Nietzsche contra Greenspan

As Fran pointed out (eurotrib.com), 15th October was Nietzsche's birthday. He urged others to "live dangerously" - but he didn't do extreme sports :-) His life was very much one of the mind and the danger was in challenging his culture's most basic assumptions and values. He would not be surprised to learn that he is widely misundertood now, he was widely misunderstood in his own time:

It has been said that Nietzsche is one of the best known and yet least understood of philosophers
...
 Nietzsche never wanted disciples, indeed even Zarathustra hopes to see his followers repudiate him in the end. Nietzsche wants thinkers, able and willing to form their own answers for themselves. In this way, Nietzsche is not so much telling his readers what to think, but rather how to think. His works are meant to convey not a product but a process, and that process is at the heart of what it is to be human.

http://www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_feb2002.htm

In a comment on Jerome's diary  "nobody could have predicted  ..."
I cited an article which was very critical of Greenspan and those in government who'd failed to question his his pernicious ideology and became, effectively, his disciples:

Re: "nobody could have predicted..."

(Greenspan) had a way of speaking that made you think he knew exactly what he was talking about at all times," said Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa. "He was able to say things in a way that made people not want to question him on anything, like he knew it all. He was the Oracle, and who were you to question him?

ARGeezer commented:

... While I do not recommend that all college undergraduates be required to take a course on rhetroic, I do think that they should be required to take a course that alerts them to the power of that art to win on style arguments that should loose on substance.  The dominance of Friedman and Greenspan and the techniques used by Greenspan should be combed and used as exhibit A.

http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2008/10/12/155513/02

I think a course in rhetoric and informal logic would be a lot more valuable than many things students study, but I don't think it's really necessary. It wasn't so much anything Greenspan said so much as his confident manner, according to Harkin (above). More fundamental is doing what Nietzsche tried to do, i.e. encouraging others be generally sceptical, to think for themselves and to be critical of even the most widely accepted experts and authorities:

Not giving Descartes the benefit of the doubt

Modern philosophy is often said to begin with Descartes and his radical scepticism, but a review of a recent book on Descartes in the IHT gets it wrong regarding the significance of one of Descartes' most famous ideas:

Descartes' Bones A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason By Russell Shorto
He naturally begins with the living, breathing Descartes, whose proclamation "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am") can be seen as the cornerstone of modern scientific thought.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/15/arts/bookmer.php

In fact Descartes' cogito was almost the exact opposite of the scientific approach, it was a betrayal of his scepticism. He presented it as an indubitable truth and used it as the basis of an argument for the existence of god.
Nietzsche's dissection of Descartes' cogito is brilliant - once you've read it you wonder why it took so long for someone to see what he made so obvious - this was not an indubitable truth, but a set of daring assumptions. It is a wonderful demonstration of philosophical thinking and a refusal to be overawed by Descartes' reputation. As Danial Goldberg says:

Friedrich Nietzsche blows the cogito completely out of the water in Beyond Good and Evil. In Section 16 of On the Prejudices of Philosophers, he notes,

The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion 'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me."

This is devastating ... Intellectual carnage. Nietzsche was awesome.

http://trivialpursuits.typepad.com/trivial_pursuits/2004/02/deconstructing_.html

A Reasonable Scepticism

But a problem I encountered as a lecturer was that when one encourages students to be sceptical, many easily go from excessive credulity regarding experts and authorities, to assuming that one should just ignore experts and that all opinions are equally valid. It can be hard to get them to accept the more complicated view that being sceptical is not the same as nihilism; one should be both sceptical AND respect well-researched, well-argued views. What we need is a "reasonable scepticism ":

While these examples are meant to disillusion the reader about the objectivity and vision of transcendent truth claimed by scientists, they are not intended to be antiscientific or to suggest that we should give up science in favor of, say, astrology or thinking beautiful thoughts. Rather, they are meant to acquaint the reader with the truth about science as a social activity and to promote a reasonable skepticism about the sweeping claims that modern science makes to an understanding of human existence. There is a difference between skepticism and cynicism, for the former can lead to action and the latter only to passivity. So these pages have a political end, too, which is to encourage the readers not to leave science to the experts, not to be mystified by it, but to demand a sophisticated scientific understanding in which everyone can share.

A Reasonable Skepticism by Richard Lewontin

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-101AA/readings/Lewontinfull.htm

Nietzsche is often seen, mistakenly, as nihilistic, but in fact he was for going beyond nihilism to construct new values:

he parts company with nihilists in that he did not argue that everything deserves to be destroyed. He was not simply interested in tearing down traditional beliefs based upon traditional values; instead, he also wanted to help build new values. He pointed in the direction of a "superman" [overman] who might be able to construct his own set of values independent of what anyone else thought.

http://atheism.about.com/od/nihilismnihilists/a/nietzsche.htm

A sceptical web

Some see the web as promoting a healthy scepticism - though unfortunately the following is too sweeping in its optimism; the web is also full of groups with dogmatic views. But there is some truth in this, the web does make it very easy to read a wide variety of views and criticisms of them.
This refers to Ireland and the vote against the Lisbon Treaty:

But one thing is for sure; we don't follow our politicians like sheep anymore[! if only - see the sheep dutifully applaud Palin's nonsense]. As a taxi driver told me, he went on the Web, looked up some stuff about the Lisbon Treaty, and decided to vote no.

The Web is about the informed, skeptical society. [AND cults and a vast array of groups with dogmatic views] There is a break developing between this skeptical society and its experts, institutions and organizations. The organization can't just say: "Trust us. Follow us. We know best."

The posters for the No campaign were second person and direct, saying things like "IT'LL COST YOU: MORE TAX, LESS POWER". Many of the posters for the Yes campaign had big pictures of the local politician. These posters were saying: `I'm your local politician. Trust me.' "What we did with the poster campaign was cynical and wrong," Leo Varadkar, a member of the Irish parliament, stated about his party's campaign.
In the pre-Web, politicians and marketers saw people as sheep to be lead. But in the post-Web the sheep have turned into wolves hungry for the meat in the message.

http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2008/07/06/experts-and-organizations-losing-trust/

"Hungry wolves" ?  Look at how quickly "Joe the plumber" was torn apart and the bits spread over the blogosphere :

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/10/16/11053/258

Cf.:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27221645/

Palin rapidly lost popularity, attacks and satires proliferated on the web and members of the more intelligent right deplored her encouragement of dogmatic ignorance, e.g. David Brooks:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/08/david-brooks-sarah-palin_n_133001.html

But, before we congratulate ourselves as being people who "celebratrate ideas" and feel affirmed in our convictions - Nietzsche offers a typical warning:

To prove a conviction is quite senseless; rather, it is important to prove that one has a right to be so convinced ... Conviction is an objection, a question mark, a défi ["challenge"] (--very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions--? Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions! ! !
--Spring 1888 14 [159]

But that can be very hard to do by oneself and it helps to be part of a community which will criticise one's convictions (which is how science works) - hard as that may be to accept sometimes :-)

So off you go.