forms [that logic] exhibits,” the commentator writes, “ . . . are necessary to the support, verification, and extension of [observation], and when the propositions they embrace are founded on an accurate and close observation of facts, the conclusions to which they lead, even in moral science, may be regarded as certain as the facts wrested out of nature by direct experiment.”

Aristotle said that there are two modes by which we invesitgate: we either we build up from particular facts to general laws and axioms, or dig down from universal propositions to the individual cases that exemplify them.

Mmm-hmm. And it seems to me like Aquinas sort of mixed up the two modes and treated particular facts—like scripture—as if they were universal propositions.

Perhaps Aquinas—and Duns Scotus, and their heirs—favored too highly the former mode of invesitgation. But Bacon—and especially Hume—disparaged the latter mode altogether, and made even the former seem suspicious. And one wonders, given the lines they drew, whose reality was better built.

That reality could not have sloughed off its chrysalis at any given point in the intervening 120 years between Bacon and Hume. That century and change were a transformative juncture. The imaginal discs Bacon had hidden in the stolen honey remained dormant—quiescent—for some time, before the full materialist form emerged and spread its dusty wings.

Okay buddy. I’ve got the mental twisties. I thought your were going to tell me about Juan Peron, and somehow we landed on English Civil War radicals⁠. I’m supposed to be going somewhere with this myself. I’m going to need another cup of the little brown haired girl. I’ll be back.

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Uki Goñi was born in the United States. Much to the chagrin of folks whose political fortunes—and embarrassment of power—have lately been restored, that would normally mean that Goñi was an American citizen. But his father was an Argentine diplomat stationed at that country’s embassy in Washington, D.C. when he (Uki) was born. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the first section of which achieved enfranchising freed slaves) does state that anyone born on US soil is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but it excludes the children of foreign diplomats from that jurisdiction.

So, Uki Goñi spent most of his first 14 years living out an American childhood not unlike my own: saying the pledge of allegiance in the courtyard of his local Catholic parish’s parochial school; wearing that AAA Safety Patrol belt the neon color of candied orange peel, making sure his classmates didn’t jaywalk; and hearing stories every November about the exploits of captain Myles Standish, Squanto, Massasoit, and a bunch religious dissenters—who, if they agreed on one thing, it was that they didn’t like Catholics; but who also (crowded in the hull of a beat-up Dutch cargo fluyt anchored in what’s now Provincetown harbor, in November 1620) signed a compact that they would “covenant and combine [themselves] into a civil body politic for their better ordering and preservation.”

But eventually the services of Goñi’s father were needed elsewhere, namely the Argentine diplomatic mission in Ireland. Just as his juices were flowing and his sense of self was taking shape, he landed in the middle of that country’s charms, and its notorious troubles. He was mostly sequestered from those convulsions, though, at a private prep school in Dublin; a place not devoid of its own darkness. His French teacher was dead-eyed and sadistic, and, as it turned out, was a native Breton who had enthusiastically joined the Nazi Schutzstaffel (the S.S.) in the Second World War and who was enjoying protection from prosecution for war crimes.

The strange juxtaposition of earthy homeyness he felt in Dublin with absolute injustice being willfully ignored (or maybe even furtively desired) was jarring—and all the more troublesome when he started getting used to it. But he was happy in Ireland, with high hopes of being a poet and musician. Youthful plans fall apart, however; or the scales fall from your eyes (I guess it depends on how you look at it), and when he turned 19, Uki’s family had to return to Buenos Aires. Having no financial means to stay behind and make his own way, he moved for the first time in his life to the country whose passport he carried.

Normally he would have had to fulfill military duty, but his situation in a diplomatic family gave him some leeway. So he set off in search of a job. His Spanish being tinged (how could it not be?) by flat American and lilting Irish vowels (making finding a job a bit tricker), he turned to the Buenos Aires Herald, the storied English-language daily newspaper, which was preparing to celebrate its centennial anniversary the next year year. And boldly (naively) he asked if they wanted to publish some of his poetry—which they promptly laughed off, saying they didn’t publish poetry, but that he could write some articles for them, if he liked; and if he proved to have a knack, they would hire him. As it happens, he did have a knack, but that might have had more to do with the confluence of factors outside his own proclivities (what people of a different age or bent of mind called destiny.) You see, Uki’s father had been summoned back to Argentina because his country was enduring troubles that—improbably—far outweighed those of Ireland.

Even though it’s chauvinistic, I doubt any American can help but feel like the story of Argentina’s path to Independence sounds a little like some imposter has copied clauses and phrases from a US history book and reassembled them—with a few fake bits to hold up the creaky syntax—into a pastiche about a thinly veiled, fictional, analogue country, whose history takes twists and turns that feel familiar but wind up with a completely different outcome. And the forger has pasted his cancel pages into an 80s hardback with a cocked spine and a plastic foiled dustcover, foxed with studiously sporadic brown dots, and has snuck his fabulation onto the shelves in the the public library of some run-of-the-mill town where no one would find it. But we do.

Spain’s grip on the South American colonies had grown weak because it was distracted by the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Either from valid grievances about colonial trade and yearning to decide their own fate, or simple post hoc justification of their motives (why not both?), Enlightenment ideas swarmed through the mouths, pages and streets of San Migel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires. Local elites and intellectuals ousted the Spanish viceroy and established a provisional government. And on July 9, 1816, Argentina ratified the Declaration of Independence at the Congress of Tucumán.

General José de San Martín defeated the Spanish, but independence was fraught with internal rivalries between Centralists and Federalists (advocates of provincial autonomy).

Mneh. If he’s gonna stick his forgery on an American library shelf, that’s kind of a confusing way to use the word “federalism.” It’s basically the opposite of the way Hamilton meant it. Whoever this faker is, he spins a good tale, but when it comes to the niceties of style, he’s kind of a hack.

A flourishing sense of national identity among the fiercely independent rural and working-class folks finally achieved something like unity. Throughout the 19th century, leaders like Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, prioritized modernization and economic development—but they favored landowners and elites, laying the groundwork for new unrest.

By the early 20th century, industrialization had taken hold on the backs of European immigrants who came in droves, yearning to breathe free, but those immigrants brought along socialist and anarchist ideas, which fueled labor movements, culminating in the formation of the Radical Civic Union, whose leader Hipólito Yrigoyen became the first democratically elected president of Argentina in 1916, with overwhelming support of the working class, who had finally gained the right to vote. And a sense of genuine steadiness settled in for a time.

But then an alternate reality, with its own history—which its inhabitants call American history—infiltrated this reality, causing a rift in its history.

Ho ho man, this guy has gone off the rails.

In that other history, following what they brazenly call the Spanish-American war, the United States, (which these strapping, young people—so cock-sure of their manifest destiny—named themselves) had a good thing going in the western hemisphere, and they did their best to intervene in their neighbors’ affairs to make sure things went to their liking.

I think he’s talking about the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, “speak softly, but carry a big stick,” and all that.

These “United States” began fighting the so-called “Banana Wars”; supposedly policing the “ne’er-do-well” tropical states with their “corrupt and lawless” politicians. But that alternate reality was not left untinged by its encounter with this one. A figure not known to many in that alternate reality—because there were those who preferred his name and hierophantic knowledge never get out—Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a man whose soul was a melted wax clotted and embossed by the filigreed arrows clenched in the talon of the Eagle on the great seal of his country.

This Maj. Gen. Butler had fought in the Philippine–American War and the Boxer Rebellion in China. But though he won the Medal of Honor for bravery in the occupation of Veracruz and again in Haiti, and fought with valor in Honduras, by the time he arrived in Nicaragua in1910, to help begin a 21-year occupation of that county, he had begun to submit to the minute and vast evidence of our timeline. Oh, Butler’s mind, molded as it was by the pressures of his native reality, was an imperfect vessel for our truths. Consciously he harbored animosity to the people of our reality, referring to them with slurs from his own. As he wrote to his parents from Nicaragua, “Things are about the same down here and I see not the slightest probability of our getting away for several months yet; that is if we are waiting for the ‘Spicks’ to stop scrapping. They are the most worthless, useless lot of vermin I have struck yet; even worse than our "little brown brothers" the Filipinos, for the Filipinos will fight and these dogs won’t.”⁠

But then immediately his thoughts turned more commensurate—if not, by our lights, coherent—as he confessed his doubts about his own beloved country’s motives: “What makes me mad,” he writes, ”is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wild cat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor. The whole business is rotten to the core and I am ashamed to think that a Republican Administration is, if anything, assisting the revolution.”

We need not expend too many words on Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler.

Too late!

But suffice it to say that when World War I rolled around, he was considered—despite his ample qualifications—too revolutionary to promote to a commanding role. He then, mysteriously to himself, felt compelled to tour his country with a speech he’d give at pacifist and socialist rallies. The speech was entitled “War is a Racket,” and he subsequently published it to some acclaim⁠.

Eventually the Great Depression—a catastrophic event shared by this reality and our own (much like the diluvial myths shared by the various Mesopotamian traditions)—spread ruin throughout these “United States.” And in its wake a president named Franklin Roosevelt—possibly touched (if indirectly) by the knowledge of our reality that Butler had begun to disseminate in theirs—attempted to alleviate the immense material discomfort his country’s fealty to “unfettered” market economics had wrought. It didn’t take long for the barons of capital to see the threat of our reality slowly insinuating itself into theirs. (Not that our two realities are diametrical; it’s nothing so insipid as that.) And these barons did not take kindly to the election of someone who would threaten their security. In the words of one of their own historians (another in whose mind the crystalline structure of Butler’s knowledge had copied itself), these financiers were horrified that Roosevelt’s policies would undermine “both private and business fortunes [and lead] “to national bankruptcy. Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist, out to destroy private enterprise by sapping [them] of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.”

And though you may find it strange, for it is hard to free yourself of a captivating duality, our own reality is replete with examples of this truth: Our souls are full of the same needs, and so no trick is simpler than commandeering the trappings of our enemies.

Between 1934 and 1935 finance employees and foreign legion members slowly attempted to groom Maj. Gen. Butler to lead a group of veterans in a coup against the president. Butler then did something remarkable (reinforced, we can only imagine, by virtue of his exposure to our alternate reality): He appeared before a so-called Congressional Committee—a council of the legislation of these “United States”—to testify about the attempted putsch. “The plan as outlined to me,” he announced, “was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, or as a club at least, to intimidate the government, and break down our democratic institutions. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to takeover the functions of government. My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. I want to retain the right to vote, and the right to speak freely, and the right to write. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech, and print.”

Some have attributed Butler’s turn to pacifism to his “Quaker” heritage, which in that alternate reality is a religious profession that renounces all ministerial setting apart; which insists that all people share responsibility, in common, for ensuring peace and justice, because all people are guided by an inward light. But we know better. First, where was this Smedley Butler’s pacifist inner light during his many years of avid and passionate war-making? Why become not merely a soldier, but an outstanding soldier if this so-called “Quaker” heritage meant so much?

No, quite contrary to some flat hierarchy of mutual simplicity, we know that he was indeed a man set apart—ordinated with sacredotal rank—by his exposure to our reality.

Wow. You gotta give it to him. He’s just a first class confabulist. But who is this guy?! Or woman—I don't know. I'm just imagining a man right now because I talked to the librarian and asked her who could have possibly snuck something like this into the library, and woo boy, she had some ideas. Well, really only one idea. She was particularly devoted to the theory that it was this one guy who came two or three times a week over a period of a month, about a year and a half ago. He stood out to her because he always wore a face mask: the surgical kind, not the coffee-cone, N95 kind. And she said that the only people who still wear face masks are, you know, those people. I asked if they had any CCTV cameras, and she said they only had the one outside at the entrance: no public funding, you know?

She got back to me a couple of days later after having triangulated roughly when she thought she had seen the guy, and then looking through the footage for a while. And she finally found one shot of him coming in. Seemed like kind of a young guy based on the way he was walking, but I couldn't really tell because he was so covered up. Besides the face mask, he also had this wax canvas coat on, and the hood was up. But you could kind of see his eyes. They looked like puppy dog eyes. Of course there’s no way to know whether that’s really the forger. I’d be surprised if it were someone so young. I have reason to believe whoever it was is a trained book conservator.

So, a book is made of big folio sheets, printed with four pages on each side in a complex order, then folded into fours, stacked, and sewn and bound together, and then cut along their edges to make individual pages. That means each of these forged cancel pages has a counterpart. They didn’t just haphazardly paste these pages over the old originals. They meticulously detached the stitching with a pinpoint awl and tweezers, found each counterpart page, and bonded them with Japanese kozo paper and wheat starch paste. Then they artificially aged the thread and restitched the sections. It’s almost completely undetectable.

But WHY?! I mean, clearly they’ve got an agenda, And so do I! I’m trying to circle back to Uki Goñi here, so—oh well, I guess there’s no way but forward now.

During his two terms in office, Yrigoyen championed labor rights, expanded state intervention in the economy, and sought to reduce the influence of traditional elites, particularly large landowners and oligarchs. He introduced social reforms, including labor protections, increased public works and measures to improve education, all of which gained him strong support among the working and middle classes. He also made ample use of tariffs to reduce Argentina's dependence on foreign markets, who were fleecing them. However, these policies alienated conservative sectors and provoked hostility from all those powerful landowners, industrialists, and much of the military.

Yrigoyen’s second term coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, which, as we’ve already noted, was an event equally epochal in our own reality. And as the tide rose, engulfing nations with waves of economic collapse, unemployment, and hardship—leaving no shore untouched by its devastation—Yrigoyen tried to sandbag Argentina’s economy by doubling down on his policies—indeed wisely increasing public spending, but perhaps unwisely reducing the influx of foreign goods in the hopes of maintaining self-reliance.

Yrigoyen’s isolationist bent not only counteracted the priming effect of his public spending, the resultant suffering it exacerbated when the demand for Argentine exports collapsed provided his critics with a wedge to accuse him of cronyism, inefficiency—even authoritarianism. It mattered little that these accusations were largely baseless. Facts are thin walls that cannot insulate too much noise. It mattered what people felt. And what people felt was that he was too old, in poor health, slow and no longer fit for the job.

That was a set of environmental pressures perfectly attuned for a military coup. And so, on September 6, 1930, a military junta led by General José Félix Uriburu overthrew Yrigoyen, marking the beginning of a 13-year era of political instability and military “interventions” known as the "Infamous Decade.”

Uriburu couldn’t just turn the spigot and end the Great Depression, of course. And a debauchery of government efficiency didn’t much help ingratiate him to the public. But once his cohort had grabbed the bull’s horns, you could be damn sure they were’t going to let go. Elections in 1931 brought Agustín Pedro Justo to power. However, these elections were widely seen as fraudulent, setting a precedent for systematic corruption during the decade. The conservatives, often referred to as the Concordancia coalition, maintained their hold on power through electoral manipulation, including vote-buying and intimidation.

Yrigoyen had long ruffled feathers with those aliens from the United States’ reality by refusing to take sides during the First World War, claiming the mantle of non-intervention. But this was never simply a pragmatic maneuver in self-interest. You might say it was a principled stand, but perhaps a principle that if I may use the word ought—ought not to have had such high priority: namely the belief that if Spain—and (sure, why not) Italy and Germany—wanted to protect their cultural integrity, well . . . fair enough, and we “ought not” interfere with that. Yrigoyen might have found it unpropitious to say out loud, but he was fine with the implicit warrant: “everyone needs to get their own s**t together.” And this was a fleetingly rare point of agreement between the Radicals and the Concordancia. They happily maintained the policy of neutrality.

Only the Concordancia didn’t care about standing on ceremony. Rules and institutions were only useful inasmuch as they kept up the naturally ordered boundaries, such as those between the landed and the un-landed, the weak and the strong. So, when it came to getting Argentina’s “own s**t together,” they had no compunction not merely tolerating the fascists, but following their example, dissolving their Congress, imposing censorship, and suppressing political dissent.

As the economic situation worsened, urban workers and labor unions became disillusioned with government of all stripes The Radical Civic Union and other democratic forces seemed ineffectual, self-righteous, and corrupt; the Concordancia oppressive and just as corrupt. Among the populace, protests grew, and nationalist and socialist ideas gained traction (of a more rigorous sort than the gradual and halting policies of Yrigoyen) Meanwhile a nationalist faction within the military was happy to follow the Concordancia in rejecting liberalism—not to protect old inequalities, but to establish an autarkic, “socially cohesive Argentina.”

 I don't know why I keep trying to listen to podcasts while I'm working. I cannot concentrate. I mean, I do. This guy just keeps rambling on. I thought I had a problem losing the plot.

The discontent with the Concordancia reached a breaking point by the early 1940s, and on June 4, 1943, that nationalist, reformist faction of the military—calling themselves the “Grupo de Oficiales Unidos” (the United Officers’ Group)—staged a coup, overthrowing President Ramón Castillo, the last in the string of presidents the Concordancia had propped up with their sham elections. The Officers’ Group didn’t have a singular, publicly recognized leader, since they were a clandestine organization.

General Arturo Rawson was the first leader of the post-coup government. However, his tenure was extremely brief—two days. He didn’t pass the purity test imposed by subfactions within the group who believed he was still too willing to include traditional conservatives in his cabinet.

Among the ranks of the Officer’s Group was a young officer named Juan Domingo Perón.

Perón had spent the decade prior to the junta studying the art of war, including three years ensconced in yet another alternate reality. The War Ministry under the Concordancia had sent him to study mountain warfare in the Italian Dolomites, and then assigned him as attaché in Rome under Mussolini and Berlin in Nazi Germany. Some have said that it was in those years—in that crucible—that an isomorphic strain had insinuated itself in Perón’s mind. But they are wrong. Yes, it was there he saw that something different from what had come before was possible. But what he witnessed happening there . . . wasn’t what he envisioned.

But I get ahead of myself. The big wigs in the Officer’s Group fought it out, trying to establish just how fascist they would indeed like Argentina to be, staying neutral in the Second World War, and playing a coy game of will they/won’t they sever diplomatic relations with the Axis Powers,

Meanwhile, Perón was shelved away, named to an office long-since written off as irrelevant: Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare⁠. Where the presiding military officers had chucked labor rights and syndicalism onto the ash heap of history along with Yrigoyen, Perón realized the power this position could unlock.

But now I misspeak. I’ve been breathing the air of the United States’ reality for too long; accepting a logic that makes it sound as though Perón’s goal was merely securing political power and enacting his preference,

That was not his goal.

I’ve been breathing the air inside this guy’s skull for too long. I need a break. I’m going to go take a walk.

We’ll reconvene here.

See you in a bit.

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. . . with this teaser.

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Hello. Hi. My name is Aaron Gowen, and I’m here to tell you about this show that you’re listening to: A Million Little Gods. A Million Little Gods has been around for—I’m just gonna keep saying “A Million Little Gods” until it gets stuck in your synapses. A Million Little Gods. A.M.L.G.

A Million little Gods is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. You might be saying to yourself, “Gosh, that’s a long time for a podcast to be around and for him to still be previewing it. And you’re right. But this isn’t a relaunch, because, well, I just take a longer view in terms of breaks between seasons.

Back in 2015, I was like Kermit the Frog after an accidental overdose of gamma radiation alters his body chemistry, and then he throws a tantrum when the Muppet Show gets out of hand: really, really, green. By the time I finished that first season, I realized I hadn’t been making one-off episodes. I’d been making a case over a series of episodes for what it means to be a self, and why that might—or might not—be important.

So I retroactively named the first season Book I: “What is a Self?” Then I got a new job at the University of Hamburg as a tenured lecturer in English language practice and applied linguistics. I enlisted students to help out with the show in exchange for elective credits. And a colleague, who’s now one of my best friends in the world, Ben Feddersen, became my co-host. Together between 2018–2019 we conducted scores of interviews with journalists, scientists, philosophers and other podcasters—and stylistically pushed as far as we could to figure out what a podcast could be. The result was a gonzo-academic mix of nine audio essays/radio plays, ostensibly about the scientific third-rail of racial categories, but really about much bigger questions. We called it: Book II: “Race—Is That a Thing?”, vol. 1. Then in 2020 we produced a coda, three last episodes: Book II, vol. 2. (Episode 10 of Book 2 is still my favorite episode of our show that we’ve released—so far!)

Three years ago, however, Ben decided to devote his massive brainpower—and uncanny skills as a raconteur—to helping a multibillion-dollar startup give the world a better battery that can store more energy. (Sad for the show; good for the planet. But you’ll still be hearing from Ben on occasion.) Meanwhile, over those three years, I’ve emigrated the show to Substack, where I began publishing little newsletter essays as I planned out the the next season. I also jumped back into interviewing and collaborating with guests and co-hosts, all of whom I’ve left wondering, “What the heck, man!? Where’s the podcast we worked on?”

Well, there were a couple of things I realized I wanted to accomplish with the pod. The focus in the first two seasons, the first two “Books,” was philosophy and culture studies. And that’s not going to change. But linguistics has always a subterranean facet of the show. And that’s my trade. That’s my jam. So I’ve brought the linguistics communication more to the fore. And beyond that—at the risk of sounding pompous—I have literary and artistic ambitions for the podcast.

By the way, if you’re saying to yourself, “Speed it up, man! Stop taking such log pauses,” . . . no. Stop mainlining TikToks and doomscrolling your way through the trenches of your own inner demons. I’m making art. Art has it’s own rhythms, man. I want to see what you can do with language in this medium—and music, and sound design.

On July 31, I’ll be back in full swing with part one of the Introduction to Book III. And like every upcoming chapter, the Introduction immerses you in spatial audio. So do me a favor: If you’re listening to this at home or work on a set of speakers, or a Sonos bar, or on an Alexa or something, please switch over to headphones so you can hear the actual sound design. And even though I know it’s convenient to speed up your podcasts, please listen to this at normal speed. (And if you use a smart speed controller to shorten the silences, you’re a monster, and I hope you get a painful hangnail on your big toe.)

One last thing, and this is important: If you’re listening to this in a car with Dolby Atmos, or surround sound, or even just with stereo and decent speakers—the audio you will hear mimics three-dimensional sound, and it can cause spatial confusion, and possibly an accident. So turn this off and listen later. (And when you do listen to it, use headphones.)

Ok. That’s it. I might have a couple of surprises for you before you listen to the Introduction (with headphones).

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