Orbis Non Sufficit

I'm working my way slowly through Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy by Susan Neiman (Princeton, 2002).  It's interesting, and it covers matters I don't know enough about.  It makes me want to read more Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel, the surface of whose work I've barely scratched.  I doubt I'll get very far with that wish, but it does map out some of what I need to know.

Neiman sees the Problem of Evil as the core of philosophy, and perhaps of theology as well.  (I nearly wrote "religion" instead of "theology."  I think religion is prior, logically and historically, to theology.)  She writes that for Hegel the Problem of Evil is central, and he thought he'd basically solved it.  "Philosophy," she quotes him, "should help us to understand that the actual world is as it ought to be" (100).

Unsurprisingly, many people object to such a program.  Neiman argues that Hegel was no sunny optimist, he didn't ignore the many terrors the world contains; he simply argued that it was impossible for things to be otherwise than they are.  Following her explication, I think I can agree with Hegel, provided we understand how his approach can be misunderstood and misused.

First, what is "the world"?  I suppose I should have studied German, because it would help to know if Welt feels the same in German as World does in English.  If it's meant to extend to the entire universe, then Hegel might well be right.  Certainly there is no reason to believe that the universe is structured to protect us or give us meaning; the universe has no feelings, and William Blake's claim that a bird in a cage "puts all Heaven in a Rage" is absurd.  We all die, most of us get sick, and this has nothing to do with human failings, as some attempts to solve the Problem of Evil argue. Ironically, it seems to me, it's as egoistic to believe that human beings could have designed a better universe than God did as it is to think that human actions can cause 'natural' disasters like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.  But it's a common religious belief that our misbehavior gives God sick headaches, and that he watches every one of us closely to add our sins to our entry in his cosmic ledger.

Second, the misuse I mentioned is not just fatalism, but the selective complacency about the appropriateness of the World As It Is which is popular among rulers and their toadies.  It isn't specific to religion, as the persistence of Social Darwinism and scientific racism should remind us.  The Divine Right of Kings easily becomes the Evolutionary Right of Elites with barely a twinge of dissonance.  Human beings can't put All Heaven in a Rage, we can't delay the exhaustion of the sun or the heat death of the universe, but we can (for example) put kings' and queens' necks on the chopping block, and we can jail bankers whose recklessness derails the economy.  We can change our laws to make society better.  Not necessarily good -- Social Security, for example, didn't eliminate death, it didn't even eliminate poverty among the old entirely, but it lessened it.  Evolution doesn't determine political systems or social arrangements.  Kings and dictators are part of the World As It Is, but so is the resistance that blocks, frustrates, and overthrows them.  It won't matter to the universe, but it matters to us, and we can have an effect on the human scale.

Is this really not obvious?  Not, evidently, to those who try to justify evil on the human scale by calling it natural.  But that's too easy.  More pervasively in our time, it's not obvious to those who try to justify the status of the rulers by defining them as meritocratic "elites" who just naturally should be in charge.  Which, come to think of it, is why Mary Midgley's appeals to human nature rub me the wrong way.  She doesn't support oppressive arrangements, of course, she's a nice, humane, liberal lady.  But her conception of human nature is equivocal at best, vacuous at worst.  Maybe I'll have to try reading some Hegel, to try to find out if he recognized this.

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).

A Good Fight'll Help Us Get Through the Winter

I've begun reading another novel by Ruth Moore, whose The Walk Down Main Street I liked so much.  Speak to the Winds, originally published in 1956, takes its time getting started.  I'm only a hundred pages in (out of 300 or so), and I'm not sure yet where the story is headed, but I'm still glad to be back in Moore's world.

The book is set on rocky Chin Island off the coast of Maine, which was colonized in the early 1800s by a couple of stonecutters.  Their business flourished against all expectations, given the lack of a harbor and other features that would have made their job easier; but if such features had been present, someone else probably would have beaten them to the place.  By the end of the century hundreds of people lived and worked there:

Schooners hauling granite down the coast had crews who might be Yankee, or Greek or Negro or Portuguese.  Some stayed, brought families, or married on the island.  The children had strange combinations of names: Eliseo MacGimsey, Nikolaides Pumlow -- not strange at all when it was shortened, as it soon was, to Nick [12].

Eventually the decline of the stone industry and the deaths of the founders whose vision had made Chin Island work led to an exodus of most of the population.  By the time the novel properly opens, the island's economy is sustained mainly by "summer people."  The main character is Elbridge Gilman, the grandson of one of the founders, who keeps reflecting critically not only on his neighbors' foibles, but on his own.

Speak to the Wind is also a philosophical novel, with reflections on common sense and human nature.  Some of the summer people have decided to live on Chin Island all year round, notably Miss Roxinda Greenwood and her elderly mother.  Even after eighteen years, the Greenwoods are still "foreigners."

Elbridge grinned a little to himself, thinking of this anomaly.  Except for [his wife] Jess, Miss Greenwood was the best cook he ever saw in his life -- maybe, with some things, she was even a little better than Jess.  She could put a brown on a pair of chickens or a turkey that a man would fairly leave home for.  At her Christmas and Easter parties, the ladies had a chance to sample this cooking and they liked it, judging by the way they stuffed it down.  But let the subject come up at any time, and the thought was automatic -- someone would be sure to express it, too -- the summer people were helpless, they didn't know how to wash or clean or any of those things that really capable people knew how to do.  Like anything said over and over often enough, people would believe it, no matter how much proof to the contrary stared them in the face.  Like still thinking of Miss Roxinda as summer people, an outsider.  You did, and she was, and would be, if she stayed forever [60-1].

Moore also touches on religion:

In those days of mighty trees, no one thought it remarkable that these planks [for the church pews] should be an inch-and-a-half thick, fourteen feet long and twenty-five and thirty-five inches wide, all clear pine.  They were, merely, what was practical.  They did not have to be joined to make the seat wide enough or the back high; they wouldn't sag under the weight of a tall man, his substantial wife, and eight or nine children.  They were probably the most uncomfortable seats ever devised anywhere, the planks at stiff right angles to each other.

"But people went to church not to be comfortable but to hear the good rewarded and the sinners fry," said [Grandfather Robert] MacKechnie.

The walls were whitewashed between the tall, narrow windows, which were clear glass below the meeting rails and arched at the top, with small, colored, leaded panes.  The pulpit was a tall box, like a coffin, of black walnut; and behind it, two Sundays in the month, oftener if he could get over from the mainland and spare the time, the Reverent Archie Snow gave forth a remarkably blazing brand of hell-fire and brimstone.  It was said of him that when he really himself go, his breath would light the kerosene lamps across the church under the gallery [14].

This led me to reflect on the widespread fantasy that hellfire religion was in some way imposed by unscrupulous priests in order to control We the People. That may be true sometimes, but it seems to me, looking at the history of religion, that many people want theirs to be harsh, unforgiving, and punitive.  (Many people who reject religion are also harsh, unforgiving, and punitive, but that's another issue.)  The least flexible believers especially enjoy forcing their mores on their fellows, and the priests are their creatures, the product rather than the source of the harhsness.  Reactionary religion doesn't come from nowhere: people invent it, embrace it, and impose it on their children when they can.  The fanatical streak of Christianity that swept the Roman Empire, for example, was not imposed by the imperium; the Christians who promulgated it had no political power and no cultural prestige, and they continued to enact holy violence even after Christianity had been recognized as the official religion of the Empire.  Their version of Christianity survived and spread because it appealed to significant numbers of people.  Dismissing them as dupes, while surely comforting to many liberals and non-believers, doesn't explain anything.

Moore also explores deep questions of identity, as when Elbridge Gilman's partner Eliseo MacGimsey frets over the necessity of killing his pig Uncle Sylvester.  "They went through this every year.  Liseo liked a pig, personally.  After he'd raised one, he had trouble bringing himself to kill it" (65).  Elbridge, who's already done with his butchering for the year, offers to do the job for his friend.  Then he goes farther:

"How'd it be if you and I was to swap pigs, anyway?  Elbridge asked.  "Let Uncle Sylvester hang till Jess can't tell the difference in the meat, then I'll harness up the team and we'll shift pigs.  Our folks'll eat Uncle Sylvester, seeing we haven't got any sentiment about him, and you folks eat mine.  No difference in pigs to me, Liseo" [67]

Liseo agrees, though he's nervous about being found out and being made fun of if the switch is found out.

So, like, who are we really? What's the difference between one pig and another, one man and another?  Are we alike or are we different?  Mary Midgley, who likes to draw on literary examples for her philosophical writing, should read some Ruth Moore; she's deep.  And fun.

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.

Love Me, Love My Wisdom; or, My Mama Told Me You Better Shop Around

[Another one from my drafts folder; I'll have more to say about Plato at the Googolplex after I read more of it.]

Everybody does philosophy, if that word refers to asking questions about the Meaning of It All, and it does.  In that sense, every child is a philosopher, except that children have questions but no answers, and no idea how to get answers except to ask adults -- whose answers are often inadequate.  "Philosophy," then, means the process of learning to ask questions and evaluate the answers, both those given by others and those that one invents oneself.  One of Nietzsche's better aphorisms was "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!"

"Philosophy" literally means "love of wisdom," but that doesn't begin to define what philosophy is about.  One of Merriam-Webster's definitions for "wisdom" is "the natural ability to understand things that most other people cannot understand", which seemed odd to me at first until I considered the possibility that many people probably do think of wisdom that way, as something that people just have naturally, instead of something they acquired through hard mental work.  Which implies that other people just naturally don't have it.

Most of us, I think, want answers, and get impatient with the process of acquiring them.  If one teacher doesn't have the answer, they'll find another one, and it's easy enough to find teachers who peddle answers.  What's harder, for the big questions, is finding someone who has the right answer.  But for many questions there are no right answers, which bothers most people even more.

And here I discover again what a naïf I am at heart: I believe that most people could learn to understand why some answers to big questions are wrong, why we find those questions so hard to answer, and why there really may be no right answers to them.  That's what I mean by doing philosophy beyond the mere asking of questions: learning to evaluate answers.  To be honest, I don't know whether most people can learn to do that very well, but I believe it would be worth trying.  I know, of course, that not everyone agrees with me.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (Pantheon, 2014) looks like an attempt to make philosophy accessible to the ordinary reader; I'm not so sure.  In large part it's Goldstein's attempt to produce some Platonic/Socratic dialogues for the twenty-first-and-a-tenth century, and so far -- I've read the first dialogue -- I'm not impressed.  This doesn't speak so badly for Goldstein, because most such efforts that I've read have not worked well, but I hoped she might do better than this. As a professor of philosophy and a novelist she's eminently qualified for the project, but I'm having trouble getting a handle on what she thinks she's doing. The book's conceit is that Plato has somehow appeared in the present and is going on a book tour, beginning with an appearance at the Googleplex in California, described by his tour wrangler (or "media escort" as she calls herself).  Cheryl the media escort gets drawn into a philosophy lesson by her charge, and I think Goldstein makes Cheryl too clueless, with no idea who Plato is, why he wears a chiton and sandals, and the like.  But the exchange is about the issue I'm writing about today, namely the relation between hoi aristoi (the excellent, who are few) and hoi polloi (the many, who are at best mediocre).

Goldstein's Plato argues, as he did 2500 years ago, that it's proper to look to experts in how to live a good life, just as we look to experts in orthodontia to straighten our children's teeth, and so on.  I should probably qualify that: as Goldstein explains, there's no agreement as to Plato's actual views on this or any other philosophical question he wrote about.  People who've spent years reading and discussing him disagree on his views, though each is confident that they know them.  But the idea of deferring to experts in the good life has generally been seen as Plato's view, partly because he himself seems to have tried to train up a philosopher-king during his career (which indicates that he thought it would be a good idea), and partly because philosophers have often liked to think they were the experts he postulated.  I admit, though, that Plato may have had mixed feelings about the issue.  Even in the dialogues I've read (and shame on me for not having read them all), he sometimes uses Socratic questioning to lead to an impasse, the kind of no-answer I've mentioned here. I think that may very be the case with the idea of looking to experts on the Good. (Next reading project: the works of Plato.)

The trouble with looking to experts on the Good is finding them in the first place.  They disagree among themselves, often vehemently.  Plato seems to have dealt with this little difficulty by accusing his competitors of bad faith.  These are now known as sophists, and supposedly they were men who did philosophy for money and entertainment.

The Sophists held no values other than winning and succeeding. They were not true believers. They were secular atheists, relativists and cynical about religious beliefs and all traditions. They believed and taught that "might makes right". They were pragmatists trusting in whatever works to bring about the desired end at whatever the cost. They made a business of education and profited from it.

That's the standard line on the sophists, and it sets off my bullshit detector.  And not only mine -- some philosophers have suspected that the standard line is a caricature, rather like Aristophanes' depiction of Socrates himself as a sophist in The Clouds.  (Plato's dialogues were probably written partly as defenses and rehabilitations of Socrates, much as the gospels were written partly to defend Jesus against certain charges that had been leveled against him.)  And if Plato didn't believe every position he seemed to advocate in his dialogues, doesn't that mean he was not a "true believer"?  As for "pragmatists trusting in whatever works to bring about the desired end at whatever the cost", see Plato's doctrine of the "noble lie" in The Republic.

But even leaving the sophists out of it, modern philosophers disagree not merely on details but on basic aspects about the questions they study and debate.  Claiming that one approach or answer is motivated just to make money is intellectually lazy.  (Which is no doubt why such claims are so popular.)  To a great extent it's also irrelevant: if I say that 2 plus 2 equals 4 because someone paid me to, it has no bearing on the accuracy of the arithmetic.  (Nor, against another popular tactic, does it matter if I say 2 plus 2 equals 4 simply because I'm an asshole who likes to argue.  But then, being an asshole who likes to argue is virtually a necessary qualification to be a philosopher.)  So even if the sophists taught and argued in bad faith, the validity or invalidity of their arguments is a separate question; and the same applies to Socrates and Plato, that even if they were motivated by a pure disinterested love of wisdom, it wouldn't guarantee the validity of their arguments.  One of the first things you must learn in critical thinking is how to cut through the various kinds of obfuscation, deliberate or unintentional, in an argument to get at and analyze its actual core.

Still an Atheist, Thank God

I got e-mail the other day that sent me back to a conundrum I've been fretting about for decades. It might be summed up by something the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to his student Norman Malcolm:

... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. & if it does not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.

I've always been inspired by these words, but they also worry me. As I've mentioned before, happiness is hard to define, but I think I can safely say that by all accounts Wittgenstein wasn't a very happy person. This seems to have been more a matter of his temperament than of his lack of religious belief; suffering seems to have run in his family. Philosophy was an ongoing struggle for him, but it was still important to him to continue that struggle. It's also important to me to think about these things.

Thinking about them, though, doesn't lead anywhere, not to final answers, not to the certainty that so many people (including me, in some moods) crave. Which brings me to the e-mail I received. I'd mentioned that, on one hand, I think atheists should inform ourselves about the religions we criticize, but on the other, we don't really need to criticize them, informing ourselves is a lot of work, and not everybody wants to do that work. Certainly most believers don't bother to inform themselves even about their own religion. My correspondent wrote:

Frankly, I think Christians (and other theists, for that matter) do have an obligation to study other faiths. Not just because the NT has no monopoly on truth, but seeing the truths revealed in the NT from other standpoints (and therefore removed from Christianity's local and temporal peculiarities) can only be beneficial. Otherwise, what folks call Christianity is all-too often just a devotional cult. Not that there's anything wrong with devotional cults, mind you, Christianity just purports to be something different. For a religion based on a book, as you point out, its followers are often shockingly illiterate.

I agree that "the NT has no monopoly on truth," but I consider that too modest a concession: I don't think the NT even has a significant market share. (I react the same way when someone declares that Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on morality. It's meant to be a generous concession, but it still claims too much.) I don't find Christian believers' ignorance about their religion all that shocking, though. Between the writing of the New Testament in the vernacular and the Protestant insistence that the Bible should be available in the vernacular, there was a long period in the West when the Bible was available in Latin and believers were discouraged from reading it. And what is the "something different" that Christianity purports to be? The early Christians didn't study the New Testament, because it didn't exist for the first Christian century or so: Christianity was a devotional cult in those days, the glory days of Christian beginnings. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question, but it has little to do with the importance of learning and thinking. It was, however, a point of pride for the early churches that most of the early Christians were anything but philosophers or scholars. Robert Wilken described a mid-second century "pagan" caricature of Christians in The Myth of Christian Beginnings, and commented (176-7):

Most Christians probably fitted this caricature, and even more significantly, liked being unlettered. They even made a virtue of their lack of sophistication by quoting the New Testament. In answer to questions about the reasons behind Christian beliefs, some Christians replied, "Simply believe. Your faith will save you." Or "The wisdom of this world is foolishness." Proud of their isolation from the surrounding culture, many Christians thumbed their noses at the autocrats and intellectuals. Confident they had found a way of life better than their fellows, they were content to remain in their ghettos. Exploited and abused by the upper classes, these people now had their own franchise on truth and were not about to let it be taken over by others.

One reason atheists so often put their facts about religion wrong is that they were raised and trained in one religion or another. (I myself was not; I had no religious upbringing, though I wasn't raised to be an atheist either.) Such atheists therefore feel as qualified to talk about their former religion and what is wrong with it as anyone still in the circle, and in a sense they are: they are as little qualified to talk about Christianity, for example, as most Christians are, since most Christians are spectacularly ill-informed about their religion. Sometimes liberal Christians trot out the statistics about Biblical illiteracy in order to hit "fundamentalists" over the head with them, but the liberals are no more knowledgeable themselves. (Christians, including liberals, mostly honor "Let him who is without sin be first to cast a stone" and "Judge not, lest you be judged" in the breach rather than the observance.) I've seen claims that this ignorance about the bare facts of the Bible and Christianity is a new development caused by Teh Teevee and Teh Video Games, but I doubt it: surveys of Americans' biblical knowledge in the 1950s produced essentially the same results. (This article, by a conservative Christian theologian, discusses the problem pretty well.)

Worse (or better?) still, there isn't really any consensus about what, say, Christianity is, or what it teaches, or how Christians should conduct themselves. Those who do trouble to inform themselves will soon find this out. There is no true core of Christianity, nor of Judaism, or probably of any other religion. Nor is there a true core of atheism -- some of us militantly deny the existence of gods, others simply don't view theism as a live option and put the burden of argument on the theist. Moving beyond the nonexistence of gods to questions of knowledge and conduct, we disagree among ourselves as much as believers do. Atheism really has few if any consequences that follow from the rejection of theism; we can't even do the opposite of what believers do, since believers exhibit such a contradictory range of opinion and behavior.

But here's my question for today. How much do we need to know about religion or philosophy? As numerous writers have argued on the biblical literacy question, it's not certain what constitutes biblical literacy. It's probably good for Christians to know the names of the gospels, who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, what's in the Ten Commandments (presumably both versions), and so on, but is such rote knowledge enough? More complex questions raise more serious difficulties, because they don't have simple soundbyte answers: how does a Christian decide questions of right and wrong, for example, where the Bible is either equivocal or silent on an issue? (Or, for that matter, where the Bible is explicit on an issue?  Even there, believers differ.) And how do atheists decide right and wrong? Most atheists I've encountered tend to skate round this question. I'm not denying that atheists have moral values, of course, since I'm an atheist myself, but I don't find that atheists are more thoughtful about moral philosophy than theists. In either case there is a wide range of positions and views, with no resolution in sight.

When I studied the Bible a couple of decades ago, I found it very interesting -- not because it was written by God, but because it was written by human beings. It made much more sense to me when I read it as a human document like any other. But that is a reflection of my own interest in reading as a way of learning about what it means to be human. There are other ways, which are also important to me, but reading isn't important or useful to many people -- maybe most? I've read enough about education to reach the conclusion that it's not possible to prescribe for everyone what they should learn. When people ask me for suggestions, I have to spend a fair amount of time listening to them, so that I know what they know and what they want to learn, before I can make any suggestions. That would be a teacher's obligation in any subject.

On one hand there's too much information that has to be taken into account on just about any matter of importance, and any important question has too many ramifications to settle simply. On the other hand, people have to decide and act, even in the absence of certainty; and there's enough shared information between different traditions that if you don't get information and ideas from one tradition, you'll eventually get it from another. That's not to say that "all religions teach the same truth", because each religion is divided within and against itself; and because all religions also teach the same lies. Belonging to a religious tradition doesn't exempt you from the necessity of choosing among its claims and prescriptions, but neither does rejecting all religious traditions.