Digressions&Impressions

Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset, Adam Smith and Mental Mutilation (and even a side comment on Graeber and Wengrow)

Who is it that exercises social power to-day? Who imposes the forms of his own mind on the period? Without a doubt, the man of the middle class. Which group, within that middle class, is considered the superior, the aristocracy of the present? Without a doubt, the technician: engineer, doctor, financier, teacher, and so on. Who, inside the group of technicians, represents it at its best and purest? Again, without a doubt, the man of science...

And now it turns out that the actual scientific man is the prototype of the mass-man. Not by chance, not through the individual failings of each particular man of science, but because science itself-the root of our civilisation-automatically converts him into mass-man, makes of him a primitive, a modem barbarian. The fact is well known; it has made itself clear over and over again; but only when fitted into its place in the organism of this thesis is does it take on its full meaning and its evident seriousness...

But the development of physics introduced a task opposite in character to unification. In order to progress, science demanded specialisation, not in herself, but in men of science. Science is not specialist. If it were, it would ipso facto cease to be true. Not even empirical science, taken in its integrity, can be true if separated from mathematics, from logic, from philosophy. But scientific work does, necessarily, require to be specialised.

It would be of great interest, and of greater utility than at first sight appears, to draw up the history of physical and biological sciences, indicating the process of increasing specialisation in the work of investigators. It would then be seen how, generation after generation, the scientist has been gradually restricted and confined into narrower fields of mental occupation. But this is not the importantpoint that such a history would show, but rather the reverse side of the matter: bow in each generation the scientist, through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with that integral interpretation of the universe which is the only thing deserving the names of science, culture, European civilisation.--José Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), pp. 108-110.

One the least flattering elements to science of Tomas Kuhn's philosophy of science is his insistence that most normal science is akin to puzzle-solving of a very specialized kind. And as Kuhn reminds his audience, "it is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important... intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle." It follows from this view, that science -- broadly viewed as a social institution -- selects for a certain kind of narrow, to-be-disciplined ingenuity. Of course, that's compatible with, as Kuhn hastens to add, a whole range of nobler motives in the scientist to join in science and stick with it. Kuhn's treatment of science is a functional analysis not psychological. But at bottom, science flourishes on a socially useful mental mutilation--and if you think that phrase too strong, Kuhn himself, more modern (and so medicalized) uses the euphemistic language of "addiction.

Kuhn leaves unaddressed whether society, which, let's stipulate, largely benefits from the fruits of scientific activity, owes the scientists any concern. Certain kinds of addiction may well be compatible with individual happiness after all. But if one takes a more expansive view of human flourishing, there is something disconcerting about the picture Kuhn draws for the scientist qua individual.

Writing a generation ahead of Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset emphasizes a mental mutilation (notice the 'barbarism') in the vicinity of puzzle-solving: hyper-specialization as an effect of the cognitive division of labor. To underlying claim is pretty clear: in order to advance on the research-frontier, one must focus on increasingly esoteric material disconnected from most other features of one's discipline and the other science. Kuhn himself captures the idea in terms of the effect of 'subdivision.'

Now, earlier in the (short) book than the passage I quoted (from chapter 12), Ortega y Gasset had offered an earnest plea for the continued significance of pure science as the fount of all technical advance (see chapter 9). And on his view this requires that the larger society embraces a set of ideals and mores conducive to people wanting to become scientists. (He recognizes that with rising affluence would be scientists have lots of other opportunities. Although his real interest is in culture.) So, Ortega y Gasset is not a critic of science or scientists as such. 

But, anticipating James Burnham and echoing themes also familiar from Hayek, he thinks both that modern "men of science" ((112)) his is a very gendered view) are the exemplary element in (to use Burnham's terminology) the ascendant managerial class, and that their mental mutilation -- their hyper-specialization -- makes them wholly unsuitable to the task of political and cultural leadership. Because while the "specialist "knows" very well his tiny corner of the universe, he is radically ignorant of the rest." (111) He is an "learned ignoramus." (112) 

The problem is, however, that while most specialists understand their own limitations and stay in their lane, the ones that stray into "politics, art, religion, and the general problems of life and the world" are likely too impressed by their own skills and smarts. (I need not remind you here of the pontificating popular scientist who makes elementary philosophical blunders and seems oddly unread.) Interestingly enough, Ortega y Gasset is not especially interested in the policy failures this may engender. Rather he thinks once these kind of people are empowered to shape society, they will fail to reproduce a culture worth having. And while he understands himself as a liberal democrat, this part of Ortega y Gasset's project is clearly very indebted to Nietszche's musing about the last man.

What Ortega y Gasset, himself a scion of Marburg Kantianism, failed to foresee is that in his own age, philosophy would also turn professional under the leadership of Carnap and Ernest Nagel, And that we, too, have become increasingly a  discipline of specialists. So, by his light (and Kuhn's) we, too, are likely to be mentally mutilated.

Because alienation is associated with Marxism, I am using 'mental mutilation.' Ortega y Gassett's interest in the political significance of mental mutilation is anticipated by Adam Smith.  I don't know whether Smith was the first person to diagnose mental mutilation as a side effect of employment, but his version of it remains striking (recall):

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations WN 5.1.f 50

Smith is explicit that the structural cause of the underlying problem is the division of labor. And while the example of those who are confined to a few very simple operations is a limiting case, ,Smith leaves no doubt that social advancements come at the expense of most of our individual capacities. Unlike most members of 'team progress,' he thinks, as he puts it in the next paragraph, that people in 'backward' civilizations actually have better trained and cultivated judgments, including most notably political judgments:

It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called...Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it.  

I used this very passage (recall) in responding to an essay by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and could re-use it in light of their recent The Dawn of Everything. They attribute something like this insight to Marshal Sahlins, and it informs a lot of the most glorious passages in their book when they describe the statesmen and women of native society in colorful detail. I mention the book, because one effect of their argument is to make me see that for Smith what we may call republican self-government (of the sort promoted by Graeber and Wengrow) of society becomes every more problematic as the division of labor advances to encompass all.* And so there is a sense in which we should not be surprised by the near disappearance of such practices of deliberative self-governing citizen assemblies (that Graeber and Wengrow like): it's a prediction that follows naturally from Smith's theory. Our representative assemblies should then be viewed as a necessary, second best.

That Smith is also concerned with the effects on self-government is clear from the next paragraphs where he holds up as exemplar "Greek and Roman republics." (His main interest is, however on 'martial spirit.') Notice, that size of population or scale are not the issue on limits of self-government. (This is rightly attached by Graeber and Wengrow.) Rather, it's the division of labor that makes us collectively smarter, but individually stupider. 

Now, Smith himself thought that to combat life-long mental mutilation, the state should creative conditions in which kids needed to be taught alongside literacy, the "principles of geometry and mechanics." And in context it is clear that he thinks this, can promote self-government. It's unfortunate that Smith does not explain what the virtues of geometry and mechanics are such that they combat mental mutilation, but he does think that even in extreme division of labor the kind of principles one can discern in them would be regularly re-activated. 

Before one suspects that Smith's criticism of the 'working' classes is meant to open the door to the interest of capital, Smith himself thought the merchant classes could not be trusted with government because they would be too self-interested. But he takes for granted that  landowners and philosophers have room to take in a wider frame and develop good judgment (an important theme in Sam Fleischacker's interpretation of Smith). But since Smith's philosophy of science is broadly proto-Kuhnian, and the Wealth of Nation pretty much starts with the observation that philosophy has become incorporated into the division of labor, he cannot be sanguine about its future.

As an aside, even though Kuhn draws attention to the analogy between political and scientific revolutions, he himself thought that judgments were paradigm relative: "neither a decline nor a raising of standards." So, for Kuhn the problem that is immanent in his work never fully arises.

Writing just as the Great Depression is about to start, Ortega y Gasset's analysis implicitly suggests that Smith was too optimistic. That as the market grows and the division of labor becomes wider, as society becomes complexer, we should not expect good judgment among what passes for the educated classes at all. Because our universities will increasingly churn out hyper-specialists (including specialists in 'governance'); and even where there is book-learning as part of a liberal arts curriculum, political judgment can never be properly cultivated in a society like ours because all of us are always too distant from the conduct of those who govern us until it's too late.*

I should stop here. Yet, I want to add one more comment. The reservoir of nineteenth century bourgeois culture has been emptied. Despite the political implosion of Europe in the 1930s, liberal democracy recovered while the cognitive division of labor (and the economy) expanded greatly. We now have lots of tools that even expert practitioners have to black box (and arguably contributed to causing the Great Financial Recession). Yet our political process muddles through. This raises the suspicion that there is more judgment in our society than Ortega y Gasset has any right to expect, or that judgment is not needed. One cannot help but suspect that the unfolding environmental crisis will test both options severely.

 

 

Caliban and the Witch, Beauvoir, and The Great Transformations

My interest in this research was originally motivated by the debates that accompanied the development of the Feminist Movement in the United States concerning the roots of women's “oppression,” and the political strategies which the movement should adopt in the struggle for women's liberation. At the time, the leading theoretical and political perspectives from which the reality o f sexual discrimination was analyzed were those proposed by the two main branches of the women's movement: the Radical Feminists and the Socialist Feminists. In my view, however, neither provided a satisfactory explanation of the roots of the social and economic exploitation of women. I objected to the Radical Feminists because of their tendency to account for sexual discrimination and patriarchal rule on the basis of transhistorical cultural structures, presumably operating independently of relations of production and class. Socialist Feminists, by contrast, recognized that the history of women cannot be separated from the history of specific systems of exploitation and, in their analyses, gave priority to women as workers in capitalist society. But the limit of their position, in my understanding of it at the time, was that it hat it failed to acknowledge the sphere of reproduction as a source of value-creation and exploitation, and thus traced the roots of the power differential between women and men to women's exclusion from capitalist development — a stand which again compelled us to rely on cultural schemes to account for the survival of sexism within the universe of capitalist relations.--Silvia Federici (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, preface, pp. vii-viii (all my references are to the UK edition).

A few weeks ago, I noted (here; echoing diagnosis of MacKinnon) that De Beauvoir treatment of the origin of patriarchy suffers from circularity. She projects backwards the idea of man as inventive Homo Faber, especially of values, who is admired by the more rooted women who then become complicit in their own subordination because they enjoy and admire the activities of the more daring men. And while violence is not contingent here -- the military and hunting exploits of men are especially admired --, and violence toward women is not absent, women's subordination is, in part, sustained by their sharing in the fruits of Man's inventions and, as Marion Garcia has noted in her recent book, the non-trivial pleasures consequent subordination. But as an origin account, this whole approach presupposes, as MacKinnon notes, that patriarchy is already fully functioning (and so circular). 

One related problem with De Beauvoir's treatment is that the origin of patriarchy itself gets pushed back into mythic times and so ends up being omnipresent. A consequence of this is that real historical differences matter less than the omnipresence of patriarchy and that because there is no spatially and temporally bounded origin to their subordination, women also do not see themselves as distinct political group (a point noted by Garcia). It also means that the history of feminism itself is either a history of permanent failure, or something very new.

Last week (recall) I was rather critical of Federici's Caliban and the Witch. But it is important to recognize that Federici offers a much more compelling account of the origin of patriarchy than De Beauvoir does. While not denying that women's subordination to men is a historical reality in many times and places, Federici shows that modern feminism is reacting to a form of patriarchy that grew out of the late middle ages and that "peaked in the 19th century with the creation of the full-time housewife." (p. 78) By 'grew' I do not mean she thinks this was an organic or pacific development. She argues that it involved half a millennium of state (sanctioned) violence against women (and heretic), which was inaugurated by several centuries of persecution of purported witches (mostly female).

While, the account presents itself as Marxist (about which below more) and feminist in character, the underlying template for the overall argument is derived Nietzsche. In particular, Nietzsche's account of the use of torture and force for the development of a so-called slave morality (structured around good and evil) and especially of breeding an animal "with the right to make promises" familiar from The Genealogy of Morals. She actually cites and partially quotes the passage, but presents Nietzsche as claiming that "blood and torture were necessary to 'breed an animal' capable of regular, homogeneous, and uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the new rules."* On Federici's account torture then is a site where "knowledge about the body was gained" and obstacles to the transformation of the modern worker eliminated. (p. 155)* 

That is to say, Federici explicitly invites the reader to see several large scale social transformations as essentially linked: the violent imposition of patriarchal norms on women's bodies and lives that are still with 'us in so-called 'developed' nations; the violent rise of capitalism out of primitive accumulation; and the violent rise of a transatlantic, racialized slave economy. One crucial feature these three transformations have in common is the rise of a national state that manages an economy, class relations, and (due to its interest in population) laws and norms of reproduction  These three transformation all occur in the centuries after the Black Death in the fourteenth century through the (so-called) age of Enlightenment. I used 'developed' because Federici believes that the linked historical transformations are being repeated today in 'lesser-developed' countries subject to forced capitalist development under the tutelage of international (financial) institutions.  

In Federici's argument the persecution of purported witches, a veritable reign of terror over several centuries, is a key mechanism in subduing, primarily rural resistance to the rise of capitalism, and in shaping patriarchal norms on all women, including a major narrowing of women's participation in the waged economy. Some of the most interesting passages are about the ways in which men conspired to remove women as competitors from the workforce as physicians, brewers, and midwives, and the steady erosion of women's rights to enter into contracts or live alone, etc. Unlike De Beauvoir, who treats 'la querelle des femme' as a secondary phenomena primarily a debate among men about the relative merits of marriage to life in the clergy (The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, pp. 118-120), while Federici sees it in as a highly salient debate over and a source of knowledge about "a new sexual division of labor" (p. 114).

To be sure, Federici never mentions De Beauvoir in the whole of Caliban and The Witch. And as the extended quote from the preface suggests, Federici is engaging with the question about the origin of patriarchy in light of an American debate. I assume that by radical feminists she has in mind people like Firestone and Millet and by socialist feminists people like Eisenstein. While De Beauvoir has a tendency to efface past feminists, Federici has a tendency to efface her intellectual targets (not, of course, her political target which is clearly transnational Capital). However, that debate was prompted in no small part by De Beauvoir, so I hope that the compare and contrast element of this post is not seen as a non-sequitur.

Compared to De Beauvoir's account of the origin of patriarchy, Federici's approach has a lot of advantages. It can point to a where and how of the development of modern patriarchy, and explain many of its characteristic features. That is to say, it can explain what we may call the patriarchal template of modern gender relations. ("Gender" is not a word Federici uses a lot, except when explaining her large scale goals.) And it is not implausible that there are many interactions between tools of oppression in the inquisition into witches and the vicious exploitation developed in the context of transatlantic racialized slavery and plantations.

It is, I think, eminently plausible that a few centuries of state mediated terror against particular women left a mark on all women, especially because this terror went alongside great legal and political changes. Federici's account is not circular. It explains how the cause of (what we may call) women's equality was tied up in the historical and sometimes intersectional defeats of rural populations and pre-reformation heretical groups. And it is, incidentally, notable that in her account the broadly protestant heresies that succeed politically were also, simultaneously, defeats for the cause of women. 

Let me close with noting three limitations of Federici's approach. First, one problem with Federici's account -- and this is remarkably similar to a problematic feature in Karl Polanyi's account (he is curiously absent from her bibliography) -- is a kind of romanticism about the pre-capitalist village economy. To be sure, to note this is not to deny the violence that destroys the rural way of life. Liberals like myself (although I am more skeptical than most) agree with Marxists that the mercantile development of capitalism is a bloody and violent affair. Mercantilism is evil, and I agree with Federici (and against some Marxists and Liberals) that the rise of Capitalism and liberal society itself cannot justify these evils. There is no secular theodicy. 

However, Federici treats the rural or village economy as a "subsistence economy" in which "the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as a value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered work." (78) Of course, Federici's focus on how this unity permits more equal gender relations and permits an enlarged space for women's agency goes well beyond Polanyi. 

So, while Federici explicitly recognizes that the rural economy is structured by feudal relations and conflict, she ignores (as I have noted before) that it is also -- not in the least due to the absence of circulating coin -- suffused with credit and debt relations. And so this very idea of an organic unity has to pretend away the many social mechanism, which promote their own hierarchies and are often infused with violence, of debt accounting and settlement.** To put this in more ironic terms: while Marxists tend to make fun of those liberals who mistakenly posit a peaceful or natural primitive accumulation (Federici follows the tradition in associating this view -- see p. 61, p. 136, and note 6 on pp. 278-9 -- with Adam Smith's account), Polanti and Federici have a tendency to treat European pre-capitalist relations as thinly disguised gardens of Eden (e.g, Federici's pre-capitalist communities have abundant community wide feasts (etc.).)

Second, throughout the post I have described Federici's position in terms of 'modern patriarchy.' Perhaps, it would be better to call it 'capitalist' or 'Mercantile patriarchy' I do this in the spirit of charity because she is not trying to explain all patriarchy. And she has useful things to say about societies that do not exhibit the modern control over women's bodies. But as MacKinnon noted about De Beauvoir, Federici's argument often presupposes the institution of patriarchy. For, the gendered pattern of defeats she describes presupposes patriarchy's ability to organize militarily, politically, and economically to common ends. 

Federici recognizes the point by admitting that in "pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons." Even on her account Capitalist patriarchy grew out of a (pre-Capitalist) tempered patriarchy. (It would have been strange for her to deny this since both Feudalism and the Church were patriarchal in character.) So, while Federici's account advances beyond De Beauvoir, it, too, presupposes the patriarchy in order to explain the victory of patriarchy. 

And, third, and finally, it is notable that the developments she describes coincide with the growing influence of representative and elective institutions first in important towns and guilds, and, eventually in the nation-states and within (protestant) Churches. These representative institutions are almost uniformly gendered (propertied) male. Federici misses this point because she is only interested in what she calls 'workers democracies' (pp. 46-49) that resisted these representative organs. And this point can explain a peculiarity that her account notes but cannot explain (although predicted by Olympes de Gouges in 1791): that modern patriarchy was further developed and ultimately perfected under conditions of mass male democracy.+

 

On Providence, Siedentop and The Re-Invention of Liberalism (III);

It would be a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential of the growth of sovereign authorities, that royal ‘absolutism’ which came to the fore during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For it contained the seeds of individual liberty. By claiming a monopoly of legal authority, sovereigns deprived many traditional attitudes and practices of legal status. What royal commands did not positively enjoin or forbid, defined – at least potentially – a sphere of choice and personal freedom.
Of course, full awareness of the model of society entailed by the claim of ‘sovereignty’ did not develop overnight. Even the late sixteenth-century French theorist of sovereignty Jean Bodin wavered over the nature of the unit of subordination entailed by the claim. Yet the time of Thomas Hobbes, in the next century, the distinctive nature of the claim to a sovereign authority was made clear, not least by Hobbes’s referring to sovereigns as secular deities.

There is one final, formidable piece of evidence about ‘inventing the individual’ available. It comes from what remains the most reliable source about social change, language itself. If we look at the word ‘individual’ in historical dictionaries of the English or French languages, we will find that it first became current in the fifteenth century. The word ‘state’, with its stipulation of a sovereign authority, became current at about the same time. And that is no accident, for the meanings of these two words depend upon each other. It was through the creation of states that the individual was invented as the primary or organizing social role.--Larry Siedentop, (2015) Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, p. 347 [HT Bart Wilson]

The quoted paragraphs are the conclusions of the central argument of Siedentop's book (that I have discussed here and here). This central argument includes two strains: first, that more than a millenium of organized Christianity created, inspired by Paul's commitment to a fundamental species of equality, entities capable of being (self-)accountable individuals with interiority, including conscience and choice. Second, the ways in which canon laws developed a notion of sovereignty (first papal, then copied by other authorities) that created a system founded on the "belief in fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system." (332) This formal equality of status is compatible with political hierarchy. For, the highest authority of such a legal system is the sovereign, which both originates law and resolves tensions in the law. The roots of canon law can be found in monastic reform movements that developed the work ethic, a democratic sensibility, and, most important, the idea of corporate life founded on consenting and voluntary association.

Siedentop is repeatedly explicit that his protagonists often do not intend nor foresee the liberal outcome of their actions (e.g., 3, 104, 197, 218, 239-240, 316,). Siedentop is  fond of unintended consequence explanations. More strikingly, many behaviors and outcomes are explained by Siedentop, by the operation of "tacit" motive/intuition/commitment to fundamental equality (e.g., 68, 123, 186,2 281) or the claims of an independent moral/spiritual order (220, 227); throughout the text such implicit understandings later become "explicit" (e.g. 252, 258, 273-6).  The problem with implicit claims is not just that their full meaning is left vague, but that their social telos is indeterminate. 

Okay, with that in place, let's consider Siedentop's claim that "it would be a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential of the growth of sovereign authorities, that royal ‘absolutism’ which came to the fore during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For it contained the seeds of individual liberty." Before I criticize it, I want to acknowledge what is right about this. That is, (reall) liberalism arose as an ameliorative project in opposition to the state as developed on the ruins of feudalism. That is, originally liberalism is a mitigating project in response to state absolutism and mercantilism. And I grant, Siedentop that as a moral and political project liberalism is much indebted to Christianity (although I noted how he eliminates all traces of Judaic influence).* Now I want to make three substantive points.

First, what is peculiar about Siedentop's argument is that while it would be indeed "a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential" he finds it extremely difficult to acknowledge any tyrannical potential in the legal and conceptual structures whose unfolding history he describes. I already noted his peculiar treatment of the inquisition: this he treats primarily as a legend (362), even though its existence was real enough to rest on shaky juridical foundation (288). The rhetorical implication of this last move is to prevent anybody from using the existence of the institution of the inquisition as evidence against his main argument.  At no point does Siedentop even acknowledge the crimes of the inquisition. When, in fact, the existence of true crimes are acknowledged -- see Charlemagne's mass murder of the "pagan Saxons" or his combat with "Muslims" (155) --, these have nothing to do with Christianity or the main arc of development (which is the unfolding "universality or moral equality"). [I note this because Charlamagne is one of the heroes of the book.] Siedentop has no interest at all, in exploring the role of his ideas when applied to native populations in the Americas. We might agree that Las Casas (who from a liberal perspective is not without problems) is the truer Christian, but is Sepúlveda really not a representative of true Christianity at all?**

Second, there is something very odd in Siedentop's reasoning. What he is saying is akin to the claim that 'it would be a mistake to only see bad consequences of  the emergence of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which caused WWI, not the least because it, in turn, led to WWII, because the alliances contained the seeds of the European Union, which, as we know, is a response to horrors of WWI-WWII.+ More subtly, not unlike Machiavelli (recall), (recall) Rousseau and Kant, he wants to take a bad history and vindicate it in terms of the good-making potential of that history. This is a kind of secular theodicy. I am not against secular theodicy, but it can easily devolve into special pleading.

Now, third, what the existence of this secular theodicy reveals, and what makes it intelligible, is Seidentop's commitment to the (soft Hegelian) idea that the last man of liberalism is the end of history. The seeds of tyranny can be safely ignored if you are confident enough that true liberalism** will prevail. But if liberalism -- qua mitigation and amelioration -- is historically and structurally parasitic on 'the growth of sovereign authorities'  then there is every reason to wonder to what degree the 'tyrannical potential' latent in, and so reproduced by, the liberal order can be successfully contained by liberalism. Even if one grants the existence of a direction to history,  no reason has been offered to think Siedentop's preferred outcome is the final word. He himself recognizes something like liberal implosion in his epilogue.  

I could close here, but I want to note one final conceptual omission in Siedentop's narrative. Throughout the book Siedentop moves and toggles between the first two central arguments, that is, (a) the invention of moralized interiority and (b) "belief in fundamental equality of status." And I have noted the similarity between his argument and Nietzsche's (who never gets mentioned). But a key Nietzschean component of the genealogy of modern individuals is missing from his argument. For, the belief in fundamental equality of status, while being compatible with other forms of social hierarchy, is also presupposed by another world-historical and older than Christianity social institution: contractual, financial debt. It is no coincidence, after all, that liberalism first presents itself in the form of a contract theory. 

On Siedentop and The Re-Invention of Liberalism (I)

Thus, even before Augustine’s ‘city of God’, Christian apologists were invoking ‘the country of God’ to assert the claims of the individual conscience. Such claims of conscience seemed to follow irresistibly from the assumption of moral equality. Equality, choice and responsibility hung together in their minds. Irenaeus repeatedly insisted on this as early as the mid-second century: ‘God’s just judgement falls equally on all men, and never fails.’
If God has created humans as equals, as rational agents with free will, then there ought to be an area within which they are free to choose and responsible for their choices. Identifying such an area was at first a means of self-defence by Christians. But soon it was also more than that. Tertullian saw clearly the implications of Christian moral beliefs. ‘Here lies the perfection and distinctiveness of Christian goodness,’ he argued. ‘Ordinary goodness is different; for all men love their friends, but only Christians love their enemies.’ Respecting a range of freedom of choice in all humans might be seen as one aspect of the latter.
The suggestion that belief in ‘equal liberty’ appeared in early Christian apologetics will surprise many and irritate some. For the-anticlericalism which has been an integral part of liberal historiography does not lend itself to such a conclusion. Besides, the distrust of anything like teleological explanations in history – of what is often called the Whig interpretation of history – reinforces such scepticism. But texts are facts. And the facts remain. In the mid-second century Irenaeus of Lyon asked, ‘what new thing did the Word bring by coming down to earth?’ For Tertullian, writing only a few decades later, the answer was clear. ‘One mighty deed alone was sufficient for our God – to bring freedom to the human person.’ Larry Siedentop (2014) Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, 77 [HT Bart Wilson]

Jacob Levy's Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom starts with a footnote to Siedentop's work. The name was unfamiliar to me, but I made a mental note to check it out some time. So when, a few weeks ago, Bart Wilson asked me if I had read Siedentop's Inventing the Individual and what I thought of it, I decided to to read the book (now done). As regular readers know (recall), I think the second wave of liberalism has ended, and so it may be useful to take stock of how liberalism was re-conceptualized, even re-articulated, by those on the precipice of imminent collapse. 

Before I get to re-conceptualization, let me do one paragraph summary. The key idea behind the book is that "Christian moral intuitions played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism." (359) Strikingly, the book ends well before the invention of either 'modern liberalism' and 'secularism.' Rather it is a fascinating attempt to offer a somewhat schematic, genealogical development of western Christianity from Paul to Ockham, as the unfolding of the articulation of key moral intuitions in which we are invited to recognize the shape of future liberalism and secularism. Although Nietzsche is never mentioned, the simplest version to describe one strain, the ethical strain, of the book is that it takes the sardonic and satirical unmasking account of the Genealogy of Morals, and endorses that account with a lot more historical and conceptual detail than Nietzsche had offered. There is also a juridical, political strain which aims to show that the development of canon law and the papal conception of sovereignty prefigure structural features of political liberalism. Along the way, the invention of the institutionalization of the work ethic is attributed to the cluniac reform movement. 

Okay, with that in place, let's turn to the character of the individual and liberalism Siedentop offers, and to start conveying why I find this book highly problematic. For a book on the invention of the individual, it is refreshing to see Petrarca, Luther, Montaigne, and Descartes nearly entirely ignored.*  This is deliberate: Siedentop is not interested in and rejects what he calls the "cult of individuality" which he associates with the Renaissance. (337) He contrasts the individual as a moral notion (originating in Paul's Letters) rooted in ontology (fleshed out by Ockham) with the cultivation of self as an aesthetic project he associates with Renaissance humanists. The true individual is interior and, in its reliance of conscience, in some sense independent of society; whereas for Siedentop the 'cult of individuality' depicts the (false) "individual as the 'victim' of social pressures and heroism as resistance to such pressures. Social institutions were presented as a threat to  the self." (337)

Let's leave aside Siedentop's embrace of Whig philosophy of history. As regular readers know, I have no right to that criticism. I have defended the legitimacy and utility of teleological explanations (of history) in print. My criticisms of Siedentop's historiographical practice will be from the perspective of a teleological fellow traveler. And not unlike him, I have (recall on Petrarca) reservations about the Renaissance expressions of individuality.

Even so, it's worth asking in light of the attack on the 'cult of individuality' what's so liberal about Siedentop's individual. Siedentop identifies "classical liberalism" with the commitment to ‘equal liberty’ which "rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others." (361)  It is no surprise that Kant is acknowledged as a kind of end-point of the narrative, (p. 107, 359), although somehow Siedentop forgets that this agent is ideal, not flesh and blood.  Even so, let's stipulate that equal liberty understood in this fashion is a core commitment of liberalism.

Yet, something more than our fallen human nature is missing here. Siedentop somehow skipped On Liberty (and Orwell's essays), and so the threats of conformism to (civil rights of) the individual and the ways in which even lofty moral ideals can turn into oppressive group think seem to elude Siedentop entirely.

Of course, he is not entirely unaware of this. To give a telling example: when the inquisition is first mentioned, briefly, it is obliquely criticized in terms of shaky juridical foundations: "Even writers well disposed to the papacy concede that ‘the juristic principles which the procedure embodied bore hardly any resemblance to those which were commonly accepted and consistently advocated by the papacy itself.’ (288) But the next mention of it (on p. 362) is in terms of the "legend of the Spanish Inquisition." My point in mentioning this is not to re-enforce enmity between secularism and religion -- something Siedentop thinks represents Europe's "civil war" -- (362). But while Siedentop clearly endorses "civil liberty" (262) and judicial safeguards for the accused, he seems to have no interest in the conditions of pluralism. 

This is, in fact, revealed by the snub of  Montaigne, who is described, and rejected as a skeptic (335; 386). Rather than understanding Montaigne's skepticism as one of the antidotes to fanaticism and one of the grounds of an experimental life worth having, it is clearly seen as corrosive of ''conviction" (362).

Thus, although the book begins with offering an attractive picture of Christian experimentation with different forms of life, under the collapsing Roman empire, once we get to Augustine, pluralism is generally presented as unattractive. Pluralism is identified with feudal, legal disorder (253; 256)-- and this is a book that embraces the middle ages as a progressive era!

This is surely deliberate. The acceptance by the 'religious camp' in the centuries after the French revolution of "religious pluralism" is presented as a good thing (360). But this is not because of a commitment to true diversity. For, there is explicitly no room for Islam in Siedentop's vision of Europe (362). Siedentop is alarmed by "born-again" Christianity Stateside. With political friends like these, religion needs no enemies.

That is to say, Siedentop shapes a narrative of the "tradition" of the "West" in the service of developing citizens that have moral convictions such that they can "shape the conversation of mankind" (363--these are the last words of the epilogue). Yet, these convictions are not to be tested robustly by alternative viewpoints.

This is characteristic of the central historiographic failure which is ultimately a failure of imagination. In Siedentop's narrative the tradition is entirely, as it were, homegrown. The emphasis is really on 'Western' in 'Western Liberalism' (except not as far west as Muslim Spain, which is mentioned once as a source of translations of Greek philosophy). The tradition, once understood, is sui generis and has nothing to learn from others; and, in fact, in Siedentop's presentation never learned anything from without. To put my cards on the table, ahead of my next installment, if that un-inquisitive autarchic edifice were the liberal tradition, it is not worth re-animating, But luckily, we find in Siedentop some of the clay for a nobler project.

 

 

Roger Scruton, Roger Crisp, Pollution, and Modernity in Moral Philosophy (I)

When considering Greek tragedy we observe two striking facts: first, that the tragic fault is seen as a pollution, by which others might be contaminated should it not be purged or purified; second, that the situations portrayed arouse the deepest feelings in us, without our really knowing why. Those facts did not escape the notice of Freud, of course, and he gave a contentious explanation of them. In the Greek tragedy we witness the residue of an older form of moral thinking, an archaeological stratum beneath the realm of personal choice. This older form of thinking, which anthropologists, following Mary Douglas, have called the “ethic of pollution and taboo,” sees moral faults as arising as much by contagion as by deed. It emphasizes purity and purification in sexual and familial relations; and it punishes people not by holding them liable for their actions and opening a path to contrition and forgiveness but by casting them out from the community and readmitting them only if some act of purification has changed their status. One might say that the tragic theater takes us into the hunter-gatherer cave, where things long hidden in darkness are briefly revealed, as though by a flash of lightning. The play is an exorcism, arousing fearful spirits, making them briefly visible, and then expelling them in a mystic act of purification. This revisiting of ancient terrors is a part of overcoming them, and it has its equivalent in our own tragic art, as well as our religious rituals.--Roger Scruton (2017) On Human Nature, Chapter 3, 87-88.

In my blogging, I have been unrelentingly critical of Scruton qua public philosopher. But I had never engaged with any of his books, so I figured a Pandemic would be as good a time as any to survey them independently. But a certain weariness made me opt for the shortest one I could find in my local bookshop. On Human Nature offers plenty of grounds of more criticism (not least its insidious way -- because allowing plausible deniability -- of sneaking in homophobia on p. 119), but today's post will bracket polemics. Rather, I want to use Scruton as a kind of useful exemplar of a philosophical mindset that presupposes successful moral progress associated with modernity. I use him because (i) in many ways he is a critic of modernity -- there is a reason conservatives of various stripes eulogized him so favorably --, and (ii) he is willing to use the language of pollution in his own theorizing (see, especially, chapter 4 of On Human Nature). But my diagnosis of Scruton also applies in crucial ways to philosophers that, at first blush, share very little in common with him (such as Roger Crisp). If you are the kind of philosopher whose response to experiencing Oedipus Rex is, 'I don't get the fuss, he was innocent,' I am probably also talking of you. 

Scruton treats examples of the 'ethic of pollution' even when displayed on the for us ancient, Athenian stage as a kind of prehistoric relic, "an archaeological stratum beneath the realm of personal choice." If I were a scholar of Scruton, I would be tempted to explore how Nietzschean Scruton's reading here is, with a society characterized by  law-governed, Apollonian sensibilities, being made to confront and then jointly excise a collective unconscious rooted in our breeding evolutionary history.

I am going to leave that aside. I  stipulate, by contrast, that modernity (and its cognates) itself presupposes a contrast between (a) the extended present, which is characterized by disenchantment and law-governed practices of moral accountability based on choice and (b) a distant past that involves ethic/practices centered on purity/pollution by way of contagion; (c) in which (a) has largely overcome or displaced (b). My account of modernity decouples it from a particular epoch although often people who understand themselves in light of a conception of modernity often think of it as having occurred once.  

In the sense that I am using 'modernity' here, Scruton is unabashedly modern, although unlike most moderns his views are compatible with the thought that different historical epochs instantiate modernity and that modernity may need or require elements of the pre-moderns to be worth endorsing. The more frequent position is that signs of pre-modern thought are disqualifying or grounds of debunking. Here's Roger Crisp commenting (also in 2017) on the piacular form of agent regret:

Could it really be that the nature of our current sentiments depends on the content of moralities far in the past? In fact, it is hard to see how it could not. Patterns of sentiment once established are, as Williams himself notes, hard, perhaps impossible, to uproot, and this certainly appears to have been the case with those in the western tradition involving pollution. As Mary Douglas pointed out long ago, St Paul’s attempt to characterize the Mosaic law as part of the  ‘old dispensation’ and similar moves within the early Church were unable to override the view, strongly supported by sentiment, that bodily states were relevant to ritual. Douglas focuses in particular on the idea of pollution by blood, noting that even the current Roman ritual for purification of a mother probably derives from the kind of Judaic practice outlined above (Douglas 2002, pp. 75–6).
   [Adam] Smith’s view, then, is that the apologies and assistance offered to the family of a person one has unintentionally and non-negligently killed are the modern analogue of an animal sacrifice....The special relation in question [of agent-regret] is most plausibly seen as involving a secularized version of the notion of ritual uncleanliness and pollution. And if we accept this account of the origin of our sense of the piacular in such cases, I take it that many would see it as providing the basis for a debunking argument credible enough at least to put the onus of justification on the defenders of the result-sensitive sentiments in these cases. Roger Crisp, (2017) "Moral Luck and Equality of Moral Opportunity," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 91, p. 13

I happen to disagree with Crisp's analysis of moral luck (he cites one of my papers somewhat dismissively in a note). And, full disclosure, this post is in some sense motivated by a desire to give a kind of counter-diagnosis to his attempt to burden shift. Here I just want to call attention to the way characteristic features of modernity are on display (leaving aside the grip of Mary Douglas and Bernard Williams on Scruton and Crisp). But rather than treating the ethic of pollution as shaped by earlier stage of civilization (hunter-gathering) as Scruton does, it is now treated as a remnant of the Mosaic law. To put this with the aim of being clever: in Crisp's hands, St. Paul and the early Church try to be modern but fail, whereas the "many" today are confident in their modernity.

Now, people who exhibit modernity in the way I have diagnosed always take its existence for granted, as something obvious. They never treat it as a hypothesis worth establishing. (By contrast, I think modernity in this sense is a kind of ideology.) That's peculiar because it is possible that the ethics of pollution/purity track genuine moral phenomena or features of moral phenomenology.  

As an aside, and to signal what I am claiming, from a metaphysical point of view moral pollution/purity is less weird than, say, a personal god or  property dualism, and on par with (more controversially) the existence of persons and human rights. While, perhaps, a personal god has not survived modernity, the others have flourished just fine. Moral pollution/purity track genuine relations between people and their effects (and the causes on people) and the way people relate to the norms of the community they inhabit. 

The claim of the previous paragraph needs to be established by argument. That's for another time. But modernity would be wrong (or an ideology) if the elimination of purity/pollution means not tracking real relations. And then if modernity were true, it would be impoverished. 

That modernity, while true, is impoverished is, in fact, Scruton's position (but not Crisp's). He wants to claim that inter alia "piety, pollution, and the sacred are necessary to us." He goes on to say, "Without transgressing the ontological assumptions of liberal contractarianism, I want to restore the complete picture of the embodied moral agent, as we know this from the literature, art, and religion of our civilization." (133; one wonders who is included in 'our' here.)

Now, this post is quite long already. So, let me take stock. One can reject modernity either by denying (a), (b) or (c). Or one can show that modernity has a function in practice and thought that is, in a sense, not truth conducive (because, say, being ideological). So, in a series of pandemic-era posts, I am going to argue that we, who are reminded of the significance of contagion,  may never be modern. 

 

Is Agamben Entirely Wrong?

In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian National Research Council (NRC), according to which “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.”

It continues: in any case “the infection, according to the epidemiological data available as of today and based on tens of thousands of cases, causes light/moderate symptoms (a variant of flu) in 80-90% of cases. In 10-15%, there is a chance of pneumonia, but which also has a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. We estimate that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy.”

If this is the real situation, why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to create a climate of panic, thus provoking a true state of exception, with severe limitations on movement and the suspension of daily life and work activities for entire regions?

Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate response.

First and foremost, what is once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm. The executive decree (decreto legge), approved by the government “for reasons of hygiene and public safety,” produces a real militarization “of those municipalities and areas in which there is at least one person who tests positive and for whom the source of the infection is unknown, or in which there is a least one case that is not connected to a person who recently traveled from an area affected by the contagion.”

Such a vague and indeterminate formula will allow [the government] to rapidly extend the state of exception to all regions, as it is practically impossible that other cases will not appear elsewhere.

Let us consider the serious limitations of freedom imposed by the executive decree:

1. A prohibition against leaving the affected municipality or area for all people in that municipality or area.
2. A prohibition against entering the affected municipality or area
3. The suspension of all events or initiatives (regardless of whether they are related to culture, sport, religion, or entertainment), and a suspension of meetings in any private or public space, including enclosed spaces if they are open to the public.
4. The suspension of educational services in kindergartens and schools at every level, including higher education and excluding only distance learning.
5. The closure of museums and other cultural institutions as listed in article 101 of the Statute on cultural heritage and landscape, and in executive decree number 42 from 01/22/2004. All regulations on free access to those institutions are also suspended.
6. The suspension of all kinds of educational travel, in Italy and abroad.
7. The suspension of all publicly held exams and all activities of public offices, except essential services or public utility services.
8. The enforcement of quarantine and active surveillance on individuals who had close contact with confirmed cases of infection.

   It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year.

   We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.

The other factor, no less disquieting, is the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.

Therefore, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to satisfy it. Agamben 26 February, 2020, translated Positions Politics.[HT Omri Boehm]

Agamben's essay has provoked virulent responses. For example, writing in the Chronicle, Anastasia Berg claims it reveals "the dressing up of outdated jargon as a form of courageous resistance to unreflecting moral dogma." In his beautiful essay (which I quoted approvingly last week), Justin Smith writes, "Agamben is pushing a species of Trumpian doubt-mongering by claiming that the “disproportionate reaction” to the pandemic is nothing more than an assertion of authoritarian biopolitics. Honestly, at this point whoever’s left of the vanguard of continental philosophy should probably just start hawking men’s vitamin supplements on late-nite TV." Berg, too, treats Agamben "like a bemused Fox News anchor."

As regular readers know, I find thinking with Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Judith Butler especially useful complements to my analytical training in reflecting on the extended political present. I do so not because they are especially good pundits nor because I agree with them -- they would find my liberalism if not dangerous than ridiculous --, but because they help me discern beyond the limitations of my commitments. If my past blogging has not convinced you of the utility of this, cést la vie. By contrast, I have kept my distance from Agamben because I find his theological frameworks and obsession with Schmitt less fruitful. Even so, in reading the responses to Agamben, one wonders if Corona-virus isn't being treated as the opportunity to rid the world of certain kind of intellectual pathogens.* And part of me thinks 'good riddance, too.' But this digression is written from the perspective of the part that does not.

The first thing to notice is that Agamben relies on scientific authority. And he is wise enough to treat its position in conditional terms: "If this is the real situation." To put matters simply: Agamben was not so much irresponsible. So unless he was cherry-picking, he was an unlucky pundit relying on a mistaken epistemic authority. "The National Research Council (Cnr) is the largest public research institution in Italy."  So, to assimilate him to Fox and late-nite TV is simply unfair. The collapse of the medical system in Lombardy was simply not foreseen the end of February. 

As an aside, I don't mean to suggest one should never doubt respectable epistemic authority. As Eric Winsberg and I argue in the New Statesman about the present context, when the relevant application of the science is not quite sorted out -- say, due to lack of high quality data/evidence --  or when the moral and political trade-offs that are undertaken with the backing of authoritative science are not made transparent, it can be necessary to be critical of even the best science of the moment.  By February, and a regular traveler, I was baffled by the lack of action by European authorities to test for and control the spread of the virus in the light of the news from Wuhan.

Second, as Berg admits, and Yuval Noah Harari points out in a wise essay in the Financial Times, policies that may well be justified in and by an emergency are often very hard to undo. So, there is nothing wrong with Agamben's instinct to warn against the actions of the Italian government (and others). Just this month the (2001) Patriot act was renewed, again, for 77-days.

Third, Agamben may well be right that the pandemic will be the "pretext" to pass a lot of legislation. But rather than being evidence of political dishonestly or a "growing tendency to rely on the state of exception" this is actually evidence of quite ordinary politics. Parliamentary politics is the art of what it is possible; and when people are afraid or attentive -- both the natural response to a pandemic -- a willingness to compromise and get things done is likely. A crisis creates openings to shift coalitions and lines of alignment. This is why ideas like basic income and debt jubilees have moved from the fringe to the center. What would be helpful is a means to distinguish new policies that foreseeable advance and entrench the politics of fear from those that do not.**

Now, one may think I am charging Agamben with a kind of confirmation bias. That the real problem with Agamben's approach is that he is in the grip of his own paradigm to see in every response confirmation of his claim that "once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm." (Bold in original.) The confirmation bias is also visible Agamben's follow up piece: "the first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life."

As Berg notes this is not so "obviously shown." One may understand people's responses  "not for the sake of our bare life, and indeed not for the sake of the bare life of others, but out of an ethical imperative: to exercise the tremendous powers of society to protect the vulnerable, be they our loved ones or someone else’s." Even so, Berg misses Agamben's point. The emphasis is not on bare life itself, but on the claim that "our society no longer believes in anything." Lurking in Agamben's essays is a Nietzschean claim about nihilism.+

If art, philosophy, culture, and even freedom seem of negligible importance in pandemic times than our attachment to them may seem to a certain mind a mere luxury. If our authentic selves are revealed in time of scarcity and danger, and if, then, we show little concern to such higher things we are revealed as puny, cowardly animals.  To such a mind the Hobbesian response to this, that commodious and generous living is only possible once the sovereign creates security, begs the question. Agamben's indictment is that in a crisis we reveal ourselves as last men all too willing to submit to Leviathan.  

One can feel the pull of both Hobbes and Nietzsche, and still note that this is a false dilemma in the moment. During the last few weeks I am noticing a heightened need and hunger for the arts and philosophy. Wonderful artistic responses have circulated to the oddly shared experience of confinement in social media (see here for my personal favorite). I have participated in the poem exchange started by anonymous. And undoubtedly somewhere a religion is starting that provides a re-evaluation of values. That is to say, we can outwardly submit to authority, political and scientific, to make at least short-term coordination possible. While inwardly and simultaneously embrace the arts, philosophy, solidarity, and even the critical spirit of freedom.

 

 

Seneca's Letter 46: On Living in an Age of Lies

1. I received the book of yours which you promised me. I opened it hastily with the idea of glancing over it at leisure; for I meant only to taste the volume. But by its own charm the book coaxed me into traversing it more at length. You may understand from this fact how eloquent it was; for it seemed to be written in the smooth style, and yet did not resemble your handiwork or mine, but at first sight might have been ascribed to Titus Livius or to Epicurus. Moreover, I was so impressed and carried along by its charm that I finished it without any postponement. The sunlight called to me, hunger warned, and clouds were lowering; but I absorbed the book from beginning to end.

2. I was not merely pleased; I rejoiced. So full of wit and spirit it was! I should have added "what force [quid impetus!]," had the book contained moments of repose, or had it risen to energy only at intervals. But I found that there was no burst of force, but an even flow, a style that was vigorous and chaste. Nevertheless I noticed from time to time your sweetness, and here and there that mildness of yours. Your style is lofty and noble; I want you to keep to this manner and this direction. Your subject also contributed something; for this reason you should choose productive topics, which will lay hold of the mind and arouse it.

3. I shall discuss the book more fully after a second perusal; meantime, my judgment is somewhat unsettled, just as if I had heard it read aloud, and had not read it myself. You must allow me to examine it also. You need not be afraid; you shall hear the truth. Lucky fellow, to offer a man no opportunity to tell you lies at such long range! Unless perhaps, even now, when excuses for lying are taken away, custom serves as an excuse for our telling each other lies!--Letter 46, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).

We learn in the first sentence of this letter that Lucilius is not merely aspiring to wisdom, but also an author. It invites us, thus, to reflect on the transaction between Seneca and Lucilius, and the interest of the latter in Seneca.

In this brief letter, Seneca seems to distinguish among three kinds of reading-styles: (i) tasting a book, which is brief and impressionistic; (ii) immersive reading, which is hurried yet thorough; and (iii) regurgitative reading, which involves re-reading a book. (Seneca compares (ii) with hearing a text.) To over-read a bit: according to Seneca only regurgitative reading -- this reminded me of Nietzsche -- can generate a truth, or at least a truth that can be heard (verum audies).

The last sentence of the epistle alerts us to the larger socio-political context of the exchange. Seneca implies that they live in a duplicitous public culture where the habit of lying is deeply entrenched.* Whether Seneca thinks this is merely a function of Nero's particular rule or the collapse of the republic or politics as such is left obscure. 

Strikingly, Seneca explicitly presents himself as a regurgitative reader who will articulate truth, eventually. But the implicature is, I think, that to hear the truths he will say certain virtues (of the would be audience) must be present: patience, a willingness to re-read and examine carefully, and a certain free-spiritedness [freely reinterpreting, Non est quod verearis]. That is to say, in a letter to a proud author, Seneca is telling us how to be an attentive reader of (his) works. 

Seneca has already made clear that he is writing for posterity (recall Letter 21; Letter 29). But not the first time I note that the beneficiaries of his writings are supposed to be alert to the fact that he expects us to understand that his writings conceal his message from some certain kinds of readers. I mention this not to remind the reader of Seneca's interest in the art of esotericism. Rather, and in particular, he invites us to reflect on how our culture and, thus, our habitual dispositions distort our receptivity toward truth.  

 

Patrick Deneen and The Noble Lie

During one of the more infamous moments in Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that the ideal city needs a founding myth—what he calls “a noble lie”—to ensure its success. The myth has two parts. The first relates that every person in the city comes from the same mother, and thus encourages belief in a common origin and kinship of all the citizens who live in the city. The second relates that every person belongs by birth to a particular class based upon his or her talents and abilities, indicated by a metal gilded upon each soul at birth: gold for the ruling class; silver for ministers, soldiers, and high-ranking servants; bronze and iron for the workers.

Socrates argues that both parts of the myth must be believed by all citizens for the city to succeed. The myth at once seeks to unite and to differentiate, to explain what is common and distinct, to foster civic patriotism amid significant difference. The first part encourages civic commitment, shared sacrifice, and belief in a common good. The second justifies the existence of inequality as a permanent feature of ­human society....If anyone is likely to accept the myth, he suggests, it is the uneducated working class.

...

Unlike Marx, [Plato] did not believe that the members of the lower class would be unlikely to know their own interests. The underclass is likely to accept the myth because they realize it works to their advantage. Its members are keenly aware of the fact of inequality. That part of the “lie” hardly seems false to them. What is novel, and what works to their advantage, is the idea that inequalities exist for the benefit of the underclass as well as the rulers. That is, members with noble metals in their souls are to undertake their work for the benefit of everyone, including those whose souls are marked by base metals. By contrast, members of the ruling class are likely to disbelieve the myth out of self-interest. They balk at the claim that every person, regardless of rank, belongs to the same family. They do not want the advantages that might solely benefit their class to be employed for the benefit of the whole.

Only if each group accepts each part of the “lie,” as Socrates explains, is a kind of social contract achieved. Elites and commoners both accept the part of the myth that does not appeal to them for the sake of the part that does. Elites are distinguished in a society that justifies inequality; commoners are best off in a society that compels service of elites for the whole. Instead of acting as warring parties, both sides work for the good of all. Such a compact is difficult to achieve. 

...

The part of the “noble lie” that once would have horrified the elites—the claim of common kinship—is irrelevant; instead, they resist the inegalitarian part of the myth that would then, as now, have seemed self-evident to the elites as well as the underclass. Today’s underclass is as likely to recognize its unequal position as Plato’s. It is elites that seem most prone to the condition of “false consciousness.”

....

While elites may suffer self-inflicted blindness to the nature of their position, the rest of society clearly sees what they are doing...Our ruling class is more blinkered than that of the ancien régime. Unlike the aristocrats of old, they insist that there are only egalitarians at their exclusive institutions. They loudly proclaim their virtue and redouble their commitment to diversity and inclusion. They cast bigoted rednecks as the great impediment to perfect ­equality—not the elite institutions from which they benefit. The institutions responsible for winnowing the social and economic winners from the losers are largely immune from questioning, and busy themselves with extensive public displays of their unceasing commitment to equality. Meritocratic ideology disguises the ruling class’s own role in perpetuating inequality from itself, and even fosters a broader social ecology in which those who are not among the ruling class suffer an array of social and economic pathologies that are increasingly the defining feature of ­America’s underclass. Facing up to reality would require hard questions about the agenda underlying commitments to “diversity and inclusion.” Our ­stated commitment to “critical thinking” demands no less, but such questions are likely to be put down—at times violently—on contemporary campuses.

....

From the vantage of nearly 2,500 years, Plato’s noble lie doesn’t appear to be a falsehood after all. For a society to function, two seemingly contradictory beliefs must be simultaneously held: We are radically different and radically alike. We are extensively differentiated yet bound together. We are called to sometimes radically unequal tasks, but those tasks are part of an effort to benefit the whole. Plato thought the “fact of difference” would be easy for people to acknowledge, since it is so evident to our senses, if not always easy for those in a position of lower status to accept. The challenge was how to achieve belief in a common origin and shared kinship. TheRepublic of Plato was one effort to answer that challenge, if a fairly absurd and implausible one (as Socrates readily admitted). 

....

So long as liberalism was not fully itself—so long as liberalism was corrected and even governed by Christianity—a working social contract was possible. For Christianity, difference is ordered toward unity. For liberalism, unity is valued insofar as it promotes difference.....

The new aristocrats believe we have transcended the need for Christianity, which they regard as a myth no less mendacious than Plato’s noble lie. They believe that by dispelling the old myths, they can become the vanguard of an ever more equal society. They blind themselves to the fact that this claim is a form of status maintenance, allowing denial of a deeper commonality with those they regard as benighted and backward. Elites denounce the “populists” while denying that they have fomented a class war. They deplore the obnoxiousness of Donald Trump, perfectly obtuse of their complicity in his ascent.

We are in uncharted territory. Liberalism coexisted with Christianity for its entire history, with Christianity moderating the harder edges of the regnant political philosophy, supporting forms and practices that demanded from elites the recognition of their elevated status, and hence, corresponding responsibilities and duties to those less fortunate. The thoroughgoing disdain and dismissiveness of today’s elites toward the working class is a reflection of our newfound “enlightenment,” just as is the belief among the lower class that only a strong and equally disdainful leader can constrain the elites. Liberalism has achieved its goal of emptying the public square of the old gods, leaving it a harsh space of contestation among unequals who no longer see any commonality. Whether that square can be filled again with newly rendered stories of old telling us of a common origin and destination, or whether it must simply be dominated by whoever proves the strongest, is the test of our age.--Patrick Deneen, "The Ignoble Lie" First Things.

I recently read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, and wanted to do a short piece on his claim in that book that liberalism today is in the grip of a noble lie that is serving the interests of elites at the expense of the have-nots; in Deneen's version the elites are deluded while the have nots see clearly. But I had left my copy at the office and instead found a version of his argument at First Things online. While the diagnosis is roughly the same between the book and the blog post, it is worth noting that in the book Deneen reads as an echt-Burkean -- distinct from the pseudo-conservatives who peddle national greatness and global markets --, who advocates a kind of withdrawal from politics in favor of small scale communal living (there are a lot of fond references to the Amish and even counterculture experimentation) while in the blog post he read as an angry Thomist who would, it seems, like to see the return of Christianity to its place of domination in the public sphere. I don't mean to suggest the two sides must be in contradiction with each other, or that Deneen is speaking in split tongues, but the distinct rhetoric is striking. (Here's another one: in the book the present-to-be-lamented-emphasis on diversity is traced back to Madison; in the blog Madison is dropped, and diversity is treated as a modern evil located in silly campus activists.) I also do not mean to imply that the historical Burke would reject national greatness and global markets!

But for my present purposes the differences between blog-Deneen and book-Deneen are irrelevant. For his account of the noble lie is fairly consistent between the two. I agree with Deneen one can encounter in elite social circles, rich folk in the grip of purported self-justifying meritocracy and victim blaming. (It is a bit peculiar that in the blog, but not the book, he seems to extol Charles Murray whose whole business-model turns on this.) But that fact is not to be confused with liberal self-understanding.

In particular, he seems to miss entirely -- and I think this is a great irony -- that his diagnosis of the modern noble lie echoes John Stuart Mill's in the introductory chapter 1 On Liberty. There Mill had argued (recall) that in conditions of domination/subordination, ruling ideologies will tend to favor the self-interest of the ruling classes. In so doing they corrupt the moral sentiments of the ruling class and even pervert how they treat each other. Deneen and Mill agree about this. In addition, Deneen and Mill agree that the lower classes see through the delusion. The one key difference is that Mill seems to suggest that the lower classes are, despite their knowledge, corrupted by becoming servile. Whereas Deneen suggests they turn to socialists and authoritarians. 

That is to say, and Deneen is oblivious to this, liberalism is quite capable of a truthful self-understanding of its own condition as an ideology that accommodates ruler-ship, while simultaneously recognizing that it needs to be committed to ameliorating the conditions that give rise to its rule while simultaneously reinforcing it. In my view this idea is also fully present in Adam Smith, who thought (recall) that property rights protect the rich from the indignation of the poor but that such a system would also benefit the poor. And while this does no justice to Rawls' arguments it is a pretty vulgar, but no less true, interpretation of the difference principle. In fact, once one pays attention to this feature of liberalism it is quite entrenched in the tradition.* 

So,  the more interesting fact is that for all his animus toward liberalism, Deneen can't see that the roots of his very critique is itself grounded in some of the best features of the liberal tradition. That is, the very terms by which Deneen proposes his criticism of liberalism is part of a historical dialectic generated by liberalism, and fully anticipated by the thinking branch of liberalism. In fact, in the book his solutions echo the Smithian strains in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. What I am hinting at is that liberalism's understanding of progress also foresees the kind of reactions Deneen exhibits. 

What to make of this is a harder question. As regular readers know I am not complacent about the future of liberalism. And once I return to the office, I want to use the more perceptive elements of Deneen's diagnosis of liberalism to help articulate our challenge today. But here I close with a kind of puzzle and a further thought: it is a notable fact that some of the most strident and most intelligent enemies of liberalism since, say, Carl Schmitt (recall) have a tendency to treat it as rank stupidity. This is a shame because liberals and even the most skeptically liberal educators have always recognized that we need our critics. Which is the true reason -- and not some deference to Christianity -- our cannon (from Plato to Nietzsche) is, well, so illiberal.

On the Philosophical Attack on Heritable Intellectual Rank

If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, – that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods....[a] noble mind is free to all men; according to this test, we may all gain distinction. Philosophy neither rejects nor selects anyone; its light shines for all. Socrates was no aristocrat. Cleanthes worked at a well and served as a hired man watering a garden. Philosophy did not find Plato already a nobleman; it made him one. Why then should you despair of becoming able to rank with men like these? They are all your ancestors, if you conduct yourself in a manner worthy of them; and you will do so if you convince yourself at the outset that no man outdoes you in real nobility. We have all had the same number of forefathers; there is no man whose first beginning does not transcend memory. Plato says: "Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors." The flight of time, with its vicissitudes, has jumbled all such things together, and Fortune has turned them upside down. Then who is well-born? He who is by nature well fitted for virtue. That is the one point to be considered; otherwise, if you hark back to antiquity, every one traces back to a date before which there is nothing. From the earliest beginnings of the universe to the present time, we have been led forward out of origins that were alternately illustrious and ignoble. A hall full of smoke-begrimed busts does not make the nobleman. No past life has been lived to lend us glory, and that which has existed before us is not ours; the soul alone renders us noble, and it may rise superior to Fortune out of any earlier condition, no matter what that condition has been.

Suppose, then, that you were not a Roman knight, but a freedman, you might nevertheless by your own efforts come to be the only free man amid a throng of gentlemen. "How?" you ask. Simply by distinguishing between good and bad things without patterning your opinion from the populace. You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend. --Seneca, Letter 44 Translated by Richard Mott Gummere.

In Morgenröte, Nietzsche treats the invention of Darwinism as the undoing of heritable grandeur, "This however has now become a forbidden path for the ape stands at its entrance and likewise other fearsome animals grinning knowingly as if to say: no further this way!" But as Seneca reminds us, one does not need Darwinsim to make the argument. There are five  key features of Seneca's argument: first, the argument relies on a distinction between what we may call history and pre-history (or the unreliable past). If you think this distinction is too anachronistic, recall this post, prompted by Adrienne Mayor, on the  nature of deep time in Ancient Greek thought. Because of the existence of pre-history, the origin and hence purity of no lineage is secure. This, second, relies on the idea that a noble-making character of the lineage is essential to the lineage and gets handed down through the lineage. The existence of pre-history makes all lineages epistemically suspect hostage to fortune.* In addition, third, and this is more of an empirical claim, what we know of human nature, all lineages will contain the ignoble. Fourth, he relies on the idea, one we have seen him develop through all the Letters, that there is no property right in the truly noble. While his sages have a certain amount of individuality -- given their differing circumstances -- the noble, which instantiates the infinite, lacks individuality (recall letter 3).

Finally, and fifth, he relies on the idea that superior qualities can be caused by a chain of inferior qualities. This point is notable because it goes against the idea -- familiar to modern readers from Descartes's Meditations (but often associated with a species of Platonism) -- that what is more perfect — that is, contains in itself more reality — cannot arise from what is less perfect. But Seneca clearly thinks this would involve one in a kind of genetic fallacy (You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend.). While the past is full of excellent exemplars, natural genealogy has no special status 

Seneca here anticipates the Hobbesian and Smithian idea that one is not a philosopher by nature, but that one is made into a philosopher. From this vantage point all are noble [omnes...hoc sumus nobiles] or at least capable of attaining it.+ (This is a core commitment of what I call methodological analytic egalitarianism) Now, as David Levy and Sandra Peart always insist to me, that a Stoic is in some sense a radical egalitarian is no surprise (given the known radical strain of early Stoicism--I warmly recommend René Brouwer's book). But Seneca insists that the point can also be found in Plato. This is a bit more surprising because while Plato is not Aristotle (think natural slaves/rulers), Plato tends to be associated with the idea that there is a hierarchy of human types (and  philosophers can be bred accordingly). Sometimes Plato presents  as thinking that natural hierarchy can be irrelevant politically or morally (see this post for some of these claims). This got me curious about the passage quoted by Seneca. (A helpful note by the translator directed me to the Theatetus): 

Hence it is, my friend, such a man, both in private, when he meets with individuals, and in public, as I said in the beginning, [174c] when he is obliged to speak in court or elsewhere about the things at his feet and before his eyes, is a laughing-stock not only to Thracian girls but to the multitude in general, for he [like Thales] falls into pits and all sorts of perplexities through inexperience, and his awkwardness is terrible, making him seem a fool; for when it comes to abusing people he has no personal abuse to offer against anyone, because he knows no evil of any man, never having cared for such things; so his perplexity makes him appear ridiculous; and as to laudatory speeches [174d] and the boastings of others, it becomes manifest that he is laughing at them—not pretending to laugh, but really laughing—and so he is thought to be a fool. When he hears a panegyric of a despot or a king he fancies he is listening to the praises of some herdsman—a swineherd, a shepherd, or a neatherd, for instance—who gets much milk from his beasts; but he thinks that the ruler tends and milks a more perverse and treacherous creature than the herdsmen, and that he must grow coarse and uncivilized, [174e] no less than they, for he has no leisure and lives surrounded by a wall, as the herdsmen live in their mountain pens. And when he hears that someone is amazingly rich, because he owns ten thousand acres of land or more, to him, accustomed as he is to think of the whole earth, this seems very little. And when people sing the praises of lineage and say someone is of noble birth, because he can show seven wealthy ancestors, he thinks that such praises betray an altogether dull and narrow vision on the part of those who utter them; because of lack of education they cannot keep their eyes fixed upon the whole and are unable to calculate that every man has had countless thousands of ancestors and progenitors, among whom have been in any instance rich and poor, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks. And when people pride themselves on a list of twenty-five ancestors and trace their pedigree back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, the pettiness of their ideas seems absurd to him; he laughs at them because they cannot free their silly minds of vanity by calculating that [175b] Amphitryon's twenty-fifth ancestor was such as fortune happened to make him, and the fiftieth for that matter. In all these cases the philosopher is derided by the common herd, partly because he seems to be contemptuous, partly because he is ignorant of common things and is always in perplexity. Plato Theaetetus translated by Harold N. Fowler. C 

Regular readers know I have a minor obsession about the representation of Thales at the origin of philosophy (recall here; here; here; here); even in scholarship, and also here). And so re-reading this familiar passage -- which so clearly articulates the tense relationship between philosophy and ordinary opinion/commitments [i call that the Socratic Problem; see here]-- in light of Seneca came as a shock to me. For, indeed, Socrates here ruthlessly attacks the idea of nobility by birth as alien to a truly philosophical mind.+ And Socrates' argument anticipates Seneca's in claiming that all lineages are impure: the products of mixture and extremely long chains themselves the product of fortune.*

Seneca, of course, invokes Socrates and Cleanthes as intellectual exemplars. And he implies that Socrates supports his argument that it is constitutive of philosophy to reject inherited social distinctions, including ones based on ethnicity, as relevant to evaluations of philosophical distinction.** I am inclined to think Seneca is right here. And so while there are original sins in the Platonic tradition of philosophy -- its hostility toward rustic wisdom is one --, its known origins (see what I did there?) also point the way toward some noble commitments. 

 

On Books and Strangers in Libraries and the Tube

Yesterday, in the tube, I was reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel). It's a long book, and despite a teenage infatuation with Narziß und Goldmund, I have been ambivalent about reading any more Hesse. (I intensely disliked Siddhartha, which I read in college, and Der Steppenwolf, which I could not finish.) Despite my misgivings about Hesse, I had bought it in paperback last year because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's  recent (and excellent), Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here).

I enjoy letting me reading habits be shaped by the quiet recommendations of fellow scholars. While I was contemplating the silent web of allusions that connect the formation of my library, I realized that I had stopped reading and was starting at the angelic infant quietly sitting across from me. Or to be precise, I was following his (her?) gaze as s/he explored the confined surroundings of our subway car. I wondered if joint attention really was involuntary.

My silent reveries were interrupted by a pleasant voice diagonally across from me, who informed me that I was reading an excellent book. I looked at her, and said, thank you for that encouragement, I had been uncertain I would finish it. She said resolutely, it gets better the more you read of it. I looked down at my copy, I was on page 154, and wondered at what page I would surrender myself over to the book's life-world. When I looked back at the lady, she had reverted back to the resolute norm not to make eye-contact with anybody in the tube. Before I was aware of what was happening, the angelic infant was dragged out of the tube at Camden Town. 

I had noticed before that the book I would read could attract some comment from other, otherwise resolutely no eye-contact passengers. And once, while exiting the tube at Westminster, I had been given a book I had inquired about over my protests. My benefactor cut my off, as the doors shut, with a compelling I work for Penguin, I will treat this as a marketing expense.

While waiting for the elevator that would take me from the underground level to the exit, I noticed a guy reading Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. I had seen him on my ride into town earlier in the day; we had been compelled to leave our train, when, while "being held to regulate traffic" at Chalk Farm (I love the name of that station), it was changed from the Morden via Bank to the Morden via Charring Cross line.

I felt a strange excitement to see one of my favorite books being read (recall)  on the London Underground (twice in a day no less). I suddenly understood the pleasant voice's desire to share. So, I mentioned to dude, that's a great book, I hope you are enjoying it. He responded without hesitation, I dislike science fiction, but it was my reading group's choice and so far I am enjoying it. For no apparent reason, while we were entering the elevator, I decided to volunteer, I love teaching her in my utopia/dystopia classes. I could see he was eyeing the book I was holding, Where do you teach, he said with surprise, while I was as subtly as possible trying to make it impossible for him to catch the title of the book. I did not want to talk about Hesse.

I am writing this a day later in the British Library just as a patron sits down next to me with a big pile of books including Stormtrooper Families by Wackerfuss. My friend Jeff Bell coined the term heterobibliophilia, to capture the particular form of scholarly voyeurism when one peek at the books and manuscripts on tables temporarily vacated by other scholars taking a break in the library (recall also this post). I am suddenly grateful that the no-eye-contact-rule norm is even stronger in the British Library than in the tube.* 

As the elevator went up, and we were making small-talk, his eye caught Hesse, and he said with real warmth, as I knew he would, I loved Narcissus and Goldmund. I admitted that my once favorable views on it had changed for the worse a long time ago. At the street corner we were about to part; he firmly shook my hand and said, I am Ned, it was a pleasure. I took it, and said, same here Ned; I am sure we'll bump into each other again. And then, remembering he had mentioned his name, I said, while he was letting go of my hand, I am Eric.

I had not expected Ned's handshake. I looked at my book vaguely guilty for badmouthing Hesse to strangers. As I crossed the street I sensed betrayal to the anxieties and confusions of my teenage self. And yet...through Hesse I had discovered Nietzsche, and through Nietzsche a philosophical journey had opened itself up to me. To mock Hesse meant to mock the chain of causes that got me here. So much for living by amor fati! 

The rain was pouring down Heath strait; I rushed home.