Let these two asses be set to grind corn!
<p>In <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/lib333.htm">The Book of Lies</a>, the diabolically brilliant occultist Alesteir Crowley once wrote: </p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;Explain this happening!&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;It must have a natural cause!&#8221;<br />
&#8220;It must have a supernatural cause!&#8221;</p>
<p>Let these two asses be set to grind corn!
</p></blockquote>
<p>In the original, there is a sort of grouping bracket connecting the second and third lines lines and pointing at the fourth.  Crowley was asserting, in both lucid and poetic terms, that to the understanding mind the distinction between &#8220;natural&#8221; and &#8220;supernatural&#8221; is meaningless, an argument conducted about language categories with no predictive value.</p>
<p><span id="more-1235"></span></p>
<p>Alfred Korzybski would have agreed with him.   The founder of General Semantics built his powerful discipline on the insight that &#8220;The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined&#8221;.  This matters because, too often, we fall into dispute over features of our maps, blithely ignoring the territory underneath.</p>
<p>Ever since reading the <cite>Book of Lies</cite>, I have considered &#8220;Let these two asses be set to grind corn!&#8221; to be the most appropriate thing to say when two people or factions have fallen into an argument that is strictly about map rather than territory.  It does the job just as well as a more reasoned argument, I find.  The imagery makes both sides look absurd, which can be a much more effective way than logic to jolt them out of their fixed categories.</p>
<p>I was reminded of this recently in connection with the longstanding argument between natural-law and consequentialist libertarians.  Like the more general and historically much older argument between virtue ethicists and utilitarians, the dispute is interminable because it rests upon a false distinction from which nonsense follows. Utilitarians don&#8217;t get that virtue ethics is an evolved tactic to prevent destructive short-termism in one&#8217;s utility calculations; virtue ethicists don&#8217;t get that without a consequential check on the outcomes of &#8220;virtue&#8221; it rapidly becomes sterile or perverse.  </p>
<p>Similarly, &#8220;human rights&#8221; is properly understood not as some mystical intrinsic property of humans ordained by God or natural law or whatever, but as the minimum set of premises from which it is possible to construct a society that isn&#8217;t consequentially hell on earth. But carving those in stone &#8211; using the language of rights and absolutes &#8212; is functional, too; it&#8217;s a way of protecting them from erosion by short-term expediency. For the best outcome, we must reason like consequentialists but speak and legislate like natural-law thinkers.</p>
<p>The universe <em>doesn&#8217;t care</em> about the human distinction between a-priori and consequentialist arguments; that&#8217;s all map.  The territory is what people <em>do</em>, the actual choices they express in action. Thus&#8230;</p>
<p>&#8220;Human rights are founded on natural law!&#8221;<br />
&#8220;Human rights are justified by consequential considerations!&#8221;<br />
<em>Let these two asses be set to grind corn!</em></p>
