Digressions&Impressions

On Patočka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of José Benardete

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Perhaps because I recognize in myself a warmth toward Spinozism, but I am always inordinately pleased when I can recognize and act on the play of chance. After a raucous pub lecture to the members of student-club of the political science department (aptly named Machiavelli) in the Amsterdam red light district, I received Jan Patočka' Living in Problematicity -- a slim volume of essays (selected and translated by Eric Manton) -- as a gift with a touching inscription from a former student. I knew that Patočka (1907-1977) was a philosopher and a courageous co-founder of Charta 77. His clandestine discussion groups and his lectures at the under-ground university are legendary. I had never read anything by him, although his work is becoming increasingly accessible in English.

Yesterday, while in transit, I read "Platonism and Politics," which is a very short meditation on Bendas' La Trahison des clercs (1927; often translated as: The Treason of the Intellectuals); recall this post). Because in preparing a syllabus for a class on conservatism, I had stumbled on a 1944 note by T.S. Eliot engaging with Benda, I had just been musing about the use of Benda by contemporary intellectuals -- I tweeted this on june 4 (and no, Tweeting is not Thinking) -- so this post was born.

I don't mean to suggest I randomly muse about Benda. As regular readers know, I write in a philosophical tradition that feels entitled to be unlearned. And so in our controversies over 'public [facing] philosophy' and 'responsible speech' we end up repeating, over and over again, the same trite clichés without any sense of embarrassment. And this lack of shame is, of course, characteristic of a modern clerisy (in Benda's sense). Since I am a blogger, feel free to read this as self-indictment. Okay, so much for set up.

Now, for sociological reasons I do not fully understand, while Benda is wholly unknown inside my tradition, he does repeatedly get invoked in relatively serious public essays. With the help of Google, here's a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:

• Mark Lilla December 7, 2021 Tablet Magazine (taken from his intro to a re-issue): Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in 20th-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority.... he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.

• Elie Kedourie, August 1992, Commentary: The phenomena against which Benda was writing were much more visible in France than in England or the U.S. There was no movement here comparable to the Action Française in its intellectual prestige or in its spread within the academy and among the intellectual classes....But in today’s English-speaking world (as indeed in today’s France), we do now see a political commitment within the academy having to do neither with the character and definition of the body politic nor with the class struggle.

• George Monbiot, 14th May 2013, the Guardian: In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars) act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political “realism” by upholding universal principles. “Thanks to the scholars,” Benda maintained, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.”.. the need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores. 

• Antony Julius (reviewing Berman), May 14, 2010, The New York Time: The masterwork, however, is still ­Julien Benda’s “Treason of the Intellectuals.” This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line....For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds. 

I listed these because each of these essays is worth reading as a window on their own polemical moment as well as a kind of an evolution of a meme/trope. What's notable here is the subtle shift in character among what Benda was supposedly inveighing against: political engagement by intellectuals; academic activists/political commitment; a betrayal of universal principles understood as disinterestedness; a betrayal of universal principles in the service of nationalism. I don't mean to suggest there is a mystery here: each essay has slightly different polemical contextual target(s) and so each also subtly rejigs Benda to their own local political-polemical ends (including, in the case of Lilla, criticizing Benda). That's what intellectuals do, after all, right? In general, on a left-right axis, the left-intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals serving power and moneyed-interests, while the right-leaning intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals who serve some (what we now call) social justice cause. All sides (correctly) invoke Benda when criticizing a nationalist-friendly intellectual, unless it's their own nation and they are prudently silent.

Now, what I like about Patočka's little essay (it’s shorter than some of my digressions) is that he inscribes Benda in a debate over the reception of Platonism (or "true philosophizing in general"), and to what degree what one might call the possibility of serving a certain (spiritual) kind of 'higher calling" (in the sense of Republic 487a to which Patočka appeals explicitly) associated with it (but rooted in philosophy), is still possible after Nietzsche (who goes unmentioned) and his death of God (which is intimated in various ways) in modern conditions. In context, it's clear that this Platonism is associated with an interesting mélange of Plato and Husserl. I quote from Manton's translation to give you a sense of what he has in mind:

The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one’s life. Thus Plato’s political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the “object” of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order.

Now, I am not interested here in trying to trace each of these claims back to Plato or, by contrast, to appeal to contemporary scholarship to show that any of this is only in a very attenuated sense to be found in Plato. Rather, let's stipulate with Patočka that this captures something of a familiar ideal. For Patočka, Benda's book raises two-fold question: the first is the Nietzschean one, is this ideal dead? The second-fold is, does the ideal “exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives?" Judging by the essays linked above, the answer to the first is: yes. And to the second, no. As Patočka suggests, Platonism so conceived "can only live where those vital hypothesis discussed above on which Platonism is built also exist."

Now Patočka is clear that his conception of Platonism is itself political in a higher sense (familiar, (recall) I hasten to add from Plato Republic,  592ab), although he gives a humanist spin on it (this is the debt to Husserl whom he quotes). Interestingly enough, for Patočka this entails that the impact of philosophy in life is "the permeation, gradually and usually distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness." This turns Platonism into a kind of Enlightenment project, despite the fact that philosophy itself is "a matter of the few." And, in fact, Patočka calls for a kind of 'new Enlightenment' ground in a new actualization of Platonism, while simultaneously criticizing what we might call the idol of collectivism. (I wouldn't be surprised if the essay were mined by biographers who see in it a prefiguration of his later courage under Stalinism with Czech characteristics.)

For, Patočka (who thinks Benda is confused on the proper task of intellectuals and the role of Platonism in this higher sense) what Benda get right (we might say) ‘formally’ is that proper myth, that is not falsehood but rather "an imaginative vestment of truth," is a useful instrument in the permeation of these concepts and for those (collectives) who do not wish to live a spiritual life. The main point of Patočka's essay is to call attention to the need for myths that express or manifest 'poetical, philosophical yearning.' The Spinozist in me understands this yearning, and Patočka grasps what makes Benda's diatribe so enduringly fascinating.

For Patočka the task of the clerisy is to use myths to help spread this new Enlightenment. This is not far removed (as I argue in this lecture) from how my friend José Benardete understood his task in his book on Infinity (although as always with José there are complications), so if you want an example of how this is supposed to work in the hands of a metaphysician go read it. I could stop here.

Interestingly and surprisingly enough, T.S. Eliot of all people, ridicules Benda: "Benda, as I remember, seemed to expect everybody to be a sort of Spinoza." In context, it's clear that Eliot's 'everybody' is 'every member of the clerisy.' Now, I lifted this sentence from the 1944 piece, which as a subtitle has ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy;" one of the questions Eliot asks in it is (unsurprisingly given that subtitle) what is the function of the clerisy. One of the proper functions of the intellectuals for him is to promote the right sort of change: "the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an influence for change." This leaves underspecified what change they promote, but it is at least sometimes compatible with Patočka's position.

In addition, according to Eliot it is, thus, inevitable that the clerisy ends up in conflict with the forces that defend the status quo: "To some extent, therefore, there is, and I think should be, a conflict between class and clerical elite." Eliot tacitly here presupposes that the ruling class is change averse. But even ruling classes can promote change if they think it will benefit them--this is something quite familiar in our own time; it does not follow we can always identify whether the clerisy is betraying its true vocation.

As I have hinted above, Eliot decouples the function of the clerisy from a higher calling. I don't mean to suggest he completely decouples it because for him "The clerisy can help to develop and modify [culture]; they have a part to play, but only a part, in its transmission." And presumably Eliot, who is no stranger to Platonism, does think that a culture might have a connection to a higher calling. In fact, when it does, then 'culture' just means an imaginative vestment of truth. Fair enough.

Now, Eliot recognizes a form of pluralism that Patočka finds difficult to accommodate (although it is compatible with his Platonism). For intellectuals share in being outcasts, and "are apt to share a discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they want to change them will be various and often completely opposed to each other." And while it is tempting to say that the opposition is merely over means (again compatible with Platonism), it is, of course, not impossible that the disagreement is also over ends which begins to look incompatible with Platonism if the unity of the virtues is broken as Eliot himself suggests in the remainder of his notes (and hard to disagree with in 1944).*

However, this all must seem rather quaint. Ours is not an age that wishes to gamble on a revitalized humanism. The transgender-wars take place when capital and the heirs of the once noble tradition of the radical philosophers are betting on transhumanism. Even the very idea of a human right, let alone a culture in the bildung sense assumed by Eliot is suspect. Talking about culture without naming the social sins on which it rests seems also a real betrayal of humanity. No high minded stance seems to be able to survive scrutiny.

But it is no better that the poetical, philosophical yearning(s) are met exclusively by hucksters, or worse. And if Platonism is wholly exhausted, what now? And while I dislike the word ‘problematicity,’ perhaps, if you follow me on this substack voyage, this is the question, if it is a single question, we must answer or the ‘problematic’ we must resolve.

• This first appeared at: <On Patočka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of José Benardete (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*See especially his treatment "clerical small fry, we have what is called the intelligentsia...in Cairo and such places."

 

Again, Foucault, Kuhn, Carnap and Incommensurability

Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ‘unsound mind’: ‘obstinate plaintiff’, ‘has obsessive recourse to legal procedures’, ‘wicked cheat’, ‘man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy’, ‘bill poster’, ‘great liar’, ‘gruff, sad, unquiet spirit’. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ‘gruff’, or to diagnose a ‘deranged mind inventing its own devotion’ as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.

And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Bargedé was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ‘treated like the other insane’. His principal occupation was 

lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133

In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.

To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139).  My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).

My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!) 

So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures). 

In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:

The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130

For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis'). 

I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori. 

Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche. 

So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy. 

 

 

Weber, Bellamy, and Burnham on Power and Truth

In contrast to these older forms, modern bureaucracy has one characteristic which makes its inescapability much more definite: rational specialization and training. The Chinese mandarin was not a specialist but a gentleman with a literary and humanistic education. The Egyptian, Late Roman or Byzantine official was much more of a bureaucrat in our sense of the word. But compared to the modern tasks, his were infinitely simple and limited; his attitude was in part tradition-bound, in part patriarchally, that means, irrationally oriented. Like the businessman of the past, he was a pure empiricist. The modern official receives a professional training, which unavoidably increases, corresponding to the rational technology of modern life. . . . Whenever the modern specialized official comes to predominate, his power proves practically indestructible since the whole organization of elementary want satisfaction has been tailored to his mode of operation. A progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoretically conceivable. . . . What would be the practical result? The destruction of the steel frame of modern industrial work? No! The abolition of private capitalism would simply mean that the management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic. Are the daily working conditions of the salaried employees and the workers in the state-owned Prussian mines and railroads perceptibly different from those in big business enterprises? In truth, there is even less freedom since every struggle against a state bureaucracy is hopeless and since, in principle, nobody can appeal to an agency which would be interested in limiting it, contrary to what is possible in relation to a private enterprise. That would be the whole difference.

State bureaucracy would rule alone. The private and public bureaucracies which now work next to, and potentially against, each other and hence check one another to a degree would be merged into a single hierarchy. This would be similar to the situation in ancient Egypt, but it would occur in a much more rational and inescapable form.--Max Weber (1917) excerpted in State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology, edited by R. Bendix, p. 301-302.

Richard Bellamy partially quotes the passage on p, 193 in his excellent (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society: A Historical Argument in his chapter on Max Weber. (Recall my more critical post here.) While Bellamy's book is not obscure it is somewhat unfairly rarely mentioned in the contemporary revival of so-called 'political realism.' The chapter on Weber and the critique of late twentieth century what he calls "neutralist liberalism" are both very nicely done and repay close reading. My favorite feature of Bellamy's book -- and the aspect that has not lost any significance at all -- is Bellamy's close attention to liberal thought in the context where survival of liberalism cannot be taken for granted (something true, I hasten to add, of liberalism everywhere and at all times).

Bellamy quotes the passage from Weber in the context of explaining Weber's views on the significance of the balancing of counter-veiling bureaucracies in industry and state in the service of Weber's larger argument against a fully planned economy. And it shows how prescient Weber was relative to Marxist revolutions to come. But also, that after the first world war, as well as the development of the cartelization of the German economy (something Lenin had also commented on), Europeans had already sufficient experience with the nature of (at least partially) planned economies to understand some of its structural political and economic weaknesses. I return to that below.

It is kind of amusing - in light of the recurring tendency in our philosophical self-understanding to treat empiricism as something noble and sophisticated --  that Weber identifies 'pure empiricism' with a kind of irrational orientation toward reality to be contrasted with a (modern) skilled control over one's environment in the context of the advanced division of labor (and rule-following). To what degree his comparative account of bureaucracy can survive scholarly scrutiny I leave to others. But it is important to see that for Weber modernity is characterized by the omni-presence of bureaucratic organization. It is an interesting question to what degree modern information technologies allow for a de-skilling of the bureaucracy (in the private and public sectors). 

Now, in the quoted passage, Weber clearly anticipates Burnham's thesis defended in the Managerial Revolution (and in a different way, Galbraith). I don't recall Burnham crediting Weber. I don't mean to suggest that Burnham plagiarized Weber; it's pretty clear that they were both familiar with Mosca, Pareto, and Michels (who work through related ideas). But Weber turns their diagnoses into an argument for maintaining the market as a site of countervailing powers. And this anticipates the ORDO-liberals' emphasis that while power in the marketplace is dangerous (and certainly to be guarded against) it can also be a partial check on state power (even if it also increases danger of rent-seeking). I don't think these passages suggest that Weber 'idealized capitalist relations to a certain extent' (a partial concession Bellamy makes to a criticism by Marcuse) because Weber's analysis relies on a kind of 'least bad' style argument.

Thus, Weber grasps -- and again this makes his analysis all the more salient today -- that relatively unchallenged and unaccountable rule by technically sophisticated administrators can itself be a species of despotism (which anticipates, again, the Hayekian attack on Saint Simonism as much as it does Graeber & Wengrow). And part of the despotic nature of pure rule by the technically sophisticated bureaucrat is that she does so in the name of, and drawing on, rationality. And it is incredibly difficult to oppose reason without looking and becoming irrational. (This is all the worse if the reason the bureaucrat is instantiating understands itself as ethical.) Again, this is all quite prescient.

Interestingly enough, Weber does not slide into conservatism (away from liberalism) and the valorization of elite rule (familiar from Burnham and his followers), but rather -- as Bellamy emphasizes --, into thinking about the ways in which institutions and procedures can redistribute power and to allow for at least a "plurality of competing values in society" (Bellamy 1992: 216). That is, such plurality of competing values is both an effect of the advanced division of labor and competing interests and, in turn, a means to check any ideal from becoming an oppressive ideology. Rather than, for example, promoting a marketplace of ideas as a means toward consensus/truth, the marketplace of ideas becomes another vehicle for permanent disagreement (anticipating Mouffe and Berlin to some degree) and a check on power that presents itself as truth. This is, of course, Foucault's great theme.* 

 

Foucault's Historicism and Societies reconsidered

By "archeology" I would like to designate not exactly a discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following: in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores—all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society. This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning [des connaissances] that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a pracctice. Thus, in order for the big centers of internment to be opened at the end of the seventeenth century, it was necessary that a certain knowledge of madness be opposed to nonmadness, of order to disorder, and it’s this knowledge [savoir] that I wanted to investigate, as the condition of possibility of knowledge [connaissance], of institutions, of practices.

This style of research has for me the following interests: it allows me to avoid every problem concerning the anteriority of theory in relation to practice, and the reverse. In fact, I deal with practices, institutions and theories on the same plane and according to the same isomorphisms, and I look for the underlying knowledge [savoir] that makes them possible, the stratum of knowledge that constitutes them historically.--Michel Foucault in an interview with Raymond Bellours which appeared in Les Lettres françaises (1966) reprinted as "The Order of Things" in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics: Essential Workks 1954-84, translated by John Johnston but slightly amended by the editors of the reprint, pp. 261-262.*

In general I dislike quoting from interviews with authors commenting on their own work. But I do so here because it very nicely captures a feature of Foucault's commitments (one that does not disappear in his late lectures) that I would like to discuss. (In the interview, Foucault himself goes on to contrast what he does with what Sartre does, so I am not doing justice to his own intentions here.) This feature is known within philosophy as a kind of historicism or even organicism.  By 'historicism' I mean here the idea that an age has certain fundamental characteristics in common and that these help define what we might call its unique nature. 

Now in the passage, Foucault relies on a distinction that in English turn out to track two kinds of knowledge, but for my present purposes I am going to leave aside possible confusion(s) about this. For I am only interested in his account of savoir, which is the common, condition of possibility that makes possible "practices, institutions and theories" (etc.) of a particular age. This is the deep structure, one might say, that makes  a particular kind of (as my former teacher, Jody Azzouni explores in his work) semantic perception possible. That is, under savoir just fall the material and formal (etc.) conditions that make, say, certain practices and theories (etc.) intelligible as possible explanations, possible causes, etc. 

To be sure, if one is in a grip of certain kind of monisms -- that truth just is what Tarski called the 'classical conception' or that causation just is counterfactual dependence (etc.) -- the previous paragraph is a certain kind of relativistic gibberish to you. That's fine. I am not interested here in defending relativism. I would deny that it is gibberish or unintelligible. But if you can't get your head around it, that's fine, too.

Now, Foucault's Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, is an exploration of  the relationship between the two kinds of knowledge in a particular age (which can last for a couple of centuries), as well as the transformation of this relationship from one age to the next, as well as the different contents of both kinds of knowledge in different ages, especially as manifested in different number of what one might call 'human sciences.' One of the effects of this study is that one becomes aware that what counts as a 'science' is itself, in part, structured by or the effect of the underlying stratum. (Again, if one is in the grip of a particular kind of monism then, of course, the idea that different sciences can differ in fundamental character may well be a bit weird.) I like Foucault's approach because it makes visible the fondness accross an age's sciences for say, fixed point theorems, or equilibrium models (etc.) that generate a certain family resemblance among domains of (say) expertise.

My interest here is not in the methodological question of how one can make visibe something implicit that is in a way, simultaneously, an absence from the material one studies. In the qouted passage, Foucault himself hints at one of his techniques; he looks for the effects of certain fundamental contrarieties (in his corpus) and explores how these have certain epistemological, pragmatic, or even generative features that these contrarieties have in common. Unlike the Straussian, for whom the tacit is the true message, for Foucault the tacit is the source of a kind of social unity (to be explained below).

As an aside, it is worth noting, and perhaps this is illuminating to some degree (if not skip this paragraph), that the underlying structure, which one may well think of as a kind of relativized a priori, has certain features in common with the place of a ding-an-sich in Kant's critical philosophy or natura naturans in Spinoza's. That is, in the substratum contrarieties co-exist and rather than being a source of falsity or nonsense, they are productive in  the domains that are conceptualized from or built on them. As I said, if this paragraph is mysterious, please skip it.

From a political perspective, it is interesting that Foucault treats philosophical ideas and everyday opinions as on par (and on the same side of the divide). He explicitly rejects, for the purposes of archeology, the Platonic, Madisonian, Arendtian (etc.) contrast between the domains of truth and  the domains of opinion. But he does not alert his audience to the significance of this rejection. (Later in the interview, when he returns to the status of philosophical ideas, as edifices, he ignores this political distinction, but contrasts these with the kind of playful 'subphilosophies' studied in history of ideas; that is, the contrast between Kant and Fontenelle.) Foucault himself, quite clearly wants to reject the priviliging of theory over practice (see p. 262). 

And the reason I am alert to a kind of (philosophical-)political perspective here, is that Foucault uses the terminology of a 'society' to characterize the kinds of intellectual eras he is interested in. Or to be precise: it seems that within the domain of what Foucault calls an archeology, a society is constituted by different practices, texts, institutions that have a common stratum that makes their unity possible.

For Foucault, societies understood in this way (as a kind of partially invisible structure that makes semantic perception possible, and a certain kind of commonality that infuses the practices of an era), have an origin, a flourishing and endpoints. And the archeologist of society points at, and makes visible to some degree, the structures that are a condition of possibility of a society. Importantly, while societies derive their unity from the lower stratum (savoir), which I playfully compared to a kind of ding-an-sich in character, they (that is, societies) are nothing over and above the practices, institutions, and disciplines that constitute them (or that express this unity).

From a metaphysical perspective one may well wonder if such societies really are compatible with the nominalism (even partial skepticism) one may also discern in Foucault. But here I close on the political question one can ask about the structures delimited by Foucault: to what degree are Foucaultian societies spontaneous orders or are they the partially foreseen effect of certain kind of (intellectual) legislators (what I sometimes call, 'philosophical prophets')?

To be continued.

Parfit, Long Termism and Existential Risk: and Nietzsche's Fearless ones.

Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life’s work? Before the recent past, very few. In most civilizations, most people have believed in the existence of a God, or of several gods. A large minority were in fact atheists, whatever they pretended. But, before the recent past, few atheists made Ethics their life’s work. Buddha may be among this few, as may be Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life’s work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:

(1) Peace.
(2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing population.
(3) A nuclear war that kills 100%.

(2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater.
My view is held by two very different groups of people. Both groups would appeal to the same fact. The Earth will remain inhabitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.
One of the groups who hold my view are Classical Utilitarians. They would claim, as Sidgwick did, that the destruction of mankind would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes. The badness of this crime would lie in the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness.
Another group would agree, but for very different reasons. These people believe that there is little value in the mere sum of happiness. For these people, what matters are what Sidgwick called the ‘ideal goods’—the Sciences, the Arts, and moral progress, or the continued advance towards a wholly just world-wide community. The destruction of mankind would prevent further achievements of these three kinds. This would be extremely bad because what matters most would be the highest achievements of these kinds, and these highest achievements would come in future centuries.
There could clearly be higher achievements in the struggle for a wholly just world-wide community. And there could be higher achievements in all of the Arts and Sciences. But the progress could be greatest in what is now the least advanced of these Arts or Sciences. This, I have claimed, is Non-Religious Ethics. Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.--Parfit (1984) Reasons and Persons, Section, 154. "HOW BOTH HUMAN HISTORY, AND THE HISTORY OF ETHICS, MAY BE JUST BEGINNING"

After my rant went viral this past weekend, Richard Pettigrew reminded me that if I really want to understand the intellectual roots of contemporary long-termism I can't ignore the last two pages of Reasons and Persons, quoted in full above. (Strictly speaking these are not the last two because the appendices are not wholly irrelevant, especially the material on social discounting.) And my hypothesis was that it would help explain, perhaps, something of the evident sectarianism that longtermism generates in its adherents. And when I returned to this material, I was, of course, immediately struck by the choice between 99% vs 100% extinction. And I started to think of objections.

But I hope you will forgive me if I step back first. For, I noticed that the hypothetical extinction scenarios are introduced with, and framed by, an implied contrast between [A] "Non-Religious Ethics" and Religious Ethics. The first oddity here is that the contrast is not drawn in the linguistically more accurate contrast between atheist ethics and theistic ethics (which in turn comes in monotheistic and polytheistic versions). Embedded in this contrast [A] is another explicit contrast (non-trivially indebted to Kant's "What is Enlightenment?") between [B] the "free development of moral reasoning" and the unfree development of moral reasoning (found in so-called 'Religious Ethics). And this, in turn, is connected to the contrast between [C] young ("recent past") and old ("more than a thousand years" etc.), which turns out to track [D] a contrast between the possibility of "greatest progress" and proven failure. And, again, this is connected to the contrast between [E] the "very few" and the very many. In addition, there is an implied contrast between [F] (a pacific) "a world-wide community" and the state of nature among nation-states. This, in turn is linked to the fact, [G] there is a to be hoped for possible consensus which contrasts with our existing cacophony. There are, finally, two further connected contrasts: (i) there is a contrast (again echoing Kant) between [H] irrational hopes (characteristic of superstition) with rational (or at least not irrational) hopes, and (ii) [I] the contrast between knowledge (of the past) and uncertainty (of the future).

As a two-fold aside, first, Parfit explicitly leaves open -- one need not be Straussian about this -- that this last contrast [D] may involve the practice of esoteric speech or dissembling: "A large minority were in fact atheists, whatever they pretended." One wonders what grounds this 'in fact.' And second, it is interesting that Parfit treats Buddha and Confucius as possible exemplars of this practice of pretending. To the best of my knowledge (and I know slightly more about the case of Confucius) this idea was popular in the wake of Bayle's linking of Spinoza to both Confucius and Buddha. (I have no idea if Parfit gets it directly or indirectly from Bayle, but in Bayle, too, we find the linking of these matters to esotericism.) And my guess is that Bayle shaped some of the orientalist tropes that helped found the study of comparative civilizations in the late nineteenth century.

I don't mean to suggests that nine-fold contrast [A-I] is exhaustive. Nearly all of these contrasts are not argued for in Parfit's book. (Please feel free  to correct me!) Such a list of contrasts is characteristic of what I call 'philosophic prophecy' by which I mean the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers is aided by rhetorical or literary imagery that shapes the reception of (more rational) arguments and thereby can shape possible futures. And I would have given you a more detailed explanation of this claim in light of the typical nature of philosophic prophecy.

But then I noticed something remarkable. In the quoted paragraphs, Parfit is treating the 'death of God' as a world-historical thesis which gives ground to the greatest possible (non-irrational) hopes. This is a feature and not a bug because it also informs the very plausibility of Parfit's rather dramatic claim that the gulf between (2) and (3) is larger than the gulf between (1) and (2). (For a certain kind of theist this would be question begging.)

That the death of God is a world historical event -- in part for its effect on morality -- is a thesis associated with Nietzsche. And one of its canonical formulations is in Nietzsche's Gay Science, Book V, section/aphorism 343. So, it is no surprise -- although it shocked me -- that this very aphorism supplies Parfit with the epigraph to his book:

At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘Open sea.

Parfit's epigraph also evokes the end of Book I of Hume Treatise as well as a famous passage of Socrates in Phaedo 99c–d, and all three cases (just like in Parfit) the very nature of philosophy, and its future, can be said to be at stake. Parfit himself reminds of his affinity with them in a passage in the book, "I would far prefer to have lived through the previous two and a half centuries, having had among my friends Hume, Byron, Chekhov, Nietzsche, and Sidgwick." As it happens Gay Science, Book V, section/aphorism 343 also is one of the texts that gave me idea of the existence of philosophical prophecy (since in it Nietzsche describes two kinds of such prophecy).

Crucially for present purpose is Nietzsche's attitude toward the rather grim immediate future: "This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling, destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who has realised it sufficiently today to have to stand up as the teacher and herald of such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a period of gloom and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken place on earth before?" Nietzsche feels not "sympathy" with the victims of history, "but rather like a new and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment, encouragement, and dawning day? ... In fact, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the "old God is dead"; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation." (If you are shocked by this God is not dead for you.) In Nietzsche the price of progress is destruction of the old order so that we can breed (either culturally or genetically, i leave that aside) higher kind of men.

Now, notice that Parfit gives a classical utilitarian and elitist (that is, Nietzschean) argument for why 3 is worse than 2.* But that's not sufficient for his argument. He also needs to offer an argument for why 3 being worse than 2 is itself worse than 2 being worse than 1. But no such argument against "most people" is given. (I have some sympathy for the idea that philosophy is not a democracy.) We only receive an explanation for why total extinction (3) is worse than (2). And I do not think Parfit has an argument that is non-question begging because it presupposes the unfolding (as of yet "uncompleted") Death of God, that is, a kind of rational faith or hope that once completed will become self-evident. Among the fruits of this hope are the captains of longtermism.+

 

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.