Digressions&Impressions

On Hazony vs Kirk, and original sin in modern conservatism

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony treats Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind as "the most important book by a postwar American conservative." (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; the fourth; and, fifth, on Hazony’s critique of Meyer here.) In particular, Hazony notes that "Kirk’s account of the Anglo-American tradition is in many respects similar" to his. They both praise Burke and the American Federalist party, although with important differences lurking in the latter to which I return below. 

Now Hazony draws out four important areas of overlap between his own conservatism and Kirk's. I quote Hazony:

Kirk emphasized that, for conservatives, (i) “custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power”—although they also recognize that “prudent change is the means of social preservation.” Conservatives regard (ii) religion as indispensable, including “belief in a transcendent order” and the recognition that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” They see that (iii) “freedom and property are closely linked,” and that the attempt to eliminate “orders and classes” from society could only end in tyranny. And they view human life as (iv) a “proliferating variety and mystery” that cannot readily be reduced to universal formulas. Kirk regarded these principles as being given voice, most importantly, by Edmund Burke in Britain and by John Adams and the Federalist Party in America.

So far so good. Hazony adds that "Kirk made a magnificent start to reinvigorating the Anglo-American conservative tradition in America," (emphasis added.) This 'start' clearly implies there is unfinished business. In fact, Hazony also thinks that on two issues Kirk drove Anglo-American conservatism in the wrong direction: "The first is Kirk’s emphasis on regional traditions."

In fact, while Kirk opts for John Adams, Hazony has a clear fondness for Hamilton. This shapes a dramatically different view of the content of American nationalism they are willing to defend. Kirk sees in Hamilton an aggressive "empire-builder." I return to this below.

And the "second, more serious problem with his historiography" is to be found in Kirk's "diligent efforts to retrieve what was supposedly worthy in Southern political thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for defending chattel slavery [which] was a mistake from which American conservatism has not yet entirely recovered." What ties the two together is Kirk's unwillingness to see "some local traditions" as "morally questionable." Hazony clearly suspects Kirk is a moral relativist and because of that incapable of criticizing slavery. I return to Kirk's attitude toward slavery below.

As an aside, there is also another line of criticism of Kirk in Hazony: that is centered on Kirk's willingness to participate in fusionism, which for Hazony entails "nothing other than the view that one should be a liberal in one’s political commitments, and a Christian in private." I also return to this below.

Now, it is worth noting that one important reason Kirk admires Burke is that he understands Burke's role in the Hastings affair as a defense of Indian local customs; Hastings "had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India." In fact, throughout The Conservative Mind, Kirk is scathing of (utilitarian) liberal imperialism which imposes uniformity on subject peoples. While critical of Macaulay, he admires "Burke's reforms" because they "were intended to purge the English in India from the diseases of arbitrary power and avarice, to secure to the Indians their native laws and usages and religions." So, it is not surprising that Hazony reads Kirk as a moral relativist of sorts.

But I don't think that's the right reading of Kirk for two reasons (the second being more important than the first). First, Kirk thinks local customs ought to be defended if and only if they involve sincere, socially inherited religious creed because the contents of which are principles of political and social order (see (i-ii) in the passage quoted from Hazony above). But he also thinks Christianity is the superior religion. I quote a passage in which Kirk attributes this precise view to Burke (without dissenting from it): "Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers." So the problem with civilizational, imperial liberalism (of the sort familiar from J.S. Mill) is that it lacks understanding of a proper political art of ruling according to Kirk. Violently suppressing existing religion just opens the door to a kind of social nihilism. Kirk's stance is not an expression of moral relativism, but of political prudence.

As an aside, while Kirk is a firm critic of liberal and other homogenizing imperialisms (including "the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy"), and thinks that "generally imperial expansion is full of risks for any conservative society" it is sometimes defensible. In context he is, for example, not uncritical of Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, while the whole book is a frontal attack on really existing home-grown American imperialism, I read The Conservative Mind as a call for a reformed more prudent imperialism. About that some other time.

If he understands Christianity as the highest religion, then Kirk is not a moral relativist. The key teaching of Christianity is for Kirk the existence and ineliminable fact of original sin. It’s probably the most important concept in The Conservative Mind. As Kirk puts it, in the context of discussing Irving Babbitt’s views, “The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.” And before you stop reading here, there is something important worth salvaging from this position.

While Hazony is not adverse to using 'sin' and its cognates, 'original sin' is not part of Hazony's moral vocabulary in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery whereas it is the key organizing principle to Kirk's social philosophy. For, one of the crescendos of The Conservative Mind is Kirk's admiration for Nathanial Hawthorne's "chief accomplishment: impressing the idea of sin upon a nation which would like to forget it." In fact from a political perspective, we also find in this account one of Kirk's most important commitments. He praises Hawthorne's realization "that projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; that the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us; that the fanatic improver of mankind through artificial alteration is, very commonly, in truth a destroyer of souls." (emphasis added.)*

Kirk's focus on original sin also qualifies to what degree he thinks one should be a Christian merely in private. As the previous paragraph suggests he very much believes that the devil within must be tamed by all social institutions working in tandem. And while this is compatible with a privatized Christianity, it does not require it and probably works better with a more robust public Christianity according to Kirk. Kirk is an admirer of various forms of Catholic social theory and a critic of certain strands of individualizing Protestantism. One may see in Shklar’s liberalism of fear a liberal attempt to struggle with Kirk’s diagnosis.

Be that as it may, at this point one may grant that I have provided considerable reason to allow that Kirk was no moral relativist. But in a way, one may think, this makes Kirk's obtuseness on slavery worse. So, Hazony is right to reject Kirk.

Before I continue: a reminder to the reader unfamiliar with my writings that I view myself as on-looker in the debates among conservatives. My own interest in these is primarily understanding and also a curiosity if anything can be learned from conservative self-reflection and understanding. I am not an impartial spectator, but I am also not an advocate for conservatism. Okay, having said that, there is something in Kirk worth paying attention to especially, alas, in the bits that are most egregious to our moral sensibility.

Now, it is true that Kirk claims that "we shall try to keep clear here of that partisan controversy over slavery." And he does so because he is eager to discuss "those conservative ideas which Randolph and Calhoun enunciated." One may well think that Hazony is right that such bracketing is a moral disaster and, when it comes to Randolph and Calhoun, impossible, if only because Randolph and Calhoun themselves tend to bring the issues together.

As it happens, Kirk is rather critical of Randolph and Calhoun and their support for slavery. He writes, "the slavery controversy confuses and blurs any analysis of political principle in the South: the historian can hardly discern where, for instance, real love for state sovereignty leaves off and interested pleading for slave property commences. Both Randolph and Calhoun deliberately entangled the debate on tariffs (at bottom a question of whether the industrial or the agricultural interest should predominate in America), and the debate on local liberties, with the debate on slavery; for thus they were able to rally to their camp a great body of slave-holders who otherwise might have been indifferent to the issues at stake." So, he recognizes that his own bracketing is not the political strategy pursued by Randolph and Calhoun.

Now, a skeptic of my interpretation might suggest that while Kirk clearly admires local liberties, it is not obvious he rejects slavery. But he goes on to claim explicitly: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." This is not a local relativist speaking, or a friend of slavery. In fact, later, when discussing John Quincy Adams (of whom Kirk has no particular fondness), he adds that "he was right in detesting slavery."

Kirk also recognizes that Randolph and Calhoun were at least in part motivated to defend slavery (although Kirk also thinks that Calhoun was aware of the dangers of slavery). But Kirk thinks "one may lift" their ideas "of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day." That is, Kirk explicitly allows that the origin of some conservative ideas is highly immoral, but (with a nod to the genetic fallacy) that that they can do good work in a different context.

This is a highly unpopular position today. In our political culture tracing contemporary views to bad previous political positions (slavery, eugenics, imperialism, racism, etc.) has become a sure route to disqualifying the opposition. And again, I don't mean to defend Kirk's blinders. He seems to lack warmth for the plight of the slaves, and is not much perturbed by racism. But if you are all in on original sin it is no surprise to find bits of wisdom alongside awful commitments—and I have some sympathy toward this methodological stance.

Kirk also clearly detests Northern abolitionism as species of fanaticism. He seems to be attracted to views he associates with President Franklin Pierce that hoped that slavery would wither away by itself. But that's because Kirk thinks the civil war was an outright disaster, and that it set up the subsequent disasters of failed reconstruction and what he considers the stupidity of Jim Crow. I wouldn’t want to endorse this position; but not seeing the civil war as a disaster is also problematic. (Of course, on my view the disaster should have been avoided by getting rid of slavery beforehand!) So, Kirk understands himself as objecting to the means (war) not the goal (getting rid of slavery).

Underlying Kirk's position is a decoupling of the institution of slavery from mercantile war-mongering nationalist-imperialism. By contrast a liberal would see in slavery and imperialism the same side of a mercantile coin. Slavery is clearly a transient institution for Kirk (and, again, this position also seems informed by a reprehensible lack of warmth toward the plight of slaves), but for him nationalist imperialism is a permanent temptation for democracies in which our nature is not properly tamed. In fact, Kirk understands the opportunities for a revived conservatism as a response to the revulsion engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he sees the atom bomb as a possible trigger for much needed moral awakening.

Kirk diagnoses war as the opportunity for destructive hubris and nemesis as much as it is the site of the growth of central planning and uniform, leveling standardization. For Kirk Hiroshima is the natural outgrowth of the valorizing of war. (Kirk is not a pacifist; he accepts the need of war for defensive ends.) For Kirk, slavery is, thus, not America's original sin; rather it is the (Hamiltonian) embrace of expansive genocidal militarism centered on an an imperial president.** Hazony, by contrast, while a critic of foreign military intervention, is a friend of (Hamiltonian) economic nationalism and a strong presidency.

On Kirk's view this Hamiltonian position cannot avoid permanent war, which Kirk views as destructive to any higher culture (recall (iv)) worth having. To what degree he is right about this I leave for another time. But since we’re in an age of aggressive and destructive left and right-wing Hamiltonianism, this strain in Kirk seems worth excavating, especially for those who wish to tame our capacity toward evil.

Let me close with some blog house-keeping. As hinted in yesterday’s post, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. Apologies for that in advance. 

• This first appeared at: <Hazony vs Kirk - by nescio13 (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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*This also helps explain Kirk's preference for Adams and his rejection of Hamilton.

**Kirk is never more eloquent than when he quotes Burke's second letter of the Regicide Peace in which Burke links a certain kind of statism to militarism. Having said that, he expresses little interest in American, pre-settler indigenous native cultures.

On Clarke's Criticism of Austrialian Settler Colonialism and his account of intelligence

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at:  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

This digression is devoted to an extended aside in A Fall of Moondust; a slender 1961 novel by Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008). It's easy to forget how famous Clarke once was not just as a science fiction author, but in wider discussions of science policy and search for extraterrestrial life. Anyway, the main action of the book is the rescue mission of a group of passengers on a sightseeing tour on the Moon, who are trapped under a kind of lunar dustbowl caused by a lunar Earthquake. While it plays some role in the development of the genre of 'hard science fiction' (or scientific science fiction), the novel is primarily a study, from multiple angles, of group dynamics and leadership under great stress and time constraints. What's neat is that there is no unique hero in the story, but that many kinds of contributions are valued. But because Clarke's characterizations are flimsy (and marred by gendered stereotypes) it's best read as an adventure story with occasionally comic touches. What follows does not contain any spoilers. 

The novel, which is set in the future, is oriented around a kind of settler-colonial mission to the Moon, and the possibility of developing a tourism industry on it. Clarke leaves the exact political details underspecified, and even the institutional contents of global peace is left unclear (especially compared to his slightly earlier Childhood's End). There is some evidence that the United Nations is politically influential and that some of the balance of power in it has shifted to Africa--we'll see evidence of what one might call 'post-colonial subaltern solidarity' that Clarke expects. (It's the great age of decolonization in which he was writing.) And while there is some evidence that the Soviet Union is culturally significant, the novel offers plenty of suggestions that ordinary market capitalism is not extinguished yet. I leave it at that (some of the evidence is quoted below).

Interestingly enough (given Clarke's own non-fictional views), the possibility of encountering extra-terrestrial life is actually minimized and ridiculed throughout the novel. It’s compared to religion in ways unflattering to both UFOs and religion.

In fact, one natural take-away from the novel is that if technological barriers to space-colonization can be overcome (and it is not obvious it's worth the money and risks), it's much preferable over settler-colonization on Earth. And the reason I say this is because there is a set-piece about 2/3rds of the novel, when -- during the dramatic action of the novel things have reached a real nadir -- there is an extended conversation between Pat (the captain of the space-bus buried under lunar dust), who we just learn is Lunar born, and McKenzie (who is one of his terrestrial touristy passengers trapped alongside him). I'll quote the passage in full:

 

"...Incidentally, how did you get a name like McKenzie?"

Having had little contact with the racial tensions that were not yet wholly extinct on Earth, Pat could make such remarks without embarrassment—indeed, without even realizing that they might cause embarrassment.

"My grandfather had it bestowed on him by a missionary when he was baptized. I'm very doubtful if it has any—ah— genetic significance. To the best of my knowledge, I'm a full-blooded abo."

"Abo?"

"Aboriginal. We were the people occupying Australia before the whites came along. The subsequent events were somewhat depressing."

Pat's knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened before 8 November 1967, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution had been so spectacularly celebrated.

"I suppose there was war?"

"You could hardly call it that. We had spears and boomerangs; they had guns. Not to mention T.B. and V.D., which were much more effective. It took us about a hundred and fifty years to get over the impact. It's only in the last century— since about nineteen forty—that our numbers started going up again. Now there are about a hundred thousand of us— almost as many as when your ancestors came."

McKenzie delivered this information with an ironic detachment that took any personal sting out of it, but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors.

"Don't blame me for what happened on Earth," he said. "I've never been there, and I never will—I couldn't face that gravity. But I've looked at Australia plenty of times through the telescope. I have some sentimental feeling for the place— my parents took off from Woomera."

"And my ancestors named it; a woomera's a booster stage for spears."

Are any of your people," asked Pat, choosing his words with care, "still living in primitive conditions? I've heard that's still true, in some parts of Asia."

"The old tribal life's gone. It went very quickly, when the African nations in the U.N. started bullying Australia. Often quite unfairly, I might add—for I'm an Australian first, and an aboriginal second. But I must admit that my white countrymen were often pretty stupid; they must have been, to think that we were stupid! Why, 'way into the last century some of them still thought we were Stone Age savages. Our technology was Stone Age, all right—but we weren't."

There seemed nothing incongruous to Pat about this discussion, beneath the surface of the Moon, of a way of life so distant both in space and time. He and McKenzie would have to entertain each other, keep an eye on their twenty unconscious companions, and fight off sleep, for at least five more hours. This was as good a way as any of doing it.

"If your people weren't in the Stone Age, Doc—and just for the sake of argument, I'll grant that you aren't—how did the whites get that idea?"

"Sheer stupidity, with the help of a preconceived bias. It's an easy assumption that if a man can't count, write, or speak good English, he must be unintelligent. I can give you a perfect example from my own family. My grandfather—the first McKenzie—lived to see the year two thousand, but he never learned to count beyond ten. And his description of a total eclipse of the Moon was 'Kerosene lamp bilong Jesus Christ he bugger-up finish altogether.'

"Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon's orbital motion, but I don't claim to be brighter than Grandfather. If we'd been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different-that's all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count; and I never had to raise a family in the desert—which was a highly skilled, full-time job"

Perhaps," said Pat thoughtfully, "we could do with some of your grandfather's skills here. For that's what we're trying to do now—survive in a desert."

"I suppose you could put it that way, though I don't think that boomerang and fire stick would be much use to us. Maybe we could use some magic—but I'm afraid I don't know any, and I doubt if the tribal gods could make it from Arnhem Land."

"Do you ever feel sorry," asked Pat, "about the breakup of your people's way of life?"

"How could I? I scarcely knew it. I was born in Brisbane, and had learned to run an electronic computer before I ever saw a corroboree—"

"A what?"

"Tribal religious dance—and half the participants in that were taking degrees in cultural anthropology. I've no romantic illusions about the simple life and the noble savage. My ancestors were fine people, and I'm not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land."

"They did that? "

"They certainly did. But why are you surprised? That was a good hundred years before Belsen."

Pat thought this over for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch and said, with a distinct expression of relief: "Time I reported to Base again. Let's have a quick look at the passengers first."—Chapter 19.

We don't learn what role Belsen (presumably a reference to Bergen-Belsen) has in the intellectual self-understanding of the future. But the implication seems to be that it is a non-trivial part of the cultural common ground of the educated of the future. Clarke here invites the reader to reflect on the commonalities (and some of the differences) between the genocidal treatment of the Jews by the Nazis and the settler-colonialism of the Anglo-Australians toward the aboriginals. 

More explicitly, McKenzie's argument (which is not contradicted anywhere else in the novel) is critical of racist views of intelligence in two ways (one obvious and one more subtle): first, he rejects racial nativism as explanatory when it comes to intelligence, and he plainly comes down on the side of education, opportunity, and culture as key drivers of intellectual development.

Second, he explicitly rejects the idea that there is one kind of intelligence; intelligence is something context specific. And, in fact, in this day of machine learning, it's a useful reminder of the older, wiser idea of intelligence as a culturally embedded skill that allows one to navigate one's environment(s).

This anti-racist view is embedded in a Victorian stance (that one finds in, say, J.S. Mill) that draws on a much older conceptual contrast of civilization vs savage that is understood in energetic and cultural evolutionary/selectionist terms ("geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence.") Now, again the 'civilized' are not necessarily smarter--the point of the passage is to alert us to their arrogant stupidity and biases that makes the more powerful miss or overlook intelligence when they encounter it (and it suits their interests to do so).

But the implication of the cultural/group Darwinian argument in the quoted set-piece is that it is fundamentally better to be technologically civilized and that ‘savage’ life-styles are fundamentally not worth preserving or revitalizing (notice that 'dead end'). That is to say, the total effect of the extended aside is a kind of cultural argument for technological progress or spatial manifest destiny that tries to avoid the racialist, even genocidal versions of the past. But the racist versions are not wholly repudiated on consequentialist grounds because  "in the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived" despite the costs. Not to put too fine point on it, but this is a species of secular theodicy.

• This first appeared at: <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-arthur-c-clarkes-criticism-white> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

On Knowing that Imperialism is Bad, Grotius and Plutarch

Victoria therefore rightly saith that the Spaniards got no more authority over the Indians for this cause than the Indians had over the Spaniards if any of them had come formerly into Spain. Nor truly are the Indians out of their wits and unsensible but ingenious and sharp-witted, so that no pretence of subjecting them may be taken from hence, which notwithstanding by itself is sufficient manifest iniquity. Plutarch long since calleth it πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, to wit, a wicked desire of that which is another’s, to pretend this color to himself that he may tame the barbarians. And now also that color of bringing the gentiles against their will to a more civil kind of behavior, which the Grecians in times past and Alexander used, is thought wicked and impious of all divines, but specially the Spaniards.--Hugo Grotius The Free Sea (Hakluyt trans.). Liberty Fund, 1609, chapter 2, pp. 15-16.

It's nice to see Grotius reject natural inequality (of the Aristotelian sort used by Sepúlveda (recall here)); and also to see him reject civilizational missions as a proper justification of imperialism.  I re-encountered the second half of this passage (from Plutarch onward) as a frontispiece to Chandran Kukathas' (2003) The Liberal Archipelago. Before I continue I should acknowledge that I am too aware of the work of Barbara Arneil and Martine Julia van Ittersum, to use this passage to vindicate Grotius from the charge that he was an enabler of settler colonialism (both as a paid lawyer and in his more independent writing). So if you are a debunker of great, dead men don't feel you need to be on guard in what follows (not the least because there may well be a hint of sarcasm at the end of the passage because it is unlikely Grotius treats Spanish theologians -- how rational they may be -- really as authoritative).

I find passages like this useful because they undermine the pseudo-sophistication of what I (recall) call  'modern historicism. Modern historicism is constituted by three claims: first, our minds are "socially conditioned." Second, while we, too, will make socially conditioned moral mistakes, we are the products of moral progress or "Enlightenment." Third, some mechanism of historical change, even improvement, is required. In practice, modern historicism is trotted out to excuse the mistakes of the past and to re-affirm our (moral and intellectual) superiority. 

For, what's really neat about about the passage quoted at the top of the post is that for Grotius the civilizational argument that purportedly justifies imperialism -- one I was taught was only really invented in the Victorian age, and that one could trace back (recall) to Hume  -- is already very old and has been debunked before. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.

Now the version of the passage that Kukathas cites is translated (in 1916) by Van Deman Magoffin edited by James Brown Scott (here). Somewhat annoyingly the editorial footnote suggests that the passage from Plutarch is on his life of Alexander. The Latin facing text suggests correctly, as does Hakluyt's translation, it's from Plutarch on Pompey (70.3). I quote it in the translation from  Bernadotte Perrin.

Besides, a great task still remained in the subjugation of Scythia and India, and here their greed would have had no inglorious excuse in the civilization of barbarous peoples. And what Scythian horse or Parthian archery or Indian wealth could have checked seventy thousand Romans coming up in arms under the leadership of Pompey and Caesar, whose names those nations had heard of long before that of Rome, so remote and various and savage were the peoples which they had attacked and conquered. 

Now, the wider context here is the Roman civil war (we're on the eve of the battle between Caesar and Pompey) and the self-inflicted implosion of the Roman republic. The romans could have quietly governed and enjoyed "what they had conquered, the greatest and best part of earth and sea was subject to them, and if they still desired to gratify their thirst for trophies and triumphs, they might have had their fill of wars with Parthians or Germans." So, Plutarch's point (and one kind of echoed by Machiavelli long after him) is that the Roman republic could have brought good government (i.e., low taxes, respect for property rights, etc.) to conquered nations, and continued their imperial conquests. But the desire for glory meant an unwillingness to share victory with purported equals. That is, Plutarch defends a kind of manifest destiny for the Romans which is to bring (softly: Greek) civilization to the barbarians (after the Greeks civilized their rulers), as Alexander had done before them.

Grotius has turned Plutarch's "πρόφασις οὐκ ἄδοξος ἐπὶ ταῦτα τῆς πλεονεξίας ἡμερῶσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά" into πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, and so misrepresented (or misremembered) him for his own ends. When I realized this I was modestly disappointed. It would have been nice if Plutarch had anticipated Grotius' point, although it's undeniable that Plutarch clearly recognizes that often greed often is the real source of purportedly civilizing missions, even ones he endorses.

 

Sydney Hook's Creed of Liberal Democracy

Our conception of a democracy without event-making figures runs counter to a plausible but fundamentally mistaken critique of democracy developed by a notable school of Italian theorists Mosca, Pareto, and Michels. These men in different ways seek to establish the impossibility of democracy. Their chief argument is that all political rule involves organization and that all organization, no matter how democratic its mythology, sooner or later comes under the effective control of a minority élite. The history of societies, despite the succession of different political forms, is in substance nothing but the succession of different political élites. Democracy is a political form that conceals both the conflicts of interest between the governing élite and the governed and the fact that these conflicts are always undemocratically resolved in favour of the former. To the extent that these élites make history, their outstanding leaders are heroes or event-making figures even in a democracy.

The whole force of this argument rests upon a failure to understand the nature of ideals, including political ideals. In addition, the critique overlooks the fact that the problems of political power are always specific and that they allow choices between courses of conduct that strengthen or weaken, extend or diminish particular political ideals. Finally, it underestimates the tremendous differences between societies, all of which fall short in varying degrees of the defined ideal of democracy, and the crucial importance of institutions in the never-ending process of realizing ideals.

In virtue of the nature of things and men, no ideal can be perfectly embodied. There is no such thing as absolute health, absolute wisdom, absolute democracy, an absolutely honest man—or an absolutely fat one. Yet when we employ these ideals intelligently we can order a series of flesh and blood men in such a way as to distinguish between them in respect to their being healthier, wiser, or fatter. And so with states. There is no absolutely democratic state, but we can tell when states are more democratic or less democratic. Ideals, in short, are functional. They are principles of organization and re-organization but cannot be identified with any particular organization as it exists at any place and time.

If we define a democratic society as one in which the government rests upon the freely given consent of the governed, it is obvious that no society is a perfect democracy, even one in which the members are so few that they can all meet in one place without delegating power to representatives! For we never can be sure that consent is freely given, that is, not in bondage to ignorance, rhetoric, or passion. Further, the division of labour requires that decisions be carried out by individuals and not by the assembly. There can be no guarantee that these decisions as well as the discretionary powers they entail will be carried out in the same spirit as that in which they were authorized.

What follows? That democracy is impossible? No more so than that a man cannot be healthy because he cannot enjoy perfect health. The defects when recognized become problems to be remedied by actions, institutions, checks, and restraints that are themselves informed by the principle or ideal of democracy. The remedies are of course imperfect, fallible, and unguaranteed. But we do not therefore reject them. We continue to improve them—if we are democrats. And we test by the fruits of the process the validity of the unrealizable democratic principle that serves as our functional guide.

Mosca, Pareto, and Michels make much of the fact that when power is delegated in a democracy and when political organizations arise, as they must in a society sufficiently complex, the decisions of the government may reflect the interests of the governors more than the interests of the governed. This is indisputably true.

What follows? Not that democracy is impossible but that it is difficult. It is more difficult under certain social and historical conditions than under others. But as long as we hold to democratic principles, again the remedies consist in thinking up of specific mechanisms, devices, and checks which (1) increase the participation of the governed in the processes of government, (2) decrease the concentrations of powers—educational, religious, economic, political—in the hands of the governors, and (3) provide for the renewal or withdrawal of the mandates of power by the governed. Again, the remedies may be defective. But if we believe that those whose interests are affected by the policies of government should have a voice in determining those policies, either directly, or indirectly by controlling the makers of policy, the direction which the never-ending task of democratizing process must take is clear. Whether it does take that direction depends greatly upon us.

That there will always be a governing élite to administer government is true...The governing élite will always have more power for good or evil than the medical élite. But it need not be more permanent or even as permanent as the medical élite. So long as the governing élite operates within a framework of a democracy, we have a choice between élites. Where élites must contend with out-élites, the victor must pay a price to the governed for victory. How high the price is depends in part at least on how much the governed ask.

The great limitation of the thought of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels is their failure to appreciate the differential advantages of the specific institutions available in a democracy that enable us both to select élites and to curb them. They overlook the concrete ways in which the governed through pressure groups, strikes, public debates, committee hearings, radio discussion, telegrams to newspapers and their representatives, petitions, mass meetings, primaries, and elections actually contribute to moulding the basic policies and decisions of the government in a democracy.

...

The amount and quality of freedom and democracy in a society are determined by many things—economic organization, education, tradition, religion, to name only a few. But they depend just as much upon our willingness, to fight for them as upon any other thing.

Democracy is difficult, and it is made more difficult because many who call themselves democrats are totalitarians in disguise. The moral is not to call off the struggle but to struggle all the more.--Sydney Hook (1943) The Hero in History (chapter 11; emphases in original).

In the 1930s, Hook and James Burnham had collaborated in organizing the American Workers party and in various Trotsky-ite circles. But in the quoted passage, Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (recall here) and The Machiavellians are Hook's clear (albeit unnamed) target. Burnham helped co-found the revival of American conservatism. Hook's journey was more complex in part because he never quite severed his ties with pragmatism.

From the vantage point of the development of professional philosophy and the partial merger of pragmatism and analyic philosophy, Hook's writings are important because they help us understand the character of naturalism and the criticism of dialectical materialism (recall) that became standard within analytic philosophy (in part through the efforts of Ernest Nagel) as well as point us toward the character of political philosophy in the Pre-Rawlsian era in which it is often said, falsely, that political philosophy did not exist.

Despite its archaic and somewhat misleading title, as Hook notes "The Limits of the Hero in History" would be just as apt, The Hero in History is a fun mixture of the philosophy of social science/history, social theory, and political philosophy. In fact, one finds in it all kinds of moves one tends to associate with others. For example, I had to think of Popper while reading Hook's criticism of Spencer and Hegel that their positions are "irrefutable because it does not risk anything by venturing specific predictions. It represents the triumph of metaphysics over empirical method in the study of history." (chapter 4.) There are more resonances with Popper not the least in that Hook also denies that one must tolerate those that wish to overthrow democracy through armed means (chapter XI).

The key distinction in the book is the hero as the eventful man and the hero as event-making man (chapter IX). Despite the gendered language, Hook allows women as heroes. In fact, Catherine II is the exemplar of an eventful person (and, in chapter X, Lenin the exemplar of an event-making man). And Hook's main point is, as is clear from the quoted passage at the top of this post, that in democracies one should be quite resistant to (would-be) event-making heroes in politics.

There are in fact at least three reasons for this democratic suspicion of the event-making political persona: first, the politician who thinks of himself as event-making often is very naive and has a impoverished view of social causation. In chapter 9, Neville Chamberlin at Munich is held up as the kind of dangerous innocent who completely misunderstands his own role in social affairs. It's a devestating portrait.

Second, and unsurprising, is the demagogue, who uses "the very instruments of democracy to debase its quality." This is about as good a definition of a demagogue I have encountered, except that I am inclined to think that a demagogue also expresses the permanent risk of such debasement. In addition, the demagogue acquires "a contempt for the group he leads by virtue of the methods by which he corrupts them."

Third, in a proper functioning democracy, what counts as a hero, should be go against the invidious distinction between leader and masses and should glory, what (recall here; and here) Francis Hutcheson calls, "Heroism, in all stations." In fact, Hook goes beyond this by claiming that a statesman exercises leadership merely by 'proposing' policy. But that its acceptance is in the hands of individuals and their representatives. And they will do so if they are properly educated or enlightened. From this Hook infers that

A successful democracy, therefore, may honour its statesmen; but it must honour its teachers more—whether they be prophets, scientists, poets, jurists, or philosophers. The true hero of democracy, then, should be not the soldier, or the political leader, great as their services may be, but the teacher—the Jeffersons, Holmeses, Deweys, Whitmans, and all others who have given the people vision, method, and knowledge. (Chapter XI)

This quoted claim suggests a kind of intellectual elitist counter position (remniscent of Lippmann) to the elitist school of Pareto, Mosca, and Burnham. But as the passage quoted at the top of this post suggests (and as reflects Hook's pragmatist and organizing background), democratic education can also be moulded from the bottom up, including through all kinds of pressure groups and political activism/organization (which are themselves schools of political education). And the multiplicity of ways in which such moulding takes place is the effect not just of the nearly infinite diversity of "human capacities" (that Hook posits), but also the never finished task of democratic renewal.

In fact, Hook articulates the point in terms of a kind of democratic faith:

A democracy should encourage the belief that all are called and all may be chosen. All may be chosen because a wisely contrived society will take as a point of departure the rich possibilities that Nature herself gives through the spontaneous variations in the powers and capacities of men. These variations are the source and promise of new shoots of personality and value. The belief that all may be chosen, acted upon in a co-operating environment, may inspire the added increment of effort that often transforms promise into achievement.

It follows, that if this creed is lacking, or if some are left behind, our society is not well-ordered.

Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV

[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understanding. Somehow, a war fought to defend God-fearing democracy inadvertently ended up destroying the religious foundations of the victorious Western nations. Within a few years, the God-fearing democracies came to see themselves as liberal democracies, and liberalism replaced Christianity as the perceived source of whatever was good about America and other Western nations.
We can see the beginning of this change immediately after the Second World War in the American Supreme Court’s determination, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that state governments could no longer support and encourage religion—whether a particular religion or any religion. In theory, this decision is deduced from the First Amendment of the Constitution as applied through the Fourteenth. But the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect black Americans from violations of their right to due process under the law, had by this point been on the books for seventy-nine years without anyone supposing that support for religion by the states was a violation of anyone’s right to due process.
What had changed in the interim was not the letter of the law, but the narrative framework through which the justices of the Supreme Court, as representatives of elite opinion, understood the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. That there had been such a change is obvious from the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Justice Hugo Black felt he needed to provide a new story of the American founding—one broadly hostile to government encouragement of religion. Among other things, he writes:

It is not inappropriate briefly to review the background and environment of the period in which that constitutional language was fashioned and adopted. A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.

In Black’s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in Roosevelt’s State of the Union address eight years earlier. On the contrary, religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms. Indeed, the very form of the American Constitution is now said to have resulted from the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America. It is in the Everson decision, in other words, that we find some of the first intimations of the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: one in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to safeguard every child in the country from being taught religion in a publicly supported school.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Part III" pp. 264-266,

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family; and here the third one on Hazony's account of statecraft). In this series, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own skeptical liberal commitments). 

The quoted material is part of a chapter, "Liberal Hegemony and Cold War Conservatism," that introduces Hazony's intellectual  history of the post WWII conservative 'fusionist' movement. It has major treatments of Russell Kirk, Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Frank Meyer. (Burnham is notably missing.) The first of these is, in many ways, closest to Hazony, but Kirk's defense of states' rights (and the racialism supporting it) are criticized by Hazony. (As I have noted, before Hazony is a fierce critic of ethnic and genetic accounts of nationalism.) The latter three are all treated as liberals, and criticized for their one-sided defense of individual freedom. The cumulative effect of the chapter is, to simplify, to show how the intellectual, 'fusionist' movement organized by and around Buckley's National Review somewhat unintentionally contributed to 'liberal hegemony.' For present purposes what matters is a common thread in these thinkers that in different degrees they are willing 'to privatize' (a phrase Hazony uses in context of Meyer) religion to a relatively domestic sphere.

Now, Hazony treats World War II as a major rupture, or a triggering cause, for the retreat from public religion Stateside. (He resists the temptation to throw this on the sixties youth culture.) His explanation for this change is that elite opinion -- shocked and shamed by the racial Nazi atrocities -- correctly retreated from Jim Crow and other forms of state enforced, domestic racial oppression, and then mistakenly treated other forms of state sanctioned distinctions as on par with the racial kind. By contrast, Hazony does not "believe these aims are substantively similar at all. However, it is important to recognize that the U.S. Supreme Court did fid them comparable. Indeed, it is fair to say that these two goals—erasing distinctions based on race and religion—were the principal engines driving the establishment of liberal-democratic government in America after the Second World War." (267) And this led to the mistake of "instead of engaging in a focused effort to assist black Americans in overcoming the racial barriers that had been placed in their way, the constitutional revolution of the 1960s set out to reconstruct America in the image of the social-contract theories of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy." (270)

My interest here is not to contest the historical accuracy of this narrative. But it is worth noting an important irony. As I have noted before, Hazony treats Locke as the key 'rationalist,' who is foundational to the 'Enlightenment liberalism' (and 'liberal democracy') that Hazony treats as a rival to his own conservative/federalist nationalism. And Hazony implies throughout his argument that the Lockean liberals are to blame for the retreat of public religion. The irony, of course, is that Locke thought only protestants ought to be tolerated, and that Catholics and atheists not. And while Jews could be tolerate in Locke's day, and in the American Founders' era, the thrust of his argument is that no such toleration is possible once there is a Jewish state (due to possibility of divided loyalty, which is the argument to reject toleration of Catholics).

The point here is not that Locke was a bigot, or even to suggest that the "spirit of old the Protestant republicanism" Hazony suddenly extolls in the context of Reagan's presidency, is rather Lockean in character (and so there is something off in Hazony's conceptual framework), but rather to look again at Justice Black's rationale (and by implication of those American elites) to change the relationship between 'government 'and 'Christianity.' And to point to a surprising equivocation in Hazony's position in which 'Christianity' is treated as a kind term and 'religion' or 'religious practices' a kind of synonym for it. We see this in how Hazony advocates for what he calls 'conservative democracy. I first quote the principle on which it rests:

Principle 3. Religion. The state upholds and honors God and the Bible, the congregation and the family, and the religious practices common to the nation. These are essential to the national heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time, the state offers toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole. (337; this is repeated from pp. 30-1, end of chapter 1)

While Hazony rejects Locke's views on consent, in the practical effects this account of toleration (to tolerate 'religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole') is, thus, actually remarkably Lockean. And while Locke might emphasize more than Hazony the right to exit from one's congregation, Hazony, too, allows this as we have seen in his account of the nature of 'loyalty groups.'

Anyway, the principle is rather vague. And is to be balanced with a number of other principles. But the practical pay-off is articulated as follows: 

Public religion. Conservative democracy regards biblical religion as the only firm foundation for national independence, justice, and public morals in Western nations. In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life and strongly reflected in government and other institutions, wherever a majority of the public so desires. Provision should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their particular traditions and way of life are not encumbered. The liberal doctrine requiring a “wall of separation between church and state” is a product of the post–Second World War period and is not an inherent feature of American political tradition. It should be discarded both with respect to majority religion and to minorities. (341)

That biblical religion is (in 'Western' contexts) the only firm foundation for 'national independence, justice, and public morals' might raise protests from liberals (like myself). But that does not concern me here. Rather I am interested in the consequences for religion to Hazony's view that a (local or national) "majority of the public" can impose their religious views on minorities. And I do so by returning to Hazony's treatment of Everson vs Board of Education quoted above. 

In the passage quoted from Black's opinion of Everson v. Board of Education, justice Black is fundamentally concerned about the political effects of sectarianism that is repeated almost staccato like in the opinion: (i) 'escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches;' (ii) 'the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy; (iii) he power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews;' (iv) 'In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place.' And the implication is that such sectarianism has also shaped American political life, or is a danger to it.

Of course, for much of American history, Protestantism was the majority religion. But Justice Black is writing in the aftermath of a huge, century long demographic shift toward Catholicism, and consequent increasing Catholic, political emancipation. The series of legal rulings that make the state retreat from enforcing religion in public life, can be understood as an attempt to pacify the potential for non-trivial sectarian strife not the least among Catholics and protestants, and among different protestant sects. In fact, liberals of the age (including Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls) suddenly start to emphasize (it's an innovation) the significance of religious wars as a foundational myth in the growth of liberalism.

That is to say, if sects can justly try to control government, this means that religious life will be politicized and factionalized permanently. Now, I think Hazony accepts that loyalty groups are intrinsically political (and hierarchical), although he underestimates what kind of leaders will rise to the top within religion if religion is a means to political spoils. But the dangers of sectarianism are obscured in Hazony's argument because he kind of tacitly assumes that 'Christians' will agree with each other. Of course, he is not unfamiliar with the history of sectarianism and political religious persecution. But because contemporary conservative Christians understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, as embattled against, and unified in opposition to, the near victory of (secular) Enlightenment liberalism/rationalism, Hazony never has to confront the dangers of doctrinal and factional sectarianism.

Let me close. In a way the problem of sectarianism makes the problem of statecraft I diagnosed in the previous post on Hazony's book worse. For in order to maintain peace among different religious sects, the wise politician must not only navigate a complex commerce of honors (and interests), as Hazony advocates, but s/he must also navigate a complex set of doctrinal and theological religious disputes founded on by no means durable majority opinion. This is a recipe for permanent political strife. 

 

Hazony on Conservatism, part I

Everything that we call a freedom of the individual, or one of the individual’s liberties, is a traditional institution whose particular form is learned by imitation, maintained through honor and self-discipline, and handed down, in a given society, from one generation to the next. Every freedom emerges through a well-structured constraint, and so it is worse than merely misleading to say that our political freedoms come to us by nature, or that reason leads easily to them, or that nothing is needed to maintain them but for government to let us be. All of this mythology diverts our eyes from the difficult road that must be traveled in order for the necessary constraints to be instilled in society, so that even the most rudimentary freedom or right can become a reality.
Where do these constraints come from?
They can come from the laws of the state and the commands of its officials, of course. And indeed, this is the most common Enlightenment-rationalist depiction of constraint. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example, fear of the government provides the constraint needed to bring peace and order to a society that would otherwise tear itself apart.
But constraint can also come from another source. In a free society, the principal constraining force comes not from fear of the government, but from the self-discipline of the people, who provide the necessary constraint themselves by upholding inherited relations and the obligations that attend them. This point was emphasized by the English political theorist John Fortescue in the fifteenth century, and taken up by Montesquieu, Burke, and the American founding fathers centuries later. Where nations can impose the needed constraints themselves, the government can be mild or moderate, offering them greater freedom to conduct their affairs without interference. But where a people is incapable of self-discipline, a mild government will only encourage licentiousness and division, hatred and violence, eventually forcing a choice between civil war and tyranny....

An individual who was guided by common sense enjoyed a broad range to think things through for himself. But his originality and divergences from the way others spoke and behaved were always constrained by a thick fabric of inherited relations and norms, which included the obligation to maintain and defend the place of God and religion, nation and government, family, property, and so on.
These inherited norms provided the framework (or “guardrails,” as we now say) within which reason was able to operate, yet without overthrowing every inherited institution as today’s adulation of perfectly free reasoning does. In our day, these inherited norms have been discarded in the name of the freely reasoning individual and his right to be rid of any constraint he has not himself chosen. God and religion, nation and government, marriage and children and caring for the aged—all these traditional ideas and institutions that once constrained the individual are now regarded as burdensome and difficult things, to be avoided because of the limits they impose on our freedom.
What would be required to build up this voluntary self-constraint rather than ceaselessly working to destroy it?
The propagation of such self-constraint depends on the honor that a given society is willing to award those who practice it. Indeed, the only known means of causing individuals to shoulder hardship and constraint without coercion or financial compensation is by rewarding them with honor.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp 164-166

When Donald Trump destroyed Jeb Bush in the (2016) South Carolina primary it inaugurated a seismic shift within the Republican party. One of the effects has been the rejection of a whole number of what we might call 'right liberal' commitments that centered on cosmopolitanism, individualism, free markets, free trade,  and a defense of the rule of law. In its wake there has been a scramble to provide a reasonably coherent intellectual program that can unify its nationalist and Christian coalition and provide a governing philosophy. This is, in brief, the political context of Yoram Hazony's increased prominence Stateside during the last half decade. 

Since 'self-constraint' and 'honor,' on one side, and 'Donald Trump,' on the other side, don't naturally go together in the same sentence, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the precise contents of Hazony's vision are at odds with Trump's persona and his style of leadership and governance. In addition, if one reads Conservatism: A Rediscovery with some care one will discern a whole number of subtle rejections of what one may call 'Trumpism' in political life not the least is a clear distancing from racism and racialized hierarchy, but also from Trumpism's zero-sum winner-takes all understanding of politics. 

Before I get to discuss the passage I quoted at the top of  this post, I don't mean to suggest that Trumpism is irrelevant to Hazony's argument even if Trump's actual views are barely mentioned. At the start of the book, Trump's 2016 victory is briefly identified as evidence for the rise of 'nationalist conservatism' and nearer to the end, the talk of 'resistance' to Trump's 2016 electoral college victory is offered as evidence that his legitimacy was denied and that Marxism has taken over the central organs of the old liberalism (pp. 327-328). There is no critical scrutiny of Republican malfeasance, and so this limits the audience of Hazony's message. 

Rather, a natural way to understand the role of Trump in Hazony's larger argument, is that he is a kind of symptom of a much wider social distress and inaugurates a period "when a major reframing of a scheme of ideas and the relations among them—a change in paradigm—becomes possible." (This echoes my own (recall) diagnosis back in December 2015.) In such periods, "we begin seeking the causes of our distress in earnest, and this search becomes the lever that pries the old paradigm loose. A period of open-mindedness is initiated, and proposed repairs that were once ridiculed are reconsidered. At this time, dissenting individuals who were once spurned and disreputable may grow quickly in importance, even as those who jealously protected the old consensus are diminished in stature and significance." (176)* 

Okay, let me turn to the passage which is from the long third chapter, "The Conservative Paradigm." This paradigm is situated in a historical narrative about the theoretical and political roots of Hazony's position in what he calls 'The English Conservative tradition" and "American nationalism," with the latter understanding itself as a continuation, even restoration (a key word for Hazony) of the former in the wake of the 1787-1789 Constitution. 

While self-discipline and constraints are not at odds with a liberal political worldview, a focus on honor is. Even liberal counterparts such as 'social credit' or 'recognition' or 'social approbation' all function differently than Hazony's account of honor. This is especially noticeable if one recognizes that those that (properly) perform the traditionally sanctioned role in a (traditional) hierarchy (parents, teachers, soldiers, political leaders, etc.) are to be honored. In addition, on Hazony's account obligations are the effects not primarily of consent, but rather of the existence of traditional relationships within this hierarchy (marriage, parenthood, childhood, membership in a clan, tribe, a nation, but also a corporation, a platoon, etc.). And so it is no surprise that this understanding of obligation is, in turn, repeatedly linked to loyalty, and that, as one can discern in the quoted passage, imitation is treated as praiseworthy. By contrast, there is no place in Hazony's scheme for (a celebration of) individual autonomy and authenticity. 

So, while I think his account of freedom can be accommodated by certain republican liberals, on the whole Hazony offers a genuine alternative to liberalism, but he has no interest in facilitating, in his doctrines, what we might call Confederate irredentism. Rather, he celebrates "Edmund Burke in Britain and...the Federalist Party of George Washington, John Jay, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton," who stood for a strong national government and rejected States' rights and slavery. Lincoln is treated as the great inheritor of this program, and Jefferson the exemplary misguided Enlightenment rationalist (and defender of slavery).+ And despite the emphasis on tradition and hierarchy, this Anglo-American conservatism is, thus, presented as not just as fully compatible with constitutional self-government, but as the true bearer of its tradition. I think this is, in fact, an improvement over the earlier (2017) presentation of these views (recall here) in an essay with Ofir Haivry at American Affairs. (Haivry seems to have co-authored the first two chapters of the present book.)

Since there are elements on the contemporary nationalist-Christian right, intoxicated by (natural law) Integralism and/or Schmittian decisionism and/or racialized hierarchy (the latter we might call the 'Jacksonian strain'), who seem little interested in constitutional and democratic self-government, it is actually to be wished that Hazony's position becomes the dominant element in Republican elite circles. For it would allow the possibility of the continuation of competitive elections that would permit alternative rule by different elites in the service of political coalitions and so the nourishment of hope that one can reverse a majority and policy. (Hazony claims that the cultural Marxist take-over of Liberal institutions will make that impossible.) In that respect, it's actually quite notable that at key moments in Hazony's narrative it is acknowledged that his favored tradition was a minority option. And unlike many other public facing thinkers on the nationalist conservative right, there is in Hazony no sign of rejection of scientific expertise. In a future post, I'll discuss his views on what a revived Conservative and Christian democracy would look like in greater and more critical detail. But here I want to close with an observation.

Hazony's road map from the present to the restoration of nationalist conservatism is, in fact, not centered on The Supreme Court or even electoral politics, even if the uptake of his views among Republican cadres will make him more influential. Rather, it is fundamentally ground in a "personal journey of repentance and return" and a rejection of "personal decadence." (p. 391) Not unlike his adversaries, Hazony believes the personal is political. And this means, for Hazony, in practice, building "family and congregation" dedicated to the passing on and honoring of tradition. (p. 393).  

Given this self-transformative focus, I find it odd that Hazony barely touches on the nature and causes of contemporary celebrity and attention culture and the (consequent) frivolity of what passes for spirituality today.** For even if one grants (as I do not) that the vacuity of contemporary celebrity culture is the effect of liberalism, and evidence of its moral bankruptcy, it is also a rather effective block on the revival of a honor society he wishes for. In celebrity culture nurses and teachers and all lives dedicated to service, or any activity that provides social [what Hazony often calls] "cohesion," are simply not truly honored. This we have seen in a pandemic that should have caused a major cultural shift in attitudes. And within this celebrity culture, attention and success are its own ends and engage in a (if you will, vicious) mutually reinforcing cycle with financial rewards. And while some charismatic religious leaders may develop huge followings, they will do so in virtue of their charisma and success at attracting attention (and huge bank accounts) not because they have been touched by the divine.

There are passages that hint at a willingness to control the "corrosive effect" of capitalism on "traditional institutions," (and especially the off-shoring of good jobs abroad), but since celebrity culture now infiltrates our lives 24/7 on hour handheld, algorithmic networked devices introduction of (say) a number of tariffs will make no material difference here. That is to say, even if Hazony got his way and the "separation of church and state" would be abolished Stateside (p. 345) and Christianity would be restored to the centrality he wishes for it in our midst, the odds are it would be a repackaged Christianity fundamentally unmoored from its history and its sacred texts, in which resources are pooled to give fellow congregationalists a leg up in the social battle for attention. 

 

 

RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022

In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.

Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.

Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung'  --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.

Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him. 

Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true). 

I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.) 

I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text. 

Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.

But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.

We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I  never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends. 

Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.

In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.

When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.

Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.

I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.

Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)

We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.

The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.

Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.

 

 

Yolton's Polemics with Strauss, PT 1

I learned a few days ago -- [HT Michael Kremer] -- that (see here) Gilbert Ryle was the supervisor was of John William Yolton (1921-2005). This made me decide that I should treat Yolton as 'analytic.' That he is an analytic philosopher is by no means obvious when one reads his (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" (Ethics (65):3) with its learned references to Hegel, Collingwood, Santayana, Croce, and Cassirer even if one allows that, unlike so many other Analytic partisans, Ryle was himself widely and deeply read in non-analytic philosophy of the age, especially (as Ami L. Thomasson (2002) summarizes) the phenomenological tradition. 

In the 1955 article, Yolton explicitly takes on a claim that he (not implausibly) attributes to Strauss' (1953) Natural Right and History (hereafter: NRH):

For Strauss, there are just two alternatives: either we are able to ground moral criticism in natural rights, or we are faced with moral nihilism. By extension, the same alternative could be posed in aesthetics and social criticism. While Strauss's defense or plea for natural right seems anachronistic, the fears which he expresses are genuine. But though genuine, they are misplaced, based as they are upon a misunderstanding of both the implications of the relativistic analysis of criticism and of the possibilities of criticism in general. There is nothing in cannibalism or civilization, in communism or democracy, which compels us to accept either. Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted. But to urge that such a view opens the danger of moral chaos is simply to overlook the nature of moral conviction as well as to misunderstand the relation between criticism and values. (206)

That Yolton was familiar with Strauss' NRH, even a critic of it, surprised me greatly. And it is worth explaining why. This post is part of a series -- (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here; here; here) -- on the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers in the post WWII era (triggered by an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The (1952) dissertation Ryle supervised, was clearly the basis for Yolton's influential book (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP). In its "preface" Ryle is explicitly thanked for his "many critical suggestions" and guidance (p. x).  

I didn't recall any mention of Strauss in the book, so I went back to search for it and found none. Since Strauss' interpretation of Locke is so important to the argument of NRH, and Yolton clearly was highly familiar with it, I was rather puzzled by the situation. Even more so, because Yolton's key claim about Locke's Essay (highlighted in the preface), it that "its philosophical doctrines were almost always directly related to the moral and religious disputes of the day." (viii) And that is Strauss's territory (especially the first two chapters of Yolton's book which deal, inter alia, with the law of nature).

One hypothesis I entertained was that Yolton had decided he didn't need to engage with NRH after (say) reading the highly critical (1955) review of Strauss' NRH in The Philosophical Review 64(2) by John Plamenatz (1912–1975). Plamenatz was (quoting Berlin's entry in ODNB) "trained in the use of the methods of such British thinkers as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and W. D. Ross which dominated the Oxford scene in the 1920s and early 1930s."* And, Jo Wolff includes Plamenatz in his influential survey of the history analytic political philosophy. In his review (which, to be sure, is not only critical), Plamenatz had claimed that "Dr. Strauss's assertion that Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally the same as Hobbes's is easily refuted." (p. 301). In fact, Plamenatz closes his review with a swipe at Strauss' method:

In several places Dr. Strauss suggests that one or other of the philosophers discussed by him was exercising caution in keeping his real opinions hidden from the vulgar, and that that is why he has been misunderstood. The reader is given the impression that he is being taken into the confidence of some of the greatest thinkers of the past. Whether he finds this impression flattering will depend on what he thinks of Dr. Strauss's book. (302)

But, of course, that a reader is flattered -- and surely Plamenatz is right about the effect of Strauss' writing on some -- is not itself an argument that Strauss' hermeneutics is unreliable or that the interpretations are false.

Anyway, my current guess is that Yolton's book went to the press before he read NRH. But that Yolton recognized Strauss' views were an alternative to his own, and worth refuting, is indisputable. For, in 1958, Yolton published "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4). In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) In his (1958) paper Yolton draws on his own book.+ And, in fact, the 1958 article is one long argument that Strauss' method is bogus and his reading of Locke (as, inter alia, a kind of Hobbesian) utterly misleading.

My current view is that Yolton's 1958 essay, marks a sharp distinction in the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers.** Although its impact was really felt, only after Peter Lasslett's edition of Locke's Two Treatise, which strongly condemns' Strauss' reading of Locke and appeals to Yolton's essay, started to circulate widely. (Yolton's essay is itself barely cited before the mid 1970s.) I return to this paper in a follow up digression.

Okay, with that in place let's return to Yolton's earlier (1955) engagement which is much more respectful and also, de facto, an immanent critique (and also one that kind of anticipates Gadamer's philosophy).

Let's grant on Yolton's behalf  that his position embraces a circularity ("Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted.") It's not a vicious circularity because the value is, in part, to use anachronistic language that accepted values help solve coordination problems; knowing the wide acceptance of certain values helps predict behavior and also helps organize political life. (This is among the reasons why they are valuable because they are accepted.) This is a kind of Humean point (although Yolton doesn't cite him here.) My reason for mentioning Hume should be clear below.

Okay, how does Yolton respond to Strauss? (Much of the article is a working out of Yolton's own view on the complex relationship between relativity of one's values and possibility of mutual criticism.) Here's what he says after developing his own views (which can be intuited from what I quote which is the final closing paragraph(s) of the paper):

Then it is time to set forth with boldness and firmness the criticism entailed in our position. Histrionic understanding, while being an indispensable condition for worth-while criticism, does not (as it first seems) render criticism impotent; rather it discloses its only valid habitat.

The bias and externality which are provincial and objectionable without histrionic understanding lose their discreditability [sic] when combined with a careful, sympathetic understanding. For some time now the critical problem has been resolved by the historicist emphasis upon the relativity of understanding viewed as conditioned by one's time and place. Such emphasis is obviously overstated since we can transcend our cultural context and understand other points of view internally. Criticism needs to be harnessed to such histrionic understanding, but it is necessary also to free ourselves from the either-or position of assuming, as Strauss does, that either criticism is based upon some absolute, such as natural right, or we end in moral nihilism. The kind of criticism which we make of other points of view is controlled by the kind of values inherent in our own position. Once the other position is understood intrinsically, our own commitments compel us to criticize. Since all criticism must be thus rooted in a point of view, the kind of placid change into cannibalism suggested by Strauss will be avoided simply by vigilance, by speaking and acting in defense of our own point of view. Criticisms cannot be made in vacuo; we must look to some set of values, to some basic convictions in order to determine what criticisms are appropriate in any given situation. Such a recognition of the intimate, dependent relation between accepted values or convictions and criticisms will not, of course, take care of the other problem that bothers Strauss: how can we say that our position should triumph over cannibalism? But the problem here is ill-stated, and the anticipated solution frustrating. The only solution for this problem tolerated by Strauss is some totalistic or some indisputable point of view which can legislate between right and wrong, while itself being immune to such ethical decisions. The desire to solve the issue of such moral and social tensions is urgent and important. But if we assume, as has been done so often in the past, that the solution of this problem must either be justified philosophically (in the sense of finding some absolute basis from which to resolve the conflict) or else degenerate into brute force or moral nihilism, we have misconceived the nature of this particular problem. The resolution of such moral or social conflict cannot be done in the manner required by Strauss simply because it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution: there is no point of view which is itself immune from criticism. Important as this area of ideological tension is, it cannot be solved by theory. We can only trust to reason and the council table for a peaceful coexistence. (211-212)

If I understand Yolton correctly here, his solution to the dilemma posed by Strauss, is to deny that it is capable of philosophical resolution (" it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution.") This has a Humean sensibility. I believe this is also Strauss' all things considered point of view.++ But rather as understanding that as a concession to Strauss, Yolton thinks it is an alternative and he opens the door to wise statecraft: "we can only trust to reason and the council table."

It suspect that Yolton means here to invoke the United Nations' Security Council. But it might be also understood as a metaphor for either great power discussions (this is how I understand what he is saying) or be understood for more general commitment to civilization as peaceful coexistence, that is, (recall this post on Khan; this one on Coetzee) of keeping the conversation going (rather than resort to arms). Either way, while philosophy may not be absent around the council table (recall 'reason') in the end it's a kind of prudence and skill -- Locke might see this as part of the 'art of government' - that maintains co-existence between incompatible viewpoints. While I have some practical sympathy for Yolton's position (and by no means hostile to his kind of relativism), having a seat at the table cannot be taken for granted in the manner he does. To be continued.

On Fire, Civilization, and Religion (via Goudsblom): a hypothesis for Cognitive Science of Religion (pt. 1)

That human beings have managed to learn to handle fire at all I regard as an outcome of their living together in societies. Everywhere the use of fire and caring for it require certain social arrangements and individual adjustments. Fire exerts inexor­able constraints to which people respond by developing commands and prohibitions and forms of self-restraints. The control of fire is always part of a system of social control and self-control; in this respect its development may be regarded as a 'civilizing process' in Norbert Elias's (1978, 1982) sense of that concept. 
The physical effects of fire have not changed during human history. Its direct contact with the skin causes burning almost im­mediately, at all times. What has changed, however, are the kinds of fire with which people are confronted and the ways in which they react to it. As the human capacity to control fire has increased, people have generally come to depend more and more upon social arrangements regarding fire, such as the supply of fuel and safe­guards against fire-risks.--Jaap Goudsblom "The Domestication of Fire as a Civilizing Process. "Theory, Culture & Society. 1987;4(2-3): 458-459 

Before the war in Ukraine started, I read Goudsblom's fascinating Fire and Civilization in Dutch (as Vuur en Beschaving (1992)). The war distracted me from the substantive posts I wanted to do about his book,* and also the sliding doors of life that meant I never met Goudsblom (1932-2020) despite ample opportunity and being fairly close to people who were very close to him. But an idea that occurred to me while reading the book stayed with me, and I want to try it out briefly here and perhaps it will inspire others to explore it more fully. I quote from the 1987 paper to give a sense of his views because I left my copy at the office. And so rather than offering copious quotes and references, I'll write from memory and a general sense of what I take to be Goudsblom's views. (If you want you can treat all of this as Goudsblom*.)

As noted in the quoted passage, Goudsblom is building on Norbert Elias (although a case can be made he goes beyond Elias). To avoid confusion, by 'civilizing' Goudsblom does not want to activate the Enlightenment contrast between barbarism/civilization. 

The core of Goudsblom position can be discerned in the quoted passage: he views the control of fire as presupposing a system of social control that also generates further self-control, even self-domestication (the "civilizing process") among the members of the community that controls fire. This will be important for my purposes. A related point Goudsblom makes is that in general the control of fire by a community also generates dependence on fire as the division of labor expands. Along the way, the centrality of fire in our lives is masked -- it is almost literally put under the car hood -- such that we end up treating it as something worth controlling by specialists with esoteric knowledge. 

The previous paragraph does not do justice to the many provocative claims and sensitive readings of works of history and literature that Goudsblom offers.  But here I focus on the significance of a point Goudsblom uses to frame his discussion: all known people are familiar with fire and are capable of controlling it. To use language he eschews, the control of fire is a universal social kind. (Some think the domestication of fire goes back a very long way in hominoid pre-history.) And it shares this with language, the upright thumb, tool use, and religion. I don't mean this list to be the end of the matter. Regular readers know, that I have been intrigued (recall) by Graeber's claim in Debt: the first 5000 years, that anthropologist have discovered some other invariances about human nature.**

Anyway, Goudsblom is quite clear that fire involves self-domestication in at least two related ways: (i) individuals of a community have to learn to control their behavior around fire in non-trivial ways and (ii) the community has to develop mechanisms of social control that reinforce and police individual self-command around fire. And clearly there is for Goudsblom a kind of mutual bootstrapping between (i) and (ii) and various coordination mechanisms that maintain a kind of balance between (i) and (ii) in light of other social and environment constraints and scaffolding.

Now, in his analysis Goudsblom notes that fire plays a non-trivial role in many religions. Lots of temples and altars involve the control of fire and the duty to maintain a fire without interruption. In addition, Goudsblom notes that many religions have imagery related to fire. And as he notes (also in the paper I quoted above), "stories relating how 'man' came to obtain fire have a prominent place in the mythologies of many peoples (see Frazer, 1930). These stories show how long people all over the world have continued to consider fire as something very special to which a divine origin is ascribed." (Goudsblom 1987: 458) I take the significance of fire in religion as a useful hint of what I am about to propose which is in the spirit of Goudsblom's analysis. 

Cognitive science of religion (CSR) "brings theories from the cognitive sciences to bear on why religious thought and action is so common in humans and why religious phenomena take on the features that they do." On my view of CSR, it is methodologically resolutely pluralist (it's not only about putting people into a FMRI scanner)." And a key question in CSR is the origin of religion. Recall this post on Hobbes. 

What if the origin of religion its rituals, its prohibitions, its original belief systems is, in part, to be found as one of the mechanism of the civilization process surrounding fire, that is, its function as facilitating self-domestication and the coordination mechanism that help society monitor and promote such self-domestication. I don't mean to suggest religion is reducible to a list of dos and donts -- which is at least non-trivial part of the control and manipulation of fire and simultaneous self-domestication --, but it does provide such lists with significance (and incentives to comply and advance them) and a place in communal life.

In order to avoid confusion, I don't mean to suggest that the known religions with fire imagery played a role in the early domestication of fire and self-domestication of humans. As Goudsblom notes the recorded material we have is actually characterized by an absence of detailed descriptions of how to treat fire. Rather, I take these religions as a kind of symbolic after life, a means to convey a cultural memory (can you tell I just Wengrow & Graeber?) and a way to teach about the significance of earlier events (not technical fire handling manuals or rituals to be followed in order to safely engage with fire). 

But if early religion was indeed a mechanism for facilitating the domestication of fire in virtue of aiding individual self-control and for reducing the costs of social control of such self-control, then it could have provided either a biological or cultural selection advantage (or both). And this can help explain why religion is so widespread, after all. (If you don't like the Darwinism here, I think you can drop it w/o loss.)

I have more to say about the exact details about what early religion might have looked like to play a role in (i)&(ii). But I'd like to do that when I have my copy of Goudsblom nearby, so I can take advantage of some of the hints he provides in this endeavor and show that this hypothesis can also enrich his argument. To be continued.

 

 

 

 

Historiography of the Enlightenment in The Dawn of Everything, Pt 2

Kandiaronk: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment? … 
    You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.

Given that the Wendat most certainly did have a legal code, this might seem disingenuous on Kandiaronk’s part. By laws, however, he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,– of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

For Europeans in 1703, this was heady stuff.---David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, pp. 54-55

This is the second digression on The Dawn of Everything (here is the first); and here tweet impressions of each chapter (see here for links). When the book first appeared, David Bell (a historian of the French Enlightenment at Princeton) skewered the book for its misrepresentations of the French enlightenment, even going so far as to use "scholarly malpractice." Soon, this was followed by a generous and sensible, but at times critical review by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times. This review also strongly suggests that the characterization of Enlightenment thought is flawed. Meanwhile, Justin Smith (Paris), who arguably is the leading historian of early modern philosophy of my (now senior--shit times flies) generation, gave the book a very positive review (here). Smith notes, quite rightly that their achievement can be found in "their sympathetic plaidoyer for the singular reality of lives lived in the past, their commitment to the idea that these were real people, as weird and idiosyncratic and unfathomable by quantitative methods as you and I....It’s a weird thing to have to insist on: that there is something that it was like to be a member of the prehistoric leisure class, which is to say to have been a prehistoric human being." However, when he comes to their treatment of Lahontan's Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario, he expresses considerable skepticism about their insistence that 'Adario' just is expressing the views of the historical Kandiaronk (a Huron statesman).* I then read a critical (as of yet) unpublished review by Helen de Cruz (who among her specialities is an expert on the philosophy of anthropology and the cognitive sciences). 

As it happens the last few years, I have been reflecting a bit on the encounter of Europeans with the new world as reflected in early modern (political) philosophy. And so, before I say anything else, I think it is highly likely that European philosophy was shaped by the Jesuit Relations as Graeber and Wengrow suggest (p. 44ff), and that it makes a lot of sense to look for traces of (American) indigenous influence on European thought. Prompted by Ryan Hanley, my own focus has been on the Jesuit reports on China, but I noticed, while preparing this post, that Leibniz comments on Lahontas and 'Adario' in a letter from 1710, and does not treat him as fictional. (This letter is discussed in scholarship on Lahontas.) 

In various undergraduate courses, I teach Machiavelli's The Prince, which seems to have circulated as early as around 1513, but was published in 1532; I teach More's Utopia, which was first published in 1516, and I teach the Las Casas-Sepulveda (or The Valladolid) debate (1550–1551), centered on Las Casas' Defense of the Indians read at the Valladolid debate (and drawing on his earlier works). I mention these because they are very well known through the next few centuries; all of these texts are much earlier than Montaigne's Essays, which seems a common reference among Appiah, Smith, and Bell. Now, of these three works, The Prince is rather provincial. Even though it has quite a bit to say about Mediterranean politics, the Turkish barely register, and the other Islamic powers are ignored. It is a surprisingly Euro-centered book.

By contrast, More's Utopia is clearly responding to, and drawing on, another Florentine's adventures in the Americas, Amerigo Vespucci’s The Four Voyages. Utopia is important because, in passing, great civilizations of the Americas ("New Castille," that is, what we would call Peru) are mentioned in passing, "they came to towns, and cities, and to commonwealths, that were both happily governed and well peopled." And it is strongly implied that the locals have knowledge of navigation and astronomy (but lack a compass). In The Dawn of Everything, Utopia is mentioned in passing, as an exemplary work representing "civic prosperity and hierarchy," (p. 336) but little more. The fictional city that gives Utopia its name, is generally not treated as hierarchical because property is in common and money abolished (!), and it is in many respects rather egalitarian, but it does have a political hierarchy: in which the federation is governed by elected representatives.

In addition, the whole book, Utopia, is framed by a critique of the legal practices then current among Europeans (recall back in 2013). In fact, a stadial theory (with the Bible being the savage baseline!) is inscribed in this account! And the implication, as I noted a few years ago, is that the Europeans are the real savages (a point echoed by Montaigne and by eighteenth century legal reformers like Beccharia (recall) and Sophie de Grouchy). So, this precedes Kandiaronk's criticism by considerable  time. Now, some indigenous described in Utopia are treated as savages and ripe for colonialization, so I don't want to suggest More's book is unproblematic (recall here; here). 

Las Casas  was himself steeped in the Spanish conquest and control of the Americas. (By comparison, Justin Smith does mention Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote a generation after Las Casas.) He wrote detailed histories of the conquest (and its brutalities), and echoing the work by some fellow Dominicans, he famously attacked the Aristotelian view of natural slavery (in which the indigenous were natural slaves), from the (more biblical) perspective of natural equality. Throughout his adult life he attacked the manner of Spanish rule, and as a bishop refused absolution to slave owners. Las Casas was very famous for the next few centuries. (Unfortunately, he is the originator of the idea -- which he later much regretted -- of importing African slaves to the Americas.)

Now, Las Casas' rival, Sepulveda invents (recall) the disastrous trope that the natives are inferior, and like backward children: *"If you know the customs and manners of different peoples, that the Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults." This idea has a disastrous afterlife. In the Essay, Locke, who (alas) was rather invested in the colonial enterprise, frequently treats the savage mind as if a child's (see, especially, 1.2.27), and he suggests they don't think general propositions (1.2.12). The effect of this, and the tremendous influence of his anthropology, is -- as Chris Berry, Sandra Peart, and David Levy taught me--, that for some Enlightenment thinkers, it became natural to equate indigenous people with an earlier ('savage') age or stage of the development of the human species. It's this view that became influential among nineteenth century imperialists and their anthropological handmaidens, who draw on a contrast (which gets its most eloquent articulation, alas, in David Hume (recall here; recall here, drawing on Chirimuuta)) between civilization and savagery to justify conquest. Much of The Dawn of Everything is on the legacy of such views in anthropology and popular culture since.

But as plenty of scholars have noted, the Lockean anthropology, while influential, has notable critics including Adam Smith (recall, also with a passing comment on The Dawn of Everything) and Beattie (recall).  Hume and Smith both had stadial theories. But, as the previous sentence suggests, they have very different details. This is important because Graeber and Wengrow suggest -- and I was really fascinated and impressed by this -- that stadial theories are invented by Turgot (a contemporary of Smith) as a response to the "indigenous critique" (of the sort quoted at the top of this post), although presented by Madame de Graffigny in fictional form. And as the rightly suggest (p. 60), Turgot draws on what I have been calling a Lockean anthropology and so for him the earlier stages are vestiges of our earlier selves. (I think there is a direct influence of Locke on Turgot, but leave that aside.) This kind of thinking, inspired the earlier anthropologist mindset that studying indigenous types was kind of a window into our past (like the light of distant stars). But as I documented in my book, Smith's critique of this whole approach was well known in the nineteenth century (although some (recall) also treated him like a Lockean in these matters). While I am happy that Wengrow and Graeber are critical of the use that people like Pinker make of the Enlightenment, their own approach also flattens the intellectual landscape (and the intellectual roots of their own discipline).

Locke matters to the larger story in other way, and especially in light of the passage quoted above, but before we get there a brief detour with regard to  Las Casas, who is not mentioned in the book, but he is alluded to in the following passage:

Legal scholars in universities like Salamanca in Spain were not impressed by this expedient. At the same time, attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally like animals, also didn’t find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend the justice of their (cannibalistic) social arrangements; therefore they were clearly humans, vested by God with powers of reason.
    The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We need not linger here on the exact formulae that natural law theorists came up with (suffice to say, they did allow that Americans had natural rights, but ended up justifying their conquest anyway, provided their subsequent treatment was not too violent or oppressive), but what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity? Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It’s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict – because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.--The Dawn of Everything, pp. 32-33.**

But this story does no justice to the fact that people like Las Casas attributed genuine civilization to the Americans. And, in fact, when Suarez (in 1612), the greatest of the Salamanca school, develops his state of nature theory to justify a social contract (recall), his is ground in an account of the Fall, where political life originates in patriarchic clans (and this is by no means projected onto the Americas). So, the story that Graeber and Wengrow tell while not implausible skips a few steps. (In my own view it is more likely that Hobbes and Grotius are drawing on Book 3 of the Laws and Lucretius.)

So, Hobbes' choice, in chapter 13 of Leviathan, to project the state of nature on "many places of America" (not all) actually cries out for a better explanation. These Americans are treated as anarchist, but sadly find themselves in a war of all. But unlike the later Locke, Hobbes is a natural egalitarian and so his Americans are not children or idiots. For while they are savages, they "are not without some good Morall Sentences; also they have a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers not too great." (Chapter 46) It's true they not philosophers, but that's because, on his theory, the state of nature prevents the development of higher sciences.

So, where are we? There was a huge sixteenth discussion of the Americas in Europe. Thomas More's brother-in-law, John Rastell, has an interest in exploring Newfoundland (but the expedition ended near Ireland in a mutiny). It's a problem that this material has not been properly assimilated yet into scholarship of the Enlightenment (despite Pagden's efforts). And we see that from the start, that is the early sixteenth century, this is the occasion for stadial theories. But these are used to criticize the European (late Feudal) status quo.

I could stop here, but I want to offer a remark on the quoted passage from Lahontan. Kandiaronk's position is completely compatible with Locke's description of the state of nature in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise (1689). For Locke (recall) the invention of money facilitates accumulation of property (and of itself) (see sect 35-48), and the need for laws that can settle disputes (94). And then in section 49 he writes, "thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known." (That is an important contrast with More's account of the Utopian abolition of money.)

 I have no reason to doubt the words attributed to Kandiaronk are his. But the position was not wholly original. (Remember Locke's state of nature is actually rather pleasant; that's part of his criticism of Hobbes.) The difference being that Locke thinks the institution of money and property have beneficial outcomes that are endorsed, whereas Kandiaronk sees in them (what soon became known as Mandevillian) vices. That is to say Lahontan's readers could assimilate what they read to an already familiar position. In addition, while it is true that Lahontan's work influenced other Enlightenment books that used and perhaps drew indigenous critiques of Europe, Lahontan himself was not wholly original. He had been preceded by a somewhat mysterious and wildly popular work (recall) Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (L'Espion Turc), which was written from the perspective of a Turkish visitor to France. Of course, that work did not offer an indigenous critique, but an oriental(ist) one! And finally, Fenelon's The adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulisses (1699) was widely influential (and overshadowed Lahontan) and offered a potent attack on European hierarchies founded in luxury. But it projected the ideal into the remote (Greek) past. 

None of this amounts to a charge of scholarly malpractice. I learned quite a bit from their critical treatment of Enlightenment stuff. I would happily give the book to a nerdy kid wanting to be inspired by intellectuals taking on big problems. And, as a scholar, I am glad they have re-opened the debate over the influence of indigenous views on European intellectual life in such a provocative way. My suggestion is that this influence is real, but that it should be pushed back into the early sixteenth century. And that many of the tropes (both bad and noble) that shape debates since, actually can be found already there. 

Okay, let me stop here for now. And leave the question of why we are stuck now, for future occasion.