COGNITION AND DUALISM

Are Nato and I converging? Probably not, but I was interested to hear him mention that "it's true thoughts are immaterial." What? I thought Tom and Nato were both materialists, and that materialism rules out anything immaterial. The attempt to abolish metaphysics was part of what seemed so naive. If Nato is willing to believe in immaterial entities of some sort, the gulf between us may be narrower than I thought-- though the concession of "logical entities" falls short of the affirmation of a whole parallel universe of ideas and souls and God and right and wrong and beauty that I advocate.

We have arrived so far, I think, at the idea that ideas can be mapped on to, or written in, "reflected in," "instantiated in," etc., the physical world, whether this be in abacuses or computers or sound waves (bearing words) or books or blogs or vocal cords or nerves and neurons. I never the less insisted that none of these instantiations are ideas, anymore than a scientific tome exhaustively describing the microphysical properties of a Whopper is a Whopper. Nato asks:

It still means physical processes execute our thoughts. We don't experience our thoughts as physical processes, of course, but why would we think our thoughts would seem physically intantiated to us? One can define "thought" in an essentialist manner so as to rule out any 'reductionist' account, but what's the motivation?

One point to make is Nato's use of the word "seem" here, as opposed to the straightforward affirmative "physical processes execute our thoughts." What is the difference between seeming and being? What evidence do we have of things' being other than their seeming? I sense here a willingness, on Nato's part, to attribute reality to physical nature but not to mental experience, which is probably unwarranted.

But my main task is to give the "motivation" for defining "thought" in an "essentialist" manner. In the first place, it's a question of epistemology. Any belief I may form about thoughts as electrical signals in the brain must be a result of a tremendous chain of deduction and induction, starting with patterns in the sensory world, object constancy, the existence of other people, communication and language, the reliability of information from other people (and which ones), and so on; for beliefs I form from my own mental experience of ideas, the epistemological chain is much shorter, and therefore (it would seem) more manageable and reliable.

But more to the point, I take issue with Nato's claim that "physical processes execute our thoughts"-- and let us add "all our thoughts" which I presume Nato means, and which points to why this claim is problematic.

It's not that I necessarily disbelieve the claim. It is a plausible one, in my opinion. We may begin by looking at the example of less arcane instantiations of thoughts, e.g. writing. Writing is used, first of all, for communication between different people. But it might also be used by a single person, to help herself organize her thoughts, or remember something, to sustain a chain of reasoning longer than she is able to keep track of mentally, and so on. There are certain math problems which I can solve with a pencil and paper, but would not be able to solve merely in my head. Though calculation is an essentially mental process, it is useful to use implements external to the mind, and I thereby make my thinking more effective. There are many other examples where we use the instantiation of ideas in the physical world not to communicate but strictly as an aid to our own individual thinking. You may keep a journal, which you don't plan for anyone else to read. You may count on your fingers-- and at this point we are no longer using instruments external to the body, though certainly external to the mind. Another case is talking to yourself. There is a cultural prejudice among us that talking to yourself is a mark of insanity, but I think it may be quite reasonable. People think it's crazy because they believe talking is only useful to communicate ideas to others, and that if you talk to yourself it's as if you imagine someone else is there. But if you are struggling through a difficult concept, it is sometimes useful to say words aloud. It's as if they slip away too quickly if you just think them; say them aloud, and the physical shock to your ears gives them more of an impact. And if you're excited about an idea or a phrase, it's fun to say it. When I was thinking of the argument I am writing now, I was walking around the streets of DC, talking to myself-- that is, not vocalizing, but moving my lips. I do it a lot, actually. Such visible instantiations of ideas in the physical world are not necessary for all our thoughts; for some problems I need a pen and paper, but others I can solve just by thinking about them. However, it seems plausible that while the mind can sometimes do its thinking without the assistance of mumbling or finger-counting or scribbling on a notepad, it always requires some physical instantiation. Perhaps the mind can't think a thought without "jotting it down" in the neurons.

On the other hand, the opposite position (that some thoughts have no physical instantiation at all) seems plausible, too. Some of my thoughts cause movements in my body; others do not. Might it not be the same within the brain: some of the mind's thoughts trigger neural movements, others do not? And there is a weighty point in favor of this view, namely that physical instantiations of ideas are always, or at any rate usually, imperfect and inadequate in varying degrees. Picture your favorite scene in the whole world. Now try to put it into words and describe it for a friend. Will he or she be able to imagine it as vividly as you do? It depends, in part, on your powers of description, and on their powers of imagination: if you are a clumsy verbalist and they are a dolt, hardly any of the beauty will be conveyed, whereas if you are a brilliant poet, and they an ardent aesthete, you may inspire a sense of wonder a bit nearer to your own. But in any case they will certainly never be able to reconstruct, based on your words, the full experience of what the scene looked like and how it affected you. It seems that the same may apply to the brain. Just as we can never convert our thoughts perfectly or fully into words, or gestures, numbers, abacuses, paintings, etc., brittle and finite neural networks can perhaps never adequately instantiate in the physical world the infinitudes of man's imagination.

What does seem clear is that the statement that "all our thoughts are executed by physical processes" could never be proven. Part of the problem is that science is based on induction, and the information that emerges from induction is constrained in certain ways, namely that 1) it is at best probabilistic, and 2) it is dependent on the belief in an underlying order (which I denote "faith.") But a more serious problem is that any such proof would seem to involve 1) a comprehensive description of the movements of ideas in the mind, arrived at through introspection, and only then 2) a complete mapping of these movements of ideas onto the neural networks of the brain. But (1) is more than all the philosophers since the dawn of time have been able to accomplish!

So as to the link between thoughts and physical processes, we will have to remain agnostic, unless we adopt the materialist worldview on a dogmatic basis. But we can still study mind and thought directly, through thinking about thinking. It therefore seems worthwhile to be rigorous in defending the distinction between thoughts and ideas as we know them through mental experiences, and the physical instantiations of thoughts in the world, of whose extent of embodying our thoughts materially we cannot know.

SOCIAL MORALITY AND SUICIDE

Tom suggests that my recent claim that all morality is social is incompatible with Christianity:

Let's use as an example a homeless person, with no family, no friends, no job, no debtors, and in all regards of no significance to anybody. If this person commits suicide, it will go un-noticed, and will effect no one. Does that mean that suicide in this case is not immoral? Christianity teaches us that suicide is wrong in all cases, but Nathanael teaches us that morality is only relevant in a social environment.

Tom realizes that suicide, though the chief victim is oneself, does affect others, and so cannot be prohibited on the basis of "it's my own business." That's why he sets up his example so carefully, mentioning the lack of family, friends, job, etc.: the force of his point depends on the suicide "affecting no one." If I had to concede that a suicide might "affect no one," that for some individual there was no possibility of any present or future social interaction that might be disrupted by his suicide, it would be difficult to affirm both that all morality is social and that suicide is always wrong. But I don't think I will ever have to concede this. If the homeless man lives in a city, there are a huge array of possible social interactions which he might engage in, good and bad, from smiling at old ladies to knocking them over the head, from sitting on a street corners thinking up jokes to crack for the benefit of passersby, to cleaning the streets. And tomorrow his country may be overrun by enemy armies, and he may have an opportunity to join the resistance movement and be a hero.

THE QUEST FOR A CHRISTIAN RES PUBLICA

First, a word of thanks to Nato for this helpful correction:

First, I want to mention that I think Nathanael meant “Foundationalism” instead of “fundamentalism.”

Yes, the epistemological position I was describing is "foundationalism," not "fundamentalism"-- and I was just thinking how unfortunate it was that the term for the position that we "just know" certain things (which I subscribe to) was the same as what often describes the Biblical literalist attitude (which I do not subscribe to). What a relief!

On free will, I wanted to add that my position on free will-- "free will is real, we just know it"-- may seem to cut off debate, but actually, for better or worse, does nothing of the kind. To what extent, and how, can we control our thoughts and feelings? Is forgetting things voluntary or involuntary? Can we break a bad habit just by choosing to? Can we believe something by choosing to, e.g. that there is no free will? (Here my position is paradoxical: I don't think anyone can really succeed in believing this; I might put my view in a deliberately perverse way by saying that we have no free will over whether we believe in free will.) Freud (among others no doubt) exposed that "free association" (e.g. "Name the first thing that comes into your head when you see this picture") is an illusion, and I have seen these impressively illustrated by a hypnotist, who tore a piece of newspaper repeatedly in two, letting a volunteer pick which he would throw away, until there was only one word left. The volunteer read the word, and then he showed a card written beforehand: he knew what the word would be! He knew how to induce in a predictable way what appeared to be freely made choices. This doesn't refute the idea of free will (in morally significant cases) but it certainly problematizes it. "Introspection," as a source of knowledge, is not gratis: it demands care, rigor, and reasoning.

Also, about cognition, Nato claims:

When a computer moves electrons around to calculate 2+2=4, there’s no Platonic “two” or “four” made physical in the computer; all that has occurred is the modeling of logical relationships using physical processes. Nonetheless, the calculation got done, and the logic of 2+2=4 has been successfully reflected in the material world. When huge neural associations cooperatively reflect the same logic, the mind of which these calculations are a part has “thought” of this immaterial mathematical relationship.

I'd substitute the abacus as an example. By moving beads back and forth, an abacus can help a human being to perform calculations. A human looks at the beads on strings and forms a belief concerning numbers. In this sense, arithmetic logic has been reflected in the physical world, but it's easy to understand that the interaction of numerical ideas occurs only in the human's brain. There are no ideas in an abacus. A computer tends to create the illusion of being like a person because 1) we cannot normally observe the physical processes taking place, and 2) whereas patterns-of-beads-on-strings is a different symbolic language than what people use, computers use the same symbolic language people use, namely, shapes (12345) representing numbers. But conceptually, the computer is no different from the abacus: pixel patterns on a monitor contain no ideas, except in the sense that they were created by a person (who does contain ideas) to be read by other people (in whom ideas will be inspired). For that matter, the computer is (for our purposes) no different from the air which transmits sound waves from my mouth to your ear: the air assists physically in the transmission of an idea from me to you, but itself has no mind, no imagination, no reason, in short, none of the features associated with idea-content. We can carry this further. If the air does not contain an idea, do my tongue, my lips, my mouth, my saliva and vocal cords contain ideas when I speak? If not, if they only transmit an idea and do not contain it, do my nerves contain the idea? If not the nerves, what about the brain, the "neural associations?" Or are they, too, like the abacus?

Suppose you walk into Burger King one day and order a Whopper. The person behind the counter takes your money, and then slaps down on the counter a huge, dusty tome, thousands of pages thick.

"What's that?" you ask.

"It's an exhaustive scientific description of the complete contents of the Whopper. It describes the chemical composition of all the ingredients, the direction and velocity of motion of all the molecules in the Whopper, reflecting the different temperatures of different parts, the exact shape of a Whopper in geometrically precise terms down to the last nanometer, the microstructural features of the meat, bread, lettuce, and tomatoes..."

Nato's description of an idea reminds me of this imaginary transaction. Just as the scientific tome is not a Whopper, no matter what's going on in the brain, that is not an idea. Ideas are what you think, and you experience them by thinking them, and learn about them by thinking about them, and neural laboratories and brain-molecules, though possibly interesting in the same way computer science and abacus-study might be, cannot throw any light on what ideas are. None of this is mysterious unless you trip yourself up by insisting on viewing non-material things through a materialist lens. It's a bit like someone who goes to a symphony and insists on imagining that it's a baseball game, and asks "Did they score a home run?" when people applaud after the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth.

But now to the main point I wanted to address. In my first post on Enlightenment morality, I claimed that:

the theories of Kant, Bentham, Mill and other moral philosophers were articulated and disseminated in societies that remained, and which were able to hold together because they were, largely Christian. In the mid-19th century, Christianity was beginning to be eclipsed in the intellectual sphere, but at the level of the populace, the actual rules that motivated the decisions of the masses in their daily lives, Christianity still held sway. When Enlightenment morality began to reach the masses in the late 19th century, the flaws and incompleteness that an intelligent person can rapidly recognize in reading Bentham or Kant were translated into social catastrophes. In the Soviet state, meddling in every detail of life and liquidating all opposition for the sake of the communist utopia in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number would come to pass, we see Bentham's errors writ large. In the Nazi soldier, braving death and suppressing all kind feeling for the sake of Fatherland and Fuehrer, never mind the consequences, we see Kant's categorical imperative discredited through being realized.

to which Nato supplies this apt and welcome counter-point, which I would have supplied myself (or something like it) but for time constraints:

The most parsimonious return volley here is to ask how often actions taken in the name of and ostensibly directed by Christian teachings have turned out to be awful moral catastrophes. The Crusades are a much-ballyhooed member of that vast set (and frequently overstated), but I would also like to point out that people have attempted to justify monarchy, slavery, female thralldom, numerous wars, and even, yes, Naziism in Christian terms. At least frequently these involved distorted simplifications of Christian theology and biblical reasoning, but nonetheless, the people doing the arguing presumably considered themselves to be faithful to Christian truth.

I put my intended opposition to Nathanael’s conclusion more plainly: Soviet socialism is at best a misapplication of utilitarian principles and I reject the claim Immanuel Kant has more connection with Naziism than does Jesus Christ. Nathanael does, however, demonstrate how demagogues can repackage and repurpose originally subtle positions to serve their own ends.

Yes, but. First, the Soviet quest for proletarian general happiness, and the Nazi heroic will, were not just "awful moral catastrophes." They were comprehensive catastrophes-- moral, social, economic, demographic, military, geopolitical, you name it. The "awful moral catastrophes" that have occurred in the name of Christianity do little to undermine Christianity's peerless success as a credal foundation for society, in terms of the major criteria the worlds finds desirable. The saga of the effort to create a Christian res publica has lasted for 2,000 years, and has been a civilizing force of incredible potency.

The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity after (so legend says) he saw, before a battle, a Cross in the heavens, with the words, "In hoc signo vinces." "In this sign you shall conquer." He believed, won the battle, and converted, and converted the empire, to Christianity, but a century later Rome fell after generations of triumphs: the vindication of the words Constantine saw in the heavens was transient. Long afterwards, people debated why Rome fell, and some, such as Machiavelli and Gibbon, blamed Christianity, which raised a lot of hackles since Europeans were all Christians by then. Arnold Toynbee, an Anglo-Catholic historian, seems a bit defensive in his insistence that the roots of the fall of Rome went back to civilizational weaknesses starting long before the Christians took over.

Toynbee needn't have exercised himself so much for Christianity's sake, for by his day there was a raft of ultra-successful Christian states to offset the unimpressive fate of Christian Rome. In modern times, the great empires and nations-- Spain, France, Germany, Britain, Russia, and the United States-- have all been Christian in a sense stronger than merely that their populace is majority-Christian. At a critical formative stage in their history, each of these nations has had a "chosen people" complex, has taken shape in the ecstasy of imagining itself as the
emerging Christian res publica.

For the British, this came in the 1500s, the age of Elizabeth, amidst the enthusiasms of the Reformation and the pressure of defying "papism;" the idea took another form in the Puritan Revolution before dissipating in the later 17th century. Muscovite Russia suddenly began to conceive of itself as "the Third Rome," heir of holy Byzantium as universal Christian monarch, after the Turks took Byzantium in 1453, and this sense lingered for centuries as a "shadow ideology" for the empire. In Spain, religious fervor gradually intensified in the course of the Reconquista; they began to feel themselves the leaders of Christendom in the years after 1492, as the conquest of the New World provided the Spanish monarchs with vast new territories and resources, and the expulsion of the Moors from Granada gave them new security and wholeness at home, just when heresy had appeared in Germany in 1517 that had to be stamped out. France and Germany both inherited the legacy of Charlemagne's coronation as successor of Constantine in 800 (Charlemagne was "Frankish," i.e. sort of proto-French, but the "Holy Roman Empire" shifted to Germany). The French, leaders of crusades, most beloved allies of the papacy, paragons of chivalry, founders of the Gothic school of paintings, source of many monastic movements, formed as a nation in the High Middle Ages; for the Germans, in the time of Martin Luther, when they rose in defiance against the papal anti-Christ in favor of a new Jerusalem.

It is in its moment of maximum religious enthusiasm that each of these nations (except maybe Germany) took shape as nations (i.e. as "imagined communities.") Before the late 15th century, there was no Spain but rather "Spains," Aragon and Castile; France was consolidated in the medieval Albigensian Crusade; in Russia, Moscow was only first among many cities under the Tartar yoke until Ivan the Great and his "Third Rome" ideology; England tended to be one of several holdings of (French-speaking) Angevin kings until the Reformation and the Tudors forged England as a single cohesive realm. The experience of trying to "build Jerusalem" was usually not remembered very well as such, but the national solidarity that emerged from it lingered aftewards. For each nation (except maybe Spain), there is a gap between the climax of the "chosen people" complex and the peak of national power. The British thought they were the chosen people in the 1500s but reached the peak of their power in the 1800s. The Russians imagined themselves "Third Rome" in the late 1400s, and the Schism and Westernization had largely obviated that idea by the time Russia reached the peak of its power in the late 18th century (or, of course, the mid-20th century). The French piety of the High Middle Ages had been compromised by cynical realpolitik alliances with Turks and Protestants by the time France became, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe's leading great power. And by the time Germany was in a position to bid for first economic, then military, hegemony over Europe, vestigial Protestantism was valued in Weberian terms for its effect on work ethic, but no one was trying to build Jerusalem.

The pattern here may be stated: governmental efforts to build a Christian res publica do not succeed but succumb to doubt and disillusionment, but in the process they create nations with the solidarity and dynamism to achieve tremendous power and empire, as no other historical process does.

But of course they fail to establish the Christian res publica a certain kind of critic might answer because states are based on coercion, which Christ disavows. Christianity calls for a very different kind of res publica, not based on coercion, not a state, but based on free will and love.

Good point, and people have thought of it before, not only thought of it, but acted on it. Monasticism became a mass movement in the time after Constantine, in part because many were disillusioned with the way "the world" embodied Christianity, and sought a purer Christianity by fleeing from it. Among the resulting communities was that of St. Benedict, which formed the model for hundreds of "Benedictine" monasteries that spread across Europe. They preserved the classics, scribbling away documents that otherwise would have been lost to history. They preserved literacy at a time when it was really jeopardized. By the 9th century, the Benedictines were almost the only learned men left. They invented the "Carolingian miniscule," which we all use now. They became advisors to kings and emperors, court scholars. Many of the popes came from the Benedictines. They helped keep the structure of the church intact. They achieved much, but their "flight from the world" proved strangely abortive. The Cistercians were an even starker case. The Benedictines had grown wealthy by the 12th century, and men like St. Bernard were disillusioned, and set off for true wildernesses to live simply. As it turned out, this was an excellent method for breaking new grounds. The Cistercians also proved successful agricultural innovators. They fueled a demographic expansion, led a movement of internal colonization, but grew very wealthy, undermining their initial purpose. They fled from the world, but the world followed. In Russia, too, monasticism preserved culture and learning through an age of barbarian conquest, and proved the spearhead for internal colonization, rather more impressively in fact, for the monks played a big role in colonizing Siberia and making Russia the world's largest country today.

Monastic and community attempts to create the Christian res publica have, in short, been extremely successful in extending civilization, but not much in freeing people from the world's cares and corruption.

America is the climax of both trends: we are at once the last and most remote refuge for Christian communitarians seeking to flee the world; and we are the last and greatest of Christian empires forged in the experience of a "chosen people" complex. The Puritans, the Quakers, the Amish, the Mormons, have all played key roles in colonizing new geographic regions; by contrast, commercial attempts to open up such regions have tended to either fail or have much more partial success. Jamestown and Boston tell the story in miniature; Jamestown, founded for profit, is now an archeological site; Boston, founded for faith, is a huge metropolis and a state capital. Later this effort to build the Christian res publica by withdrawal took a political form. The Founders were admittedly not very Christian, but the populace certainly was, and the Revolution came in the wake of the First Great Awakening. As with the others, Christians who fled the world prospered but ended up drawing the world with them; and the political Christian res publica became ultra-powerful but in the process lost much of its Christian character.

A third kind of Christian res publica deserves mention: the Church. As a transformative agent for social morality over the centuries, the Church has been highly successful, with corruption surveys today (Christian countries tend to be less corrupt) serving as only one bit of evidence.

Does the huge success of Christianity as a credal foundation for society, in contrast with Enlightenment morality which leads to comprehensive catastrophe, show that Christianity is true? No, and moreover if all this is a compliment to Christianity, it is an extremely back-handed one. For while these Christian res publicae have achieved tremendous success in the world's terms, whether they have achieved anything in Christianity's own terms is not at all clear. The world values wealth, and Christian societies have proved massively successful in generating it, but Jesus condemned the rich and told his disciples to lay up treasures only in heaven. The world values military power, and Christian societies continue to surpass non-Christian societies militarily by a huge margin, yet Christ said "do not resist the wicked man" and "turn the other cheek." The world values great intellectual achievements and knowledge, and Christian societies surpass all others in scientific achievement, art, philosophy, historical discovery, etc., but Christ said "I thank you, Lord, that you have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes." The world values outward morality, and Christian societies have proved the best at controling corruption and crime and instilling sexual restraint, yet Christ emphasized an inward morality of intention and good will. So what we are left with is an almost unbearable irony. As a Christian, I'm not sure whether to be pleased with this or not.

FREE WILL AND CHOICE

What prompt interlocutors I have! Tom objects to my refutation of (what I took to be) his utilitarianism by pointing out that

He attacks my *individual* morality by adding other agents to the equation, when the absence of other agents was clearly stipulated in my post. Does Nathanael perhaps think that morality has no meaning except in a social environment?

Okay, I missed that. Yes, I think morality, and even humanity, has no meaning except in a social environment. Not that other people are physically present at a given time, but that one's life is shaped by relationships with other people (or possibly, in their absence, with God alone, but I'm not sure about that.) That makes Tom's line of argument more interesting.

In response to Nato, I guess to some extent I was trying to "bracket the question of cognition," though, to me, the questions of cognition and morality overlap quite a bit. But I would not dismiss cognitive neuroscience in toto on the suspicion of faulty epistemology, on the contrary I might learn much from it, even possibly something about morality, though probably things either marginal, or which simply deepen or expand what I already believe rather than introducing anything new. Reasoning introduced from other disciplines (economics, for example, which I know much better) can yield some insights about ethics, but tends to be extremely and absurdly naive in certain particular ways, and is a poor substitute, as best I can judge, for moral reasoning per se.

On free will, Nato is right that he and I differ on definitions. It is true, of course, that if I ask "did so-and-so do such-and-such of his own free will," I am talking about coercion and not about philosophical determinism, (though in other cases, e.g. "did he cry out of his own free will [or was it a reflex?]", they are asking whether this was by volition or not.) I would submit that this is merely the usual artful imprecision of language, and also that the reason for this usage is that everyone assumes that we have free will by nature, that this belief is "built-in." The first reaction to the assertion that our choices are determined by molecular interactions is a shocked and defiant "But in that case nobody is responsible for anything!" Whether this reaction, or the "compatibilist" complacency that may later be induced by certain philosophies, is more proper, I don't know and don't care all that much, since I believe in real, or let us say non-deterministic, free will. Moreover, I think that's what people who earnestly embark on the question of free will typically have in mind, too.

Not that free will means "uncaused cause." I can have plenty of causes. To continue the pattern of gratuitously violent examples, suppose I punch a man in the nose, am hauled in to the police station, and asked "Why did you do that?" I am not at a loss to answer. I might say:

"Because he implied that my wife is a slut!"
"Because sometimes that cocky grin on his face just drives me crazy!"
"Because he acts all tough, but really he's a wimp!"
"Because sometimes you just have to draw the line!"

Can all of these be true? Yes! Each is a "cause" of my action, and there are a million other causes, too. There are even material "causes," too, e.g.:

"Because my fingers clenched into a fist, and accelerated in the direction of his lousy good-for-nothing face, leading up to a collision in the exact center of his noses, causing structural strain on the cartilage which resulted in a great effusion of blood."
"Because I was in his vicinity, and have a good deal of muscular strength in my right arm."

or even:

"Because I was drunk."

The material causes would not impress the police much, because they know their question had nothing to with material causes, but rather with causes relating to volition. That aside, though, the material causes are "causes" in the same sense that the mental causes are. Free will does not imply the absence of causation by any means; and yet, even in the presence of all these causes, I could have refrained from punching him in the nose. That is choice.

This is becoming a marathon debate! Must work now, but that's all I planned to say on the philosophical side. I have some remarks left, however, on the history side, which is more my area of expertise.

MORE ON MORALITY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Well, I'm sorry to have dismayed Nato and Tom on the issue of materialism and moral philosophy. I mentioned a feeling of "poor sportsmanship" in my last entry about this, and afterwards I realized another reason why: to say that morality is impossible to justify in materialist terms sounds ad hominem, as if I'm saying "if you don't believe in God, you have no morals." Let me be clear that I am not saying that. In my experience, atheist and materialist individuals (societies are a completely different story) I have known have certainly been moral and ethical, no less so, as far as I can tell, than Christians. In one respect, perhaps, atheists in a Christian society are likely to be more ethical than Christians, because many people are raised as Christians, and to doubt and deny the faith of their upbringing involves a certain courage and commitment to truth. If materialism does not provide any real basis for morality, as I am claiming, why do atheists and materialists, in practice, behave ethically. I think there are two reasons. First, a sense of right and wrong, conscience and guilt and so on, are innate in human beings, and while theories and ideas and traditions can certainly strengthen, weaken, or channel these, the basic moral impulses are resilient and ineradicable. Second, most people are guided less by moral ideas than by the praise and blame of those around them.

Next I have to slap Tom on the wrist for making what appears to be a repetition of one of the most naive mistakes in all moral philosophy (also made by Bentham):

Since there is no dogma but empiricism and reason dictating the best way to fulfill self-interests, she merely must learn from her experiences and failures and improve her behaviour to lead a good, moral life. The ultimate end of this moral system is the psychological and physical welfare of the individual.

Morality, by this account, is enlightened pursuit of one's own "psychological and physical welfare." Let's take an example. Suppose you and I, perfect strangers far from home, pass each other on a road, with no one else in sight. Each of us has a fair amount of money, but I have a gun, and you do not. Should I hold the gun to your head and take your money? "Thou shalt not steal," thunders the Old Testament, and has its counterparts in other traditions, but Tom suggests that we should instead simply contemplate what best enhances our own "psychological and physical welfare." In terms of physical welfare, I benefit from the money, but run a risk, in this case small, of getting caught by the law (which in corrupt countries may in any case only oblige me to pay a bribe.) How I weigh this will depend on my information about the efficiency of the law, and on my degree of risk-aversion. Next, psychological welfare. Even if I can get away with it, would the scene, or the fear of capture, haunt me afterwards, offsetting the monetary benefit? On the other hand, it might be fun to rob someone-- a thrill, a sense of empowerment. Or I might learn something-- understanding what it's like to be a robber. If I'm feeling lazy, or benevolent, I'll let you pass. If I don't like your face, and I'm in the mood for an adventure, in short if I think it would enhance my psychological and physical welfare, I'll rob you. To be precise, robbing you is the moral thing to do, by Tom's theory. The same applies to corruption, or rape, or genocide, or whatever: if it feels good, do it! Tom seems to be doing his best to prove my point about morality being impossible for a materialist. Morality's first task is to get people to sacrifice, sometimes, their own psychological and/or physical welfare for its sake. This is not the whole of morality, just the simplest, most elementary first step-- only the first, mind you, there is a long road ahead after that. To pursue only one's own "psychological and physical welfare" would serve as an excellent definition of amorality.

Next, I want to admit that, as Nato guessed, I have "not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good." And I was no doubt too bold in stating categorically that modern ethical philosophers "have been refuted." Frankly, I suspect I could "refute" the recent philosophical efforts if I read them (at least inasmuch as they offer a materialist basis for morality) but I haven't, and I probably won't, which perhaps puts me in an awkward position here, so how can I justify myself?

I've heard about a school of computational Biblical interpretation, people who run extremely complex computational operations on Biblical texts, as if they were code, and generate findings that some have found surprisingly cogent. I am imagining that I attended a party full of such people, excited about the latest prediction of the 2004 election based on computational Biblical analysis. Not having read the works they found persuasive, how would I be able to justify my skepticism to them? Well, maybe I'd just lay low, and maybe that's what I should do here, but if I chose to argue, I think I would have to explain why the whole line of work seemed to me unfruitful because it was built on faulty premises: in the case of computational Biblical interpretation, because it would seem somehow unworthy of God to have packed His holy book with bizarre codes.

In the case of Nato's reading list, I suspect they are imbued with a faulty, but at present widespread, epistemology. Let's revisit a basic question: What can we know? The skeptic follows Descartes' example of doubting everything, denies that we can put knowledge back together, and answers "nothing." If we defy him, he counters with an infinite regression: "how do you know x?" and then, in response to "because y," he says, "but how do you know y?" There are two ways to escape this infinite regression: 1) we can say at some point, "we know that a priori" or "we know that by introspection," or something of that kind, or 2) we can bring the chain of reasoning back around to some place where we've already been. These two methods of answering the skeptic define two schools of epistemology, "fundamentalism" and "coherentism." The problem for fundamentalists is to argue how we can "just know" something; for coherentists, it's to deal with the charge that their whole system is a "circular argument."

Nobody wants to be a skeptic, and the charge against coherentism is decisive, so I (with most philosophers these days, I'm told) take the "fundamentalist" line, and am willing to accept that there are a number of things it is fundamentally absurd or impossible to doubt. The most self-evident truth is my own mental experience, which consists of thinking and making choices, along with some basic logical truths; next is the existence of the physical world, and its laws; and gradually I try to build the edifice from there. To me, choice is as fundamental as it gets. I have my own private proof of the existence of the physical world, too, though some might not be satisfied with it. But that is all somewhat secondary: introspective knowledge is the starting-point.

Science is so prestigious nowadays that it tends to inspire a certain selective application of Cartesian doubt. People apply skeptical techniques and infinite regresses to morality, intuition, etc. quite freely, arriving at a fairly complete skepticism or relativism, while taking science as "proven"-- and in particular, accepting (consciously or by osmosis) the idea that everything, categorically, must be governed by certain fixed natural laws. If this is your epistemic position, it seems worthwhile to try to study the mind in a materialistic way, and import the certitude of the physical sciences into the field of phenomenology of the mind, about which our information is poorer. But since I find the epistemology underlying these efforts flawed, I don't expect that I'd learn much by reading this literature, except to see a lot of interesting examples of how initial flaws "flow downstream" in the course of an argument.

This brings us to choice. Nato asserts that:

freewill is properly the opposite of coercion and determinism is the opposite of indeterminism.

No, no, no! This is like saying that what matters in the game of baseball is not scoring the most runs, but having enough mitts and bases. If I am "coerced" to shoot myself, that might mean, 1) you fold your fingers around mine and push them to pull the trigger, or 2) you threaten me with much worse tortures, and persuade me to go the easy way. In the first case, coercion has overcome free will, but it's hard to say then whether I shot myself at all: a better description might be "you shot me, using my own fingers." In the second case, coercion certainly narrowed my options, but I still had free will. Even in the first case I still had free will: my thoughts, my decision to push back, and so on, were still under my control. Free will still exists in a case of coercion, just as it is possible to play baseball without mitts and bases, though each circumstances makes judging the outcome harder. But just as you can never win a baseball game except by scoring the most runs, no matter how many mitts and bases there are, you don't have free will if deterministic molecular interactions predetermine your every move, no matter how absent coercive circumstances are.

I have more to say to reply to Nato: stay posted!

OF MORALITY: CHRISTIANITY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Nato takes up my challenge to offer an account of "state-of-the-art ethics" compared to which "Christianity is passe." Well, sort of. He writes:

Meanwhile, modern ethical philosophers have some excellent offerings on how to get from raw self-interest all the way to pursuing common goods at (at least superficially) personal disadvantage. Baier, Moore and Hare are examples of this from different schools, but of course there are a great many more. None of them are really complete and flawless by any means, but...

Of course, he goes on after the "but," and it's a bit unfair to cut him off there. A lot of modern philosophers "offer theoretical backing to the moral practice that Nathanael grants has been improving" in some sense, but those theories are incomplete and flawed. To be more precise, their arguments have been refuted, by Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell, for example. It's not in the interests of professional philosophers to admit this, and moreover, professional philosophers may be a self-selecting group, since, for example, those who see immediately that Kant's arguments fail are unlikely to become Kant scholars. The general public, however, might be said to demonstrate its unpersuaded-ness by having lost interest in moral philosophy, though not in religion.

Nato states that:

Now, some Christian theologians drop a lot of the details and synopsize Christ’s innovation as the elevation of love over mechanistic, heartless law. Some of the more liberal brand even manage to do this without distorting the definition of the word “love” into something I don’t want in the process. The problem I find with this is that all of these theologians are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment.

I would make the reverse point: the problem with Enlightenment moral philosophy is that it is dependent upon Christianity, in two ways.

First, most of what is best in it draws on Christian themes. Nato identifies Kant and Bentham as initiating the two chief traditions in modern moral philosophy. Bentham exhorts us to seek "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," a translation of Christian charity. Kant, who claims that we should treat people as ends not means, is translating the Golden Rule. Neither Kant nor Bentham have good arguments for their respective theses, and were persuasive mainly because Christian Europe was already conditioned to believe things quite similar to these.

Second, and more profoundly, the theories of Kant, Bentham, Mill and other moral philosophers were articulated and disseminated in societies that remained, and which were able to hold together because they were, largely Christian. In the mid-19th century, Christianity was beginning to be eclipsed in the intellectual sphere, but at the level of the populace, the actual rules that motivated the decisions of the masses in their daily lives, Christianity still held sway. When Enlightenment morality began to reach the masses in the late 19th century, the flaws and incompleteness that an intelligent person can rapidly recognize in reading Bentham or Kant were translated into social catastrophes. In the Soviet state, meddling in every detail of life and liquidating all opposition for the sake of the communist utopia in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number would come to pass, we see Bentham's errors writ large. In the Nazi soldier, braving death and suppressing all kind feeling for the sake of Fatherland and Fuehrer, never mind the consequences, we see Kant's categorical imperative discredited through being realized.

The irony is that Enlightenment moral philosophy has, by most accounts, been realized most fully in the United States. Whether you like "natural rights" or "perpetual peace," "treating people as ends not means" or "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," your model will probably be that of the US, with its prosperous and free democratic capitalism (or maybe of Europe as rebuilt by the US after WWII.) And yet it is in the US that the Enlightenment has never broken the hold of the Christian faith on most of the populace, and it is precisely because America's continuing Christianity has spared Enlightenment morality from generalized societal realization that America has remained safe for those ideas. Enlightenment morality is like a vine growing upon the tree of Christian faith: it can begin only by wrapping around the tree; it relies on the tree but may weaken it; and if it strangles the tree, it is soon itself destroyed by the trees collapse. This does not bode well, by the way, for post-Christian Europe's hoped-for emergence from its present economic and cultural stagnation under the grip of a bureaucratic technocracy with centralizing aspirations.

Nonetheless, Nato offers valid resistance to viewing Christ as an unsurpassed source of morality.

1) First, he emphasizes that he "views all words through the lens of assumption that the inspiration of their human authors came from non-supernatural sources." Well, fair enough. As a believer in a supernatural soul, I think the opposite-- that all words come from supernatural sources, since inasmuch as we think and imagine and reason we are supernatural beings-- but I do reject the assumption of "plenary inspiration." It does not follow, though, that we should not "tease the sublime from a few sentences based on the idea that the person speaking has an extraordinary conduit to transcendent truth." I look for the sublime, for transcendent truth, wherever I can find it, and if I am much more inclined to tease out higher meanings from Christ's words than from those of others, it is because experience is shown that they have a way of perennially yielding new meanings.

2) Nato is smart enough to point out Christ's most embarassing teaching: "the world was going to end pretty soon, as Christ seemed to be saying in Mark 13:30-33 (as well as in other places)... it didn’t work out that way..."

3) Nato points out that since Jesus's teachings derive their authority from presumed divine will, they have no force for atheists:

If we endeavor to love consistently and thoughtfully, so that we do not reduce our love to a thin facsimile of itself, we indeed lead to many excellent insights. However, Christ offers little justification to the materialist for his directives. “Why?” we ask, and we receive back an answer that references God’s will - not a convincing tactic for those who fail to believe in God in the first place.

I accept Christ's teachings not on dogmatic grounds but because all my speculations, reflections and experience seem to come back to them, vindicate them again and again, each time revealing new depths of meaning, in a manner paralleled by no other words I have ever encountered. In that sense, I don't need the reference to God's will in order to believe them. But it's still hard to know how to justify them to a materialist. It's hard to justify any morality in a materialist framework. In fact, I'm inclined to say it's impossible, which is what a lot of people have assuemd, and what is argued perennially in the pages of magazines like First Things-- and yet it seems like poor sportsmanship, somehow, to say that. That debate reminds me somehow of a parent is playing chess with a child, and no matter how many times the child is beaten he keeps saying bravely, "I challenge you to another match!" but the parent meanly refuses ever to let the child win.

And yet, it just seems obvious a priori that there can be no morality for a materialist. Morality implies free will and choice, but for materialists those are illusions, we are all just particles bouncing around. If I stab someone with a knife, I am held guilty, and the knife is not, because the knife is just a material object with no volition of its own. But for the materialist, I too am just a material object with no volition of my own. Can I be guilty? Morality implies right and wrong, good and evil. But how can those metaphysical entities exist in a strictly material world? What could they mean? Not that these questions-- free will and choice, or good and evil-- are easy to answer in the framework of other metaphysical positions (e.g. body/spirit dualism) either; they are still quite difficult. But a materialist cuts himself off from all possible avenues of answering them from square one.

C. S. Lewis dismissed materialism as "a philosophy for boys." He was too optimistic: in the 20th century, materialism was held true by many very erudite men. And yet to me materialism flies in the face of the most basic experiences. I have thoughts. I do not see any thoughts in the world around me. Thoughts are within me, and do not have the characteristics of material objects, such as size or shape. They have a certain connection to material objects, as we say "I'm thinking of a mountain." It's almost as if the mountain was in our heads, and we might even say that "I have the most beautiful scene in my head." But of course, the mountain isn't physically in our heads: it wouldn't fit. Another example: I can conceive of abstract things, such as 2+2=4, which, though they may be instantiated in the physical world, cannot exist in the physical world per se. Yet I can most certainly think them. Then there's free will. If I am told that free will is an illusion I lose any reason to believe anything, for choice is the most fundamental of all experiences, and if my information about choice cannot be trusted then nothing can be. Certainly not the senses, which I know for a fact can be deceived. But materialism implies naturalistic determinism and leaves no room for free will (except maybe some obscure sophistries rooted in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).

This whole complex of thoughts, abstract ideas, right and wrong and free will, materialists must somehow explain with reference only to electrical signals bouncing around among neurons. Have they accomplished this? Of course not, not even close. To the question, "If the world is strictly material, then how do we think, and how are our thoughts linked to things in the physical world that we're thinking of, and how can we think abstract thoughts that are not equivalent to anything in real life, and how can ideas be communicated, such that the 'same idea' can exist in two different heads, and if we can make choices, as we seem to be able to do, how can we do that?" the answer is "Somehow." (Perhaps more fancily worded.) Materialism demands a colossal leap of blind faith.

So why are so many modern philosophers materialists? The reason, I think, is simply that science has been more prestigious than philosophy for some time now, so philosophers have decided to defer. Scientists, for their part, are like Muslims in the late Middle Ages: once committed to a certain creed but with a taste for speculation and philosophy, they have turned into fundamentalists. Faith, the unreasoned prejudice that there is some order in the universe, takes a particular form in scientists: they insist that everything can be explained by natural laws, the sort of statement that can never be proven, as Hume understood, but never disproven either, as Karl Popper understood, because anything unexplained will only suggest that there are more laws to be discovered. Scientific materialism has had colossal successes based on this method, but none where man's thoughts and relationships are concerned (e.g. ethics), because this is the domain of the spirit.

THE CRISIS OF JOURNALISM

I've been wanting to write something like this for a while now. But I couldn't do it as well. This is an amazingly cogent summary of the mainstream media's peculiar ideology:

This collective view emerged as a rather well-intentioned product of an age of wild hope, ill-informed academic speculation, and youthful optimism about the world. Nurtured in the great European and American universities, it was statist, existentialist, anti-religious, suspicious of any science that did not support its views, snobbish, pacifist, anti-technological, hedonistic in practice, puritan in theory, postmodernist in its tastes, committed to a social rather than an individual morality, hostile to the virtue tradition, sentimentally Romanticist in its attitude to Nature (which, in an unconsciously Creationist turn, did not include human beings), relativist about cultural differences, legalistic, optimistic about human nature, and deeply hostile to the marketplace. In one sense it was a nostalgia for the aristocratic European world of our collective rose-tinted memory, when the virtues of artists and intellectuals and university-educated people were recognized automatically, and merchants and financiers were "rightly" despised. In another sense it was a yearning for the dear lost days of revolutionary fervor, moral certainty, "free" sex and callow cynicism about tradition and respectability. It was escapist in its worship of Otherness -- cultural, social, political, economic, ideological, sexual, biological -- and conformist in its anxious attention to the next move of its "coolest" current leadership.

In the past couple of years, this peculiar ideology has become more corruptly self-conscious to the point where:

Editorializing crept into the news pages and then right out onto the front page above the fold. The editorializing, with its suppressions, its half-truths, its word-choices, and so on, carried an odd double-entendre -- for the cognoscenti, an implicit acknowledgement that this was useful strategic rhetoric to be used for the campaign, and for the rubes, all the solemn garb of scientific or historical or judicial gravity. Talk radio is hilariously explicit about its leanings and its spin, and is honest at least in that. Internet bloggers assume that they cannot fool their readers into thinking that their propositions come from the oracular lips of Truth. They are thus more trustworthy, oddly enough, than the Gray Ladies of the traditional journalism.

This is exactly what has driven me to the blogs in the past couple of years. The condescension of the New York Times just gets too hard to take. It's a little bit like when Martin Luther went to Rome and saw the corruption of the priests there and was shocked into launching the Reformation. You get to the point where you can practically watch the NYT tricking you and deceiving you in front of your eyes, but that's not even the real problem: the problem is that they act as if you had a duty to just sit there passively and let them do it. Fox News is my favorite news channel because they have a slant, they know what it is, you know what it is. You don't have to be convinced. I don't always agree with them. I would watch al-Jazeera, or a socialist news channel, almost as readily as Fox News. The NYT has its usefulness, I should say, in reporting facts, and I love Tom Friedman, and Paul Krugman is even worth taking to the cleaners now and then. But the pretense of objectivity is like having a bag over your head; it's hard to breathe, and sometimes you want to scream.

What's better still, though, is that Turner explains why this is, or at least, might be, a good thing:

As such institutions as coffee-houses, town meetings, old fashioned barber shops, primary caucuses, soap box gatherings, debates, and suchlike fell into disuse, and the networks and newspapers took over, the Public itself began to disappear, to be replaced by a segmented demographic mass swayed by centralized journalistic voices and shaped by polls. What is now happening is that rather swiftly a new Public is forming, self-organizing around Google and link lists and blog chatrooms. And it will demand a new Res Publica.

The article I planned to write would be a bit different. I wanted to present a model of how an information and news economy could operate without the big media organizations. Title: "The De-Professionalization of Journalism." Maybe I'll get around to it.

THE BUSH ECONOMY

It is often cried out that the Bush administration favors the wealthy, increases inequality, or even incites class warfare, but this is rarely backed up by statistics. In an econ course I took in college on poverty, inequality and welfare, we saw tables showing that inequality increased steadily from 1968 until the late 1990s, but that this reversed around 1999 and inequality started to tick downward. Did this trend reverse in the last couple of years? I wondered. Well, finally someone presents an argument with statistics. It seems that the recession hit the rich hardest. My guess why: the high-tech and knowledge sectors suffered, while the weak dollar helped the manufacturing sector. Of course, we all hear about how the manufacturing sector is suffering, but it was suffering under Clinton, too. David Friedman wrote in August 2001 that:

Today, while experts debate whether the U.S. economy is nearing recession, the nation's manufacturers are in full-blown depression. In the last year, 837,000 production jobs were lost, and more than 1 million since 1999. Yet, beguiled by a still-expanding service sector, few economists seem deeply concerned by the nation's production tailspin.

Moreover, the rich now shoulder a larger share of the tax burden than they would have without the Bush tax cut.

Gregg Easterbrook shows that any rise in inequality in recent years owes mostly to immigration:

There is no question that statistics show a rise in inequality. The main reason: America welcomes more immigrants - legal and illegal - than all the other countries of the world combined. These newcomers typically start on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Exclude them from the statistics, calculates Easterbrook, and the increase in inequality disappears. Indeed, for the nine out of ten Americans that are native born, inequality is declining. And here is the reason that will surprise America's critics: the decline in inequality is due in good part to the rising affluence of African Americans.

(I couldn't find the original source for this and had to lift it from a Glenn Reynolds column...)

The Heritage Foundation sums up recent economic performance this way:

In sum, economic pessimists are likely to point to the GDP growth rate of a mere 3 percent as proof that the economy can do better. John Kerry may be dead right that the economy can do better, but an honest assessment has also to admit that the economy is doing very well to start with.

I pretty much agree with this. We must always remember that these are growth rates. None of the gains from the Clinton era have been lost. On the contrary, there have been further gains. We're just not increasing our wealth as rapidly as we were in the late 1990s. (Just almost as fast.) So we complain. There's a word for that, folks. We're spoiled.

More troubling, though, is unemployment. The Bush years have seen, if anything, a retreat from the free-market model, relative to the Clinton years (and if anything Kerry or Edwards says is to be believed, their administration would represent a further retreat.) One lesson of the 1990s may be that restraining the growth of government and giving the market free rein is a pretty good way of generating economic growth, but a really good way to create jobs. Bush is pro-business rather than pro-free market. What does business want? Here's my suspicion: business wants the economy just a little below full employment, because that makes workers fear losing their jobs more, so they're more productive-- and productivity has indeed been zooming upwards. I'm not saying, let me be clear, that Bush is deliberately engineering unemployment for the sake of his business allies, but rather that the broad engagement of the administration with the interests of business may make its policies more sensitive to businessmen's emphasis on production and efficiency, and less to economists' theories of free markets and full employment.

Now here's an interesting question. Suppose the economy will grow faster in the medium run if unemployment stays at 5-6% rather than falling to 4%. But some people will have real trouble finding a job. Which is better? The argument for the latter is that full employment is in some sense part of America's social contract. If a poor person asks you why you are entitled to keep your wealth, you answer "I earned it, and you could earn it too: get a job!" But if there aren't enough jobs available, this is undermined. The specter of unemployment spurs workers to work harder and be more productive, but to make it credible we have to sacrifice a few people to unemployment.

This dilemma (if I'm right about any of this) could form a very interesting framework for two-party competition. Republicans could be the pro-business party, willing to tolerate somewhat higher unemployment; Democrats could be the Clintonomics party, embracing free markets and full employment, but sometimes walking into financial bubbles and productivity slippage. Unfortunately, the Democrats are not playing that role. Instead, they are promoting the policies that lead to stagflation.

STATE-OF-THE-ART ETHICS

Nato withdraws his attack on tradition--

In the end, though, I’m forced to moderate a bit - it may not be obvious that appeals to tradition cut no ice. If the ice is very thin and there’s no reason available to apply, then one can, I suppose, appeal to it directly. Further, tradition has within it all sorts or reason that is not necessarily visible to the naked eye, so one should seriously address oneself to understanding how it functions and why. It is valid to demand justification someone who opposes tradition.

but also makes the following interesting remark:

The Christian Bible has its wise and less-wise portions (and its wise and less-wise followers) and is incontrovertibly a prominent distillation of a millennium and more of Mesopotamian thought, but of course it’s not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days.

I wonder what Nato thinks is "state-of-the-art ethical reasoning?" "State-of-the-art" suggests an analogy being progress in moral and scientific theory, yet it seems to me that the stunning failure of such an analogy is one of the major themes of modern history. In 1945, one might have lamented, "We continue to accomplish new and more amazing technological wonders, but we go on fighting and oppressing and killing one another, and technology only enables us to perpetrate our crimes more effciently, and on a more terrible scale! Technological progress is coupled with horrifying moral regression!" Nowadays I think a pretty strong case could be made that we have made significantly improvements in moral practice, and certainly great advances in moral practice have occurred since the Bible was written. But I am at a loss to imagine what the advances in moral theory have been over the sublime principles spoken by Jesus Christ. There is a tremendous amount of moral progress within the Bible, from a harsh and capricious God of the Old Testament who orders Abraham to kill his son (he withdraws the order at the last minute but wanted to be sure that Abraham intended to obey) and who seems chronically genocidal, to the lawgiving, nation-building God of Israel, to the loving God who takes flesh and suffers alongside his creatures in order to lift the world up from the abyss of sin and death into which human pride had driven us. But what in moral philosophy over the past 2000 years has surpassed the words of Jesus Christ? Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell both see post-Enlightenment moral philosophy as finding its logical culmination in Nietzsche, whose mercilessly "heroic" doctrines underlay Nazism. I know some people look for moral systems in Rawls, Kant, Nozick, or even Marx, but does anyone really have the bravado nowadays to see these as "state-of-the-art," and Christianity as somehow passe? To hear someone (Nato, if he has time) defend this point of view would be very interesting.

IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION

Nato makes such an alarming statement on his blog that I had to respond.

Appeals to 'tradition' should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice.

In France in 1789, some people came to power who thought that tradition should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice. Six years later French society had been torn apart in an orgy of bloodshed. Twenty-five years later the orgy of bloodshed had spilled over all of Europe before the genie was rammed back into the bottle at Waterloo.

Edmund Burke, in his 1791 classic Reflections on the Revolution in France, accurately predicted that the revolution could only end in military dictatorship, and articulated the value of tradition; other thinkers emphasized that development should be "organic," i.e. building on tradition. He convinced most of Europe's leaders, who met in the Congress of Vienna determined to set up a conservative traditional order. They laid the foundation for an unprecedented 99 years of peace and economic and technological progress, like none the world had ever seen (although, in the course of these years, people's understanding of the value of tradition gradually faded).

In 1917 the Bolsheviks came to power, who once again thought tradition should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice. Millions died, a culture was raped, colossal suffering ensued; fascists reacted to but also emulated them and a bloody war ensued; when fascism fell, more nations fell under the icy grip of communist tyranny.

In this crisis, F.A. Hayek and others stepped forward to articulate the value of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty and markets. A conservative movement arose in America culminating in Ronald Reagan, and communism fell.

It may sound "colorful" to describe the nation that won the Cold War as the world's most traditional. But think about it. Tocqueville commented long ago that American lawyers, in contrast to French ones, are obsessed with precedent. They do not acknowledge great principles at stake; rather, they refer to this case and that case. The backbone of American democracy is the common law, which has evolved for a thousand years to protect rights and property. Ours is the oldest regime in the world, and the philosophy it is founded on is 18th-century liberalism. We are traditional in other ways, too: strongly religious, for example. No other country in the modern world has managed to maintain its traditions intact with such success.

Tradition is alleged to be static, yet history shows the opposite. The 19th century, launched by the traditionalist Congress of Vienna, was an age of cumulatively stunning progress. America, too, has been a powerful engine of change. It is those who overturn tradition who are static. Napoleon's era saw a resurgence of dueling, and an archaic ceremony of being crowned as emperor by the pope. The Soviet economy got stuck in paleo-industrial stagnation. Why is this?

The value of tradition is an extension of the logic of "two heads are better than one." It is a recognition that my own mind and reasoning are unlikely to be a match for the collective wisdom of all humanity: instead, I will create static traps through sheer lack of imagination if I cut myself off from the great conversation among the ages. At the end of the day, knowledge is social rather than individual.

Of course, some things that become embedded in tradition are wrong. Nato points out that:

disenfranchisement of women is traditional. Racial discrimination and even slavery encrust every written history stretching back more than a hundred years.

As for slavery, to be precise, it was an innovation for the Portuguese when they re-introduced it to European culture in the 1400s, or for the English colonists in Virginia. Later it became traditional, but a critique of slavery existed alongside it and was equally traditional: this contradiction is embodied, for example, in Jefferson. The tradition of the equality of man, and humanitarian traditions embedded in Christianity, opposed slavery, and ultimately overpowered it. Slavery is no longer traditional in any sense; what is deeply and essentially traditional is liberty, which depends on the reliable and reflexive observation by the state and individuals of complex restraints. We may consider this illustrated by the historical record, for those who overthrow tradition rapidly invent new forms of slavery.

To respect tradition is an essential part of all wisdom and indeed all sanity, but not to submit to it completely. Indeed, one can never "submit to tradition completely," because tradition is full of complexities and seeming (or real) contradictions: genuine respect for tradition forces an open mind. Self-conscious "traditionalists" are always innovators, who have to dumb tradition down in order to render it into something that can be deliberately "obeyed" or "followed." What narrow-minded "traditionalists" lack is adequate respect for tradition. Students of contemporary Islam, such as Bernard Lewis, are keenly aware of this.

Nato's argument will perhaps serve to illustrate the need to respect tradition:

if one wishes to curtail freedom of any kind, it is incumbent on one to explain why. If one wants to curtain freedom in a discriminatory way, one must explain not just why the freedom should ever be abridged, but why it is valid to abridge in a special case.

He assumes that gay marriage is a "freedom" being "curtailed" in a "discriminatory way." Presumably the freedom in question is the freedom to marry, but marriage can be interpreted just as (or more) easily as the surrender of freedom, for if there is one core aspect of marriage it is sexual exclusivity. The question of the "right to marry" may therefore be phrased: does my present self have the right to restrict the rights of my future selves? We certainly would not grant this in all cases. If I promise my mother never to leave her side, the promise has no legally binding status in the eyes of the law. It would even be inhumane to hold people to certain kinds of crazy promises they might make. (How many times do people get angry with each other and shout "I'll never speak to you again?") Marriage, then, is a special case, where we do grant to my present self the right to restrict the rights of my future selves, and must be justified. Why do we do this? (Hint: why might marriage have been embodied in tradition?)

Another way to look at this is an ad absurdum argument. If two men can marry, why can't a man marry an animal, or his car, or two women, or himself, or his mother? There may be good reasons, but they are incompatible with the simplistic nondiscrimination rule Nato proposes. To decide if a rule is being applied in a nondiscriminatory way, we have to first define the rule, and if we are to define that rule as (for example) "only two human beings may marry," then there is no logical reason not to restrict the rule further, and say "only one man and one woman may marry."

This is enough to refute Nato's argument, but it is not a case against gay marriage. It simply makes it clear that the task is to explain why a man should have a right to bind his future to another man, as (for some reason) he is considered to have a right to do with a woman, but as he is not considered to be allowed to do with an animal, an inanimate object, a place, a member of his immediate family, etc. I hope it illuminates, however, how reason is often a poor substitute for tradition. In the realm of argument, so much rests on how you define terms, and there is so much scope for manipulation. To respect tradition is to doubt oneself whenever one draws conclusions contrary to tradition, and to insist on understanding it at least before dismissing, or, more often, modifying it. It spares you convincing yourself that you have hit upon truths when you don't have your concepts straight.

BUSH LIED

No, just kidding, but... The worst point of Bush's record is certainly the deficit. He said we could afford the tax cut because there was a surplus. I never liked that argument, and history hasn't been kind to it. Unfortunately, Kerry puts Bush to shame when it comes to fuzzy math:

Even with that generous accounting, the Kerry spending promises add up to an extraordinary amount of money. Our best estimate is that Kerry's proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.

Deficit hawks will just have to hold their noses and vote for Bush this year, it seems. But let's wait and see what noises he makes at the Convention.

I DONATED
$25 to the Bush campaign. And proud of it. (Yeah, not much, but I'm poor.)

THE POTTYMOUTH LEFT

Tom links to this piece of anti-Bush bile. It's times like this that I'm glad I have a blog. Reading a piece like this is like being beaten with a club. A blog gives you a chance to offer a little token resistance, so you feel less violated. Just a few points.

A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?

And yet John McCain, who suffered torture for five years in Vietnam, and therefore ought to feel strongly about issues of torture, and who has personal reasons to resent Bush, is campaigning enthusiastically for Bush. Apparently he is convinced that the chains of responsibility end well below the president, as I am. (Or maybe he remembers how Kerry's speeches were used against him by Vietcong torturers. But anyway...)

The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American public.

On the contrary, Bush has proclaimed in speech after speech the value of freedom for every human being. I have oft been inspired by his rhetoric, and he deserves credits for most of the patriotic feelings I have felt in my life. My only regret is that people aren't listening.

This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose...the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate.

That argument has been obsolete since 2002, when he swept several Republicans into Congress on the tide the his massive, unprecedented personal popularity.

he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party,

Would that were true! On the contrary, he has passed a massive new federal entitlement program, the prescription drug bill, expanded the federal role in education, increased spending broadly... he's a tax-and-spend liberal!

I trust George W. Bush. I trust him because I believe the dictum "innocent until proven guilty." And I have never encountered a politician in my life whom I trust more for his commitment to freedom and humanitarianism. On the facts, I trust more than I trust about 90% of newspapers. This is not a statement of naive faith. It's based on observation, analysis.

But these were the lines that made me saddest:

A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.

He's praising dissent, as if it's something new and brave, in the midst of the greatest tidal wave of opposition and hatred against a sitting president since Richard Nixon. "Dissent" has gained a propagandistic hegemony which I find rather terrifying. The real dissent today is to support Bush. It's more than I have the courage to do in most social or professional contexts.

This piece made me feel like I was sitting in a Stalinist show trial. Just because some of George Bush's critics show an inquisitorial ferocity that should have no place in our democracy does not mean you have to vote for him. My mother is rightly disgusted with the Bush-haters but still plans to vote for Kerry. Bush never shows anger or animosity, but all the same, when he promised to "change the tone in Washington," he forgot that it takes both sides to do that. Hopefully the voters will dish out some humble pie to writers like this come November, and help Bush to fulfill his 2000 campaign promise.

MORE REPLIES TO TOM REASONER

Tom also pans the DNC, and, while calling his responses "more cooled-off" than mine, he is if anything more depressed, because he has the misfortune of feeling great antipathy towards George W. Bush:

But as I cooled off, I realized that even if Kerry does not deserve to be president, it would not be right to condone Bush's unilateralism and narrow-minded view of world affairs by allowing him to be re-elected... I feel Kerry cannot do much economic damage with his policies because of congress, but he will be able to veto the sorts of legislation that I disagree with entirely. He will also improve foreign relations just by not being Bush, which I think is very important at this stage in the game when we're trying to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan and bring "our boys" home at the same time. I've heard that there are some foreign leaders who refuse to help because of Bush, not because of the cause itself. Maybe that's childish, but it's understandable considering the ego that is required to attain leaderiship status. Anyway, all of this is to say that I hate Kerry, and I don't hate Bush quite so much as I used to, but I'm still voting "against Bush".

What unilateralism? For the billionth time, we had dozens of allies going into Iraq, and a lot of nations have troops there. Colin Powell has long since debunked this myth in Foreign Affairs:

It is an unfailingly effective applause line for critics of any U.S. administration to charge that the president has no vision for the world, that he has no strategy. Every trouble is attributed to this failing, as though the world would otherwise be perfectly accommodating to U.S. purposes. Unfortunately, this criticism has come close to being true in some administrations. But it is not true in the present one. President George W. Bush does have a vision of a better world. And he also has a strategy for translating that vision into reality. I know -- I was present at its creation. Another side benefit of electing Kerry is to keep Hilary Clinton out of running in the next election :)

And Bush's narrow-minded view of world affairs? Give me a break! Bush is tolerant in the extreme, preaching over and over again that everybody including Arabs and Muslims deserve human rights and are capable of democracy. A reasonable critique of Bush is not that he is narrow-minded but that he is panglossian. If anyone has a "narrow-minded view of world affairs," it is certainly the America First Democrats. As for Kerry's foreign affairs advantage for "not being Bush," I don't buy it at all. Here's the dirty secret: we were pretty unpopular in Europe and with the left even in Clinton's time. And if Kerry tries to recruit NATO to send troops to Iraq, that won't go over big. If Kerry is elected, every terrorist in the world will celebrate victory, and every dictator in the world will sleep much easier, and with good reason. And about Hillary Clinton, another little secret: while I'm no fan, she's a lot better than John Kerry.

REPLIES TO TOM REASONER
Pardon the long hiatus: I've been between jobs, relaxing out in the suburbs. Did you miss me?

A few remarks on what's going on at Tom Reasoner's blog. Most recently, he has a post about morality. He makes what I think is the sound (though I believe quite controversial-- does he think so?) point that we cannot think about morality without addressing the issue of the end of man:

When we talk about morality, we're not just referring to any old system of right and wrong, we're referring to a system of right and wrong towards a specific end.

This point resembles the one made by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, my favorite book about ethics, where he argues that it is possible to derive an "is" from an "ought" (which Thomas Hume denied, thus doing much to undermine the belief in objective morality in the succeeding couple of centuries) if we have in mind some (as Tom puts it) end of man, in the same way that we can derive statements about good and bad watches from facts about whether they keep time. Tom's conclusion leaves me less satisfied:

Now we're at the end, the end of man. The end of man is to act within his nature, just like everything else. It is natural for man to ask questions, seek answers, and create answers, even in the absence of rational justification. It is natural for man to act in his own self-interests, and to determine what those interests are, even those that may require a personal sacrifice. Above all, it is natural for man to propagate, both physically and intellectually. That is the sum of it. All of human morality can be derived from these ends. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover how.

To ask questions and seek answers I consider admirable. To create answers even in the absence of rational justification, though certainly a common characteristic of mankind, I consider morally wrong, or at any rate dubious. Tom leaves an unresolved tension between "self-interest" and "personal sacrifice"-- maybe a good thing, since what looks at first glance like self-contradiction is often a recognition of complexity. "Above all, it is natural for man to propagate, both physically and intellectually." The "physically" seems to recommend an African moral universe, where the chief is polygamous and measures his success in the quantity of his offspring relative to his rivals: not, I feel, a good ethical ideal. The "intellectually" (slurred together with "physically" by a clever sleight of hand, luring the reader into a strange and unwarranted feeling that man's propensity to discussing, believe and philosophize is somehow an extension of the physical process of reproduction) I can sympathize with-- that's what blogging is all about!-- but what does it mean, after all, to "propagate intellectually?" If I convince others to believe what I believe, have I propagated intellectually? Is that my end? If so, do I fail to achieve my end when I become convinced that I was wrong and someone else was right? I think, on the contrary, that I benefit more by abandoning my own false belief and adopting someone else's true one, than by persuading someone else to adopt my false belief, or even my true belief. "Intellectual propagation" is not the end, but truth, to which "intellectual propagation" is a means when and only when I have (or think I have) truth that others lack.

My most serious objection is that "the end of man is to act within his nature, just like everything else." Man's nature contains both good and evil, and morality is a struggle within his nature. Moreover, the analogy implicit in "just like everything else" is invalid: man's nature, let alone his ends, have no comprehensive or even particularly close analogy in the natural world. Language, thought, belief, feeling, all have no counterpart whatsoever among things mineral or vegetable, and only the dimmest analogy even in the animal kingdom. Morality applies to man, and only to man, and sets him apart from nature (along with the soul, but that is another discussion.)

My own idea of the end of man is Christian in inspiration, and full of irony. Man has spiritual ends that are largely at odds with the ends that arise from his bodily nature. Through truth, service and faith, he can come to participate in the love and grace of God, and thus both feel joy and radiate it to others, although, like the geode, this inner glory will be masked by a facade of humility.