Hold That Thought

I"ve begun reading Louise Erdrich's new novel Future Home of the Living God (Harper, 2017), which so far appears to be a satirical speculative-fiction novel worthy of (now late) Ursula Le Guin, only with a sharper edge.  I love much of Le Guin's work, though I don't think she ever made me even chuckle, and at times she could be obnoxiously pompous.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm not casting the first stone.

But I digress.  It's a pleasure to see Erdrich, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa, skewering some fantasies about Native Americans, starting with her narrator, a twenty-six-year-old adoptee named Cedar Songmaker who learns that her biomom back on the reservation is named Mary Potts, Senior.  Cedar goes to meet her birth family, and muses on the End Times material she sees along the way.  (Something big is happening to the world, that's the speculative-fiction part, but just what hasn't been explained yet.)  I'm taking this as part of the satire, please Jesus:

Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep.  We are an idea, then.  Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.

Hold that thought.

A week ago, a Facebook friend from high school who's lost the struggle with Christianity posted a link to an online preacher's video dedicated to the proposition that in Scripture, Every. Word. Matters.

Now, this is of course absurd.  I posted a comment pointing out that if every word matters it would have to be words in Greek or Hebrew, and because of textual variation in the New Testament especially, you can rarely be sure what the exact words are.  Few of these variations make any difference in overall meaning or doctrine, but that's just the point.  In that previous sentence I could have written "seldom" rather than "rarely" and the meaning would have been roughly the same, but the exact word would not.  My friend replied that he knew all that, that he subscribes to the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration, and every word of the Bible testifies to God's love and care for us.  We left it there, with me giggling in the eternal silence of the Internet, but the exchange sent me back to James Barr's fine 1977 book on fundamentalism.

Barr pointed out that most fundamentalists officially distance themselves from "dictation" theories -- the idea that the Holy Spirit told the biblical writers exactly what to write, word for word -- but plenary verbal inspiration is mainly an attempt to have a dictation theory without calling it one.  Lay believers like my friend who don't know any language but their own have trouble grasping the problems involved in translation, the difficulty of finding equivalents in one language for the words of another, or the problems raised by textual variation. The phrase "plenary verbal inspiration" ought to include "of the original manuscripts," a late nineteenth-century attempt by Professor B. B. Warfield of Princeton University to make sense of the phenomena.  This inspired more critical scholars to joke about "the Princeton Bible," compiled from the (non-extant) original manuscripts.

Conservative scholars who hold to plenary verbal inspiration have a rough time of it.  In Fundamentalism Barr quotes numerous examples of their efforts to maintain the Bible's freedom from error, for example:

We move to yet another venerated conservative publication, The New Bible Dictionary (Inter-Varsity Press 1962), and J.  A. Thompson there tells us (pp 271f.): “[Genesis] I has an artificial literary structure and is not concerned to provide a picture of chronological sequence but only to assert the fact that God made everything.’  Only that God made everything!  How are the mighty fallen! and how ridiculous a mouse has the mountain of fundamentalist interpretation brought forth!  What radical ‘liberal’ or wild ‘modernist’ did not believe ‘only’ that God had made everything? [Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1977), 41-2] 

But it isn't only fundamentalists who resort to such feeble expedients.  The highly sophisticated, non-fundamentalist, ostensibly non-theist philosopher Mary Midgley, drawing on Origen and St. Augustine, wrote that

the Genesis story simply describes the total dependence of all creatures on a ruling benevolent spirit and does this through a myth: an imaginative vision that is the most appropriate way of bringing such vast and mystifying facts within human comprehension.  The details of the story are merely shaped to make this central point clear [The Solitary Self (Acumen, 2010)].

The total dependence of all creatures on a ruling benevolent spirit!  Of course there is no such being, certainly not the god of the Bible, and even such a vaguely platitudinous "central point" is not necessarily or obviously what the writer had in mind.  No doubt he also believed it, but as Barr went on to note:

In fact the only natural exegesis is a literal one, in the sense that this is what the author meant.  As we know from other parts of Genesis, he was deeply interested in chronology and calendar, and he depicted the story of creation in a carefully and deliberately arranged scheme of one week.  As Kevan, cited above, rightly sees, the ‘evening’ and ‘morning’ phraseology clearly indicates that he thought of a day such as we understand a day to be; but that is only one of the multitudinous details of the story which show that the seven-day scheme is essential to his way of describing the creation [42].

In other words, the author of Genesis, though he or she probably would have agreed with Midgley about the dependence of all creatures on their creator, had other fish to fry.  All those multitudinous chronological details aren't there as mere ornament, they have a function, and it won't do to brush them lightly aside.  The irony here is that though Midgley, the daughter of a parson, despises fundamentalists, she interprets the Bible like one.  Or vice versa -- as Barr shows, fundamentalist scholars often interpret the Bible as if they were liberals.  The same is true of the message my Facebook friend finds in Scripture.  I don't believe it, either as a governing principle of the universe or as "the" overarching message of the Bible, but it's a doctrine that the most liberal, even wildly modernist Christian could agree on.  You wouldn't even have to be a Christian to believe it; such platitudes are beloved of theists of many stripes.

So back to the passage I quoted above from Louise Erdrich.  I hope it's satire, though I fear it's the kind of vacuity that even the bitterest satirists will come up with to show that they're really big softies at heart.  Once again I'm disappointed by the conceptions of gods that people who reject conventional religion come up with: in this, a deity who nods off at its station, allowing his creation to fall apart.  Cedar's musings would be better reversed, I think: If God has lost interest in us, that doesn't trump our interest in ourselves. God is an idea, an idea we should decide is not worth thinking anymore.

You've Been Telling Me You're a Genius Since You Were Seventeen

 

Reading Curtis White's The Science Delusion (Melville House, 2013) renewed my respect for Mary Midgley.  I happened on White's book in the library just after I'd reread Midgley's Science and Salvation (Routledge, 1992) and was mulling over the (very critical) blog post I wanted to write about it.  Since White, a novelist and academic social critic, was going over much the same ground, and I enjoyed his title's dig at Richard Dawkins, I decided to give it a try.

I can sum up part of my reaction by quoting this writer at BoingBoing, who says that most reviews of The Science Delusion have missed White's point:

All the invective? White thought he was just being funny and satirical, like Jonathan Swift. The over-generalizing about what all scientists believe and what the culture of science is like? He thought it was clear that he just meant the subset of scientists who don't think there's any value other than entertainment in art, that philosophy is dead, and that culture has no affect on how we interpret science or what we do with it. The weird, pseudo-Deism? He thought he was explaining that science is part of culture, that the questions being asked and the way answers are interpreted are culturally bound and and we have to take that into account. The humanities triumphalism and points where he totally dismisses science and acts like he doesn't understand why somebody would find meaning in being curious about how the mind works? Not what he meant at all, apparently. He just wants to make the case for us needing both science and the humanities to properly understand the world. And White is deeply confused about why reviews of his book keep getting all of this wrong. 

Of course, many writers have had the experience of discovering that the book their readers and critics read was not the book they thought they wrote.  And I must say that I nowhere got the impression that White "totally dismisses" science; only a sloppy and probably biased reader, one with a science-cultist agenda, should have taken that from the book, in much the same way that Obama cultists jump to the conclusion that anyone who criticizes Obama is totally a Republican who hates him and doesn't like or respect or admire anybody. (Or American exceptionalists accuse anyone who argues that the US shouldn't bomb the shit out of countries that haven't attacked us of wanting to see America conquered and destroyed by Al-Qaeda.)

The BoingBoing writer, Maggie Koerth-Baker, complains that The Science Delusion "is written in such a way as to nearly ensure that it will quickly alienate anybody who identifies with science as their community, their career, or their passion."  As I've argued before (and Koerth-Baker herself notices), writers like Dawkins and Hitchens can dish it out but not take it -- Dawkins especially has very tender sensibilities when someone turns his rhetorical style back on him -- so it's highly unlikely that anyone could write a book critical of any aspect of science that wouldn't alienate anybody who "identifies with science."

Still, a humanities-oriented writer, especially one who's been around the block a few dozen times (White is 65, almost exactly my age) should have, you know, thought about the way his or her writing was coming across.  This is why writers show their work to readers they trust before publication: not just to check for factual or typographical errors, but to get their reactions to the content as a whole.  I've mentioned before how surprised I was when I wrote a satirical piece mocking college fraternities with Christian-right rhetoric, and friends (including graduate students in the humanities, from whom I'd have expected better; hadn't they even heard of Swift's "Modest Proposal"? evidently not) took it literally, exultant that I'd given those Greek-system snots what for.  Satire is always tricky that way.  I often showed my poems to people who weren't academics to get their reactions, as I did with my big anti-Christian project (still unpublished) of the 1980s: to see what non-professionals took away from it.  I had better luck with the anti-Christian book; people seemed to get what I intended.

It's to be expected that scientists might have trouble with tone and balance in what they write for a general audience: that kind of subtlety isn't in their job description.  But if White wanted to show the value of the humanities as well as the sciences for understanding the world, he did a poor job of it.  Since I am also humanities-oriented, critical of science triumphalism, and am predisposed to agree with the point he was trying to make, I'm just the audience he was aiming for, and he still left me dissatisfied.

Interestingly, White told Koerth-Baker in e-mail:

I hope you won’t be entirely surprised if I say that I don’t think anything went wrong. The Science Delusion is much like my earlier work, especially The Middle Mind. One person’s “angry screed” is another person’s “passionate defense.” My native audience tends to be among artists, lefty intellectuals, humanists, and other species of the socially dispossessed. This particular book has generated a broader audience, much of which is sensitive to criticism of the sciences. I just received a review by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher, for the Globe and Mail. It’s a sympathetic review although he complains of the “bad jokes.” (At least he noticed there were jokes!) But the on-line comments about his review hacked him to pieces in the name of the superiority of the scientific worldview. Utter disdain. Baseless contempt. I have to say, the comments made me feel a little better about some of the treatment I’ve received. 

(Wait -- "artists, lefty intellectuals, humanists" are "socially dispossessed"?  Bitch, please.  [P.S., 2017: it just occurred to me that White was perhaps being sarcastic there.])

So it appears that it's Koerth-Baker who misunderstood White's intention.  The part about the attacks on Kingwell's review also fits a pattern I've noticed before: those who try to position themselves as moderates, whether philosophically or politically, tend to find themselves vilified for allegedly taking the very positions they were trying to repudiate.  So, when the journalist Richard Goldstein tried to distance himself from Noam Chomsky's supposed anti-Americanism a decade ago, readers attacked him as anti-American.

Similarly, Koerth-Baker wants to take a middle stance on scientism, by mildly criticizing the tone of writers like Dawkins, and rejecting what she calls "pop-culture, self-help neuroscience."  But "pop culture" isn't really the problem, it's actual working scientists who genuinely believe they know more and can explain more than they can.  So she wrote that "much of White's argument against this hinges on framing pop-neurobollocks as a problem created by and supported by scientists, and a problem that very few people have spoken out about. Neither of which is true."  What she calls "pop-neurobollocks" is in fact created by and supported by scientists.  It's true that other scientists have criticized their colleagues -- see Robert A. Burton's A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, which I discussed here -- and they locate the problem not in pop culture but in the field itself.  And the criticisms are commonly dismissed by their colleagues as coming from (you guessed it) the humanities, from feminists and leftists who hate science and want to see it destroyed.  Another, superficially milder stratagem is to accuse critics of scientific racism of favoring a "blank slate" view of human nature.

Koerth-Baker also claims that

anthropology was once a field pretty much dedicated to proving the superiority of white, Western colonial powers over their brown subjects. The societal context shaped the questions those early anthropologists were asking, it shaped how they chose to study the world, and it shaped how they chose to interpret the data they came back with. The fact that, by the time I got to anthropology school in 1999, the field had been drastically realigned as a challenge to its former self also says something about the influence of culture and the importance of questioning ourselves and our values in ways that are not purely scientific.

This is mistaken.  First, anthropologists were always divided among themselves.  Many were dedicated to justifying Western imperialism, but others weren't.  Franz Boas is probably the most famous example of an early 20th century anthropologist who opposed and criticized racist anthropology in the service of European colonialism. As an effective critic of scientific racism, he was predictably vilified by his colleages, often on racist grounds.  The eugenicist Madison Grant, for example, jeered that Boas "naturally does not take stock in any anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history."  (Boas was Jewish, which Grant thought was a "race.")  Second, some anthropologists are still serving Western imperialism.  I'd add that scientific racism based in biology is still very much with us.

But her error is instructive, as an example of the common tendency to speak of "science," "religion," "art," and other fields as if they spoke with one voice and were mutually exclusive.

If Curtis White wants to preach to the choir, that's his lookout.  It's perfectly legitimate to take a side and write for its adherents, to keep up their morale and, if possible, given them good reasons for continuing to believe what they want to.  My complaint about The Science Delusion is not that White picked on science, but that he made such a shitty case for the humanities.  I think that's largely because he too thinks, or writes as if he thinks, that "science" and "the humanities," etc., speak with one voice and are mutually exclusive.

White writes, for example:

What scientists / polemicists like [Lawrence] Krauss refuse to admit, perhaps because they think that it creates an opening for their enemies, is that there is any limit on what they can claim to know.  Nevertheless, it is true even for science that there are unknowable things -- unknowable because not accessible to observation or experiment -- chief among which is the question of being's ultimate origin.  That is not an invitation for the God-mongers to set up camp where science cannot go (creating a "God of the gaps").  Rather, it is simply one of those matters about which science ought to open itself to other forms of thinking, if not knowing, and it might if it felt a little less besieged [53].

What are those "other forms of thinking, if not knowing"?  White isn't willing to concede too much to religion.  He dismisses the "God-mongers" as lightly as the scientists and New Atheists do, and though he stresses that "There are still many and large congregations of liberal Christians, even liberal evangelicals, starting with Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter. And the liberal, even radical, Jewish community is famously large" (34), he doesn't spend much time on liberal or radical religious forms of knowing.

Not for Hitchens that rich cross-cultural fertilization of the Levant by Helenistic [sic!], Jewish, and Manichaean thought.  Not for Hitchens the transformation of a Jewish heretic into a religion that Nietzsche called "Platonism for the masses" [29].

What an anachronistic mess!  Didn't Nietzsche also call Christianity a slave morality?  I doubt that he meant "Platonism for the masses" as a compliment, either.  Did Christianity have answers that science knows not of?  Not that I can see, and White doesn't mention any.

White spends some time on various New Atheists' dismissal of philosophy.  He quotes, for example, the same Lawrence Krauss from a 2012 interview in The Atlantic:

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym.”  And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. [Well, scientists kind of read it sometimes to give themselves conniptions. - D.M.] … And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it.  And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't [24].

White waxes indignant about these philistines: "What do any of these science writers know about the history of philosophy before Bertrand Russell?  Their comments are merely expressions of an anti-intellectual prejudice.  I would go so far as to say that they are a kind of bigotry" (25).  It might be more to the point to point out that these science writers are still doing philosophy; they're just doing it ignorantly and badly, like the plain-speaking businessman who claims that common sense is good enough for him.  When such scientists try to rebut philosophers and historians of science, they generally get everything wrong.  Philosophers keep worrying away at questions that scientists (and remember, science used to be called "natural philosophy") don't even try to answer, perhaps because they're unanswerable.  To my mind, the benefit of doing philosophy is that it brings home so forcefully how much we don't know.

For Curtis White, the best alternative source of knowledge lies in the arts, specifically in the Romantic movement.

At its inception, Romanticism was about the discovery of a social attitude almost entirely new in the history of Western civilization.  Up through the late 18th century, individuals found themselves only in a group identification with tribe, kingdom, church, nation, and, brutally, social caste.  Romanticism offered a revolutionary and enduring alternative to being absorbed by the culture into which you happened to be born: alienation.  Alienation is the feeling that, as Lord Byron's Childe Harold expressed it, "I stood amongst them but not of them." ... I don't belong anywhere in my own world.  In fact, I see this world for what it is, and it is shameful.  In place of this world I feel something nobler within me that poets and philosophers, not soldiers, must make real...

And yet this sense of being homeless was for the Romantics [like the early Christians] a source not only of pain but of strength and potential joy as well. ... They would be heroes.  They would be free.  They would create themselves [59-60].  

A vain fantasy, and not far from the Promethean fantasies that drive a lot of scientists.  (White overlooks the notorious alienation experienced by many scientists.)  I don't believe White is correct about alienation being wholly new when the Romantics took it up.  Alienation is all over the New Testament, especially but not only in Paul's letters, and it's arguable that a feeling of not being at home in the world accounts for the popularity of mystery religions and other initiations around the Mediterranean in Jesus' time.  Alienation is a basic feature of Gnosticism too.  It seems to me that it's also part of Buddhism, certainly in the Buddha's origin myth (a pampered, sheltered prince, confronted with the reality of human suffering, leaves it all to seek Truth), which reminds me that White thinks almost exclusively in terms of "Western" art, culture and religion; odd that, in one who avows the influence of 1960s California counterculture in his life.

But again, what answers does Romanticism offer?  None that White mentions.  He makes much of its supposed egalitarianism, and throws the word "freedom" around a lot, especially "Schiller's mantra," "Art models freedom" (69).  Freedom is good, who could object to that?  But if Schiller was right, art models freedom through constraint, whether by using established forms or by creating new ones.  Freedom is never absolute. When he tries to get positive about art, White falls as flat as any scientist does.

The more agonistic way would be to say that for the past two centuries artists have hated mop inventors. Beethoven … seemed to hate just about everyone, and wrote his music against them, against his father, against Haydn, against “inkeepers, cobblers, and tailors,” and against the philistine nobility that paid his wages.  In short, [Jonah] Lehrer either has never heard of or simply dismisses the role of social alienation as a driving force for what he blandly calls creativity [117-8].  

What galloping horseshit.  Let's note again the social alienation found in many scientists.  Second, let's note that these alienated kids always expect to be taken care of, usually by women.  White hasn't noticed what a boys' club the arts have always been, no less than the sciences or religion.  Beethoven's hatred of merchants and servants for failing to serve him gratis wasn't "egalitarian" but aristocratic.  Feminism is another alternate way of knowing that doesn't seem to be on his radar.

Lehrer writes, “The story of 'Like a Rolling Stone' is a story of creative insight.  The song was invented in the moment, then hurled into the world” [121]. 

Bullshit, and White recognizes this, but for the wrong reasons. "Like a Rolling Stone" did not spring fully grown from Bob Dylan's head.  Think of the actual process of writing, which was not a moment but went on for some time, producing ten pages of a rant that Dylan whittled down to four long verses.  Then think of the process of arranging and recording, which was protracted and painful.  Some of the versions, including a waltz, have since been released on CD.  The release version emerged in collaboration with other musicians, and Dylan's producer.  Then think of the hostility in the folk community to Dylan's artistic changes.  He was accused of commercialism, though his record label understandably didn't see a six-minute opus as obvious fodder for the charts; but also remember Mim Udovich's rejoinder (from the Village Voice, 29 September 1992, 94-97) to Camille Paglia's lament about commercialism in pop music:

Outrage about the artistic limitations placed on musicians by the marketplace is equally unfounded.  And just to stick on Paglia's elementary level, if Leonard Chess had not told Chuck Berry to ditch the blues for something that would sell, it is arguable that Keith Richards would not be the coolest person living today.  And lastly, if you're going to make this argument at all, you should mention Colonel Tom Parker.

The case of rock'n'roll also brings in the relationship of art and technology -- that is, science.  Dylan could not have made "Like a Rolling Stone" without changes (advances, if you like) in the technology of musical instruments and of recording. The effect of recording on music has not been purely technical -- or rather, technical changes have wrought cultural changes.  A generation, the generation White and I share, learned to think of music as existing in sequence on two sides of a long-playing vinyl record. The advent of CDs changed that, and then music on the Internet, and Youtube, changed it again.  Musical performances used to be ephemeral -- we have no idea what Jenny Lind sounded like, for example -- but we can now listen to the music of long-dead musicians, frozen on lacquer, vinyl, compact discs and now as virtual computer files.

For the scientist, blue is a particular wavelength in the light spectrum that is visible to humans. For the linguist, blue is a sign or symbol carrying meaning (heaven, salvation, Caribbean vacation, etc.).  But for an artist like Messaien, blue is a presence -- both a thing and the experience of the thing -- and only when we are attentive and responsive to this presence can we be said to understand it.  As Messaien shows [except that he didn't, but never mind for now], attention requires a certain non-evaluative openness to the thing [which thing?]; to respond to what the openness offers is the act of music-making itself [162].  

It occurs to me that White always thinks of art from the standpoint of the artist, the Promethean genius who creates, models freedom, and demands our "non-evaluative openness to the thing."  Anytime someone demands "non-evaluative openness" (also known as "faith"), I reach for my critical thinking.  It seems that for White, it's the artist who matters, and the audience exists as a receptacle for "the act of music-making," or poem-making, or painting-making, or philosophy-making.  That's not an "egalitarian" model of the arts, or of life, and it sits oddly with White's insistence, quoting Schlegal, that "To have genius is the natural state of humanity."  Personally, my idea of Hell is a roomful of geniuses, demanding non-evaluative openness to their own products but never paying attention to the products of all the others, who may claim to be geniuses but are just a bunch of posers, man, to say nothing of the stupid sheeple who don't realize the pain of being a supergenius in an uncaring, un-understanding world full of idiots.

One should, of course, take artists' philosophizing about their practice as skeptically as one takes scientists' philosophizing about theirs.  But what is blue to the painter?  A technical problem.  The technology of paint is ancient.  You can't draw a neat line between art and science.  Each practitioner, obsessed with his or her own problems, sees himself or herself as the center of the universe; one role of the philosopher is to decenter them.

The important thing to remember, those few of us who do [really? who is "us" here?], is that there are other metaphors than those offered to us by science, and other ways of thinking about what it's like to be a [sic] human.  There is a long, now dishonored tradition in philosophy and the arts that seeks to account for the "interior distance," our personal and species internal landscape.  The crucial thing to say is that this tradition is under no illusions that it is providing the Truth, the human-in-itself. ... What's more, these metaphors will also provide insight into something science is mostly clueless about: how we ought to live [167].

I disagree that "this tradition is under no illusions that it is providing the Truth"; it seems to me that all these traditions have such illusions, and their "insights" about "how we ought to live" are clueless when they try to prescribe and legislate for everyone.  The religious and philosophical traditions I've gotten the most from acknowledge that "our personal and species internal landscape" can not be accounted for.  People constantly mistake metaphors for reality.  Religious people are especially prone to doing so, with scientists close on their heels. 

White notes that the culture of science "is notoriously thin-skinned and combative" (96), then quotes at length a scientist on the cutthroat competition of science conferences and the scientific professional generally.  I suppose he takes for granted that his readers are aware that this also describes the humanities and the arts, but he doesn't make the point, so let me do it: the culture of the arts is notoriously thin-skinned and combative.  He also told Koerth-Baker that he liked a lot of science writing, such as John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, but he didn't discuss it in The Science Delusion because "McPhee is not in the business of using science to produce pernicious ideology."  Of course, the humanities and the arts have often produced pernicious ideology.  (The Romantics' adulation for, and then disillusionment with, Napoleon Bonaparte is not really addressed by White.) The only way to avoid doing so lies not in a given field or a particular movement in a field, but in not producing pernicious ideology in the first place.  How to avoid that?  There's the rub.  In The Science Delusion Curtis White offered an entertaining though scattershot sendup of the pretensions of scientists, but he merely showcased the pretentions of artists and the humanities.

Mopping Up

Just a few thoughts that I couldn't find a place for in yesterday's post.

One of the other ironies about attempts to defend inarticulate feces-flinging as an expression of Deep Manhood is that critical reason, science, philosophy, and the entire enterprise of the critical intellect has traditionally been claimed as a male preserve.  Women who tried to intrude into this sanctum sanctorum were warned that they were unsexing themselves.  I didn't quote all of that "subculture" comment; here's more of the context (emphasis added):

I think you can describe it as that Sarkeesian launched a attack on a subculture using her style of rhetoric and that many people from that subculture responded with attacks using a style of rhetoric common to that subculture.

As far as I can tell, Sarkeesian's "style of rhetoric" could be called a male style of rhetoric, not her own.  I don't consider any style of rhetoric to have a sex, but intellectual women have often been accused of having or aspiring to have male minds.  Sometimes they are complimented for it, but in any case the assumption is that rationality is a male trait and practice.  I don't deny that vituperative abuse and threats are deployed by women as well as men; but that makes the defense of these tactics by men all the stranger.  Aren't these emotional outbursts kind of ... girly?  I don't think they are, remember; it's masculists who think so, except when it suits them to think otherwise.

Some feminists have bought into the masculist characterization of rationality as a guy thing, so let me stress again that I don't think critical reason has a sex.  But one of the hallmarks of the American mythopoetic men's movement of the 90s (which seems to have faded away, though maybe it only gets less press now) was a rejection of critical reason, on some rather dubious grounds.  Around the turn of the century, I had an online altercation with a self-styled mythopoetic, who accused feminists of rejecting reason.  I pointed out that so did the mythopoetics, and he indignantly denied it but didn't refute it.  His own style of argument was short on reason and evidence, long on homophobic and misogynist abuse.  But that's not because he is male; it's because he's human.  And that's only an explanation of his behavior, not a justification.

In connection with all this, I remembered a useful quotation from Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985):

The effect [of specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science.  Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists.  Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians.  It makes its academic converts among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists [24].

Midgley's correct about the intellectual and professional base of Creationism and Intellectual Design, and I think she's correct about many of today's physical scientists' weakness in the area of  "general" or, as I'd call it, critical thinking.  There's a popular kneejerk reaction to any criticism of scientific claims among many science cultists, whether lay or priestly, that such criticism is the doing of religious nuts or ideologically-driven irrationalists in the humanities.

But there are plenty of religious nuts in the physical sciences today, as David F. Noble has shown (see his The Religion of Technology, Knopf, 1997), and scientific racism / sexism comes from the sciences.  It's true that the criticism of scientific racism comes largely (though not exclusively) from the humanities, from the anthropologist Franz Boas onwards, but that's an indictment of the physical sciences, especially when you consider that apologists for the latest brand of scientific racism admit that earlier brands were discredited but prefer not to admit by whom.  When physical scientists do criticize scientific racism, they frequently are accused of not being scientists, and the accusations are framed in almost paranoid terms.  A prime example of this was my liberal law-professor friend (her background includes doctorates in statistics and computer science) who, when I mentioned the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, snapped that Kuhn had no scientific training.  When I pointed out that Kuhn had a doctorate in physics, from Harvard, she boldly changed the subject.  It was like arguing with a Creationist, and now I understand why.  (I've seen denials of Kuhn's scientific training before, so I surmise it's an item of folklore among scientific fundamentalists.)  If someone is properly positive and uncritical about science, on the other hand, he or she needn't have any scientific training at all.  Again, this corresponds to religious piety.  As long as you respect duly constituted authority, you don't need to know anything, and no one will criticize you for your ignorance.

Another amusing example of this tendency was an academic geneticist who fumed that a paper claiming that human beings are progressively becoming less intelligent was "Arts Faculty science."  As it happened, the author of the offending paper was also a geneticist.  While some humanities faculty do indeed hold and express risible views of science, the true fount of this kind of wackery is the physical sciences themselves.  I imagine that the accusation was a kneejerk, less-than-fully-rational reflex against the supposedly woolly-minded arts and humanities.  Far from being Arts Faculty Science, Crabtree's paper is Science Faculty Science.  Recognizing that would be too painful to bear, I suppose.

I'm not saying that all scientists are irrational or that all humanities faculty are rational; of course they aren't.  But scientists who use the humanities and even religion as a straw man on which to blame attitudes they dislike are being irrational.  It's entirely possible for a person to be brilliantly rational in one domain, and bouncing-off-the ceiling irrational in others.  Think of Edward O. Wilson's pitiable cry, "multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism."  Notice that Wilson here blamed declining funding for the supercollider on multiculturalism rather than on changing post Cold-War conditions, let alone on its cost overruns and the failure of the damn thing to work.  It would not be out of line to notice too that "communism," in the Soviet Union spent lots of money on scientific research and technology.  (In the good old days, cutting-edge technology pretty much got a blank check, especially if it might have military applications.  Today's scientific revivalists miss those great days.  There were giants in the earth then, or at least giant science budgets.  Now we can only show children Star Trek reruns and hope they'll catch the fire.)  Much of the wackiest (and sometimes harmful) ideas come from the science departments, though, and get published in peer-reviewed journals.

As with religion, I often must ask whom I am to believe among those who claim to speak with authority.  What if the teacher points to his miracles, his mighty acts of power, as proof of his authority?  As a layman, I'm not supposed to evaluate religious or scientific claims; I must simply believe.  Those who Fucking Love Science point to their authorities, but jeer at those who point to theirs.  And vice versa, of course.  Even worse, yesterday the curators of a liberal Facebook page linked to a Slate article which marshalled statistics to show that states with stricter gun laws have few gun deaths, and added their own judgment: "This is not a conversation. You are not entitled to a different opinion. These are FACTS."  It is a conversation. People are entitled to a different opinion, always. Only an authoritarian dirtbag says otherwise. Statistics, especially about social phenomena and policy, are always open to question and disagreement.  For example, on the most elementary level, are we talking about correlation or cause here?  This is not the way to settle a question, or even to discuss it.

I'm presently reading Feyerabend and Scientific Values: Tightrope-Walking Rationality by Robert P. Farrell (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), which is quite interesting.  Farrell shows that many (most?) critics of the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend misunderstand and misrepresent him.  (Like Kuhn, Feyerabend had training in physics, though unlike Kuhn he didn't complete a degree in it.)  This can't be entirely excused by the fact that Feyerabend wasn't always consistent, though like any philosopher, let alone human being, he wasn't always consistent.  Farrell shows that at one point in his career, in Science in a Free Society (Verso, 1978) Feyerabend did adopt something like that radically relativist position he was often accused of.  But the accusations also refer to (and misrepresent or misunderstand) the work he did before that book.  Granted, philosophy isn't easy at best, and I wouldn't necessarily blame a lab physicist for misunderstanding Feyerabend.  But I do blame other philosophers and historians of science, who should have been able to follow what he was doing: that is their job.

One conundrum I wasn't able to disentangle in F. G. Bailey's discussion of the moral mind in The Tactical Uses of Passion  (Cornell, 1983) was how much the public outbursts of emotion he describes are involuntary and how much they are conscious, willed performances.  For example:

Projecting from the way he has behaved in similar situations in the past, he is “beside himself” or “not himself” or “unlike his normal self” if he conducts himself as others would not have predicted: the calm man who flies into a rage, the irascible woman who remains passive when provoked, the bold person who shows fear, or the coward who confronts danger.  (Of course, if such displays happen often enough, then the definition of that particular “true self” is likely to be modified.)  Second, we may look not at the person and his unique and individual history, but at the status he occupies.  Profanity from the headmistress and sentimental tears from the sergeant major are evidence that these people are “beside themselves” or “not themselves” [51].

Supposedly people who are "not themselves" or "beside themselves" are "out of control."  The politician, the preacher, the salesman, may walk a fine line between being "carried" away by emotion and managing very carefully his or her effects.  Sometimes, however, those outbursts are surely deliberate, theatrically so:

It is a tradition, at least in the British army and I presume in others, that the drill sergeant should taunt the recruits, heap abuse upon them, and so conduct himself that, off the drill square, any normal person would reward him with a black eye.  Recruits are compared to pregnant ducks. They are told that if the Queen saw them, she would certainly abdicate. The trooper whose hair is the length of toothbrush bristles is asked if his head hurts, and, compelled to reply loudly and clearly that it does not, is told that it should, because the sergeant is standing on his hair.  All these things are formalized provocations, and the individual must learn not to fight back, not to get angry, not to show himself as an individual.  The training is generally effective. Very few people do fight back (at least openly – there are all kinds of interesting ways of doing so covertly), and those who fight back openly are heavily punished and generally judged by their peers to be stupid rather than brave ... In this performance not one iota of emotion is encouraged, unless it is collective and stage-managed.  For example, a drill was used at the funerals of important persons.  At the command “Rest on your arms reversed!” one placed the muzzle of the rifle on one’s toe, bowing one’s head.  We were told, “Look sad, you buggers!”  We were like hired mourners at a funeral, and no one expected us to feel sad.  There was also a drill for giving three cheers, laying down where the cap should be grasped (easier with the old peaked cap than the floppy forage hat), where it should be held during the “Hip! Hip!,” and the appropriate duration of the “Hurrah!”  The only occasions on which “genuine” emotion was enjoined were simulated encounters with an enemy: when thrusting a bayonet into a sandbag, one was required to shout with anger and exultation [52-3]

I think Gamergaters also walked this line: Oh, I was so angry to have my subculture vilified by that man-hating bitch that I saw red, I totally lost it, I was out of control.  And perhaps paradoxically, the person who claims to be basically rational expects to be congratulated for becoming irrational in the face of such provocation.  What else could I do, Your Honor?  The bitch was asking for it!  This is the rhetoric of the lynch mob.  The best thing about it is that if you weren't yourself, you don't have to make reparations to your victims afterward.  (The destruction was mutual: they failed to obey our orders, which was emotional violence on a vast scale, so we bombed them into the Stone Age.  It balances out!)

There's no shame in misunderstanding a complex discussion, and none in getting angry at someone for holding opinions you dislike.  But it's one thing to yell "You suck!" at the book you're reading or the post on your computer screen, and another to go public with the same words, to post them to the author's Twitter account; let alone to send the person threats of death and dismemberment.  Or, if I may speak allegorically, there's no shame in losing control of your bowels -- it happens to all of us sooner or later if we live long enough, and of course we all began our lives as incontinent, wailing babies.  There is shame in taking up those feces and hurling them at someone, and even more in defending such behavior as essential to your "subculture" or an inevitable result of your genetic makeup.  Feelings are, we were taught at the telephone crisis line where I volunteered for several years in the late 1970s; they aren't necessarily reasonable, and there's no reason why they should be.  What we do with them, how we act on them, does need to be reasonable.

Doing What Comes Naturally

I considered adding this to yesterday's post, but decided I might as well start a new one.  Midgley also wrote in Heart and Mind:

Now it is exactly this variety, this obstinate innate uniqueness of each human being, that gives real force to the demands for political freedom.  Mill, in his Essay on Liberty, emphasized it constantly and correctly with organic metaphors.  People, he said, are like trees which should have their full shape and not be pollarded; like human feet, which should have their natural growth and not be bound.  

Like human hair, which should have its natural growth and not be cut or bound or dyed?  Like the human body, which should go naked and not be covered by clothing?  “Nature” in this sense starts to stretch too much, and those organic metaphors bump up against real practice, such as longstanding human manipulation of the breeding and culture of non-human species.  Is it bad to trim a tree, to mow your lawn, to domesticate plants or animals for food and other purposes?  We expect a more hands-off approach to human beings (though some of us fantasize about breeding people as we breed dogs or cattle), but the organic metaphors Midgley approves break down there.

But stick to people: I wonder what that Victorian gentleman John Stuart Mill thought about contraception?  Abortion?  Homosexuality?  Celibacy?  Chastity?  For his time he was a very advanced supporter of women's autonomy, but I haven't yet read The Subjection of Women and don't know the details of his opinions.  Sex-reassignment surgery didn't exist then, and it's interesting to speculate what he would have thought of it.  Transsexuals don't think they are going against their natural growth, of course: they insist that they're expressing it.  And who can say?  But human intervention in nature, our own or other organisms', is too widespread and general to be dismissed as lightly as Mill did according to Midgley.

In the real world, “nature” is limited not by innate gifts but by the environment.  But then, "the environment" is often just another word for "nature": a drought for example, or a plague, or a fire, or an asteroid strike.  Or, as in Mill's case, a driving father who was determined to make him into a genius.  As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "His childhood was not unhappy, but it was a strain on his constitution and he suffered from the lack of natural, unforced development."  I wondered when I read this passage if Mill didn't have his own experience in mind when he said these things.  But that raises another point about "nature": Mill would not have been the person he became if not for his controlling father, and would not have written what he did in the way he did.  If he'd been born in England with the identical "nature" a thousand years earlier, he'd have turned out very differently.

They shouldn’t have a single stereotype, he insisted – and that is why we need a rich, varied, hospitable, enterprising society.  But if they were not innately unique, if they were naturally indeterminate, there would be no objection to pouring the lot of them into standard moulds.  It is quite time that the radical Left got rid of this confusion, this dead beetle which is poisoning its concept of freedom [42].

I'm not sure I can disentangle Mill from Midgley here, but I think this passage confirms my impression that when she wrote that "each person is different in kind" from birth, that by "human nature" she meant individual human nature.  That's all well and good, but I don't think it's the usual commonsense meaning of the term; people may say "that's his nature" of an individual's quirks, but "human nature" usually refers to the species.

And what if one's nature drives one to do terrible things?  People have often tried to find a way around this problem, by postulating that the terrible things are not the result of nature but of being carefully taught the wrong way to behave.  I don't think so.  Nature isn't as red in tooth and claw as some romantics like to think, but it's not all sunshine, rainbows and lollipops either.  Hyenas are part of nature as surely as butterflies are.  This only means that we needn't be, mustn't be nonjudgmental about nature either.  It may not be pleasant, but some natures must be bound, pollarded, and even extinguished; and we must take responsibility for our judgments and how we act on them.  (I think this was roughly what Sartre had in mind with his denials of human nature and the necessity of choice.  If I'm wrong about that, no matter: it's what I have in mind.)

What made this passage stick with me, though, was Midgley's apparent assumption that "unique" is the opposite of "indeterminate", and that those unique individual natures are somehow fixed from birth.  That may very well be so, but it needs to be argued, not asserted.  It seems to me that human nature, both at the species and the individual level is indeterminate.  That's not to say it's unbounded, or infinitely malleable, but everything we know about the interaction of genetic endowment and experience / environment, to say nothing of human beings' capacity for learning, tells us that organisms are both unique and indeterminate.

As an example of the uniqueness and determinacy she has in mind, Midgley declares:

The fascinating thing here is not just the capacity, but the interest which goes with it.  Our faculties demand use; we need to do what we are fitted for.  That delightful wood-engraver, Thomas Bewick [1753-1828] was the son of a small farmer in a lonely part of Northumberland.  He tells in his Memoir how from his earliest years he used to draw pictures, with anything he could get and on any surface he could find, although nobody suggested this to him and on the whole people discouraged him.  ‘At that time’, he goes on, ‘I had never heard of the word “drawing”, nor did I know of any other paintings besides the king’s arms in the church, and the signs in Ovingham of the Black Bull and other inns.’

Bewick, in fact, was a born draughtsman ...  Such people exist.  Therefore, there has to be something wrong with a concept of freedom which can’t accommodate them.  Certainly, they show that freedom has its limits.  Nobody is free to have somebody else’s gifts as well as his own, or instead of them [41]. 

This is true of certain individuals, but not of all.  Not everyone has the kind of early-onset vocation that someone like Bewick exhibited.  I'm not sure what I myself was born "fitted for"; it's hard to see how either reading or writing could be inborn, since these abilities are human inventions.  Drawing, we know, is older, but what kind of innate endowment would produce a "born draughtsman"?  I have a good ear for music, a decent voice and the dexterity to play guitar adequately, but no driving need to make music above all else.  I can also draw fairly well but never worked at it.  I sometimes liked to tease people I knew by saying that I was born to be a dishwasher, since I fit so well into that job for thirty years.

In the communitarian society she imagined for her 1976 science-fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy addressed questions like this.  Of one character we are told that she "does not switch jobs but is permanent head of this house of children" because:

Sometimes a gift expresses itself so strongly, like Jackrabbit's need to create color and form, like Magdalena's need to work with children, that it shapes a life.  Person must not do what person cannot do -- you have heard us say that a hundred times; but likewise, person must do what person has to do.

Most people, however, are expected to work at certain service jobs rather than identify themselves with one office.  Even Jackrabbit, the artist also mentioned, must work on food and other production, cleaning and so on; he must also go on defense against the mega-corporations that menace his community.  Connie, the novel's protagonist from the 1970s, is shocked to learn this: he's an artist, shouldn't he be free to commune with his muse?  Why risk such a talented person on defense?

Most of the characters in Woman on the Edge of Time are doubled, in the 1970s present of Connie, the protagonist, and the 2130s of Mouth-of-Mattapoisett.  One reason for this is to suggest how the environment shapes whatever innate characteristics a person has.  Jackrabbit's 1970s counterpart is Skip, a young gay man committed for to a mental hospital for electroshock by his parents in an effort to "cure" him; if he has a "need to create color and form," he never gets a chance to express it.

Luciente, Connie's guide in Mattapoisett, says of her daughter:

"At four, Dawn was timid.  We worried.  Me, my [co-mothers].  We all struggled to bring per out."

[Connie] "But you say you respect difference." 

"Different strengths we respect.  Not weakness.  What is the use in not actively engaging life?  It passes anyhow."

I'm sure that Midgley, who's a mother herself, knows this: respecting each child's individuality doesn't mean that one never intervenes to encourage growth in what seems a desirable direction.  Contrary to her paraphrase of Mill, some interference and shaping, conscious or not, is inevitable in the raising of human children, because of their long period of dependency and their great capacity for learning. What is desirable, though, is not determined by "nature" but by ideological preconceptions, and decided by judgment.  Somewhere I read that in 'the West' babies are seen as dependent beings who must learn to be independent and take care of themselves, while in Japan (and perhaps elsewhere in 'the East') babies are seen as little egoists who must learn to be connected to, and interdependent with other people.  This is probably an overgeneralization, like most generalizations about cultures, but the point is that babies aren't different in Japan and the United States, but the way they are seen and the expectations for them are.  Both of these ways of thinking about babies seem true to me at the same time: they are dependent, but they're also little egoists who must learn to co-exist with others.  "Human nature," whether we're speaking of individuals or of the species, is self-contradictory at its root. Woman on the Edge of Time is, among other things, a book about human nature, but I suspect it would annoy Midgley for dealing with questions she doesn't care to engage.  (A couple of years after Heart and Mind, Midgley co-wrote an awful book on feminism that I hope to dissect here one of these days.)

Another reason why talk about nature, human or otherwise, runs into fatal difficulties is that nature has history -- that is, a sequence of changes that can't be predicted though they can, with luck, be described in hindsight.  The pitfall of doing so is that, no doubt also as part of human nature, the historian is tempted to find a story in the sequence: an ordered, causal narrative, which implies that with a bit more wisdom one could have predicted how it would turn out.  Darwinian evolution is the anti-story of change in Nature.  Not only do languages and other cultural features change over time and from place to place, but the biology of organisms changes too.  It's indeterminate -- not infinitely malleable but not fixed in place either.

You've Got to Be Sloppily Taught

It's not enough to reject biological reductionism: you must also offer a better alternative to it.  Mary Midgley is properly critical of "blank slate" (or, as she calls them, "blank paper") conceptions of human nature.  I began to wonder, though, how many people actually, consistently believe that human beings are blank slates.  I've noticed that many who are accused of that belief don't actually hold it; often they are professionals in biology and related fields, like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard C. Lewontin, Hilary Rose, and Anne Fausto-Sterling.  It's a typical reaction to criticism of a belief to accuse the critic of holding an absolutely opposed stance: if you criticize a given case of biological reductionism, you will be accused of believing that biology is totally irrelevant, just as someone who criticizes a given US policy will be accused of hating America and wanting to see it destroyed, or a woman who criticizes a man's behavior will be accused of hating men and wanting them all castrated.

Case in point: I just read Paul Shankman's The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (Wisconsin, 2009), an account of Derek Freeman's trashing of Margaret Mead at the end of the twentieth century.  Among much else, Freeman accused Mead and her teacher Franz Boas of believing that human beings were blank slates and that biology played no role in numan nature or culture.  Numerous evolutionary psychology types, including Steven Pinker, David Buss, and Matt Ridley, were happy to parrot Freeman's claim without bothering to determine how accurate it was.  Shankman shows that this accusation was utterly false.  Ironically, Freeman himself rejected sociobiology (though not, it seems, evolutionary psychology) and adhered to an approach he called interactionist; but he could have been accused of rejecting biology for blank-slate cultural determinism if anyone had cared to misrepresent him by dishonest selective quotation.

Shankman quotes Ridley as noting that "For fifty years Mead's Samoans stood as definite proof of the perfectibility of man" and that Boas, Ruth Benedict and Mead had argued that "human nature must be infinitely malleable by culture because (they thought, wrongly) the alternative is fatalism, which is unacceptable" (Shankman, 207-8).  These are also common accusations, but there's no reason why a real blank slate position should imply "the perfectibility of man," and Mead seems not to have believed in such perfectibility: arguing that some cultures are better than others suggests improvement at most.  And ironically, nowadays it's biological determinists and Artificial Intelligence propagandists who talk as though they believe and hope that "man" is perfectible and "infinitely malleable" by genetic manipulation and by turning us into cyborgs.

Midgley does discuss a couple of positions that might plausibly be called "blank slate," such as Skinnerian behaviorism and Sartrean existentialism.  Certainly both approaches seem to encourage people to make extreme and not very well thought-through statements about human nature.  It's not clear to me that Skinner, as wrong as he was, actually thought human beings are blank slates.  Often people will make such extreme statements but if they're challenged, they'll backtrack quickly and qualify them.  I haven't read enough Sartre to be sure about him, but even leaving aside the many changes in his philosophy and politics during his career, I suspect that his reduction of human nature to pure will was a rhetorical move he wouldn't have cared to defend very far.

I've found this to be true of laypeople, who are perfectly capable of saying that human beings are effectively blank slates. and then almost immediately make equally wild, concrete, and unfounded generations about our real human nature.  They may not root that real nature in biology -- often they think it consists of "spirit," "soul," or some other non-material essence -- but they are sure it's real.  So, for example, I've become very tired of the "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" meme, such as this one:

Someday I must make a meme in which a baby reminds us that it knows nothing of language, clothing, taking out the trash, or bowel control.  But when people say things like this -- there's a DJ on the community radio station who regularly plays "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" and similar, less well-known songs -- I want to ask them where they think hatred, intolerance, racism, etc. come from if they must be "taught" to us.  Who invented them, and first taught them?  Someone bad, I betcha.  Maybe it was "religion," conceived as an independently existing autonomous malevolent being rather than a human invention. Someone who sees other people as Them, no doubt -- but that certainly includes many people who believe that Someone Bad taught innocent little babies to be intolerant.  A photo circulated recently on Facebook of a very young bobcat and a very young deer cuddled together, with the caption "Why can't we humans do this?"  Well, first, of course, we humans can, and we do.  We are not always at each other's throats, and a meme like this does nothing to explain why we sometimes engage in violent conflict.  But second, do the people who made, shared, and like this image believe seriously that bobcats and other predators kill for their food because some bad person "carefully taught them"?  This isn't a blank-slate position, it's thoughtlessness.

Midgley talks about the human "heart" and the "soul," which doesn't really get her very far.  Both of these are metaphors, and extremely vague ones at that.  If "heart" means something like core or center, fine, but in fact neither our blood-pumping hearts nor our chest cavities more generally are organs of moral reflection and judgment.  As for the "soul," it's even vaguer.  People talk about it in various ways, sometimes equating it with "spirit" and sometimes distinguishing the two; since neither term refers to any entity in the real world, it doesn't matter where you draw the line, but it doesn't settle anything either.

At one point Midgley declares: "For Christianity, the true self is indeed the soul, but the body is a necessary and suitable expression for it; the resurrection of the body will ensure that whole people, not just ghosts, inhabit Heaven" (10).  As usual, when Midgley talks about religion she gets it wrong.  Christianity has never quite sorted out the nature of the "true self."  The Bible is no help, and later theologians have had to fall back on Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy.  The apostle Paul, whose discussion of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 is often referred to, distinguished between the body and flesh, declaring ex cathedra that in the resurrection of the body, the flesh will be replaced with a body of spirit.  The gospels present Jesus' resurrection as a body of flesh, so most people who quote Paul equate the body and the flesh.  If the new body will be "spirit," what is the difference between that and the soul?  "Ghost" comes from the old German for "spirit," so that's no help to Midgley either.

She even falls back on "common sense," which she defines as "not some special naïve set of beliefs, but any sort of practical assumption compatible with the business of everyday living" (38).  The trouble with this is that any number of irrational and harmful assumptions are "practical" and "compatible with the business of everyday living."

The notion of human nature is wide and indispensable to political thought.  Thinkers of all colours have always used it, and it is still presupposed by those who officially deny it.  (For instance, those who deny that man is naturally aggressive on the ground that he is naturally friendly are not dispensing with the notion of human nature.)  The real disputes are about what human nature is like [39].

The trouble is that "human nature," like "common sense," is always used from the wrong end: rather than point to evidence of "what human nature is like", people tend to rationalize their prejudices and wishes as "common sense" and "human nature."  In an important sense, they're right.  A popular slogan from the 60s and 70s claimed that the only unnatural sexual act is one you can't perform -- that is, because it's physically impossible.  Anything that human beings do is "natural" -- if it weren't, we couldn't do it.  This applies to traits and behavior we don't like as well as to those we do.  If "thinkers of all colors have always used" the concept of human nature, that suggests to me that it doesn't have much content: it's what I call a totem-word, invoked to shut off debate and to obscure the issues rather than introduce any real information into the discussion.

There's a curious divide in the way people use words like "nature" and "natural."  People "oscillate," to use Midgley's word, between descriptive and prescriptive means of important abstractions.  "Normal," for instance, can describe what most people do -- or it can prescribe what people should do, though the thought process  (such as it is) is circular: we should do this because it's what most people do, but if most people don't do it, they should.  Other such words are "culture" (used descriptively for the constellation of practices and norms and so on typical of a group of people, and prescriptively for good practices and norms which demonstrate that you're a "cultured" person.), "art," and "nature."  ("Nature" especially exhibits this oscillation in Christian use, where "nature" is both the voice of God and the voice of sin.  In Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death [Routledge, 1992], Evelyn Fox Keller shows how and why this oscillation came about.)  Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good, as the most dogmatic champion of human nature will concede; but he or she will flipflop to the normative sense of "nature" when it's expedient.

Another important concept that gets used in such conflicting ways is "evolution."  People commonly use it as a moralizing term: an "evolved" person is mature, wise, learned, an "unevolved" person is not.  But any trait that human beings exhibit has survived the trial-by-ordeal of Darwinian natural selection.  Midgley herself falls into this error when she says that "In going up the evolutionary scale, we find a quite steady increase in the openness of programs" (154); but there is no evolutionary scale to go up and down.  She's referring to the pre-Darwinian, and actually anti-Darwinian Great Chain of Being, which ranks organisms from less "complex" to more "complex" -- the latter of course assumed to be better.  And every organism, human beings not excluded, embodies old and new, "primitive" and "advanced," traits.

So it seems to me that "human nature" is a vacuous, circular term that is not of any help in the discussion of moral issues or any other.  You can debate whether a given trait is innate or not, but particularly in human behavior, it's hard to settle the question.  As Midgley also says,

Right from birth, people are individuals; each person is different in kind. I think this is in part what makes the concentration on IQ seem so unsuitable and offensive.  What happens in heredity certainly is not that we are born with a definite quantity of a standard stuff called intelligence, or even cleverness, entitling us to a particular place in the social hierarchy, a pre-programmed degree in some monstrous cosmic examination.  Instead, we each have our own peculiarly formed set of capacities and incapacities, our own personal repertoire [40-41].

If it were true that "each person is different in kind", then each individual would have his or her own nature (which is what "kind" means in this context) and it would be meaningless to talk about human nature as a trait of the species.

Still, Midgley is on to something here: most reductionist talk about human nature overlooks the variety among individuals, assuming that all men are alike, and all women are alike, all blacks, Hispanics, and so on, even though if "science" can be said to have shown everything, it is that we are all different from each other in important ways, and that the variation within groups often exceeds the average variation between them.  It may well be "human nature" to ignore such differences -- but if it is, so much the worse for human nature.

So, for a hot-button contemporary example, there's been a fuss over the women who passed Army Ranger camp recently.  Can women meet the exacting standards of this elite terrorist group? the media asked.  Well, not all women can, any more than all men can; but it's not obvious a priori that no women can.  It would be surprising if none could, given a fair chance to do so.  The same goes for any discussion of race, sex, etc., as it affects ability to do science, math, music, or any other human endeavor.  Every few years somebody, usually a sports journalist, tries to argue a scientific case that people of African descent are innately better at sports than white people, which explains why there are so many blacks in elite sports nowadays.  This project is touted as a bold defiance of Political Correctness, of course.  Whatever the validity of the science involved, there always seems to lurk the assumption that if you're good at sports, you're not good at anything else, and shouldn't be allowed to do anything else.  Analogously, there's no doubt that human females "evolved" to bear young, but that doesn't imply that all women must bear children or that they can't also do art, science, sports, or anything else.  The same illogic would dictate that, since males evolved to supply spermatazoa, we are good for nothing else.  But whatever ideas about "human nature" can be used to bolster the status quo qualify as "common sense."

The problem then is not "human nature" -- which doesn't settle anything -- but how we think about it.  And while I'm mostly on Midgley's side, she seems to miss most of what's important about how we think about it.  If I want to study mathematics or nuclear physics or basketball or poetry or the violin, it doesn't matter whether males or whites or any other group does better on average at those tasks.  Regardless of who I am, the odds are overwhelmingly against my excelling compared to the very best individuals in the field.  There's no way to know in advance how well I'll do, and there's no reason why I must be the best anyway.  One of the reasons why the concept of "meritocracy" is so malign is that it tends to devalue everyone who isn't in the top rank of achievement.  It seems to me that "human nature" only functions negatively, to tell certain people they can't do what they'd like to do, that they must do what they don't particularly want to do, or to excuse bad behavior by the privileged on the grounds that it's just human nature.  I can't think of any positive uses the concept could have.  I'm not denying, mind you, that there is such a thing as human nature; only that we don't seem to be able to say anything useful about it.

Just Our DNA Talking; or, Why Do They Hate Our Science?

Human nature has been Mary Midgley's primary philosophical topic since her first book, Beast and Man, was published in 1978.  She always does a good job of criticizing scientific pretension and confusion, but as I know very well, criticism is much easier than constructing a better alternative.  As I reread Heart and Mind, her second book, I began having reservations about a lot that she said about human nature.

It's fun to take apart the absurdities peddled by biological imperialists, of course.  Midgley gives us these gems from Edward O. Wilson, who "with endearing abandon ... shows his flag:"

The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized (Sociobiology p. 562).  Having cannibalized psychology, the new neurobiology will yield an enduring set of first principles for sociology (p. 573).  We must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge (On Human Nature p. 6).  Neurobiology cannot be learnt at the feet of a guru ... Ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely wise (p. 7) [Heart and Mind, 19].

Ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely stupid either.  Oh well, that's just his DNA talking.  I recall how many defenders of sociobiology's newer avatar, evolutionary psychology, lament that social scientists, leftists, and feminists simply dismissed Wilson's scientific truth out of hand, attacking him personally because they Hate Science.  If Wilson wanted his ideas to be taken seriously, he should have come up with something other than these simple-minded Village Atheist cliches.

It appears that Wilson shared Richard Dawkins's fantasy that human beings, especially scientists, are somehow able to "transcend" our genes.  As the molecular biologist Gunther S. Stent wrote of Dawkins at about the same time Midgley published Heart and Mind,

The notion of transcendence of our evolutionary genetic heritage has, in fact, been a characteristic, essentially apologist, stance taken by many ethologists that have made claims for the moral relevance of animal studies. Such ethologists usually first show why evolution has endowed us with a selfish, aggressive, and on the whole, rather nasty set of genes. They then reject the seemingly justified accusation that they are providing a naturalistic justification for an immoral society. To make this rejection, they claim that, on the contrary, they are paving the way for the City of God by pinpointing those beastly aspects of our human genetic heritage that we must struggle to “transcend.”  But the idea of any organism, including man, transcending its genes is a biological absurdity. Within the context of biology as a branch of natural science, and upon proper consideration of any conceivably scientifically valid relation between the genome and phenome, transcendence of genes is no more possible than natural selection of the unfit.*

But Midgley also quotes Wilson walking back from the precipice of genetic transcendence (page 22):

If the brain is a machine of 10 billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect -- we are biological and our souls cannot fly free (On Human Nature, p. 1).  [Italics Midgley's.]

The other thing to notice is that Wilson demands that biologists be allowed to steer society when they have not (not then and not since) come up with any findings that would justify their doing so. This is like someone with no flight training experience -- or indeed, someone who has already crashed several planes -- demanding to pilot an airliner.  As Richard Lewontin wrote in his introduction to Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense,** "Despite its recurring failure, the ideology of genetic reductionism persists."

If the mind could be explained -- the "somehow" acknowledges that it hasn't been, yet, and (more important) that Wilson has no idea how it might be done in the first place -- as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions then, maybe, neurobiologists might have something to contribute to ethical discourse.  (Probably not, though, since it would then follow that neurobiology is the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, and control by neurobiologists would be merely automatic control based on our biological properties.) That will have to be seen if they ever actually produce their explanation.  But Wilson merely postulates that it can be done, and as Bertrand Russell said, postulating has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Midgley generously allows that Wilson coudn't possibly believe that, "as his language constantly suggests, genes or DNA were conscious agents, sitting in some inner Kremlin and masterminding events."  (I'm not nearly as generous.)  She concludes that he must mean that "the essential or real self is the biological self, that what biology tells us about ourselves matters supremely, and is the only sort of psychology that does matter" (23-4).  But she stresses that "Wilson has no idea at all of the scale on which conceptual analysis is needed, or the enormous part it plays in life" (20), and concludes that "Not to mince words, Wilson's impression that no special methods of thought are used or needed in this area is a monstrous piece of ignorance, as bad as the ignorance of science which he rightly deplores in humanists" (21).

I completely agree that human beings are "biological" and our brains are "biological," but we are biological in a way that current biology has not yet begun to grasp fully.  It would be different if Wilson had a fully-worked out biology for human beings that could explain everything that the social sciences and humanities try to work with now; but he doesn't, and no one does, so he's laying claim to a territory he doesn't even know how to map, and trying to deny other explorers access to it.  This is a scientific dog-in-the-manger attitude, which needn't be respected.

It would be as churlish to declare dogmatically that biologists never will be able to explain human society purely in terms of brain function, as it would be to say that Christ will never return on clouds of glory, seated at the right hand of power.  But it's not churlish, and in fact it's obligatory, to stress that contrary to their hints and suggestions and sometimes explicit claims, they haven't yet explained it.

To be continued.

* From his introduction to Gunther Stent (editor), Morality as a Biological Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, rev. ed. 1980), p. 12.
** Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Gregory Gruber (Harvard, 2013).

Subsisting on Dawkins's Tears

I'm rereading the philosopher Mary Midgley's 1981 book Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience.  It's an excellent introduction to the subject of ethics and morality, even if I disagree with some of what she says, which I intend to write about more in the next few days.  In the meantime I've also been looking around the Web for some references on her 1979 critique of Richard Dawkins, which led to the entertaining spectacle (still in progress, apparently) of Richard Dawkins, the No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy of the New Atheists, Mr. Take-No-Prisoners in the War Against Superstition, whining that Midgley had been mean to him, that he couldn't understand why she was so hostile: "I have been taken aback by the inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault ... I deplore bad manners as strongly as anyone ..."  He also claimed, falsely, that she hadn't read The Selfish Gene when she wrote the review, and though he later retracted the claim, it still moves.

In the course of this agreeable procrastination I found a revealing characterization in a 2015 interview with Midgley.  (She's 95 this year, and though she's lost mobility she's still writing, and as well as ever.)

One gets the impression that Midgley doesn't keep on writing just because she enjoys it, but because she thinks the world needs her to counter prevalent ideas she considers "silly" or "ridiculous", and bring us all back to "talking sense" - and because she believes such questions should not be purely left to scientists. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has put it: "Midgley's view is that philosophy, in leaving the question of human nature to the biologists, has betrayed its mission."

Notice "One gets the impression" there -- Midgley didn't actually say that she thinks "the world needs her."   One gets the impression that the interviewer wanted to give the impression that Midgley has a big head.  Writers write for many reasons -- fame, fortune, and the love of beautiful women, as Freud reportedly said -- and if you want to know why we do it, why not just ask?  I hope that people will read what I write, but I'm agnostic as to whether the world needs me to counter prevalent ideas I consider silly or ridiculous.  What I do know is that I need to write about such things, and why not?  For myself, it's a way of scratching the itch that such ideas put in my brain: instead of just fuming about them, I write about them, as much to explain to myself why they bother me as to explain to anyone else, and thanks to the Internet I can publish myself.  Writing for me, then, is partly habit, and I would imagine that at 95 it's a habit for Midgley too.  I know from experience that some people find my writing useful, as I have found other people's published disagreements with prevalent ideas.

It occurs to me to wonder, however, whether the interviewer would have written such a patronizing suggestion about Richard Dawkins, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or Francis Crick, or Carl Sagan, or Bill Nye, any other purveyor of the prevalent ideas that people like Mary Midgley and I feel the need to differ with.  I certainly get that impression from them: they are often explicit about their conviction that the world needs to know the scientific truths of which they are merely the humble prophets and servants.  They even see themselves, rather like many Christians, as an embattled and even persecuted minority, and the ideas they present as anything but "prevalent."  Considering that they have (and welcome, and seek out) much more media access than Mary Midgley, and that Tyson for one was appointed by George W. Bush to government commissions on science, I think that their stance is as dubious as Christian claims of persecution when someone disagrees with them.  Yet it's someone like Midgley who, the interviewer hints gently, thinks that the world needs her opinions.  Well, yes, I think it does.

Divine Whimsy and Darwin; or, The Madman Theory

In the fall of 1971 I moved into a dormitory room at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University.  Before that I lived for a year in a house I shared with other students in South Bend, Indiana, during my second year attending the regional campus there.  I was very ambivalent about the move, because in South Bend I had for the first time in my life a circle of friends among whom I felt I belonged; but I also had wanted to live in Bloomington ever since my first visit there as a high school senior in 1968, and I wanted (but also feared) the resources for gay life that I knew Bloomington had.

As I settled into life in Bloomington, I noticed something odd: I was using the word "home" to refer to three different places -- my dorm room, the house I'd shared in South Bend, and my parents' home in the country outside South Bend.  I realized that they all felt like home in their ways, so it was proper to use the word, but only context could tell someone else which home I had in mind when I'd saying I was going home.

This might have something to do with why I'm uncomfortable with some of the arguments in Nelson Rivera's The Earth Is Our Home: Mary Midgley's Critique and Reconstruction of Evolution and Its Meanings (Imprint Academic, 2010).  Nelson Rivera (who shares a name with a Salvadoran footballer who died young) is a theologian who teaches at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.  The book is as a whole a disappointment; it reads rather like Cliff's Notes on Midgley for ministers who might not otherwise venture to read a philosopher, even one sympathetic to religion as Midgley is; but also like an attempt to appropriate her for the faith, as theologians like to do.  Aside from references to a few stray articles by her that I hadn't seen before and might track down, like this one, I didn't get much from Rivera's discussion that I hadn't already got from reading Midgley herself.

I have to admit, though, that some of those articles included information I was happy to get.  In one, for instance, Midgley says that "for most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.  And unfortunately, there is no single law showing us how we have to combine them.  We simply have to keep on doing this carefully as the necessities of each case dictate until we reach a result that appears satisfactory" (quoted by Rivera, 179).  I agree completely, and I'm pleased to see someone else saying this.  And again:

According to Midgley, when it comes to the assertion of a personal God within the framework of a scientific view of the world, there we confront some problems.  She thinks, for example, that the notion of a personal cosmic will, which is typically found in an anthropomororphic religious creed, is basically hostile to science.  There is no place in natural science for it.  She thinks moreover that this notion is not consistent with conceptions of order, so vital to our understanding of the universe (as cosmos).  It is order, and not a personal arbitrary will, that the human mind seeks to penetrate with the tools of science [209].

Here Rivera cites an article and Midgley's Evolution as a Religion, page 70.  This interests me, because usually Midgley hedges on issues like this; she's apt to use "religion" to refer to her donnish, twentieth-century philosopher's notions of what religion should be, rather than to what it means to theologians, clergy, and lay believers.  And yet this reminds me of something I wrote a few years ago, arguing that belief in a personal God does not support a lawful ordered universe but rather an arbitrary, disordered one.  Reading some of Rivera's remarks about the role of randomness and chance in the genetic variation that is the raw material of evolutionary change, it occurred to me that randomness, far from setting natural selection at odds with religion, might actually make it more compatible: the variation among individual organisms could be interpreted as Yahweh's idle fiddling around to stir shit up, or as he put it in an old rabbinic story I quoted, "Be still, that is how it entered my mind."  Or, as Terry Pratchett put it, more wisely than he knew, we are in the hands of a madman.

But back to the question of the earth as our "home."  Rivera concludes:

As I hope will be clear through these pages, evolutionary theory is not necessarily incompatible with religious belief.  On this matter I side with Mary Midgley when she states that one of Darwin's major contributions to philosophy, and I would add to theology as well, is the conviction that we belong down here, that we belong to the earth, that we are part of creation, not under or above the whole of the biosphere.  Darwin's common sense [!] has brought our attention back down here from up there.  Most importantly, when the theory is properly assessed, it becomes quite a corrective to human arrogance, and to any religion that forgets where our proper place is: down here, with every other creature.  In this sense, the theory could be said to contribute to a spiritual if not a religious view of how things really are, us included [129].

Midgley has (correctly) criticized scientific dualism, but she sometimes forgets that the belief that human beings are not part of nature, that we are not at home in the world, was a religious doctrine first -- it is, in fact, an important part of traditional Christianity (see Philippians 1:23 and 2 Corinthians 5:1) to seek escape from this world and this body of flesh to the heavenly mansion where the believer will live with Christ.  Rivera does cite some material -- again, mostly not from her books -- which shows Christian theologians indignantly claiming that Christianity is so into ecology!  But the main evidence they seem to have for this claim is Saint Francis, the exception who proves the rule, and the concept of "stewardship."  As Rivera admits, "But even this notion of a steward [Midgley] finds somewhat patronizing.  And I may add, it has been mixed with notions of 'dominion' over the earth, as in the end of the first account of creation in the Book of Genesis" (203).

What interests me here, though, is the concept of home.  I agree that human beings are part of nature, and that we "belong" on this planet, in this biosphere that produced us.  But "home"?  A home is something I construct from a place I'm in, a feeling I have about a place -- it's not something inherent in the place itself.  Any place can become a home; any home can cease to be a home when I leave it.

Homes don't exist in nature; people (and depending on your views, other animals) construct them by altering the space they occupy.  The location of a home isn't determined by where one was born; often people travel long distances to create a home, and often they meet resistance from those who are already there, who may tell the newcomers to go back where they belong.  Those predecessors may not be "natives" themselves; if not they, then their parents or grandparents.  Human beings have always been wanderers.  If we could leave this planet with a viable destination, some of us surely would -- and then the new planet would become home.  I felt at home in Bloomington the first time I visited here, but I've felt the same way about other places.  Home can be an aspiration, not something that already exists.

The connotations of "home" as a secure place of love and care, which I think Midgley and Rivera are invoking here, are also doubtful when applied to the earth.   Rivera says that for Dawkins and for evolutionary theory generally, "Nature seems to be rather indifferent to pain and suffering" (143).  Rather indifferent!  The same is true of gods, including the Christian god -- except when they aren't indifferent but actively and gleefully inflicting pain.  Conventional religion doesn't get rid of these problems, it just shifts the blame around.  At least "nature" is indifferent, not sadistic, though some non-theists can't resist anthropomorphizing natural disasters as punishment in a very religious manner.  Like certain early Christians who fantasized that they would view the suffering of the damned from the bleachers in Heaven, such people think of other people's suffering as a spectator sport.  I think that Midgley is cheating by using sentimental appeal if she wants us to view "nature as home, as a nurturing experience, as garden and not just the context of our tears and sweat" (166).  Perhaps it can be viewed that way, but Mother Gaia also hurts and kills us, starves and burns us out, creates our tears and sweat.  Our home, yes, but we're not necessarily at home here.

Some homes become places you need to leave.  There are reasons why people feel alienated from the earth, the world, their bodies, their lives.  Some of them may not be particularly good or rational ones; some are probably internal to the person and others the result of experience; and the fantasy is unrealistic, but it seems to me that many people (including me, including Midgley) dismiss it too easily, as a perverse, even wicked refusal to face reality.  They may be just that, but what they are first is subjective -- just like the feeling that this world is our home.  Maybe we need to think more carefully and sympathetically about those reasons. 

P.S. I've done some rewriting, adding, and rearranging in this post, and I can't decide where to put this, so I'll put it here for now: It seems to me that although Midgley knows better, she seems to fall from time to time into the nurture/nature, environment/genes error.  Some molecular biologists are beginning to abandon the environment/genes distinction altogether -- see Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (Duke, 2010) for a dense but brief discussion of this.  It also appears that the very concept of genes, selfish or not, is in trouble: what a gene is thought to be has changed drastically ever since the concept was first proposed.  It was more a placeholder than an actual thing for a long time, and it may be that the placeholder has begun to outlive its usefulness.