Notes

“In order that this may be clearly understood, let us conceive a very simple thing. For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone’s motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions, inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.

“Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined. Thus an infant believes that it desires milk freely; an angry child thinks he wishes freely for vengeance, a timid child thinks he wishes freely to run away. Again, a drunken man thinks, that from the free decision of his mind he speaks words, which afterwards, when sober, he would like to have left unsaid. So the delirious, the garrulous, and others of the same sort think that they act from the free decision of their mind, not that they are carried away by impulse. As this misconception is innate in all men, it is not easily conquered. For, although experience abundantly shows, that men can do anything rather than check their desires, and that very often, when a prey to conflicting emotions, they see the better course and follow the worse, they yet believe themselves to be free; because in some cases their desire for a thing is slight, and can easily be overruled by the recollection of something else, which is frequently present in the mind.”

Benedict de Spinoza, Letter to G.H. Schaller (1674).

“The [right-wing] agitator seems to steer clear of the area of material needs on which liberal and democratic movements concentrate; his main concern is a sphere of frustration that is usually ignored in traditional politics. The programs that concentrate on material needs seem to overlook that area of moral uncertainties and emotional frustrations that are the immediate manifestations of malaise. It may therefore be conjectured that his followers find the agitator’s statements attractive not because he occasionally promises to ‘maintain the American standard of living’ or to provide a job for everyone, but because he intimates that he will give them the emotional satisfactions that are denied to them in the contemporary social and economic set-up. He offers attitudes, not bread.”

Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit (New York, 1949), pp. 91–92, quoted by Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt—1954,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Vintage Books 2008) p. 54, fn. 7.

While walking with my wife this evening, and holding forth on “the broad sweep of history,” I was reminded of a fascinating piece from Fortune, originally printed in 1955, and reprinted online last year: “How top executives live.” Replete with anecdotes on the cultural oddities of a bygone time, it conjures a sense (in me, at least) that our lives today are both better and worse.

And then consider how Paul Krugman, commenting on the piece, observed that “inequality was much lower and tax rates at the top much higher [in 1955] than they are today. The business leaders of the time led straitened lives by historical standards — they were substantially poorer than the previous generation of executives[.] [¶] According to modern conservative dogma, this kind of punishment of ‘job creators’ should have brought economic progress to a screeching halt. Yet according to Fortune, executives continued to work hard — and the postwar generation was actually a period of economic progress that has never been matched.”

Last November, I wrote to express my frustration with our needlessly acquisitive culture:

[W]hen we say that this is a deeply polarized nation, we are talking about deep disagreements that boil down to one issue: How can we make more Americans richer? We are not arguing about how to lift Americans from the chaos of a country riven by warlords. Famine and disease are problems, but they are well in hand. Racism and sexism and all our cultural “wars on” whatever do have terrible effects on people, but I doubt anybody would trade them for outright civil war, with guns and bombs and helicopters. We ought to be arguing about how to build a more sustainable society and use our resources in ways that preserve an environment where we can thrive. We ought to be figuring out how to maintain our society without sending soldiers and robots around the world to kill other people. But no, we are really just worried about how to make more Americans richer.

Never mind that most Americans today are better off than just about every person who has ever walked this planet. We live a long time. We have lots of food. (Too much, probably.) Very few people are without shelter. Despite widespread ignorance and irrationality, and despite a vocal element of our society doing everything it can to disparage the gathering of knowledge that might be used to improve our lives, we manage to maintain high levels of reliable public services over enormous geographical areas.

That is, our problems are on the margins, about how to ensure that Americans have more of what we already enjoy. But you wouldn’t think so from the insane rhetoric—like people claiming this is “a nation where nobody can prosper.” According to my grandmother, there are two ways to prosper: earn more, or want less. This is a balance. But we are a nation of spoiled brats, completely out of balance, where the idea of contentment or gratitude is foreign. American Exceptionalism means we always want more, and if we are unable to earn enough to keep up with those wants, we are “poor.” Lunacy.

This morning, I read that John Maynard Keynes thought about this problem, too:

The question Keynes set out to solve was how humanity would adapt to a world of abundance. “He saw two options,” explains Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. “One was that we could consume ever more goods. Or we could enjoy more leisure. . . . ” [¶] By and large, we have chosen door number one.

Here is the hope as Keynes expressed it:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

If only. Here is Robert F. Kennedy, nearly four decades later:

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product—if we judge the United States of America by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

And that remains true, more than forty years later again. We have the means to make more meaningful lives, and still we just acquire, acquire, and call ourselves “poor” for not “getting ahead.” Ahead of what?

“The business of a healthy eye is to see everything that is visible, not to demand no colour but green, for that merely marks a disordered vision. Likewise hearing and scent, if healthy, should be alert for all kinds of sounds and odours, and a healthy stomach for all manner of meats, like a mill which accepts whatever grist it was fashioned to grind. In the same way, then, a healthy mind ought to be prepared for anything that may befall. A mind crying ‘O that my Children may be spared,’ or ‘O that the world might ring with praises of my every act,’ is an eye craving for greenery, or a tooth craving for softness.” [1]

“Philosophers look upon the passions by which we are assailed as vices, into which men fall through their own fault. So it is their custom to deride, bewail, berate them, or, if their purpose is to appear more zealous than others, to execrate them. They believe that they are thus performing a sacred duty, and that they are attaining the summit of wisdom when they have learnt how to shower extravagant praise on a human nature that nowhere exists and to revile that which exists in actuality. The fact is that they conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be.” [2]

[1] Marcus Aurelius (trans. Maxwell Staniforth), Meditations (Penguin 2005), Book X, No. 35.

[2] Benedictus de Spinoza (trans. Samuel Shirley), Political Treatise (Hackett 2000),  p. 33.

A couple weeks ago, Massimo Pigliucci critiqued a piece by Gary Gutting.

Gutting said: “[I]t is utterly important to know, to the extent that we can, the fundamental truth about human life: where it came from, what (if anything) it is meant for, how it should be lived.”

Pigliucci said: “[I]t seems to me that by far the most defensible answers here are that (a) life came from a process of physical and then biological evolution that had nothing whatsoever to do with supernatural forces; (b) life is not meant for anything, it just is (although we do construct meanings for our own existence); and (c) it should be lived in a way that is both moral and allows individuals to flourish in whatever way suits them best.”

On Pigliucci’s three responses, the first is pretty much unassailable and the second is reasonable. The third, I think, would have to be entailed by a constructed meaning under the second. That is, I doubt whether anyone can “know” how life “should” be lived in the same way we can know where human life came from; whether it is true that life should be lived in a particular way only makes sense if we have constructed a meaning of life that includes moral principles. Even so, reasonable people might disagree.

All of that is well enough.

But what about these other ideas, that knowing “the fundamental truth about human life” is “utterly important,” and that knowing “where [human life] came from, what (if anything) it is meant for, [and] how it should be lived” is equivalent to knowing the “fundamental truth about human life”? Since when?

Why is it “utterly important” to know “the fundamental truth about human life”? Does anyone live a better life by any standard for knowing where human life came from, or what (if anything) it is meant for? Does no one get by without knowing anything about the origin of human life, or whether it is meant for anything? (And meant for anything by whom?)

And what could possibly be the “fundamental truth about human life” anyway? Why should we assume that it is knowable? (If it turned out to be unknowable, then where would we be? Is unknowability a truth?)

If Gutting’s Catholic education only imposed particular answers, like tinny fundamentalism does, we would have a different kind of negotiation—and Pigliucci’s responses would be complete as well as appropriate. But Gutting describes something more fundamental: his Catholic education has defined the appropriate questions. And that imposition appears to be covert, or lost on Gutting, at least. He suggests that his church “now explicitly acknowledges the right of an individual’s conscience in religious matters,” even as he admits that the authoritative hierarchy remains, and he appears to conclude that disagreement (not orthodoxy?) defines his church, thus making it a “live option” for him. But all of this slips past while Gutting and Pigliucci both fail to wonder whether circumscribing the appropriate questions is a help or a hindrance.

Suppose that life is a chemical process, that it has no meaning except what we imagine, that even our imaginings might be reduced to chemistry, that there is no way we ought to perpetuate that chemistry, and that we cannot possibly know any fundamental truths about ourselves. And suppose we take those ideas as our starting place. What then would be the “utterly important” questions? Maybe there are none. Answering questions is certainly useful to accomplish feats of invention, transform how we communicate, alter our modes of comfort, and so on. But to have a life of meaning? To live life well? To live? To be?

If you wish to think carefully about who we are, what we do, why we do it, how we ask these questions, and whether they or their answers mean anything, there is no reason to be satisfied with an institution that circumscribes the premises of your inquiry, especially when that institution also purports to organize the totality of your life. If we need expert assistance to confront truthlessness and meaninglessness, then it ought to come not from people who mask the universe with imagined truths and meanings, but from people who help us to see that all of our lives remain no matter what we think about truth and meaning. There are far worse things to fear in the universe than not having ready ideas or beliefs about what it all means.

“Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and collars with the large, mild inscrutability of cattle or of gods, functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.” (William Faulkner, Sanctuary (Vintage 1993) p. 111.)

“Suppose someone were thus to see through the boorish simplicity of this celebrated concept of ‘free will’ and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his ‘enlightenment’ a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of ‘free will’: I mean ‘unfree will,’ which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly reify ’cause’ and ‘effect,’ as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now ‘naturalizes’ in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it ‘effects’ its end; one should use ’cause’ and ‘effect’ only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication—not for explanation. In the ‘in-itself’ there is nothing of ‘causal connections,’ of ‘necessity,’ or of ‘psychological non-freedom’; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule of ‘law.’ It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself,’ we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically. The ‘unfree will’ is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 21, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library 1992) pp. 218–219.)

Beyond Good and Evil was published first in 1886, well over a century ago. And then there was David Hume, writing well over a century before that, who also suggested that our ideas about causes and effects are constructed from our experiences. (See An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, § 4, pt. 1.)

But still I am told by a recent convert from engineeringism that ideas about distinguishing between real world phenomena (the world “in itself”) and the models and descriptions we use to describe the world (including the causation model) are the new, new thing, that people are just now figuring out that “science” (not my scare quotes) is only a description of the world, and not the world itself.

These are not new ideas. They are what philosophers and working scientists, who actually think about things as part of what they do, have long recognized. Only the popular misunderstanders and the readers of nothing but journalism (and the journalists themselves) and the fringe-y speculators and the postmodernists have failed to grasp that science has always been something we build, not something we find. If you are surprised to discover that statement, it means that you were unaware of these ideas, not that the scientists have recently admitted something shocking.

And then read this.

“Just how irrelevant is your blog?” I asked myself the other day. I had to ask myself because no one asks me questions, because nobody cares what I think about anything.

“Pretty irrelevant,” I said. “On a good day, there are ten or eleven visitors, who stay an average of about a minute and twenty seconds, which is just long enough to see that there is nothing here about Justin Bieber or Paul Ryan.”

“But that should be a draw! A world without those two would surely be a better place.”

“One would think,” I said.

The conversation fell silent for a while, and we stared at the wall.

“Wait, ‘we‘?” I said.

“You know,” replied myself, “me, myself, and I.”

“But that’s three and we’re only two. Where’s me?”

I laughed. “You’ll have to ask me sometime. And I think that we makes four of us: me, myself, I, and we. You know, the royal we.”

“That sounds like dualism. Or is it an emergent property of me, I, and myself?”

“Maybe it’s property dualism. Hard to say,” I said.

“Even harder to think. But wait a minute—shouldn’t there be a fifth around here: what about you?”

“Me, myself, we, you, and I?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose so. This is turning into quite the party. Where are all these fellows?”

“Right here, idiot!”

“Oh, I didn’t see you there.”

“Neither did we.”

“Your ignorance astounds me.”

We rolled our eyes.

“Hey, which one of us is the narrator?”

“Naturally, I am,” I said, throwing in the ‘naturally’ to avoid making myself sound theologically supernatural. I had to assert my priority, but I preferred to avoid controversy and keep things quiet, to prevent myself from making trouble. We always hates that. Yes, we hates it.

“Speaking of making trouble, have you noticed that our corner of the blogosphere has become pretty isolated?”

“Blogospheres don’t have corners, you idiot.”‘

“Metaphorically. You know. And woods don’t have necks, either. But here we are.”

“Yes,” I said. “And in the last couple weeks, I’ve had comments on two different other blogs disappear into moderation. They weren’t intemperate or even that interesting! But—shoop!—down the memory hole.”

“Weird.”

“I guess we’ll just have to keep talking to ourselves.”

“Quite right,” I said.

“An interpretation is not evidence of some further fact. A true interpretive claim is true because the reasons for accepting it are better than the reasons for accepting any rival interpretive claim.” (Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Belknap 2011) p. 154.)

Following “Theology,” consider the possibility that a valid answer to “What is God?” or “What do you mean by ‘God’?” might be “an interpretive claim.” This suggests a different way to think about the questions “Does God exist?” or “Do you believe in God?” Answers are determined not by looking for evidence of an entity with certain characteristics, but by looking for reasons to conclude that an interpretive claim like “God” is worthwhile, or not.

As I have long said, whether you believe in God or not, you live in the same world as the people who disagree. We all have the same evidence; the question is whether a particular interpretation of that evidence is better than another. And “better” invokes the problem of values. What should we value? The idea that the unseen forces binding an otherwise cold and recalcitrant universe evince a boundless love for these particular apes? Or the pedigree of those apes in “the war of nature, from famine and death,” to “endless forms most beautiful”?